The Pleroma · the fullness

πλήρωμα — "the fullness": the divine world in its entirety, and the Valentinian account of it is a piece of architecture, not a ladder. At the source, Bythos (Depth) with Sige (Silence). From them, in pairs, the aeons unfold — Mind and Truth, Word and Life, Man and Church — eight, then ten, then twelve: thirty aeons in fifteen syzygies, married couples, each one a quality of the unknowable source given a face and a partner. The geometry is the doctrine. The Tree hangs its ten lights on three vertical pillars and the light descends; the Pleroma is concentric and paired, radiating out from a Depth, and what matters is that nothing in it stands alone. Which is precisely why the whole story turns on one aeon who tries to.