The Column of Glory (Syriac ʿAmūdā d-Šubḥā; Middle Persian Stūn ī Wuzurg) is the Manichaean deity of the soul's ascent, an evocation belonging to the redeeming apparatus of the Third Messenger. It is conceived as a vast luminous pillar reaching from the lower cosmos up toward the moon, and is expressly identified with the visible Milky Way. Up this column travel the particles of light freed each day and the souls of the redeemed Elect, borne first to the moon and then, as the moon waxes and wanes, ferried onward in the vessels of the luminaries to the Realm of Light. Because it gathers all the rescued light into a single rising body it is also styled the Perfect Man (Latin vir perfectus), the sum of the redeemed light in person, and in the Iranian texts it is associated with the god Sroš (Sraosha).