Column of Glory

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).

Parentage

• Third Messenger

Domains

• ascent of souls
• pillar of light

Powers

• to carry the souls of the redeemed and the freed light up toward the Realm of Light

Epithets

• ʿAmūdā d-Šubḥā
• Sroš Ahrāy

Relations

• subordinate to: Third Messenger

Sources

• Werner Sundermann, 'Manicheism ii. The Manichean Pantheon', Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed., 2009)
• Werner Sundermann, 'Cosmogony and Cosmology iii. In Manicheism', Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed., 1993)
• Paul Van Lindt, The Names of Manichaean Mythological Figures: A Comparative Study on Terminology in the Coptic Sources (Studies in Oriental Religions 26) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992)