Thus too the world is governed by an intellectual nature, and a wisdom ever flourishing and vigilant, who also bestows on the conquerors in the athletic race of life, the crown of victory, as the reward of severe toil, and patient perseverance: and the mighty builder who supports the universe by his divine energies invigorates miserable and suppliant souls, contending for the most glorious of all prizes, the Olympiad of the Soul…

…all external possessions must be deposited; here, naked and assuming a suppliant habit, afflicted in body, and casting aside every thing superfluous, sense too being averse from needless possessions, it is requisite to sit at the foot of the olive, and consult with Athena, by what means we may most effectually amputate and destroy that hostile rout of passions, which lurk in the secret recesses of the soul.

-Thomas Taylor, Concerning Porphyry’s On the Cave of Nymphs. 1823: 11

Introduction: On the Powers of the Soul

In his Epistle to Aretē (Πρóς ’Αρετὴν περὶ σωϕρoσύνης), the Divine Iamblichus admonishes his recipient to cultivate the powers of the soul, informing us that:

“Good orderliness [εὐταξίαν) consists in the symmetry [συμμετρίαν] of these [powers] with each other, and the correct arrangement [εὐκοσμίαν] of the spirited element [θυμoῦ] and the desire [ἐπιθυμίας] and the reason [λóγoυ], in accordance with the ranking proper to each.

As Simmons (2015: 181) has argued, the central Platonic virtue of σωϕρoσύνη -sound mindedness/self control- that appears to have been a key element in Porphyry’s thought especially, and considered instrumental in the soul’s process of ‘turning’ (ἐπιστροφῇ) towards true being and away from the affective passions that “nail” its presence into the body, is further defined by Iamblichus as a εὐκoσμία -good ordering- between the tripartite division of the soul found in Book IV of the Republic. For this definition, he is seemingly reliant on Plotinus’ conception of Civic Virtue, which was intended to set the soul in proper order (κατακoσμoῦσι) by imposing μέτρoν and κoσμoς on its Appetitive part. For the Late Platonists, however, the classical division of Reason, Appetite and Spirit do not function as parts (μέρη) of the soul, but rather as its powers (δυνάμεις).

In similar fashion, as Ambury (2015: 52) has argued, where Plato holds the virtues as “dispositions of the individual soul, the late commentators identity the virtues at different levels of reality”.

An ongoing debate in later Platonism with regards to the soul was whether (and how), during its descent and 'birth' into the world of Becoming, it changed. Questions arose around whether the alteration of Soul related only to its habits and faculties (i.e Aristotelian ενέργεια) or, if its engendering within Time also fundamentally changed its substance and essence. Similarly, when the soul was thought to elevated itself towards knowledge (via theoria or theurgy, resulting initially in apoira) and pass from ignorance, did this imply an actualisation/entelechy of its noetic faculty, or did it experience a change of essence, resulting in its recollection of the Forms?

For Plotinus, Soul remains essentially (i.e in substance) unchanged in its descent. As a hypostasis, Soul does not really descend at all, but simply irradiates its warmth and light towards the body, creating an ίχνος (impression/image) of itself, which vivifies the organic mechanisms (Enn I, I.7-8; Enn VI, 4.15-16). Soul therefore is never directly bound to/in the body, but the body exists within Soul. Liberation consisted of removing attention from and purifying everything that was not Soul, i.e everything alien to it, until we were left with a “flight of the alone to the alone”.

Porphyry, similarly argued that as an incorporeal essence, the soul is never enclosed in the body, and its substance (τη ούσία) never comes into contact with it. Instead, he builds out the idea that Soul "inclines" itself towards the body, and generates from itself its various vital powers (δυνάμεις), through which it acts on the body (Sententiae IV. 2, 5-9).

Iamblichus however, broke with Platonic tradition in stating that -in its generating of lower powers- the soul projects (προβολή) itself in toto to the body, and in doing so, its essential unity and nature underwent a radical change, relaxing and breaking (hence the need for theurgy to repair it). Soul was no longer united in act to its objects of knowledge, and had to re-aquire its original state, and repair a kind of self-alienation. Paradoxically, he argues the soul both remains inherently the same (otherwise it would be impossible to return to its “original” state) AND undergoes a change of essence -hence the sense of alienation we feel in bodies-.

Proclus, despite his influence from Iamblichus, and his agreement that the soul descends entirely, ended up reverting to a modified Plotinian position that the soul does not undergo a change of substance (being eternal). Instead, Soul is only changed in its faculties and acts (which can be affected by passions), not in its essential nature (In Tim. III, 330, 9-331, 2).

On Virtues and Sciences

Many times, this process of anamnesis -recollection of the Forms- began with an education in virtue, as a way to begin triggering a recollection of the Form of Beauty, which could lead (ἀναγωγή) the soul progressively upwards. Insofar as eudaemonia was considered the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, the virtues (aretê) were the dispositions and skills needed to attain it. From Iamblichus onwards -although we see traces of the initial structure in Porphyry’s editing of the Enneads-, the entire Platonic curriculum was structured around a Ladder of Virtues (Scala Virtutum) conjoined to a corresponding Ladder of Sciences. These ladders constituted a logical progression whereby human nature could be assimilated to higher levels of divine life.

The essential Ladder of Sciences -which traces its intellectual and moral origins back to Aristotle, c.f. Metaphysics I.I; VI.I- divided the subject of philosophy into a hierarchy of lower and higher forms of knowledge that corresponded to practical and theoretical reason.

The Practical Sciences -learned first to morally edify the student- consisted of:

Ethics | Economics | Politics

Alcinous’s 2nd century C.E Middle Platonist Didaskalikos -Handbook of Platonism- tells us that in the Practical Sciences Ethics were concerned with “the care of morals”, Economics “the administration of the household”, and Politics with “the preservation of the Polis’“.

This was followed by the Theoretical Sciences -designed to purify the intellect-, which consisted of:

Physics | Mathematics | Theology & Metaphysics

As O’Meara (2005: 50) explains:

The [Neoplatonic] school could be much more than a teaching institution: it could constitute, and sometimes did in Late Antiquity, a community of life and moral education. Indeed the curriculum of the Neoplatonic schools was so designed as to lead the pupil to live a different and higher life, a life as divine as possible, and the books used in the curriculum were assigned an appropriate edificatory function: these books were to be studied, not simply as sources of information, but especially as instruments for the formation of the soul, as pagan ‘spiritual exercises’, leading the pupil to higher modes of life.

Porphyry’s editing of the Enneads was arguably intended to reflect this scale and progression. He tells us himself that his choice of ordering was designed to coincide with the division of sciences. Ennead I was set initially because it dealt with ethical and moral matters (which also included political virtue, c.f Vit Plotini 24; 36), Enneads II and III covered questioned of physics (Vit Plotini 24), IV dealt with Soul (Vit Plotini 37-8), and finally V and VI concerned the One, which acted as the pinnacle of the system (Vit Plotini 59-60).

As O’Meara (2005: 52) further explains:

Porphyry applies here a tripartite division of the sciences (ethics, physics, and ‘theology’, i.e. the science of the divine) and…this sequence of sciences represents a progression from lower to higher levels of virtue corresponding to the scale of virtues systematised by Porphyry

Classes of Virtue varied considerably between Neoplatonist thinkers. The essential four Cardinal Virtues found in Plato’s Republic (IV. 426-435) are Sound-Mindedness (σωϕρoσύνη), Courage (ἀνδρεία), Justice (δικαιοσύνη), and Wisdom (φρόνησις):

Originally, Plato associated these four virtues with the social classes of the ideal city, and with the various human faculties. Sound-mindedness was instituted to control the animalistic appetite (of the Producers), Courage to strengthen the Thumos (primarily of the Guardians) and encourage it to action to pursue the other virtues and defend the city, and Wisdom was assigned to rulers and intended to guide their intellectual faculty to better institute policies and laws that aligned with the Good. Justice emerged from a proper balance of the others and characterised their relationship as a harmonious order. Throughout the Protagoras (349b; 324e; 329c; 330b; 331a-c) Plato also lists Piety (εὐσέβεια, ὁσιότης) among the Cardinal Virtues, but largely associates it with Justice.

Alongside cultivating anamnesis of the Forms, part of the duty and wider spokos of Platonic Education, then, was to endow the student with the moral and ethical framework to develop σωϕρoσύνη to initially moderate, then ween and finally turn away from the passions and return to true being and thus align with Reason. To perceive and act with a well-developed Reasoning Faculty was to have an ordered soul, characterised by Justice -the unopposed reign of Reason and Intellect, directing the Spirit to give us the motivation and courage to pursue virtue and keep the Appetite in check, so as not to engage in self-destructive habits-.

In another of his letters1, one addressed to Anatolius, Iamblichus even goes as far as to say that Justice subsumes all other virtues within it and is thus the τέλoς καὶ σύναγωγή of all of them. In another letter, to Asphalius2 on the topic of Wisdom, he argues that wisdom is the underlying ruler of all the other virtues in that it guides the creation of this proper and Just order. On the level of Civic Virtue, Wisdom -embodied in the Philosopher King- creates a community/polis that is in a Just relationship with the Gods. When Wisdom is cultivated, it directs us in relations with each other, and enables every level of society from individuals to households to the wider city to live in conformity with a divine (notably, mathematical) model. On the level of the individual, Wisdom orders the internal ecology of the soul along the same principles.

Plato himself recommended music3 for the soul and gymnastic for the body (c.f. Republic Book III). Education consisted of a proper ordering of the soul, the development of its faculties -particularly Intellectual, but also ethical and moral- and ultimately its re-alignment towards the True, Beautiful and the Good. All of this was considered part of the process of the classic Platonic telos that has its origin in Theaetetus (176b): ὁμoίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατóν -becoming like God as far as possible-.

On Grades of Virtue

Plotinus is uncharacteristically unsystematic in his theory of virtue, something that led Dalcourt (1963: 64) to suggest he was a relatively eclectic moral thinker. He largely discusses two classes of Virtue: Civic and Purificatory4. His conception of Civic Virtue largely follows that of Republic IV 427 E-444 E, and was seen as ensuring the well-being of a state. Ideally, in his Platonopolis, the laws were set by a Philosopher-King and so are Just and aligned with Reason and the Good, so for even for the average masses uneducated in philosophy, following them would instruct them in virtue and begin a process of purification leading to the second class of superior virtues, which allow a soul to achieve the Platonic teleology.

With these degrees of virtue, the baseline Civic Virtues utilise σωϕρoσύνη (embodied in the laws of the state, and the relations between its classes and people, i.e a kind of φιλία) to control the Appetite and set the passions of the soul in proper order, preparing a citizen for deeper contemplation of more personal virtues. As John Dillon (1983: 97) had argued, this second class of Purificatory Virtues “are not concerned with the ordering of the irrational soul or of the body, but rather with escaping from all entanglement with the sense-world”.

Porphyry inherited Plotinus’ two classes of virtue and made them more coherent, elaborating them into four classes: Political (Civic), Purificatory, Contemplative (Theoretic), and Paradigmatic (Exemplary). For Porphyry, the Contemplative Virtues are those developed in the soul of the philosopher who turns towards Nous and true being, contemplating its contents, while the Paradigmatic are virtues proper to Nous-as-itself.

To help make sense of this, Simmons (2015: 167) outlines three elements which he argues constitute “basic principles of Platonism” in this context:

Virtue is Knowledge

Epistemology and Ontology are Inseparable

Development in Virtue Presupposes Ontological and Epistemological Progression

While not explicitly stated in-text, he also cites Wildburg (2002: 263) that “metaphysics and moral philosophy cannot be separated in Neoplatonism.” In the past, I have discussed Valantasis’ (1991) dimensions of the role(s) of spiritual guides in the 3rd century in his study on Semiotics which I think is relevant quoting again. Citing Ilsetraut Hadot’s (1986: 436) work on spiritual exercises in the Late Antique Mediterranean:

Drawing extensively on Lamberz’ (1975) critical translation of Porphyry’s Sententiae, Simmons (2015: 147-8) has quite a nice exegesis of how these virtues play out in practice for Porphyry:

Civic/Political Virtues -intended to make the human being virtuous, largely by influencing them to conform with the essential laws of human nature and the polis (c.f Lamberz, 1975: 255, Sententiae 6-8). The first essential step in the elevation of the soul is the lived practice of political (civic) virtues within the Neoplatonic state (i.e Platonopolis). Even for those uneducated in philosophy, since the laws are Just and divinely inspired, following them will, at the very least, guarantee the salvation and harmony of the city, which will ensure the blessings of the gods through public piety. Σωφροσύνη at this foundational level consists of a basic harmony between Appetite and Reason (Lamberz, 1975: 23, Sententiae 9-106) which serves to keep the passions in check, and thus create that essential φιλία that characterises the civic bonds of the polis and makes citizens well disposed towards each other.

Purificatory Virtues -these are the next stage, in which the novice philosopher and those more inclined towards true being and the gods begin to look inwards and towards Nous. Based on Lamberz (1975: 31, Sententiae 6-77) they are intended to transform us into a good δαίμων. Σωφροσύνη at this level, according to Lamberz (1975: 30, Sententiae 8-318) and Simmons, assists the soul in purifying itself of the harmful passions.

Contemplative/Theoretic Virtues -at this level, the philosopher is actively contemplating Nous and its contents without the hinderance of the passions, so Porphyry tells us that these virtues deify a man, and transform him into a God (Lamberz, 1975L 31, Sententiae 7–89). At this level, σωφροσύνη serves to convert the soul toward Intelligibles (Lamberz, 1975: 23, Sententiae 1-210)

Paradigmatic/Exemplary Virtues -This final grade of virtues are reserved for the late stage Neoplatonic philosopher, and are described by Porphyry as making “man a father of gods” (Lamberz, 1975: 31, Sententiae 811). At this final level, σωφροσύνη resembles that Plotinian flight of alone to alone, and consists of the Intellect (i.e our true nature) turning towards itself, and residing in itself (Lamberz, 1975: 23, Sententiae 2-312)

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The Classes of Virtues and Porphyry’s Soteriology

Simmons’ general overarching argument (drawn from Philosophy from Oracles and Against the Christians) that Porphyry’s tiered soteriology corresponds to these grades of virtue seems fairly coherent to me, and I largely agree with it, although I don’t have space to get into the specifics here. Essentially, if we follow the Ad Marcellam’s suggestion, Porphyry is called away to consult with the Roman state on the growing presence of Christianity, and perhaps even composes Against the Christians in the prelude of Diocletian’s Persecution. If Simmons’ revised later dating of Porphyry’s other major work, Philosophy from Oracles, is correct, then the three books act as a kind of systematisation of his later thought on universal salvation in response to Christian Universalism. These various grades of virtue have their own forms of accompanying practice and behaviour, and corresponding eschatological outcomes.

Porphyry’s soteriology (for which see Simmons, 2015: 168-185, other than my summary below) is divided along these lines into three possible kinds of salvation: For the Masses, For the Novice Philosopher and For the Mature Sage.

For the masses, engagement with the civic cult, including animal sacrifice, and ritual theurgy is recommended, primarily to ensure the continued order of the city, and fellow relations between citizens. Moderation (μετριoπάθεια) is to be emphasised to control the Appetite, and Sound-Mindedness (σωϕρoσύνη) is encouraged through the Civic Virtues to foster a gentleness of spirit and camaraderie between citizens. The ancestral customs of a place are to be continued and engaged with -all the local cults to daimons, heroes, ancestors etc-, primarily to “unite the citizens for the salvific welfare of the family, city, and ultimately, the empire”. Insofar as theurgy is demiurgy, the maintenance of the gods -and their statues- maintains cosmic sympathy and allow them to do their work in us, purifying the Appetitive power of the soul, and the Pneumatic Vehicle13. Importantly, as Majercik (1989: 32) emphasises:

For Porphyry, theurgy could elevate the soul only to a position within the material world. It could never lead the soul back to the One

In the second Way of Salvation, for the Novice Philosopher, they are to be concerned with cleansing and purifying the Spirited Power, and thus the Lower Soul -and the Pneumatic Vehicle- in total. Simmons argues here that what began in the first Way with σωϕρoσύνη aiming to simply moderate the passions, here it serves to begin weening the philosopher-in-training off them altogether. This is the epistemological and ontological turn towards true being that we mentioned above. In practical terms, this phase entailed a lengthy (perhaps up to 15 years) and complicated study of the Platonic Curriculum (more on this below), including all of Aristotle and Plato, and an advanced training in Mathematics.

The aim was to familiarise oneself with the deep truths of the dialogues, and phenomenologically move up the epistemological-and scientific- ladder outlined in the Allegory of the Divided Line (Republic 509d–511e). That is to say, you will begin with a modality of knowing that is characterised by δóξα (opinion) and πίστις (faith). since opinion is the last of the rational powers of the soul. Simply put, you will begin to see universals in their sensible particulars, and know that a thing is, but not why it is. You take the dialogues and your teachers at their word -i.e on faith-, so to speak, not necessarily understanding them yourself.

As you study and discuss the dialogues, contemplate them and see their truths play out experientially, you will slowly progress to a more intimate knowledge characterised by διάνoια (discursive understanding) of the μαθηματικά (mathematical and numerical principles behind them). Discursive Reasoning (διάνoια) is described by Plato as “not reason (oὐ νoῦν)”, but a form of knowing situated between opinion and Reason (Republic 511 D). It is the power of the soul which reasons scientifically, deriving the principles of its reasoning from Intellect, and sees the truth intuitively.

An essential element of training this scientific reasoning, is a cultivation of mathematical knowledge, as mathematical proofs “are intermediate between the physical and the incorporeal realm”14. Of course, by mathematics, Plato has largely arithmetic and geometry in mind. In the Republic (511 A–B), he emphasises that mathematical forms and principles can act as a median between Being and Becoming because they “use as images or likenesses…the very objects that are themselves copied and adumbrated by the class below them.” Mathematics serves to provide knowledge of true being, and pave the way towards the final tier of Reasoning, Intellection (νóησις), which concerns direct knowledge of the Forms.

On the topic of engagement with cult at this level, Simmons (2015: 178) raises a useful sticking point. On the one hand, the philosopher-in-training is to be concerned with developing the Intellect, and weening themselves off the Appetitive passions, which are only aggravated or titillated by ritual and animal sacrifice. However, on the other, the philosopher must continue to uphold their public duty as a citizen within the civic cult, and maintain the Civic Virtues themselves. Further, in his letter to Marcella, which Simmons assigns to this second tier of salvation, Porphyry still encourages his wife to continue participation in τὰ πάτρια (her ancestral customs, see Ad Marcellam 25–32). Even in the fabled Platonopolis of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, the pious (i.e virtuous) man, is still one who participates in the local cult of his city, engaging with sacrifices, hymns, temples, festivals, priests, prayers, and other elements of civic religion.

Simmons (2015: 179) recourses to another of Porphyry’s major works to solve this problem, the Περὶ ἀγάλματων (On Images/Statues). From what we can gather of the fragments of this work, Porphyry's intention seems to have been to expound and codify what he saw as the underlying philosophical (read noetic) meaning that lay behind depictions of the pagan gods in myth and visual culture, primarily their depictions in statues.

His emphasis appears to be that the philosopher-in-training/initiate of the mysteries can begin to ween themselves off discursive thinking and matter by using such imagery to trigger theoria and contemplative action in Nous when presented with such images in temples (i.e while continuing daily worship). He implores his readers to "decode" the hidden rational meanings (λόγοι) behind depictions or objects, and use them as cues to see the subtler noetic virtues embodied by the different levels of gods and daimons. By contrast, the "ignorant" would see only a wooden or terracotta image in a shrine.

As an example, consider his description of a statue of Zeus15:

Clearly, as Simmons argues, the philosopher who attends the local cult can “worship the gods on a higher epistemological and ontological level. By looking upon the image of the deity, the human mind could begin to meditate upon the harmony and order of the cosmos”. A statue could codify philosophical truths and meanings that were “the visible image of the Intellect to which his mind is being converted”. As I mentioned last week, Porphyry also hints at this idea in De Abstinentia (2.36) in reference to the Pythagoreans:

The final Way, for the Mature Sage, was for a Neoplatonic philosopher at the end of their life, who had remained contemplating the Intelligibles and cultivating the Paradigmatic Virtues. As Gerson (2003: 57) argues, the turning away from all sensibles and worldly concerns at this level is to approach a kind of metaphorical death, allowing the soul to strip away all that is foreign to it, and re-discover itself in the Intelligible Realm.

As the philosopher progresses through lifetimes, and the corresponding grades of virtue reflect their engagement with different levels of Platonic education and science, each reincarnated life on earth becomes progressively closer to a permanent union with the One. Eventually, as the philosopher chooses three successive lifetimes devoted to Philosophy, they will cease the Cycle of Rebirths and attain perfect union16. Iamblichus, by contrast, does not teach a final, permanent release that results in an absolute union with the One, but rather a continuous Cycle of Rebirths, even for the highest theurgic sages, who constantly re-descend like Boddhisatvas to teach and purify other souls.

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Iamblichus’ Innovations

Alongside Porphyry’s classes of virtues, Iamblichus introduced additional grades at both ends of the ladder -although maintained the Aristotelian division of sciences-. Prior to Porphyry’s Civic/Political Virtue, he coined Natural (ϕυσικαί) and Ethical (ἠθικαί), and above the Paradigmatic, he introduced Hieratic/Theurgic Virtue (ἱερατικαί/θεoυργικαί), which served to fully transform the soul into a divine being (c.f. Finamore, 1985: 2f). This schema was largely accepted as authoritative by Neoplatonists after Iamblichus, and Theological Virtues were largely considered synonymous with Porphyry’s Paradigmatic. They were, properly ordered, above the Contemplative/Theoretical Virtues -i.e those of the philosopher-. This schema does have an intuitive logic to it, in that it represents the Way of Philosophy that progresses from the sensible realm of Becoming (and the phantastic) towards the true being of Nous, primarily by way of discursive reason (dianoia) and mathematics, as mentioned above. In fact there would be very little with which Porphyry would disagree17.

The key distinction for Iamblichus however, is that the holy and sacred dimension of Philosophy-as-Mystery is embodied in the fact that his Hieratic Virtues crown the hierarchy and go beyond the Paradigmatic Virtues, considered Being-in-Itself. Cultivation of these Theurgic Virtues unites us to the Ineffable God Beyond Being; the ἄρρητος (arrhetos). It’s no wonder then, that Proclus refers to Plato’s teaching as a mystagogia analogous with the ἄρρητος τελετή (unspeakable initiation) of the Mysteries. Certainly, Proclus’ primary aim at the School of Athens in the 5th century was the act of interpretation and systematisation of the various Greek theologies -Pythagorean, Orphic, Chaldean, Homeric and Hesiodic- to show their accordance with Platonic Theology. In this act, the philosopher-as-interpreter was the mystagogue par excellence.

Philosophy as Mystery

Insofar as the goal of the philosopher is divinisation, it is through initial discursive thought that the soul can awaken to a Vision of the Forms. The term Theoria, as I have said elsewhere, originally denoted an act of pilgrimage to a temple or sacred site with the intention to view the sacred cult objects of the deity18. Under Plato’s spiritualisation of the term, the “sacred objects” or idols of viewing and contemplation became the Forms themselves. However, the original context still subtly remains. Theoria as a kind of contemplative “pilgrimage” to the “cult objects” of the Forms is still to be considered part of the “right conduct” paid to sacred things espoused by traditional eusebeia.

This sentiment is echoed by Porphyry on a few occasions throughout his works. We see this archetype of Philosopher-as-High-Priest, who understands the hieratic nature of the gods, and their proper modes of worship particularly in De Abstinentia (2.49):

Very properly, therefore, will the philosopher, who is also the priest of God that is above all things, abstain from animal food, in consequence of earnestly endeavouring to approach through himself alone to the alone, God, without being disturbed by any attendants

He is even more explicit in the letter to Marcella (Ad Marcellam 11):

Reason tells us that the Divine is present everywhere and in all men, but that only the mind of the wise man is sanctified as its temple, and God is best honoured by him who knows Him best. And this must naturally be the wise man alone, who in wisdom must honour the Divine, and in wisdom adorn for [the Divine] a temple in his thought, honouring it with a living statue, the mind moulded in His image.

It’s certainly no secret that Philosophy co-opts and utilises the language of the Mystery Cults, beginning perhaps with Pythagoras. Plato himself utilises such language on numerous occasions (e.g Symp. 209e, Gorg, 479c, Theaet 156a). As Uždavinys (2008: 67) argues “Platonism is modelled on the experience of Mysteries. The highest step of philosophy is analogous to epopteia – the beatific vision of the Eleusinian mysteries.”

Uždavinys (2008: 31-32) has also argued extensively for a Platonic-Egyptian connection. It is a fairly long standing -if not a little shaky- theory that Plato modelled his ideal Republic on an Egyptian “constitution” -if ever there was such a thing-. Certainly for Plato, it appears, Uždavinys (2008: 31) argues, that “the return to the ideal ancient institutions means return to Egypt, as if the deeper one goes towards the true and primordial Hellenic roots, the closer one approaches the sacred pharaonic Egypt.”

From the Egyptological side, Assmann (2011: 151-153) concludes on the basis of Laws 656d-657a that Plato was seemingly familiar with the “Late Egyptian self-image” and conventions of canon, while when discussing Plotinus (2011: 171-172) -who was himself ethnically Egyptian, although never seems to have learned the language or cared much for the culture- he admits that an echo exists of the Late-Period Egyptian awareness that primordial knowledge was “expressed not through words but through iconic forms” and that “the medium of cultural memory is pictures not speech”, something he believed was codified within the temple as “the central institution of cultural memory”.

That the philosopher was considered a Mystery Initiate is perhaps even more explicit in Post-Proclean Platonism and within the later Academies. Todd Krulak (2017) provides one of the best introductions to the model of the ‘Bacchic Philosopher’ in Damascius’ thought. For the philosophers of the Late Academy, the exemplar was a figure who “perfectly blended the hieratic and the philosophical”. In his Vita Isidori, a collective biography of the last pagan intellectuals of Late Antiquity, written in the early 6th century, Damascius identifies the best and balanced life as one that is:

Dedicated to both philosophy and the worship of the divine -PH 73a

As Krulak (2017: 472) explains, in practice this manifested as an imperative to “blend the philosophical and hieratic in such a way as to invest theoretical philosophy with ίερατική’s cathartic potency…to retain the power associated with the rites without requiring their performance”. This should be borne in mind in light of Koutsoukos’s (2026) recent re-evaluation of Iamblichus’ theurgic orthopraxy as potentially a rallying call for resignification and restoration of what -by his his time- was perceived as a dying religion, and with it, a loss of access to the gods. Iamblichus’ elevation of theurgy to supreme status -arguably above what Plato himself intended- seems to reflect a cultural transformation in the religious atmosphere between Classical Athens and Late Antique Alexandria.

For Plato writing in 4th century B.C Athens, the gods and the Beautiful are part of a generally accepted -shared- consensus reality. Many of his assumptions and experiences that set the context for his philosophical systems -erotica, beautiful young men of the Alcibiades variety, civic virtue and the gods- are things present in everyday life. They are the background against which his philosophy is constructed and operates, so he doesn’t feel a need to foreground them, since everyone already lives in that world and intuitively understands his concepts. By the time you get to the Neoplatonists, Iamblichus especially, paganism was beginning to wane under pressure from an expanding Christianity, but also other competing ethnic religions that the cosmopolitan Roman Empire brought within its borders as it expanded.

To a Neoplatonist whose worldview is based upon a civic Hellenic religion, the world and culture of Late Antiquity would have undoubtedly appeared increasingly profane. Coupled with the Third Century Crisis (235 C.E - 284 C.E), during which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressure of repeated foreign invasions, civil wars and economic disintegration, all of those shared Classical reference points were increasingly disappearing and unfamiliar. Iamblichus’ response, much like we see in the PGM/PDM- is seemingly to elevate the private and personal ritual space. The closed and consecrated ceremony allows for a return to sacred time and becomes the primary means through which the Divine can be accessed precisely because it is the one space that is reliably set apart from the de-sacralised outside world. Again, consider O’Meara’s (2005: 50) comments:

In practice, by the end of the fourth century, as the pagan philosophers became more and more objects of suspicion and persecution, more and more isolated in an overwhelmingly Christian world… a context in which divinisation might still have seemed possible, a context in which corrupting influences could be excluded and the means for divinisation found, was provided by the philosophical school.

While undoubtedly controversial to say, Theurgy may have been elevated not out of metaphysical necessity, but because the cultural situation demanded it.

It’s also worth noting from a purely practical perspective, that many of Iamblichus’ phōtagōgic rituals, alongside many of the visionary procedures of the PGM depend in their practical implementation on an absolutely undisturbed execution, which could keep the concentration of the ritualist unbroken. Private spaces where you remained undisturbed are naturally much better suited for this.

As Chaitow (2025: 147) has expertly formulated “A Dionysian life, per Damascius, could be achieved by following the same steps as found in the Eleusinian Mysteries (no longer practiced in his time), mapped onto the Platonic Virtues instead of the route of theurgic ascent proposed by Proclus”.

This model is more fully explicated in Krulak (2017: 476-6), which Chaitow quotes in full:

The Platonic Curriculum of Proclus’ Academy

This brings me to my wider overall point in this article, the order of education for Platonists. My writing here began by reading Schissel’s (1926: 265-273) analysis of the teaching schedule and daily routines of Proclus:

Sunrise: Prayer to the sun

Early Morning: Interpretation and lectures of the school’s authors/canonical readings

Late Morning: Literary work of his own

Noon: Prayer to the sun

Early Afternoon: Philosophical discussions with other teachers and advanced students

Late Afternoon: Seminars and dialogues without texts and discussions of philosophical problems with his students

Sunset: Prayer to the sun

Evening: Composing hymns, writing up notes for the next day, reflections

Proclus appears to have been quite frugal with his daily habits, perhaps only eating one or two (vegetarian) meals a day, and only slept a few hours a night. This would have given him the opportunity to compose litanies and hymns and reflect on his teaching from the day.

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In Neoplatonic teaching vocabulary, praxis -πράξίς- usually denoted a lecture with prepared passages and materials to be utilised in the demonstration of philosophical points. When it was not introductory material, the subject of a praxis would have been the explanation of a passage from the author being read at the time. This would have been divided into two forms: a general explanation/discourse that aimed to provide a grasp of the overall meaning of a section -the theoria-, and a detailed examination (exetauis, έξέταΰις) of individual points or topics.

Schissel argues that, since a given praxis would have been temporally limited, often multiple sessions were necessary for the explanation of a single passage of text. On the basis of Marinus (22. fr. 53) we also find the phrase praxeis exēgeisthai (Πράξεις εξηγείσθαι), with the sense of “to lead through”, which seems to have referred to the process/act of interpreting lectures, which gives us a better idea of what they contained.

On the basis of a few passages from Porphyry’s Vita Plotini, Schissel contends that an official order of dialogues was not fixed during Plotinus’ teaching in Rome, but seemingly contained an emerging canon of Middle Platonists and Neopythagorean works, and occasionally Aristotelian. On more than a few occasions, Porphyry reports that Plotinus would adapt his lectures -both the style and subject matter- to the understanding of his audience.

It appears to have been under Porphyry that a more systematised teaching and reading curriculum began to emerge. However, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the context these ‘schools’ are operating in.

A Discursus on Neoplatonic ‘Schools’

Something that doesn’t get enough attention is that the social networks of many of the Late Antique philosophers -including, even, the Athenian and Alexandrian Schools- were held together and operated largely by familial -if not, paternal-ties and intermarriage (for this essential nature of philosophical networks, consider Proclus’ Theol. Plat. I xxvi–xxxv).

After Gordian was killed during the expedition to Persia in 244 C.E, Plotinus escaped to Antioch before eventually finding his way back to Rome, where he began his ‘school’ of teaching. Upon his arrival he was received by Gemina, a Roman noblewoman, perhaps even the wife of the emperor Trebonianus Gallus who shares the same name (Saffrey, 1992: 32), although this is uncertain and has been questioned by Hadot (1997: 85). In the very least, Plotinus’ Gemina was well connected with Roman high-society. It was in her house that he began -unofficially- teaching, and according to O’Meara (2005: 14-15), who stays close to the details Porphyry gives us:

Of the fourteen regular and dedicated members of this circle mentioned by Porphyry, three were women (Gemina, her daughter, and Amphiclea), most came from the eastern part of the Empire, five were politicians (three of them senators), three were doctors, and two literary men… of the three senators, Orontius, Sabinillus, Rogatianus, the last might be identified with the military prefect (241 C.E) and proconsul of Asia (254 C.E) of the same name… of the other two politicians, Zethus had political ambitions which Plotinus sought to limit and a property in Campania where Plotinus retired. Castricius, the fifth politician, also owned a property in Campania. Zethus was a doctor, as were Eustochius, who attended Plotinus on his death

It’s uncertain whether Porphyry eventually returned to Rome after Plotinus’ death, or whether he ever had a circle of pupils like Plotinus (although if Augustine and Eusebius are to be believed, there were a group around him who they identify polemically and with only a touch of sarcasm as “New Men”, novis quibusdam virus/των νέων των δή καθ’ ήμας αύτους φιλοσοφείν έπαγγελλομένωον). Amphiclea went on to marry Ariston, the son of an Iamblichus, most likely ‘our’ Iamblichus, who founded his own school either at Calchis, or more likely Apamea, the same place Amelius, the older of Plotinus’ pupils had retired to.

Iamblichus’ students went on to influence the later Athenian and Alexandrian Academies and played essential political roles in the late Roman state. In particular, Sopater -Iamblichus' preeminent student- got entangled with political drama in the court of Constantine, and if John Lydus (De Mensibus Book 4. 65-66.2) is to be believed assisted as an “initiatory priest” in the founding ceremonies of Constantinople. Importantly, Sopater went on to have two sons, Sopater the Younger and Himerius. Himerius’ own son also appears to have been named Iamblichus [the Younger] after his grandfather’s teacher.

Another of Iamblichus’ direct students, Aedesius took over leadership of Iamblichus’ Syrian school after Sopater left, at least for a time, before founding his own school in Pergamon, where he was eventually visited by the Emperor Julian in 351 C.E.

We know less about Iamblichus’ other students. One of them, Eustathius, went on to found his own school, but is more remembered for his wife Sosipatra, who moved to and taught at Aedesius’ school in Pergamon after Eustathius’ death. Among her students were Priscus, Eusebius of Myndus and Maximus of Ephesus, who went on to teach Julian and participate in his Polytheist Revival. By the end of the 4th century, both Priscus and Iamblichus the Younger (grandson of Sopater) were in Athens, and appear to have helped Plutarch (of Athens) and Asclepigenia establish the Neoplatonic Athenian Academy. This New Academy, as with Plotinus in Rome, seems to have been a private foundation, conducted in a large house of considerable wealth which Proclus eventually inherited from Plutarch and Syrianus (Sheppard, 1970: 837; Hoffmann, 1994: 548-555).

Upon Plutarch’s death in 432 C.E, Syrianus succeeded him, who was in turn succeeded by Proclus, and he by Marinus. Marinus eventually went on to teach Isidore (his direct successor), Zenodotus, Ammonius, Asclepiodotus (all teachers of Damascius), and Agapius (who himself taught John Lydus).

On the Alexandrian side, Hypatia is roughly contemporary with the third generation of Iamblichean Platonists, and was to Alexandria what Proclus was to Athens, having her own list of famous political and religious students. We should not think of there being a rigid distinction between the two schools, since many of the students and teachers moved freely between them and got their training at both.

Porphyry appears to have been the one responsible for more deeply integrating the Peripatetic dimensions into the Platonic Curriculum, chief among which ranked his own Isagoge -an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories-, which became the work through which he was primarily known throughout the Middle Ages.

Proclus’ Lectures

Schissel (1926: 269) further notes that the various disputations and discussions that we witness with Porphyry in the Vita Plotini are “contrasted with kathólou lógous práttein (χαθόλου λόγους πράττειν) and eis biblía légein (είς βιβλία λέγειν).” These ‘general discourses’ are most likely synonymous with the wider ‘official’ prolegomena that has come down to us through Alcinous, Ammonius, Ioannes Philoponus, Olympiodoros, and most completely the Anonymous late 6th century C.E Prolegomena, and is likely similar to -if not the same- as that taught and discussed by Proclus in his morning sessions.

This comprised an order of reading and teaching that consisted of two cycles. The first cycle comprised 10 dialogues, and was intended to instruct the student up the Ladder of Virtues and Sciences from physical to theoretical virtue and science (i.e through Civic and Political, Purificatory and Theoretica virtuesl):

Alcibiades I, Gorgias, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Phaedrus, Symposium, Philebus

The second cycle consisted of an education on the heights of physics and theology:

Timaeus and Parmenides.

Simmons (2015: 176) clarifies an important point:

Though the recent editors of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis explain the absence of the Republic and Laws from this list as probably being due to their being too long, necessitating exegesis of only sections of these dialogues, a more plausible explanation is that the list as we have it includes introductory and intermediate studies in Platonism. The longer two dialogues containing Plato’s mature thought on such important doctrines as the state, the human soul, immortality, virtues, eschatology, and many more, I suggest, made up the list of required texts for advanced students.

This is a decent enough point, but seemingly ignores the reasoning given in the Anonymous Prolegomena itself (Anon Prol. 26, 7–12), which tells us that Proclus excluded (ἐκβάλλɛιν) the Republic and Laws precisely because they were too long for the general curriculum, and seemingly reserved them for his own study or more private sessions with the more ardent students.

It’s important to contextualise this reading order before taking it too literary and jumping straight in. Not only is it intended for introductory and intermediate studies that would have followed propaedeutic studies of Aristotle and, perhaps, Epictetus and Pythagoras (see below), it also presents a picture of how Plato was interpreted among the final generations of Alexandrian polytheist philosophers. It was almost certainly written before the final closure of the Academy, though. There are a series of other more esoteric elements to it that should make us cautious. The anonymous author goes to lengths to present Plato as participating in the Apollonian Seira (1.20), complete with a virgin birth and a mouth full of honey prepared to utter divine prophecy (2.12-22). We see that Damascian idea of hieratic philosophy on full display, with Plato said to have learned “the hieratic art” from the Egyptians (4.9-10). There is also a general Neopythagorising tendency to reject and even admonish the Skeptical Tradition (10.1-11.20) of the Old Academy.

Further, that this prolegomena is somewhat artificial is outlined by O’Meara (2005: 62-65). Not only is it based on Iamblichus’ theory of σκοπὀς that each dialogue must have a single purpose, but it is this assumed purpose that structures a dialogue’s place in the order19, even if the corresponding science doesn’t map to the topics of the dialogue. There was clearly some measure of oral teaching that guided their placement and interpretation which is beyond us, for now. Note, O’Meara (2005: 63):

A measure of the artificiality can be seen in the arithmetical scheme that inspires it, the decade (the complete series of ten numbers) and the dyad (the first two numbers which potentially contain the following members of the series of numbers). Iamblichus’ Pythagorizing tendencies are no doubt here at work. We notice also that the second theoretical science, mathematics, is missing. Finally, the parallelism between the scale of virtues and the scale of sciences is not absolute, since the‘purificatory’ virtues fit neither into practical philosophy (ethics and politics, to which ‘political’ virtue corresponds), nor into the theoretical sciences. They should probably be considered as essentially transitional, bridging the divide between practical and theoretical science.

It is a source of confusion for me why Iamblichus doesn’t seem to include mathematical education in the prolegomena itself, despite using Pythagorean numerology to structure it, however, it is easily enough rectified by looking to his sources (see below). There also appears to have been disagreement among Neoplatonists as to the topic and position of Alcibiades:

Proclus [c.f. In Alcib. 11, 1–17] saw the dialogue as concerning self-knowledge, as the beginning of all philosophy. It thus anticipates and pre-contains the variety of sciences covered in the dialogues of the curriculum that follow. However, Damascius related the Alcibiades more specifically to the level of ‘political’ virtue [c.f. Olympiodorus, In Alcib. 4, 15-5, 1]

Returning to Proclus’ daily schedule, in the early afternoon, probably after completing his own writing, he would consult with other teaching members of the Athenian Academy, the majority of which were concerned with interpreting Aristotle, while he appears to have reserved the more mystical theologies of the Orphics, Chaldeans, Sibyllines, and of course, Plato himself, to his own teaching sessions, or those of the senior instructors.

In the evening, Proclus would host seminar discussions with his students with the aim to give them a space to discuss dialogues and any sticking points that were raised from the morning session. Importantly, Marinus identifies these as agraphos synousiai (άγραφος συνουσιαι) -‘unwritten seminars/discussions’-, since they did not have texts as their basis. Instead problems and difficulties were resolved through a small group dialectic, i.e direct question and answer. That these sessions were still instructional is shown by the fact that they’re designated synousiai, which in Neoplatonic school terminology was the other usual word for teaching sessions.

Schissel (1926: 269) contents that Proclus’ ágraphoi synoysíai are probably the same as the disputations about which Thaumasios complains in Porphyry’s Vit Plotini 14. 14. Certainly, the morning lectures were more intellectually heavy and systematic, and led as formal sessions with a leading teacher. The evening seminars would thus be less formal, and student-centric. It’s worth bearing in mind here the essential tension raised in the Phaedrus (274a onwards) about the dangers of committing ideas to writing. The third chapter of the Anonymous Prolegomena is directly concerned with resolving the difficulty (aporía) of why Plato recorded his own doctrines in writing, despite his own recommendations against it.

The essential argument is that a writing cannot stand up to questioning, since it always asserts the same thing and cannot refute any doubts raised against itself. This conclusion to the Phaedrus clearly troubled the later Platonists since it directly questions the legitimacy of philosophical writing.

Schissel concludes:

[Platonists] later helped themselves out of that fundamental difficulty by comparing Plato's attitude toward writing with the attitude of The God toward creation. Just as creation encompasses what is perceptible to the senses and what is not perceptible to the senses, so Plato also transmitted some things in written, i.e. sensorially perceptible form, and some things without writing, i.e. not by way of sensory perception.

This notion of Plato’s Unwritten Doctrines is somewhat of a controversial point in scholarly Platonism. The Tübingen School is perhaps the most famous proponent that Plato had unwritten oral teachings (primarily centred around the One and Indefinite Dyad) within the early Academy, and the best introduction to the debate I’ve found is O’Brien’s (2025) Plato’s Unwritten Doctrines. My own opinion on the matter is that Plotinus’ articulation of the One and Indefinite Dyad as the principle of multiplicity and unlimited potential is an heir to these Old Academy oral teachings.

These unwritten lectures acquired a kind of esoteric dimension in the later Academy. For Proclus, Schissel suspects that the esoteric interpretations proper took place in the oral discussions between teachers in the early afternoon, while those between students in the early evening were maintained as more causal environments. This model of intense intellectual labour with texts in the morning progressing to a more relaxed discussion and seminar format with a small circle of students in the evening can most likely be attributed to Porphyry’s Peripatetic influence.

It makes sense then, that many of the written publications of Neoplatonist authors began their life as the by-product of these school disputations, much like Plotinus’ Enneads. Over time, as the various heads of the Academies (both Athenian and Alexandrian) published more and more, many of their commentaries on central dialogues or treatises became teaching materials in their own right.

Expanding the Curriculum

While the Anonymous Prolegomena is certainly useful, and provides a good introductory reading order for Plato in itself, it assumes an oral teaching environment and deep familiarity with Aristotelian, Stoic, and perhaps Epicurean, doctrines that are not made explicit. As can be seen from Iamblichus’ notable absence of dialogues corresponding to his Natural and Ethical Virtues, it is assumed that by the time prospective students began reading (First) Alcibiades they would have been prepared to understand its lessons and themes because they had already habituated the lower grades of virtues by other means.

While we need not assume every member of the academy went through the same rigid curriculum, and could most likely have geared their study towards their interests, it is not in any way controversial to say that a Platonist in the Neoplatonic Academy would not have began with Alcibiades as their first text. Naturally, in some contexts and periods, fewer of the texts could be read, while in others much more could be accessed.

Nevertheless, as Marinus (Vit. Procl. 13) testifies:

In less than two complete years [Syrianus] read with [Proclus] all of Aristotle’s works, on logic, ethics, politics, physics, and, above these, on theological science. Having sufficiently brought him through these, as if through . . . lesser mysteries, he led him to Plato’s mystic initiation, in the right order

Aristotle was considered the primary and pinnacle authority on the physical world, and so his treatises acted as the Lesser Mysteries that served to introduce the potential student to Plato, whose ineffable doctrines on the transcendent and universal were the Greater Mysteries. Aristotle’s focus on rhetoric, argumentation and physics would serve as a kind of mental, ethical and moral disinfectant to purify the natural and ethical virtues through correct habituation and prepare you for understanding Plato.

The below is intended as a hypothetical work in progress, and is a kind of expanded curriculum that is largely modelled on O’Meara’s (2005: 61-68) and Ambury’s (2015: 49-75) reconstruction, with some of my own amendments based on how I am currently going through it. A basic heuristic grouping i’m assuming is mapping three essential categories of Body (Sensual), Intellect (Noetic) and Soul (Hieratic), as well as the basic Ladder of Sciences. I am also assuming you are already well familiar with Homer and Hesiod, who could just as easily fit into the Contemplative Virtues on their own.

Before beginning, it’s worth outlining Iamblichus’ basic model for the reading order. As I mentioned above, Iamblichus divides the prolegomena into two orders based heavily on Pythagorean numerical justifications (a Decade). In his model, Alcibiades actually does not correspond to a particular virtue, something that lead Ambury (2015: 51) to conclude that:

[Alcibiades] is not merely introductory but exhibitionary because the character of Alcibiades embodies the first two kinds of virtue [Natural and Ethical] that are seemingly omitted from the reading order. Alcibiades leads the student to the second dialogue…the Gorgias…The means for the transition is achievement of self-knowledge, understood…as identification of the self with soul. It is for this reason that Alcibiades provided the transitional pedagogical moment for a student between his inculcation to virtue and his reversion upon the source of his virtue

It thus “accounts for a student’s transition from the Natural and Ethical virtues to the Constitutional (Political) virtues”.

The Gorgias then corresponds to the level of Political virtues and the Phaedo to Purificatory. The next level of Contemplative virtues contains the Cratylus (on names and semiotics) and the Theaetetus (on concepts). The next grouping are considered in the prolegomena under the title of περι πραγμάτων (on practical/worldly things) and consist of the Sophist and Statesman (forced to yield ideas on Nature and Physics, φυσικών). The Phaedrus and Symposium then are grouped as θεολογικών (theological) dialogues, while the Philebus teaches its reader knowledge of the Good.

The Second Order and final cycle consists of the Timaeus -for physics and nature- and the Parmenides -for perfect theology-

Part of the assumption Iamblichus is making, according to Ambury (2015: 54) is that the Natural and Ethical virtues “do not require the soul to work upon itself in the same way the other virtues do…indeed, they do not assume familiarisation with one’s psychic nature at all.” Alcibiades looks both forwards and backwards in this light, anticipating the self-knowledge that is requisite of later virtues, and embodies the previous two levels of virtue that are absent from the initial stage of the Platonic element of the education.

Stage 1: Body (Sensual)

1.1. Natural Virtues

Before beginning education of the Aristotelian sciences and moving up the ladder of virtues, O’Meara concurs with Ambury and emphasises that occasionally a “non-scientific moral instruction” was instituted to students to educate them in pre discursive ethical virtues. Taking cue from Hadot (1978: 160-164) and her work with Simplicius’s commentaries (particularly his In Epict) this appears to have taken the form of, on one hand Epictetus’ Manualis, better known in Greek as the Ἐγχειρίδιον Ἐπικτήτου. This was a short manual of Stoic ethical advice compiled by Arrian, a 2nd-century pupil of Epictetus. Part of its appeal is that the text is essential immensely practical. It rarely -if ever- touches on Metaphysics, and is instead a compilation of aphorisms and quotes that aimed at teaching you how to apply philosophy to daily life.

On the other hand, the other initial option was the pseudo-pythagorean Golden Verses. These 71 lines of dactylic hexameters are traditionally attributed to various Pythagorean philosophers. Schibli (2002: 14) has argued that their influence potentially shows up as early as the 3rd century B.C, but the versions we have come from the 5th century C.E (Joost-Gaugier, 2007: 60). Two commentaries on these are attested in Arabic from Iamblichus and Proclus (of Laodicea, not Lycius), but their authorship is uncertain. They do, however, seemingly derive from (possibly 4th century) Neoplatonic originals (see Westerink, 1987; Daiber, 1995).

Hierocles (In Carm Aur 5.1-7, 1; 84.7-85, 14) considered the Golden Verses to provide basic but essential moral instruction at the level of Ethical and Natural virtues, and began to touch upon the Political and even Contemplative ones.

Two of the later Alexandrian Neoplatonists who are associated with the Platonic Prolegomena, Ammonius and Elias, also seem to cite (c.f. Ammonius, In Isagoge 15, 21–3; Elias, In Categorias 118, 30–1) three oration texts by the influential 5th-4th century B.C Attic orator Isocrates:

Ad Demonicum, Ad Nicoclem and Nicocles

in conjunction with the Golden Verses as being an initial introduction to ‘practical philosophy’. These three texts, interestingly, move topically from the private to political sphere, so their inclusion isn’t surprising.

The Aristotelian Curriculum

At the first introductory level, as an essential first step, we should be aiming to train the Natural Virtues, particularly that of the soul’s power of Apprehension and Perception. Natural Virtues are properly concerned with instinctive, pre-rational dispositions that guide the soul naturally. These will train the aspiring philosopher to recognise how the world is categorised, and the kinds of particularised groupings that are essential for building a foundation in proper reasoning, and eventually moving towards higher categories and Forms. For this I would suggest beginning with the way much of the Medieval Period began with studying Aristotle; Porphyry’s Isagoge, and have it lead into Aristotle’s Organon. Start at the beginning with his Categories.

In Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras (46)20, while professing the virtue of the ancient sage, he explains:

Note that section i’ve bolded. The ‘purified mind’ arrives at contemplation first by “considering the most minute things”, and then gradually elevating itself from particulars to their Forms, and in the process from the temporal world to the world of true being. Thomas Taylor (2001 [1807]: 2-6) outlines this reasoning process succinctly in his introduction to Porphyry:

Insofar as the soul noeticises with phantasms, we must begin by giving it things to survey and a means to understand the categories of the things-that-are. Categories 1b25-2a4 provides the definitive list:

Porphyry also extolled the virtue of Mathematics as an intermediary between Being and Becoming, as Plato did, so I think it’s also worth getting a grounding in this early. While certainly more advanced, and something you should be revisiting again and again at each stage, I think there is room initially for some of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Pythagorean works here, particularly at least a cursory glance at his Introduction to Arithmetic21. We know that Iamblichus made this text a central part of the Neoplatonic curriculum (see O’Meara, 1989: 51-2), and that it was the standard Neoplatonic reference work for mathematics, even used by Boethius for his De Arithmetica. Consider also, Iamblichus’ On Pythagoreanism.

This would naturally also lead to a study of music -primarily for ensuring the harmony of the soul, and a proper understanding of Modes-. For this, I would recommend Ptolemy’s Three Books on Harmonics, and Porphyry’s accompanying commentaries. Nicomachus’s Manual of Harmonics may also be useful here.

1.2. Ethical Virtues

The next stage of Ethical Virtues are intended to allow basic mastery of the passions through rational habit. Once you have a good awareness of Categories and Genera -the basic building blocks of perception-, you should be moving to build up the power of Reasoning, to be able to put them in proper order. For this, Aristotle’s indispensable On Interpretation is best as the next reading. In terms of the mathematical dimension, we should be able to reason geometrically and provide diagrammatic proofs of certain arguments, so Euclid’s Elements, and perhaps Proclus’ commentary would do well here. Both Euclid and Nicomachus were considered Platonists in Late Antiquity, i.e articulating Platonic principles. This would lead to a natural progression towards astronomy (and astrology), for which Ptolemy’s Almagest would be your best antique introduction.

All together, this initial learning program would prepare the soul very well for reasoning and categorising the world, and ensure it was ready to develop its further faculties.

Stage 2: Intellect (Noetic)

2.1. Civic/Political Virtues

At this next level, we would aim to cultivate the noetic faculty and learn to recognise intelligibles. On the bodily level, we should also be training the virtues of communal living and societal expectations, i.e the aspects that make us a good citizen and develop our view of the world, and the necessary camaraderie that is characterised as φιλία. Remember, for Iamblichus, φιλία is not just friendship, but is a word that characterises the well-ordered (and thus Just) community. It transcends human affection, and operating as a metaphysical bond that holds the universe together. He frames it as a divine, unifying power that links gods to humans, binds the cosmos in sympathetic harmony, and provides a vehicle for the soul's ascent.

The Civic Virtues are concerned with the practical elements of operating in human society, i.e those that ensure order, justice, and social harmony. The next power we should be training then, is that of Judgement. If the previous stage was about learning to reason and put things in order, we should next focus on training our ability to evaluate virtue and vice, and ultimately establish what is good and well-ordered for us. Here I would actually include the majority of Aristotle’s works in sequence.

Prior Analytics trains reasoning from First Principles, so it’s logical to begin here. Next, I would go with Posterior Analytics to round it out and train your knowledge of demonstrations. From there, progress through his central works, particularly: Topics, Rhetoric and Poetics.

Here is where we then start overlapping with cultivating the Purificatory Virtues, as the next set of treatises purify our understandings of virtue and logical argumentation, alongside the soul and intellect.

Developing an understanding of Plotinus and Porphyry’s Civic Virtue also fits best at this stage, and gives you ground to reflect on when it comes to cultivating the Contemplative Virtues. For this I would include Ennead I here, primarily to educate the ethical dimensions of the soul. I could see an argument to skip ahead and do a cursory reading of the Republic and Laws, if you were inclined, but I would recommend at this stage sticking with Aristotle’s Politics if you want begin with political philosophy.

It’s worth noting that O’Meara (2005: 66-7) presents a different order of reading, specifically catered to education of the Political/Civic Virtues:

It’s worth experimenting yourself and seeing which order helps your understanding better.

2.2. Purificatory Virtues

The Purificatory Virtues proper are concerned with shedding bodily attachments and emotional interference, allowing the intellect to turn inward. To begin purifying our argumentative and demonstrative capacity -necessary to move from an understanding based on opinion to one based on dianetic reasoning, with logical demonstrations- the first treatise in this stage would most likely be On Sophistical Refutations. In this work, he expands on the principle of deductive reasoning22, and presents thirteen logical fallacies -primarily those of the Sophists- that the philosopher should be aware of in argumentation.

Once you’ve completed this -and practiced disputation a bit, so you can get used to it and find the logical proofs of your arguments- then we can move onto arguably his crowning achievements: the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, both of which treat virtue and elaborate on his essential theory of the mean.

In the final stage of purification, we have his Physics and On the Heavens, which are his chief cosmological and natural treatises. Aristotelian physics has obviously been supplanted since the Medieval Period, but many of the texts of Late Antiquity assume and Aristotelian or Stoic physics for their worldview, as does astrology. Enneads 2-3 mentioned above also include Plotinus’ comments on physics and cosmology, so should be read in conjunction/alongside Aristotle’s treatises here.

Finally, once the physical world and the cosmos are grounded, we can move to what is beyond them, i.e the soul. Naturally, De Anima is the best fit for this, alongside Metaphysics. It’s worth noting, however, that there would have been extensive oral tradition around this transitory point that was dedicated to refuting Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato presented in Metaphysics. So, bear this in mind when reading it.

Further, on the soul, knowledge and the One, I would include the remainder of the Enneads (4-6) from Plotinus here.

2.3 Contemplative/Theoretic Virtues

By this point, you will have developed a solid grounding in the Platonic and Aristotelian worldview and argumentation style, along with engaging in the Neoplatonic thought of Plotinus and some other thinkers. I consider Plotinus fundamentally a harmonialist; one who synthesises the thought of Plato and Aristotle expertly well. On more than one occasion, Plotinus’ genius is that he seems to vindicate Plato from Aristotle’s criticisms by way of conceptions and distinctions derived from Aristotle himself. Notwithstanding the fact that Hegel23, remarked that Plotinus could just as much be called a Neoaristotelian as a Neoplatonist, the fact that his Enneads circulated in the Islamic world for centuries under the assumption of Aristotelian authorship surely speaks in favour of harmonialism.

Contemplative Virtues are those concerned with the soul’s active, intellectual focus on divine realities and the Forms. I think there can be great value in studying harmonialist works at this level, particularly the commentaries of Neoplatonists on Aristotle’s works. Porphyry’s Isagoge should be revisited first of all here and contemplated more deeply, especially as it pertains to the compatibility of Aristotle's Categories with Plato's Forms. If you’re wanting to get a bit of the Neopythagorean education in there, Simplicius’ commentary on De Anima is a good option. Syrianus also composed a commentary on Metaphysics in the 5th century, but only Books B, Γ, M and N survive.

I’ve mostly neglected the Pre-Socratics here, although you will have come across them in the reading up to this point. At his level of Contemplative Virtues, I would perhaps include Parmenides’ On Nature and the fragments of Heraclitus, who were Plato’s two primary influences, and arguably who he is responding to throughout his dialogues.

Plato’s Prolegomena

At this point, once you have covered all of the above, as the final part of cultivating the Contemplative Virtues -i.e virtues that point towards the Forms-, I would now start with that classic Platonic Prolegomena, and begin reading Plato’s dialogues.

Beginning with the Alcibiades I and Gorgias, these two dialogues train us further on virtue, particularly civic, and endow us with a Platonic conception of self knowledge and the identity of the soul in relation to the body. This naturally progresses to the Phaedo in third place, whose topic is to confirm the immortality of the soul. In fact, throughout the Western Middle Ages, this dialogue was rather confusingly often referred to by its subtitle -Peri Psyches- translated into Latin as De Anima.

The Cratylus holds next position and deals primarily with the topic of names, primarily whether they are "conventional" or "natural", i.e a debate of semiotics and whether language is a system of arbitrary signs or whether words have an intrinsic relation to the things they signify. The central argument is that the creator of words uses letters containing certain sounds to express the essence of a word's subject. The major point of contemplation here is what the relationship is between words and reality, and it sets the stage for the next grouping of epistemological dialogues.

The discussion follows nicely into the next dialogue, the Theaetetus, which considers νοηματα (concepts) and epistemology further. It also gives you a very moving introduction to philosophy as a subject that begins in awe and wonder. Here you should contemplate Philo vs Ero Sophia, and the role of love in the process of philosophic ascent.

The next group of dialogues follow on from each other, and are generally set days apart. They deal with reality, primarily the different classes of educator, office and knowledge, as well as deepening our understanding of Platonic love. The Sophist examines the characteristics of sophists and how they differ from philosophers and statesmen, but also contains an important section on clarifying the nature of the Great Kinds (μέγιστα γένη). These consist of Being (that which is), Non-Being, sameness (i.e identity), difference, motion (change), and rest, and how these are interrelated. It includes an examination of Parmenides’ ideas in comparison with Empedocles and Heraclitus’ and aims to discover whether Being is identical with change or rest, or both.

The Statesman deals with defining the characteristics of such, and reflects a lot of the attributes of the Republic’s Philosopher King. Its discussions of politics, the divisions of society and the art of ruling make it a primary dialogue for contemplating Civic Virtues. There is also a remarkable section on a Platonic interpretation of the Myth of Ages.

Moving upwards from contemplation of society and the world, the next grouping of dialogues deal with Plato’s theological ideas. The Phaedrus deals extensively with love (particularity erotic) and the soul (including Metempsychosis and the Chariot Allegory), but also more widely with rhetoric. Alongside this, there are essential elements that deal with the different kinds of mania, and divine inspiration, which would go on to become essential in Iamblichus theory of theurgic possession.

The other crowning achievement of the Symposium is positioned next. This is arguably Plato’s chief dialogue on (erotic) love, and contains a young Socrates being instructed by Diotima, a foreign priestess of the Mysteries, as to its nature. Iamblichus considered it to embody the Contemplative Virtues par excellence, and assigns it a theological role. This dialogue also contains the central discussion of Eros as a daimon, as well as the definition of daimons as mediating beings between humans the gods.

In this manner, as we progress up the ontological ladder, the next dialogue, the Philebus, concerns The Good, and more specifically, a discussion on the nature of pleasure and its role. In response to the hedonist Philebus and Protarchus, who propose pleasure as identical to the Absolute Good, Socrates argues that reason and insight are its characteristics. He also presents a hierarchy of different forms of pleasure which recall the issues of Categories and how we subsume different things under genera. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates gives us his own value order in which moderation is highest, and harmful pleasures are to be avoided so that a balanced emotional state and Just soul can be cultivated.

The final few dialogues that are often missed off the prolegomena are Plato’s true crowning achievements and concern the soul, the ideal state, First Principles and his own critique of an objectivist theory of forms. Here is where the Timaeus, Republic, Laws and Parmenides fit into our reading program. I would also consider them in this order. The Timaeus grants us a full working model of emanation and the creation of the universe, while the Republic is properly concerned with the ordering of the soul, metaphorically discussed through the lens of a ‘city made in speech’. Laws was Plato’s last written dialogue and represents his mature thought on politics and the state. Unlike the Republic, which arguably was never intended to be a ‘real’ city, Laws is concerned with the ideal constitution and program for an actual city. The fact that Plotinus utilised it as a primary guide for his Platonopolis demonstrates that he is a far more astute political philosopher than he is often given credit for. The Parmenides is Plato’s most complex and difficult dialogue and represents the crowning achievement of thinking on the Forms, in which he demolishes any kind of thinking that objectifies the Forms or considers them separate to their instantiations.

This concludes the Platonic dialogues. I would recommend as you read each one, also read an accompanying commentary on it by one of the Neoplatonists. Proclus and Iamblichus have quite extensive ones to draw from, which elucidate key principles and would purify the contemplative faculties to help truly understand the key points, and pave the way for the next and final stage of education; the training of the Hieratic Virtues.

Stage 3: Soul (Hieratic)

3.1. Paradigmatic Virtues

The Paradigmatic Virtues are the highest level of moral and intellectual perfection in Neoplatonic philosophy, save total transcendence beyond Being. For Iamblichus, they represent the state where the soul no longer contemplates the divine Nous but actively participates in it, embodying the divine forms of the virtues themselves. Given its concern with the divine intellect, I think there is an argument to begin considering the more mystical and theological texts utilised in the Platonic Curriculum here.

We know Proclus actively taught on the Orphic, Chaldean, and Sibylline texts, i.e the Orphic hymns and Derveni Papyrus, the Chaldean and Sibylline Oracles, and worked to integrate them with Platonic allegory. To this list I personally would add other revealed scripture. In particular, I’d include the Old and New Testament, the Avesta, and the Quran. I think there is also an argument to include much of the Philosophical Hermetica at this level, considering they present themselves as revealed texts more so than discursive dialogues.

As above, consider reading various exegeses and commentaries on these texts where possible. For a Platonic interpretation and allegorisation of the Old Testament, consider Philo’s works, while for the New consider Origen. It’s unfortunate that we do not have any of Iamblichus’ commentaries on the Oracles preserved, but the fragments of Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles would also be a good contemplative reading here. There are certainly no shortage of Platonic and Peripatetic commentaries/interpretations on the Quran either. I’d recommend familiarising yourself with the work of Ibn Sina and here.

3.2. Hieratic Virtues

Finally, at the heights of a Platonic education, the Hieratic Virtues are characterised as those transcending even intellectual existence, representing the unification of the soul with The One through theurgy. This is an eminently practical and contemplative endeavour. Therefore, I would begin with Iamblichus’ principle text, De Mysteriis to understand his view of theurgy. Following this, I would culminate with Proclus’ quintessential works: Elements of Theology and Platonic Theology, which is arguably the most fruitful and beautiful synthesis of all Late Antique Platonic thought.

This, to me, completes at least a foundational approach to Platonic Education through the lens of the virtues. I have obviously not included everything, but I think there is enough here for you to work out where you might place other dialogues or texts on your own.

Platonic Reading Curriculum

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Edit: Here is an expanded bullet-point list of the Wider Curriculum mentioned in this article. I have continued to update it since writing this, but it is still a work in progress. I would like to add in more commentaries as and when I find them, as well as do a section on the Arabic reception.

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Bibliography

Ambury, J. 2015: Neoplatonic Pedagogy. Dionysius. Volume 23. 49-75

Assmann, J. 2011: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. (English Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Chaitow, S. 2025: The Hieroglyphica of Horapollon Nilōos. A New Translation With Commentary and Notes. Black Letter Press: Obernkirchen

Daiber, H. 1995: Neuplatonische Pythagorica in arabischem Gewande. Der Kommentar des Iamblichus zu den Carmina Aurea. Brill: Leiden

Dalcourt, G. J. 1963. The Primary Cardinal Virtue: Wisdom or Prudence? IPQ 3.1. 55–75.

Dillon, J M. 1983. Plotinus, Philo and Origen on the Grades of Virtue. In: Blume, HD; Mann, F (eds.) Platonismus und Christentum. Festschrift für Heinrich Dörrie. JAC 10. Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 92–105

Finamore, J F. 1985. Iamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul. Chico, CA: SP.

Gerson, L P. 2003. Knowing Persons. A Study in Plato. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Guthrie, K.S. 1987. The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library. Edited and Introduced by David Fideler. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press.

Hadot, I. 1986: The Spiritual Guide. In Armstrong, H, A. ed. Classical Mediteranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek & Roman. 436. Crossroad: New York

Hadot, I. 1978: Le Problème du néoplatonisme alexandrin. Hiérocles et Simplicius. Paris: Études augustiniennes

Hadot, P. 1997: Plotin ou la simplicité du regard. Études Augustiniennes: Paris

Hoffmann, P. 1994. Damascius. In Goulet, R (ed.): Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques. Babélyca d ‘Argos à Dyscolius. Volume II. CNRS Èditions: Paris. 548-555.

Joost-Gaugier, C. 2007: Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and his Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press: Cornell

Koutsoukos, M. 2026: Restoring the Ancient Religion. The Theurgic Orthopraxy of Iamblichus. Springer Nature. Palgrave Macmillan: Switzerland

Krulak, T. 2017: Philosophy, ‘Ιερατική, and the Damaskian Dichotomy: Pursuing the Bacchic Ideal in the Sixth Century Academy. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies. 57. 454-481

Lamberz, E. (ed.) 1975. Porphyrii Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner.

Majercik, R. 1989. The Chaldaean Oracles. Leiden: Brill.

O’Brien, C.S. 2025. Plato’s Unwritten Doctrines. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (Elements in Ancient Philosophy).

O’Meara, D. 1989: Pythagoras Revived. Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press: Oxford

O’Meara, D. 2005: Platonopolis. Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press: Oxford

Saffrey, H. 1992. Pourquoi Porphyre a-t-il édité Plotin? Réponse provisoire. In Brisson et al: Porphyre, Vie de Plotin II. Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin: Paris. 31-64

Schibli, H S. 2002: Hierocles of Alexandria. Oxford University Press: Oxford

Schissel, O. 1926. Der Stundenplan des Neuplatonikers Proklos. In Heisenberg, A; Marc, P (eds.): Byzantinische Zeitschrift. Volume 26. Leipzig: Verlag und Druck von B. G. Teubner. 265-273.

Simmons, B, M. 2015: Universal Salvation in Late Antiquity: Porphyry of Tyre and the Pagan-Christian Debate. Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press: Oxford

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Taylor, T. 2001 [1807]: The Works of Aristotle [The Organon]. Volume 2. The Prometheus Trust: Chepstow

Valantasis, R. 1991: Spiritual guides of the third century: a semiotic study of the guide-disciple relationship in Christianity, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, and Gnosticism. Fortress Press: Minneapolis

Ward, J.K. 2021: Plato’s Contribution to Theoria. In Ward, J.K (ed.) Searching for the Divine in Plato and Aristotle: Philosophical Theoria and Traditional Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 50–85

Westerink, L. G. 1987. Proclus commentateur des Versd’Or. In Boss, G; Seel, G (eds.): Proclus et son influence. GMB Editions du Grand Midi: Zürich. 61-78

Wildberg, C. 2002. ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟ ΤΕΛΟΣ: Neuplatonische Ethik zwischen Religion und Metaphysik. In Kobusch, T; Erler, M (eds.): Metaphysik und Religion: Zur Signatur des spätantiken Denkens / Akten des Internationalen Kongresses vom 13.-17. März 2001 in Würzburg. De Gruyter: Berlin. 261–78.

As many of you who are following my socials will know, I have been rather euphoric for the past week and a half, having finally picked up the Prometheus Trust’s complete 33 volume Thomas Taylor collection. I must say that it truly is a thing of beauty, and unboxing it certainly has been one of the prouder moments of my life thus far:

It was a nice coincidence, then, that around the same time last week, the eminent Edward Butler released his new ‘Polytheistic Platonism’ also with Prometheus. This collection of essays spans much of his academic and philosophical career, and is excellently introduced by Antonio Vargas, who provides a very helpful overview of the Metaphysics of ‘Butlerian Platonism’1 as well as a useful proposed reading order to really make sense of his body of work. Needless to say, my studiositas summoned my wallet back before I even had a chance. Not that I would complain about what has turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable few days of reading so far:

I have been a fan of Butler’s work for a few years, and hold him in high esteem, both as a Platonist philosopher in his own right, and as an academic exegete of the Late Platonists. It was a delight, then, to read the first two essays of Vargas’ paideia2 and discover Butler’s engagement with Amerindian Perspectivism, an Ecosophy (Århem, 1990: 109) that, as many of you who have attended my Q&As will know, has formed part of my archaeological work, and increasingly, my own budding philosophical worldview.

Situating Metamodernity

My objectives in my next few essays are going to be far reaching. At a basic level, I want to introduce some of the principles of Perspectivism as I understand -and, to a degree, experience- it, and harmonise its ideas with the emerging cultural-movement of Metamodernism, which I am increasingly convinced is the direction we are collectively moving in. In this initial article, I am going to focus more specifically on Metamodernism itself, and the problem of the One and Many in Platonism. Towards the end, I also bring in some possible interpretations and comparisons from Buddhist thought that may be able to help alleviate some of the tensions, or in the very least, create more avenues for contemplation.

Defining Metamodernity

Simply put, Metamodernism is a cultural sentiment and ideological tendency that emerged in the late 90s and has steadily solidified up to the present and continues to do so. It can be thought of as a reaction to Post-modernism that re-emphasises subjective interiority, individuality, vulnerability and human affective -over intellectual- commitment to ideology. It seeks to protect the “playful irony or experimentation…[and] unabashed delight in the intricacies of being human” (Dember, 2023) from the ironic skepticism and distance of Post-modernity, while simultaneously rejecting the reductionism of Modernism.

It traces its academic origin to a 2010 article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, where Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker looked back on the previous decade and argued that many of the emerging cultural expressions did not seem describable in terms of the prevalent Post-modern models. Speaking to the sensibility, they wrote of works that:

As Greg Dember (2023) has recently argued, insofar as Modernism3 “was preoccupied with propelling humanity forward with the quest of pursuing objective, universal truths”, and Post-modernism4 “was preoccupied with drawing attention to what was missing in Modernism: an awareness of context and relationship”, Metamodernism is concerned with a “place for…interiority or felt experience after the meaning-degrading “side effects” of Post-modernism’s relativism and Modernism’s reductionism.” Simply put, each cultural movement has grown out of a recognition of the perceived failings of the former, and since we are still under the grip of Post-modernism, Metamodernism is still nascent in its critique, but is rapidly growing more solidified, and can perhaps be exemplified by the increasing shift back to analogue life, whether in music and the arts, the return to the countryside and nature in the face of environmental decline, or even the changing habits of Gen Z and the move away from Big Tech. In a way, it can also be described as a kind of radical empirical positivism -in the loose sense of articulating positive statements- that contains a kind of skepticism of skepticism itself, confronting the Post-Truth relativity of meaning.

The pendulum motif is spreading as emblematic in Metamodern circles, and actually derives from Plato, or more specifically Plotinus (Enn 3.8.4)5, as does the “Meta” prefix. μεταξύ describes the intermediary space or state between two poles of existence, such as the divine and the human, or the finite and the infinite. It is commonly used to describe human existence as a stepping-stone or a state of longing in Plotinus. Metamodernism, similarly, doesn’t settle in one position but swings between opposite poles—such as hope and doubt, or sincerity and irony—moving between them as needed. It seeks meaning and constructive engagement, even while acknowledging that such pursuits may be flawed.

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Dember intuits quite a profound necessity of the Metamodern Spirit, especially in our fragmented Post-Truth world where everything is fractured through the lens of ‘social’ media and our sense of reality is increasingly undermined by AI and narrativised through heavily edited ‘newstok’. He writes:

It is interesting too that Graham Harman and Timothy Morton’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) that Dember mentions seems to accord well with Amazonian Perspectivism, as will become clear. Such a Metamodern concern for protected interiority, not just of people, but of things -objects, concepts, natural features etc- aligns with the Perspectivist ethos (and Butler’s cosmic pluralism, for that matter), such that I think explicating this indigenous wisdom has the potential to contribute to a refining of Metamodernism itself. In so doing, I hope to show that a ‘Perspectivist Metamodernism’ can stand as an alternative to current notions of ‘animism’ and -by incorporating Panentheistic approaches6- to a mechanical naturalist Panpsychism.

To a degree, this could also be considered a continuation of the anti-Nominalist project of Radical Orthodoxy writers like John Milbank, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, who, with their Hegelian inspired critique of the spirit of abstract Enlightenment reasoning and call for a return to Thomistic virtue ethics have positioned Nominalism as one of the cardinal sins of Western thought7. Generally speaking, Post-modernist thought fetishises social constructivism, and thus has an inherent skepticism about the human capacity to access a mind-independent reality. Metamodernism instead takes a kind of radical empiricism at face value and argues for an epistemology rooted in humility.

As Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm (2022) has argued, it:

Provides an alternative account of not only how the world functions in signs but also how human sign-making activities are on a continuum with animal and plant communication. By doing so, it provides a fresh theory of the meaning of meaning, which suggests humans approach the world semiotically, but like our fellow animals we are not imprisoned in language.

To counter what Storm identifies as a “phantom opposition” between Realists and Antirealists, Metamodernism situates “real” as a contrastive term which rests on an unstated contrast, such that even socially constructed entities can be made “real” and given ontological grounding.

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Aristotelian Nominalism

I can’t really say i’m fully convinced by this yet. To historicise the debate a bit, it’s worth beginning with Aristotle’s attempts to moderate Platonic Forms. His ideas had him maintain that while the Forms do exist, they do so only insofar as they are instantiated in other things, not absolutely in themselves. This philosophical grounding lent itself to a priority of individual existent things, and especially existence in its particularity and multiplicity, in contrast to a more universalist idea in which individuations were supposed to exist via participation.

In the Medieval period, Ibn Rushd took this a step further and argued that since all existent things participate in Being, God -insofar as It exists and is- must also. Thus, God is simply one instantiation of “being” among others. Under the influence of Ockham, such an idea of God came to be that simply considering It one existent among many, and thus as separable and separate as any one particular thing is from another. Since the particular is the only thing to possess Being, the universal must have no existence outside of the mind. In such a view, there are no extra-mental intellectual realities. Rather, the correspondence that individual minds make between different things is really just a case of naming them. Universals like Plato’s Forms are nothing but nomina, the names and conceptual categories that perceiving minds map onto things to make sense of them.

In this sense, the traditional relationship of humans to God changed from that of a participatory mode that sought henosis with a Good that was beyond being, to humans as subjects that should strive to obey a singular Supreme Being who is fundamentally separate from the cosmos, and caused it to Be as a result of will. As Butler (2026: 273) points out:

The Christian God lays claim to the natural world in the mode of a thing created, and which is thus already positioned as a resource, over which humans are ultimately granted dominion, and due to the ontological closure of monotheism, this relationship of created to creator is the totalising determiner or all beings.

Gersh’s (1978) excellent study on the evolution of the Ps.Dionysian tradition has one of firmest grasps on the intricacies of Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism, and freely moves between both versions in such a way that he can speak to this transition well. At one point (1978: 20-22), he outlines the conceptual tension between Neoplatonic and Christian conceptions of emanation and creation, especially as relates to the problem of automatism. Emanation is a kind of divine ecstasy for Neoplatonists, which Ps.Dionysius links with God’s Love:

After Ps.-Dionysius, Gersh argues, “Christian Neoplatonists allow this concept of ecstasy to recede into the background, and in general its function is taken over by the doctrine of the divine will”. The tension really at place is over deliberate versus automatic causation for the cosmos. As he explains (1978: 21):

Taken at face value, the notion of something diffusing causal potency (i.e. by “flowing’, “pouring’, “bubbling’, and so on) implies an unwilled and automatic process, and there is no evidence to suggest that the pagan Neoplatonists understood it in any other way. However, with Christian thinkers difficulties arise for, although the emanationist viewpoint of their sources is superficially preserved, some of them also take steps to correct it and bring it into harmony with the notion of a consciously benevolent deity.

Certainly a theme running through the writing of those Radical Orthodoxy authors I mentioned above, is an acceptance of unknowing, and of Mystery in a way reminiscent of Ps.Dionysius8:

Within this circle, it is largely taken for granted that philosophical Realism will be “Platonic” in the broad sense articulated by Lloyd Gerson (2020) but is in need of mediation through Christianity to have any widespread effect on prevalent ways of Euro-American thinking. Instead, I would challenge them that Realist Perspectivist approaches (which are fundamentally non-relativist) are not only -and perhaps even better- comparable with a Polytheistic Platonist Realism, but can even offer us insights into a Polycentric way of worlding on its own terms, a way that is thoroughly Metamodern in its preservation of the agency and interiority of the multitude and degrees of Being9.

Another way of wording the sentiment I want to arrive in a few articles from now is captured, in part, by the title of Yarza, Rando, and Mancini’s recently digitised monograph: “One Cult, Multiple Cultures”. Or, to take it in Perspectivist terms, One Culture, Many Natures.

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Polycentric Panentheism

In a roundabout way, I am arguing here, by way of a Metamodern sensibility towards preserving individualism AND pluralism, and in its spirit of “both…and” for a Polycentric Panentheism that both respects yet positions the individual as a unit of reference to other self-contained units -a One of Ones- with their own complete perspectives and interiors, all of which stand as reference points unto themselves to open inquiry into the Pleroma. In other, more Butlerian words, All contains All such that there is no void. There is no dimension where the All is not.

As Vargas (2026: 5). explains in his introduction:

A pantheon…is a manifold of irreducible individuals, each of whom can be invoked as sovereign, each of whom gathers a whole into its own distinctive unity…each god is not merely one member of a divine aggregate but can function as a centre of the whole…thus the divine manifold cannot be modelled on a single central principle distributing fixed portions of reality to subordinate beings

The paradoxical challenge is that none of these proposed perspectives -human, deity, insect, soil, plant or animal- are necessarily “correct” in the sense of a grand narrative ‘Truth’ -or necessarily expressions of a monocentric unity-, and yet, all of them articulate a revelation of their own essence, which characterises the fullness and unity of Being. Their distinctions -which can overlap without obfuscation- are gradations of Being, and can all be utilised as philosophical reference points.

There is a tendency in modern interpretations of Neoplatonic thought to position another quasi hypostasis above the Gods-as-Henads in the Proclean sense. This allows for the interpretation that all respective Gods are simply a diffusion or multiplication of a single One, or that they simply participate in, and unfold from it in emanation. This interpretation, while having merits of its own, seemingly discounts the criticisms of the Parmenides which explicitly state that the One is not a Monad in the quantifiable sense. Parmenidean Being is not divisible, as it is entirely full, with no empty space (non-Being) to differentiate one part from another. The ‘reality’ of such Being is a continuous One that is more of an "all at once," unchanging, and perfect Essence. It is an indivisible, continuous, and whole unity that cannot be divided, quantified, or segmented.

In this sense, a Parmenidean One cannot be a Monad, properly conceived, since it has no beginning, middle, or end, and cannot be a single part in a larger structure. In order for this to function in a meaningful sense, each individual God can be considered ἴδιος -’private’, individual, their own- resting atop their respective Chain10, existing in their own continuous unity.

Proclus is certainly the most explicit thinker to express this fundamental tension. On the one hand, at his most Polycentric, one may recourse to his Platonic Theology:

On the other, as Chulp (2012:118) notes, Prolcus seemingly rejects the idea that the summa of Gods equates to a totalic One:

Now, as Chulp admits, he may simply be trying to reconcile two different modes of discourse -theological and philosophical- here. Equally, since Platonic Theology appears to have been, possibly, his final work, his thought may simply have matured between writing Elements of Theology (although this too may be a late work, given its systematisation). Certainly, in writing the Theology, he heavily depends on his interpretation of the Parmenides, and indeed his own commentary, which he quotes throughout it.

Either way, I am increasingly skeptical that we can only hope for a comprehensive pluralistic, not a unified, theory of Being; a theory that includes all major causes, aspects and experiences, but which, unlike a unified theory, does not purport to reduce them all to one basic causal mechanism or concept.

Buddhist Approaches to the One and the Many

While admittedly different in its salvational aim -the recognition of Śūnyatā-, and thus limited as a comparable paradigm, the metaphor of Indra’s Net, a favourite of the Huayan School of East Asian Buddhism, captures my point imagistically. As described by Francis Cook (1977), drawing on the Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra:

In other words, notwithstanding the following paragraph of theological nuance, we read a description resembling a kind of a πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν, or as Damascius formulates it with nuance in his commentary on the Parmenides (II. 4.22) πάντα ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἴδιος -all things in each other individually/uniquely-.

All in All, as All Things Are Full of Gods.

In some ways, this idea/image reminds me of the Pythagorean Tetractys:

Each point on the pyramid is a Monad unto itself, and yet also one overlapping element of a further triangle/triad of Monads. These triadic wholes in turn make up grander and grander triads, and the One Total -the triangle proper- consists of all the various self-sufficient Monads.

That such a diagram (or number) could symbolise a God, we can recall Porphyry’s comment in De Abstinentia (2.36):

Unimpeded Interpenetration in the Philosophy of Fazang

Central to the philosophy of Fazang, the third patriarch of the Huayan school, was a universalised and metaphysically elevated form of Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Arising). In his writing, as Alexandrov (2025: 35) contends, “the cosmos was a series of reflecting nodes, mirroring one another, demonstrating a lack of obstruction between phenomena.” One could not “distinctly define any object or entity since any unitary definition lead to unraveling relations to other objects and entities”. Everything was thought to be “only definable relative to everything else, be it uniform entities, composites, abstractions or the broader cosmos.” Understanding this led to a realisation of the interpenetration of all things on all levels, and thus, that Emptiness was the only intrinsic nature of things. Unlike a Peripatetic conception of identity, “since all events are aspects of a wider pattern, there can be no Principle of Identity.” Such realisation would theoretically allow us to escape from self-centred intentionality and achieve universal compassion for all suffering.

While I appreciate this line of thought from an ethical, and even soteriological standpoint, I personally tend more towards the Dharmakāya perspectives of Tathāgatagarbha (Buddha Nature) schools. A rare instance of a Buddhist scholar’s perspective on Realism is to be found in John Paraskevopoulos’s article on conceptions of the Buddhist Absolute. In it he charts the evolution of the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, and concludes that in its mature form explicated by Mahayanists, Nirvana is nothing less than the experiential -read phenomenological- dimension of the Dharmakāya. He writes:

While the Prajñāpāramitā tradition insists on the unilaterality of śūnyatā, such that nothing has a substantial nature -svabhāva- or a self -ātman-, texts of the Tathāgatagarbha school tend to positively use terms like ātman, ātmapāramitā and paramātman by associating them with Tathāgatagarbha or Dharmakāya. Texts of Tathāgatagarbha schools, such as the Mahāparinirvāṇamahāsūtra challenge Western ideas of Buddhism and admit an underlying Being/Nature to both Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra. This Essential Being is often described as nitya, dhruva, or śāśvata, all terms that convey an idea of eternity and permanence. As Bon (2025: 67) describes:

There is something that is common to all sentient beings, something with respect to which they are all identical: the pure and immaculate nature of their mind (cittaprakṛti), which makes them all possessors of the tathāgatagarbha.

Even the perceptible world is pervaded (sarvatraga) with this self-illuminating cittaprakṛti of the tathāgatagarbha, which serves as the ontological foundation and ground of both the manifest (samalā tathatā) and pure (nirmalā tathatā) reality.

In this context, I find many of the tensions Platonists often express between the One and the Many to be resolved. Asvaghosha’s Awakening of Faith sutra is perhaps the most fundamental expression of the beauty of this thought, and is a synthesis of the Madhyamika, Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha traditions which the founders of all these major schools have venerated as an unimpeachable authority. In it, the Absolute or Supreme Reality is described as a Suchness (tathāgata) that is both transcendent and imminent simultaneously, and both empty (sunya) and non-empty (asunya). As the core of all Being, itself formless, it paradoxically manifests itself through forms which, although finite and limited, are all reflections of its Sameness.

Paraskevopoulos writes, quoting Hakeda’s (1967: 34) translation of the Awakening of Faith:

Suchness is empty because from the very beginning it has never been related to any defiled states of existence, it is free from all marks of individual distinction of things and it has nothing to do with thoughts conceived by a deluded mind.

In this way, Emptiness is not non-existence, but simply something that is:

Devoid of a distinct, absolute, independent, permanent, individual entity or being as an irreducible component in a pluralistic world.....However, this negation does not exclude the possibility of Suchness being seen from a different viewpoint or order with which one is not accustomed. Hence, there is room to present Suchness, if it is done symbolically, as replete with attributes.

Following this, he quotes Asvaghosha in full, in the context of explaining the eternal character of the Absolute:

In other words, Suchness is not the kind of existence analogous to the reality we’re familiar with. It is something even more 'real' than anything we know. The Mahayana notion of 'emptiness' is not really an emptiness or lack of reality, but more an emptiness of limitations, relativity and delusion that serves as an upaya -skilful means- to help rid us of misguided views of the Absolute rather than being some kind of comprehensive statement regarding it. This kind of thinking finds its way into Pure Land approaches too, which are arguably the most explicit examples of the asunya view of the Absolute.

The Absolute, with its fullness of Bodhisattvas acts as a “plenitude” and “inexhaustible font of all merits, virtues, wisdom and compassion” (Paraskevopoulos, 1998). It is something possessed of personality, compassion and intelligence and actively takes that initiative in the liberation of sentient beings. As Paraskevopoulos emphasises, the Pure Land patriarch, T'an-luan claimed that what distinguished Pure Land Buddhism from other schools is that the Dharmakaya:

Takes the initiative in relation to deluded and suffering beings manifesting itself as the 'Dharmakaya of Expediency' in the form of various Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Pure Lands. This is the ultimate act of compassion.

As Vargas notes in his introduction, ‘multicosmism’ is another characteristic of Butler’s thought. However, there is an obvious difference in that Butler’s polycentricity actively resists any kind of resolution into a single Being or Absolute. Insofar as philosophical concepts in-and-of themselves are empty, and “require the disclosure of divine individuals to have determinative content” (2026: 6), we are presented with an model that:

“different pantheons may ground different metaphysical articulations of reality, and philosophy can serve as a comparative medium among them without reducing them to one single theological framework”

Perhaps in similar fashion, moving away from Buddhism momentarily to another monumental Indian thinker, Biernacki (2023) has described Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism as reclaiming the solidity, and realness of the material world and the vastness of the Śivate pantheon by positing that the entire cosmos and its inhabitants are a kind of Perspectivist theophany. For Abhinava, the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants, from gods to humans to insects down to the smallest rock or strand of soil is considered part of an eternal unfolding of a conscious reality and Being -Śiva-. This ground of Being, arising from its initial pulsation -spanda- not only pervades all things, but is active and possesses an ability to choose, continually individuating and collectivising in its movement between compression and expansion. Further, every essence and aspect of this consciousness, worlds their own world in their own perspective, all as an expression of the radical freedom and fullness of Śiva. In his Tantraloka (TĀ 15.264b-266), Abhinava informs us:

All of this points, for me, towards a new kind of Ecosophy, an ecological philosophy in the truest sense, that has the potential to ground our approach to the natural world and the plentitude of beings within in it. Not just a philosophy of ecology-as-nature, but ecology as a collective and relational philosophy that touches on its etymological origin, a study of the oikos, the dwelling. Again, I return to the fundamental point: a philosophy of All dwelling in All.

If we are to participate in demiurgy on the individual level, and -as advocated in the Hermetica- act as custodians for the beatification and maintenance of Nature as an Image (εἴδωλον) participating in The Gods, it is worth exploring and articulating such a perspective.

In the next article, I will begin outlining Amazonian Perspectivism.

Bibliography

Århem, K. 1990. Ecosofía makuna. In Correa, F (ed.): La selva humanizada: ecología alternativa en el trópico húmedo colombiano. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología

Alexandrov, E. 2025. Interpenetration in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and Plotinus. In: Alexandrov, E; O Neill, A, J (eds.) Buddhism and Neoplatonism. Entre le visible et l’invisible Book 8. Chisokudo Publications. Nagoya: Japan. 13-65

Biernacki, L. 2023: The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism. New York: Oxford Academic

Bon, L, E. 2025: Buddha-Nature and World Soul Panpsychist Paths Between Buddhism and Neoplatonism. In: Alexandrov, E; O Neill, A, J (eds.) Buddhism and Neoplatonism. Entre le visible et l’invisible Book 8. Chisokudo Publications. Nagoya: Japan. 65-89

Butler, E. 2026: Polytheistic Platonism. Collected Essays. Lydney: The Prometheus Trust

Chulp, R. 2012: Proclus. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Cook, F. 1977: Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Penn State Press: Pennsylvania

Dember, G. 2023: Metamodernism: A Response to Modernism and Post-modernism. IAI Online [Blog Article]. Available at: https://iai.tv/articles/metamodernism-a-response-to-modernism-and-postmodernism-greg-dember-auid-2682

Gersh, S. 1978: From Iamblichus to Eriugena. An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition. Leiden: Brill.

Gerson, L.P. 2020. The Perennial Value of Platonism. In Hampton, A.J.B; Kenney, J.P. (eds.) Christian Platonism: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13–33

Hakeda, Y. 1967: The Awakening of Faith. Attributed to Asvaghosha Translated, with Commentary. New York: Columbia University Press

Paraskevopoulos, J. 1998: Conceptions of the Absolute in Mahayana Buddhism and Shinran. Sacred Web 3. 121-137

Storm, J, A, J. 2022: After Post-Modernism. IAI Online [Blog Article]. Available at: https://iai.tv/articles/after-postmodernism-auid-2304

Vermeulen, T; van den Akker, R. 2010: Notes on Metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2:1

The Trade in Religious Imagination in Late Antiquity

The whole weekend ended up being very timely, and lined up nicely with some of the things I've been thinking about and writing on for the past few months since graduating. This essay is an attempt to articulate some of my thoughts, experiences and ideas for future research, and some of the possible directions my thoughts are currently going in. Think of it as a kind of informal conference proceedings, written while reflecting on some of things that came up, and how they’re relevant to my research.

Philosophical Background: The Value of Archaeological Time

As we were discussing things, it became increasingly apparent that a shared theme across all the talks was the problematising of the concepts of ‘trade’, ‘foreignness’, and ‘syncretism’. To a lesser extent, we were also critically reflecting on how valid those Grand Narrative ‘History/Handbook of…’ books are that Oxbridge are famous for. It came as a bit of a surprise to me that there still hasn’t been a standalone ‘Cambridge History of Late Antiquity’ published. The closest comparable examples are Vols. 11-14 of ‘The Cambridge Ancient History’ series, which, somewhat problematically, divides the treatment into ‘The High Empire’ (Vol. 11, the 1st and 2nd century, 70-192 C.E), ‘The Crisis of Empire’ (Vol. 12, mostly the 3rd century Crisis, 193-337 C.E), ‘The Late Empire’ (Vol. 13, 337-425 C.E) and ‘Late Antiquity: Empire and its Successors’ (Vol.14, 425-600 C.E). The last of these (i.e Late Antiquity’s) was published almost 30 years ago, in 2001.

There has been a variety of themed or topic-specific monographs such as The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Late Antique Art and Archaeology and the Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity (2011) in two volumes, edited by the eminent Lloyd Gerson, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend wholeheartedly.

One question that became apparent was whether we should even be attempting to write a ‘History…’ of such a grand, diverse and -at times- thoroughly disparate period as Late Antiquity? How does one even go about framing such a Grand Narrative? There is a more persuasive argument that to treat the state of our evidence more ‘accurately’, it is perhaps more conducive to focus on regional, particularised histories. This is a more promising methodology given the difference between what we may dub Historical Time and Archaeological Time.

In his excellent work ‘The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology & Memory’ (2015 [2011]: 3-4), which I’m currently working through, the Celtic Archaeologist and Philosopher of Time Laurent Olivier comments on such a difference:

The archaeology I hold to insists on dealing with objects themselves. It wants nothing to do with erudite references and elucidations. It is beyond all history, and rejects all scholarship (2015: 3)

The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again (Ibid)

The glimpses of the past—which are imprints and vestiges—are indeed intended for us. For them to reveal themselves to us, we have to be prepared to recognize them. I now want to know what appears to us “in a flash” and does not belong to the realm of history (Ibid)

The archaeology that drives me undermines the conventional notion of historical time. All of time is here and now, not “back then” and “long ago.” What remains of the past are the ruins and detritus that time, which is to say the evolving present, is constantly accumulating and breaking down (2015: 4)

Put simply, the past is a hidden present. Olivier (2015: 8) goes on to say that, unlike the steady march of Historical Time, with its seemingly linear progression, periodisation and sequential events (‘time’ as most of us colloquially understand it), the kind of material assemblages -and thus repositories of ‘time’- that archaeologists tend to deal with “continue to evolve, transformed by new patterns of meaning that replace the old ones as new objects and newly created materials are included”.

Thanks to the variety of Cultural and Natural Transforms any archaeology student learns in their first month of undergrad study, no assemblage is a closed capsule that freezes things as they always were. Archaeological capsules are constantly shifting, exposed to new meaning and threats under the earth (and sometimes upon it) that reposition them, even before they are discovered and excavated. If I were being particularly Perspectivist, the chthonic microbes, soils and other ‘Hidden Ones’ have their way with the material long before we can get to it. Archaeological matter is a matter thoroughly haunted, comprised of ecologies of memory, affect and soul1.

As Olivier (2015: 8) explains, “the more we add the present onto the past, the more the past itself becomes matter for conjecture and hypothesis.” He comes to a poignant conclusion that is worth quoting in full:

All things considered however, I do think there can be value to the Grand Perspectives that these ‘Historic Overview’ handbooks offer, provided they allow space for the tension between archaeology and history. One thing that we all seemed to agree on was that this genre of handbook can get you out of the weeds of particularisation and isolation, forcing you to think comparatively and inter-regionally, which can be productive if done well.

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On a Utilitarian and Emancipatory Archaeology

One of the unique things about archaeology as a discipline is that its domain of study is largely the longue dureé in a way that History cannot accomplish. The study of Deep Time allows us a multigenerational (in the very extensive sense of the term) perspective on key themes and domains of the human experience -Childe’s Revolutions (Agricultural and Urban), Cognition and Religion and the Rise and Fall of Empires, to name a few-.

There is also a utilitarian and, I might argue, even philanthropic value to archaeology in its emancipatory capacity. In the spirit of Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’ (2002) archaeology can -and should- actively search for discontinuities and acknowledge them as such. Such an act -inherently political and humanist- calls into question the continuity that is implied or imposed upon history to establish disciplinary ‘History’ at all. This includes our periodisation, temporality and historical canon. In short, an ideal archaeology gives voice to, and arguably democratises the dead, especially the masses of dead that are obscured in historical and commercial narratives, chiefly women, children, slaves and ‘foreigners’. It’s no coincidence that these same groups are also the ones so frequently commoditised and forcibly moved alongside other ‘goods’ under the label of ‘trade’.

In spite of the constant rhetoric of ‘civilisation’ you hear from politicians-most prominent currently from the Aipacrocy of the US-Israeli axis-, my professor David Wengrow has poignantly remarked that a history of true ‘civilisation’ is not one of monuments, writing or ‘high culture’, but of an extended moral community; one that has little to do with monuments and memorials.

I want you to consider that human progress is not measured by industry, technology or ingenuity. It is measured by the value we place on a life. In particular, the value we place on the lives of those who are unimportant or seemingly useless to us2. The lives without privilege. The lives, with all their intricacies unknown to us. Their value is our value. That value is what defines an Age, and a species. The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead has similarly remarked that the earliest sign of ‘civilisation’ is not a tool or piece of art, but a healed femur. One of the etymological roots of ‘Human’, after all, is derived from the Latin humus, soil or earth. This is also the same etymological root of ‘humility’. To truly be human is to be of the soil. To be humble.

There is certainly a Romantic tenor and emotionality to the idea that in excavating -fundamentally an activity of and in the soil- and actively challenging History (as written largely by urban, literate, male elites), archaeologists ensure the disenfranchised dead are not forgotten, and even occasionally are given a chance to speak. The salience of elite monumentality and display has disenfranchised most of lives of our species the opportunity to have their experiences entered into our collective narrative as anything other than a statistic. As Tainter and Bagley (2005: 65) have remarked, this act of democratising the past is something at tension with the Orientalist, despotic legacies of Western disciplinary history.

I’m reminded here of a rather macabre example. When the Plymouth based artist Robert Lenkiewicz died of a heart attack in 2002, his collection made headlines because the mummified body of the homeless vagrant Edward McKenzie was found in one of his cabinets -dubbed “Diogenes” since, in the late 1960s, Robert found him living inside a concrete barrel at a rubbish tip on the outskirts of the city-. Robert and Edward were even friends. Police investigations found no evidence of foul play, and it seems like Edward willingly consented to being mummified after his death, a wish his friend obliged of him.

I remember listening to an interview with Robert, recorded shortly before his death, in which he was asked about his Muse and interest in the human form. He responded that what he was really interested in was attempting to capture the total presence of the body in the absence of the person. Read that again, and really think about it. I think it’s a very apt metaphor for what i’m trying to get at here. Presence is a kind of privilege. If your mind is always elsewhere, you are not really experiencing anything. Nothing is ever truly ‘real’ to you. Trade, especially the trade of slaves or vagrants, and the forced displacement of people3, gives me pause and deep regret in this regard. There is something undeniably in common between vagrants and the disenfranchised dead that archaeologists deal with. Both are left behind. Both of their voices remain largely silent in ‘official’ bureaucratic narratives as nothing more than statistics.

The State, Trade and the Human Body

Trade and exchange are commonly treated as the mercantile arms of centralised states or empires, all the moreso in their mature forms in Late Antiquity. Problematising both the concept of ‘state’ and ‘trade’, however, raises some interesting questions. At least from the Late Bronze Age, we can talk about specialised groups of people such as merchants or craftspeople who were concerned with the movement of goods, people and resources across large regions. There is always an idea of exchange, but how this exchange is negotiated or what exactly it connotes is highly variable.

Such ‘trade’ is inherently tied up with international and intranational diplomacy in the realm of courtly society in places like Egypt, Babylonia, the Hittite regions and the Levant. Immediately we are faced with a problem of biased evidence. There is an interesting contrast between archaeological evidence of the LBA on the one hand, and what’s actually going on during these processes of resource extraction, the movement of materials over large distances -which appears to be very interestingly complex- and the much more simple representations of Egypt’s engagement with the outside world, which are generally produced in the courts and official circles (evidenced most strongly through narrative-driven epigraphic sources). These tend to show regions like Western Asia and Nubia very much in cosmological terms as being both outside Egypt, alien to it, and subordinate to the force of the king. This ideological grammar is old, and is a deeply rooted feature of royal representation, which continues through the early dynasties into the Old Kingdom and far beyond.

Consider, for instance, some of the surviving relief fragments from the mortuary complex of Sahure at the site of Abusir (c. 2458–2446 B.C.E):

These tell us a great deal about how Egyptian royal/courtly culture viewed and represented foreign cultures and outside lands. In this case, it includes references to Syria, Nubia and an early reference to the Land of Punt, probably somewhere down in modern day Somalia/Somali-Land around the Horn of Africa. In these official representations of Egypt’s relationship with the outside world, it is quite striking that Egypt is never shown engaging in diplomacy, trade or commerce. Instead, goods are simply depicted coming from the four corners of the known outside world to Egypt as a form of tribute and sacrifice.

How does our picture and conception of trade change when we move away from these official, pictorial or monumental representations (literary or relief) to the archaeological evidence for some of these specialised groups?

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A historical view, held only by very few researchers nowadays, was that Dynastic States in some way promoted a scale of regional interaction that didn’t exist before. This implies that before the existence of Dynastic States, humans had only small, isolated communities which were not necessarily moving materials around on a large scale. Recent work in the last decade with things like the Transcaucasian Culture Network or the various Halaf-Ubaid Culture Areas, however, has shown this view to be deeply incorrect. Small, decentralised communities of villages, households and family groups in the Early-Mid Holocene (10,000-4000 B.C.E) certainly were exchanging goods and ideas across unfathomable distances -oftentimes, surpassing the scale of later states- without any kind of centralisation or bureaucracy as were currently understand it.

Before the Global City, came the Global Village.

One thing that became apparent in our discussions in this area was that a key question about ‘trade’ and its relationship to the emergence of states and empires then, is not so much about the creation of ‘trade’ as a concept, but more about the transformation of earlier Culture Networks or Areas -specifically their routes and lifeways-, and how we go about characterising it. Simply to call all of these different ways of moving objects, materials, ideas, techniques or people over large distances the same thing -’trade’- is clearly not telling us very much. What we are really talking about are different forms of mobility and circulation, and who has access to certain routes, and what this means for their way of life.

When we think of trade in the ancient world, then, what we’re actually talking about is a multi regional -often multigenerational- cosmopolitan kind of exchange rooted in an exploitative bureaucracy in the service of sacrifice. ‘Historic “civilisations”, as Wengrow emphasises, were systems held together by violence, coercion, and the suppression of women.

Modern international law and -largely- Western nation-states like to treat the ‘state’ as an entity of time immemorial. It’s easy to fall into Western Bureaucracy’s rhetorical trap and think ‘this is just the way we’ve always lived’, especially when modern nation-states actively attempt to cultivate an image of civilisational continuity with the geographic -and sometimes ethnic- aspects of their past.

In the face of such rhetoric, it’s worth remembering that humanity as a species has lived in what were effectively decentralised, anarchic, village-level communities for far longer (thousands of years longer) than we have ever lived in centralised urban spaces. Nor was a top-down, centralised urbanism uncontested or the only direction available to us at the ‘end’ of Prehistory. If the evidence coming out of the Cucuteni–Trypillia Mega-Sites of the 5th millennium B.C.E Ukrainian Forest Steppe are anything to go by, centralised administration and the Uruk temple-economy were more of an environmentally and circumstantially unique case than the norm.

The implication in commonly proposed frameworks is that states emerge through recurrent structural pressures, implied to be comparable across independent societies, which thus renders generalising explanations possible and desirable. Such variables are your usual explanations for state formation: agricultural intensification, surplus production, population growth and density, warfare and competition and ideological legitimation/centralisation. However…we know from the Indus Valley and Trypillia culture in Ukraine that none of these are necessary existents for state formation. Communities can experience these pressures and not develop into centralised, hierarchal societies. In fact, these Ukrainian communities appear to have been largely egalitarian.

If you compare contemporary plans of early Uruk with the Ukrainian Mega-Site of Maydanetske (which possibly had a population of up to 50,000 people), you notice something interesting:

In many ways, the surviving plans of Uruk in the 4th millennium B.C.E are a bit like one of these Trypillia Mega Sites turned inside out. With the Trypillia sites, we can see concentric rings of houses alongside a large gap in the middle where the government or temple buildings usually are. In the case of Uruk, our archaeological picture is somewhat the other way around: we can see what’s in the middle on the high acropolis of the site (a series of monumental buildings) but we know almost nothing about the main residential areas and neighborhoods of the city in this 4th millennium period.

For what it’s worth, the inception of the modern nation-state largely traces its Western form to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But a great deal of the rhetoric, ‘man-making’ and ‘nation-building may be attributed to the Post-War period and the founding of intergovernmental institutions -many of which, ironically, are unravelling now in the face of challenges to International Law-. The modern political and Marxist philosopher Alan Buchanan charts this evolution in his recent (2025: 6-7) book ‘Ideology and Revolution’. He too, is worth quoting in full:

In a manner of speaking, we’re talking here about kinds of dependency. Who is responsible for caring for the populace, and I might add, historically, the dead? The creation of centralised facilities and administrative bureaucracy for the construction of grand royal and political monuments or trading institutions that we see in urban states are, from the perspective of the embodied individual, simply a process of vastly increasing the number of people from across an entire country who are, in some way, involved in caring for the bodies of deceased royalty or state and politically sanctioned deities in the form of cult-statues -oftentimes interlinked-.

The whole process of state-formation may be viewed in terms of different treatments of the body in ritual and the kind of relationships this implies for the living. It occurs to me that the underlying problem here is how a system of care becomes transformed into a system of domination; how funerary rituals -supplied by commerce on a grand scale, particularly of exotic goods-, originally intended to provide kinship or solidarity among family members, are transformed into a way of producing monarchy and kingship.

A process of kinship to kingship.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. Feminist scholars have rightly drawn attention to the fact that caring-based labour is often the very opposite of mechanical labour. It entails recognising the unique qualities and needs of the person or thing being cared for. If the institution of the state really does have any common features the world over, one is certainly the tendency to displace this very human caring impulse onto abstractions.

Today this is increasingly about caring for the ‘nation’ -however defined-. Perhaps this is part of why it is so easy for us moderns to see Egypt or the Mesopotamian city-states as prototypes, anticipating modern Westphalian Nation-States and standing at the origin of our ‘Civilisation’. Here too, popular devotion is diverted onto grand abstractions, in the Egyptian case, to the ruler and ‘venerable’ dead. This abstraction process is what makes it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined simultaneously as a kind of family and a kind of machine, where everyone -except the king himself- was ultimately interchangeable as a moving or composite part.

In ‘classic’ Egyptian temple grammar, only the king is displayed in art; no substitute, even the highest ‘priest’ of the temple, is ever shown making an offering in internal temple contexts, since ideally the king -conceptualised not as a human body, but as constituted of the same primordial essence of The God, performed every action -both the offering of Ma’at and the reconstitution of the Eye of Horus- in every cult place in Egypt4. While ideologically persuasive, this idealised and sanitised depiction obscures the labour of non-royal officiants and laity, and by proxy, the ideological possibility of everyday people rendering their own care to their gods or ancestors.

Most of this care and labour is directed upwards, whether to tending rulers or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods’ statues. However, the process was also seen as generating a downward flow of divine blessings, protection, and stability which occasionally took the form of the great feasts like we have evidence for at the Workers’ Towns.

It’s worth remembering our ideas of what constitutes ‘business’ and ‘commerce’ are equally relatively modern social constructions. The incessant desire to acquire inordinate wealth, or even simply commerce for commerce sake -or at least, for cloud and image- like we witness in the despotic Smithian Expansions of Late Capitalism (your Andrew Tates, Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world who relish in their displays of wealth) would not only have been unrecognisable to LBA merchants, but probably those of Late Antiquity as well. Trade, business and commerce has, at least historically, been in the service of something grander. That something, I would argue, is a coercion geared towards the maintenance and care of cosmology, the supply of exotica to the cult of capricious kings and gods, conceptualised as a god-given necessity for the world, and humanity’s raison d’être5.

As the receptacle of the divine on earth, the bodies of cult statues lie at the centre of numerous spheres: the temple economy (see Kemp, 1984), interregional trade & exchange -as a driver of procurement for exotica that constituted their body, and the maintenance of divine order. The 3^rd century Hermetic Logos Teleios (Asclepius) presents an apocalyptic vision of societal decline in Egypt precisely as a result of the Egyptians forgetting their ‘true religion’, conceptualised as maintaining care for the gods’ cultic bodies6 (Bull, 2016).

Wengrow (2018: 111) highlights a certain irony in this. The ‘pure matter’ arduously reserved for cult statues and the materials required for their manufacture are also "precisely those which sustained, and were the ardent focus of, [mundane] commercial transactions: metals, used as currency in international commerce; precious stones and timber traded over great distances via multiple (human) intermediaries.”

Alongside the abstraction of care levied upon us by centralised states, comes standardisations of ‘meaning’ among ascendant groups, which in turn manifest as ‘official’ realities and social value(s) that subtly infest the fabric of everyday life, reframing what was largely a holistic, and largely naturalist world of Prehistory, as one of composites integrated into abstract wholes.

Predynastic bodily visual culture in both Egypt and Mesopotamia tends to be more characterised by a lack of emphasis on anatomical detail so that only scale and outline provide the majority of differentiation (see Wengrow, 2014: 47). Such art is reminiscent of Derrida’s (1967) différance, in that it seems to actively encourage a diversity of meaning that resists systematisation and classification by playing on resemblances of natural forms. Ambiguity and a sense of free-floating meaning are central to such pre-state presentation, as Wengrow (2014: 48) notes “meaningful relations emerge from the blending of affinities rather than from the assemblage of contrasts.”

Visual culture of the earliest cities -cylinder seals, bullae, and the modular canon of proportion we witness in raised relief carving- by contrast, embodies a bureaucratic commodification of the world. Under an administrative gaze, people and objects are no longer perceived as unique or conscious wholes, but as abstract, divisible entities, comprised of consumable and substitutable parts. People become objects, conceptually indistinguishable from other traded goods. It’s no coincidence then, that the dawn of urbanism coincides with the emergence of Monsters in the human psyche -composite and ferocious beings, comprised of forms that do not otherwise occur in nature-. There is a kind of psychological compression that results when we undergo such forced abstraction and commodification.

As I have argued in a previous essay, Nietzsche hits upon something similar in Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. For him, language has a way of anthropomorphising the world, and bringing it under dominion by assigning things names or categories -the first act of the archetypal Adam in the Garden-. In the course of this process, differences are erased, or subsumed as long as the same historical method, institution or media is used to capture those differences. This process is nowhere more apparent than in the rise of urbanism and the centralisation of the earliest states in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The earliest written signs of proto-cuneiform are of precisely this nature, ideograms that stand in for concrete things, rather than units of speech (phonograms). As Wengrow (2018: 82) notes, writing, in its earliest form was utilised to “signify changing relationships within a closed system where number, order, and rank were considered the only significant dimensions of value”.

The manifest Will to Knowledge -a concerted effort to make sense of the world- masks the superimposing of ‘official’ narratives and perspectives through language. It is an illusion, shrouding the Will to Power -a desire by individuals or institutions to impose their will onto the world and others-, actively reducing natural différance (Derrida, 1967) to trivial, controllable abstractions.

Marx is perhaps more famous for his comment on history as a condition that people make, just not under their own choosing, but it’s worth also remembering that he intuitively described bureaucracy as ‘the spiritualism of the state’, creating a carefully patrolled domain of phantom entities—signs that stand for beings and things—that exist alongside real people and real objects.

I have much more to say on this, but for the sake of -admittedly ironic- brevity, I’ll restrain it to another post. What follows are some reflections on the talks given on Friday, and some of the things I took away from each.

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A Summary of the Papers

A talk by Prof. Andy Merrills that examined epigraphic and literary attestations of Christian conventions in the Kingdom of Aksum (modern Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia) in the 3rd and 4th centuries C.E. Two of the things that struck me particularly prominently (aside from Andy being an excellent and engaging speaker!) were how both the Greek and native Ge’ez inscriptions (especially those of Ezana) rest in this rather ephemeral space between the Pagan-Christian binary (which incidentally I feel is too Structuralist for my taste).

RIE 189 (see Hatke, 2013) for instance, utilises what are clearly pre-existing ‘Pagan’ epithets and titles (‘agzī’a samāy; Lord of Heaven, ‘agzī’a bǝh’ēr; Lord of the Land) in an ambiguously Christian context. A discussion about phenomenological approaches to texts also raised the question of who exactly was meant to be reading some of these inscriptions (the intended audience). Not only is there a tendency to assume (monolithic) literacy rates (often in the absence of second or third-hand interpreters and translators), but the positionality of some of them would have made them nigh impossible for an ordinary person to read. One, which I now forget the name of, was inscribed on the inner-arm rest of a throne, which would have been impossible to view, let alone read, unless a person sat on it, or rested their head in the lap of the king.

Another interesting line of thinking emerged around a discussion of a comment by Taddesse (1972: 22-3) that it was possible some Christians existed in the region (perhaps in Adulis, Coloe and Aksum itself) prior to the official conversion of the king, particularly among foreign servant and merchant classes -maybe even inside the royal court itself-. There was some problematisation of ‘official’ conversion narratives that rest on the archetype of Constantine (312-37 C.E), and the idea that he served as a model for Christian Hellenistic/Roman Emperors.

It’s an interesting idea to consider that religious propaganda and evangelism may have gathered momentum in the 4th century with the growing prestige of the Church in the wider Roman Empire (and Rome itself), and that as Christianity increasingly became Hellenised/Romanised, it grafted itself onto Hellenic Identity as a whole. To be a Roman or Hellene was increasingly to be Christian, not just to know your Homer, as it inherited the intellectual and liturgical heritage of Philosophical Paganism. To what extent did ‘foreign’ kingdoms and cultures (or simply, kings) adopt Christianity as a means to emphasise, secure or promote their entry into the Hellenic Block and present themselves as ‘educated’ and ‘civilised’? Is it right to frame any of these Christianisation narratives (often derived from problematic hagiographies) as top-down?

As Dr. Andrew Henry remarked in a recent video on Christianisation in Baltics:

In reality, new cultural and religious idioms adapt in a palimpsest fashion7. The spread and adoption of one religion does not necessarily erase older spiritual (defined here in Streib and Hood’s (2011: 433-453) sociological sense as privatised, experience-oriented religion) habits or modalities of practice, even if it does change the idiom or name to which such practices are directed8.

Certainly with Ezana, his initial ambivalence in presenting himself as a Christian ruler in inscriptions (particularly his first non-pagan one) is equivocal at best, perhaps because he had to contend with more conservative (Pagan) members of his court, or, more speculatively, because he perhaps didn’t believe the new forms as much as he publicly professed.

We also had a good laugh at a thought-experiment that was proposed modelled on the provocation of Ashis Nandi -the Indian political theorist and social scholar- that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (since the sport perfectly fits Indian culture despite its British origin). What if we were to think of Christianity as an Ethiopian religion accidentally discovered by Europeans?9

This line of thinking did far more to problematise the notion of ‘foreignness’ in Late Antiquity than you might expect. The closest analogue that comes to mind is the LBA Ulu Burun shipwreck, which gave us a snapshot on LBA elite maritime commerce, but also shook Culture-Historic archaeology to its core. All those neat little archaeological cultures defined by their ceramic typologies were discovered to have been jumbled together, and circulating similar exchange routes, being consumed by a multicultural, multiethnic cosmopolitan world not dissimilar to our own.

How ‘foreign’ can something truly be in a globalist, interconnected world? Is it even a useful category anymore, or are we just compartmentalising societies, items and activities into discursive categories that no one living through them would recognise?

Only slight self-indulgence permits me to summarise my own paper. Granted, I did not get through everything I had planned to, but the essential points I wanted to make regarding re-modelling syncretism, and thinking through cases of religious creol in Greek and Egyptian formularies were made, and -I think- were quite productive.

General Background

As Heidi Wendt (2016: 74-133)10 argued a decade ago, the Early and High Imperial period saw a diversification in religious ideas with the empire’s expanding territories and cultural geography. Religious representations became increasingly accessible due to the assorted media in which they were communicated and reinforced, including writings, frescoes, mosaics, reliefs, statues, coins, performances, and even public viewing galleries.

Depictions of Egyptian religion in Rome were even commonplace enough for the satirist Juvenal to suppose that not a single person there could be ignorant of “the monsters that crazy Egypt worships”. It’s no wonder such a period features so prominently in discussions of religious syncretism, which is often described as mytho-centric analogues of deities or ideas. It struck me that there is very little explicit theoretical reflection on what syncretism actually is in this period, despite how common the phenomenon seems to be. The general trend has been to follow the tropes of literary sources (largely Herodotus and Caesar) and treat the process as a means of 1:1 equivocations or analogisations of deities

The Problem with Syncretism

The problem with this is that approaches to syncretism in Late Antique religions of the Eastern Mediterranean have tended to embed preconceived notions of religious and ethnic boundaries (i.e. that certain motifs are “Egyptian”, “Jewish” or “Greek”). Sanzo (2024: 16-19) cautions that this tendency reflects the tacit assumption that an idealised configuration of religious boundaries (inherited from select literary sources) is the same thing as religious boundary demarcation in practice or on the ground.

Instead, rather than a simple one-one equivalency or a kind of cultural interpretation (Graeca or Romana), I contended that we shouldn’t be thinking about religious syncretism in the sense of two self-defined religious identities or cultural blocks merging into some kind of amorphous hybrid. In reality, on the ground, it is a process where people encounter a new religious belief or practice, but re work it, relying on familiar ways of understanding things like illness, spirits, the landscape, fertility, misfortune or the divine. It’s more like a religious bricolage.

Dividing the language on a given object or in a ritual on the basis of religious or ethnic affiliation obscures approaches to similarity and difference in the perspective of practitioners’ minds. Assuming a name or motif retained its original connotations regardless of the temporal, social or material context it operated in is questionable at best, and the emergence of polymorphic or ‘foreign’ deities cannot be ascribed to blanket ‘syncretism’.

In the proliferation of Christian amulets post-4th century C.E, for instance, we witness a number that utilise Hebraic divine names (rendered in Greek) such as Iao, Sabaoth etc, precisely in contexts that are used against Jews. Seemingly, a Late Antique Christian was perfectly comfortable using -what we cite as an ethnically- Hebrew name to refer to their own conception of god. What exactly is lost to us if we blanket this nuance and assign ethnicities purely on linguistic grounds?

Remodelling Syncretism

In a series of articles David Frankfurter (2021: 128-138) has attempted to model a new definition of syncretism, arguing that it should “cover the ongoing process by which a religious tradition -in the form of lore, materiality, authority and charismatic figures, [are] indigenized and rendered comprehensible in particular cultural domains”.

While helpful, his definition is prefaced by a working definition of religion that is originally modelled on Redfield (1956) and Marriott’s (1958) ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ Traditions, and therefore still displays a reliance on preconceived ideas of religious and ethnic identity and makes no distinction regarding stages or degrees. This is problematic for Late Antiquity, as Bagnall (2022: 62-5) has recently remarked that it is not until the mid-3rd century C.E that we may speak of an “imperial concept of empire-wide religious observance”, and “a willingness to abstract religious identity as an individual characteristic”11.

To my amazement, however, some very useful explicit theory on syncretism has come out of scholarship of Medieval Europe. Writing of similar circumstances of cross-cultural interaction in the early Medieval period, Canepa (2010: 12) highlights how “different objects could have different meanings according to how they are used by new owners and users and interpreted by the differently conditioned eyes of the new host society”, while Pye (1994: 217-229) initially nuanced the concept by introducing a distinction between syncretism, “a temporary, ambiguous coexistence of elements from diverse religious and other contexts” and assimilation, a matured form of that process resulting in “the outright dominance of one strand of meaning by another”.

When looking at magical gems for instance, a given image or form may combine historiola or mythological episodes with novel (or traditional) iconographic tendencies that recall different cultural contexts, allowing a single medium to layer meaning and have multiple interpretations simultaneously depending on the viewer.

Veronique Dasen (2019: 47) has termed this a kind of “Visual Bilingualism” where multiple symbolic and linguistic systems can be embedded in a single image. Juxtaposing Greek inscriptions and motifs with –predominantly– Egyptian derived iconography, for instance, produces objects that can be “read” across cultural, linguistic, and religious registers for different interpretations and signifiers of efficacy. This cross-cultural boundary crossing is sometimes so extensive that it collapses our nominal discursive categories usually assigned to individual ‘cultures’.

Framing what we encounter as either failed conversion, or stubborn survival assumes that religion only changes through replacement, but pagan cultures are dynamic and changing. What we see instead are the emergence of new religious forms and idioms, shaped by incoming cultural contact, pressure and coercion, but reworked through older religious habits and habituation.

Different kinds of relationship can exist, and ritual praxis can proceed from imposed theology/orthopraxy or aspects may selected for their utility. Similarities between deities and spirits from different systems may not just be rooted in name, title, archetype or mythical story, but in their ritual role and function. I think we need to begin de-centring the mytho-cosmic-centric lens of syncretism to consider function, not just form. Syncretism here is not just based on similarity of personae or mythos, but on what function something is playing in a given context. A given or inherited ritual structure may historically precede a formalised and stable theological/philosophical structure imposed onto it.

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Some of My Research with Priests and Temple Decline

In my own research with priestly education and the transformation of temple culture in the 3rd century C.E, this has reinforced how cautious I really have to be.

Edward Love (2021) originally critiqued Escolano-Poveda’s (2017: 298) assertion of late 2nd century temple vitality as “not borne out by documentary evidence” and that “the idea that…priesthoods were entirely vital until the end of the 2nd century C.E is simply untenable – irrespective of the precise causes of that ‘decline’”, citing the paucity of evidence from Tebtunis and Narmouthis after the first decade of the 3rd century. I have to say I don’t really buy this critique. We have to be really careful methodologically privileging Faiyumic evidence and using it to generalise wider patterns for the country as a whole. We still have very little documentation from the Delta in this period, which invariably skews our picture of things.

His further assertion that the Hermetica being in Greek constitutes “prime evidence of this ‘decline’… whereby millennia of textual culture production in Egyptian was abandoned” due to “pressure on priestly populations and resulting language shift”, seems thoroughly unwarranted to me. Temple Phylai administration of the late 2nd century were clearly communicating with the Roman state in Greek simply out of necessity, as evidenced by BGU II 406 and BGU II 627 fr.1+2, but maintained Demotic documentation on ostraca for internal temple administration into the 3rd century.

In addition to the Phyle census examples from Dime cited by Quack (2016: 105; also see Schentuleit and Lippert, 2006: 9-24), attestations of a phylai rotation system at Thebes (seemingly thriving enough to still include the trading of priestly roles) into the 3rd century can be seen in a variety of ostraca12, the latest of which is explicitly dated to the 11th year of Septimius and Caracalla (209/9 C.E).

I would additionally cite P.Ryl. II 110, the latest current papyrological attestation of a temple inventory from Hermopolis, which dates to 295 C.E. While certainly reduced in scope, the προφήτῃ Anoubion13 is hardly strapped for cash. He claims to be “in charge of the treasury of the oil-workers” (line 5) and cites the temple property declarations as (lines 13-19):

We must be attentive to which languages are present in particular institutional contexts, particularly among the multiple present polytheisms. In the 3rd-4th century, Egyptian terms (especially the titles of religious officials or deities) may evoke a Pharaonic cultural environment that has already been entirely eclipsed by Greek architecture and lifestyle. The question of ‘Hellenisation’ within ‘traditional religion’ needs a very careful assessment that maintains attention to the shifting balances in language, clothing and architecture.

Pfeiffer (2013: 68), for instance, hypothesises that reduced cults of Isis, Montu (and possibly Horus) continued in the context of “Vereinssitzungen” [συνόδ] and symposiums into the 3rd century, citing three broadly dated Ostraca:

O.Bodl. II 1861 (3rd century):

SB 18 13622 (found in the temple of Seti I in Gurna, 2nd-3rd century):

SB 18 13625 (2nd-3rd century):

His assertion that these “club meetings” occurred “every month” and drank wine in line with “alten Ägyptischen tradition” overstates this evidence, as does his evaluation of the graffiti of Hermonthite ironworkers at Deir el-Bahri, but it does strike me that these Egyptianising Symposiums speak to a similar milieu to those cited by Christian Bull (2018: 449) as possible sources for a Hermetic Sitz-im-Leben.

GEMF/PGM Transformations

That brings me to the GEMF. There is certainly a general trend in magical papyri of this period of moving away from delineated and ethnically coded spaces such as temples, with restricted access, towards more general and vague notions of ritualised place-making. Similarly, perhaps in the context of universalising motifs coming from Christianity, and competing religious ideas like Pantheistic conceptions of certain Egyptian gods, many of the gods of the GEMF display a universalised character, being able to be called on from anywhere. This is reflected in their epithets, such as Aphrodite Urania, a goddess that “encompasses the whole heavens”, or the rising popularity of Aiōn as a cosmic god who hears all and can be called universally.

Procedures for purification become correspondingly more common, and these are modelled off of known temple forms. Preparation procedures (purity, invocational, gestural, sonorous etc) will generally recall temple parallels, even if in altered or mutated forms, the most common being the appellation of total darkness when dealing with cult statues (cf. PDM XIV 117-149, PDM XIV 150-231).

Purity recalls that of active Phyle duty, primarily sexual abstinence and an avoidance of meat (primarily pork) and fish. There is also a strong topographical theme in rituals that is conducive to the “social phenomena indicative of an urban milieu” (Dosoo, 2014: 212) such as bathhouses, athletic games, public statues and local temples. Dosoo (2014: 213) also notes that “the site where the ritual is to work is generally described in vague terms as a ‘place’ (τόπος; PGM IV 2366, 3127), ‘house’ (οἰκία; PGM IV 2374) or ‘place of business/workshop’ (ἐργαστήριον)”.

Few specific temples are mentioned by name, but “temples”, rooms or theologies are mentioned as part of invocations/settings for spells (cf. PGM VII 505-528), such as PGM IV 2125-2139, which specifically mentions dirt taken from the threshold of an Osiris temple for use in a necromantic procedure. One particularly interesting one is that access to the pr nfr (embalming room) is associated with a dream oracle and statues of Anubis in PDM SM 101-116.

The position of priests and their social circles becomes even more complicated when we look at the primary glossing languages -Old Coptic and Demotic-. Dosoo (2025) identifies three strategies of Egyptian language use in the GEMF:

Ps.Egyptian: Redactors cite/identify words, symbols or phrases as ‘Egyptian’, usually as a gloss for drawing on divine power in ritual. PGM XII 201-269 [263] lists a series of “ethnic” divine names (including Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and Parthian) by which the transcendent god is known/called on, but it bizarrely identifies “high priests” (αρχιερείς) among this category of ethnicities as their own demographic.

PGM XIII 151–153 invokes the “true Egyptian name” Aldabiaeim as part of a list of divine names of the transcendent god, and glosses it in Old Coptic marginalia as an Egyptian term for the solar barque, but the name is clearly etymologically Hebrew or Aramaic. The redactor apparently took a name and interpreted it as Egyptian, implying that they wanted to draw on the authority attributed to Egyptian textual culture, but perhaps did not have access to understand the language. What intrigues me even more about this section though, is that the scribe’s Greek glossing is very poor. It has extensive phonetic and grammatical mistakes, implying they may actually be an Egyptian speaker who was copying a Greek text that had Ps.Egyptian in it (or an alternative dialect of Coptic that they didn’t recognise), which they then sought to ratify.

Loanwords: Genuine Egyptian words borrowed into Greek and inserted as glosses to identify materials, substances or concepts. These loanwords invariably cluster in semantic fields of religion, animals, plants, and technology, and are most commonly borrowed in Bohairic dialectical forms implying that this borrowing may have originally occurred in the Western Delta, but was being copied and circulated in the Thebaid by the 3rd and 4th century.

Code Switching: Entire Egyptian phrases, rendered into Old Coptic or alphabetic Demotic and transplanted into the middle of Greek invocations or instructions. PGM XXXVI.315 for instance, contains a recipe to open locked doors which addresses the bolt in both Egyptian (Old Coptic) and Greek.

Trade and Exchange in the GEMF

Circling back to trade, substances or offerings for ritual are occasionally cited as coming from specific locations, such as “Wine from Mendes” (PGM I 1-122) or a piece of cloth taken from a statue of Harpocrates in a temple14 (PGM IV 930-1114), while allusions to deities (or perhaps, statues) in famous cult-cities are also common, primarily Heliopolis or Memphis (cf. PGM IV 850-929, PGM VII 628-642).

The redactor of PGM VII 862-918 claims they found the papyrus by a statue of Aphrodite in Aphroditopolis, but it is unclear which one this refers to, since there were seven in Egypt depending on the period. Papyrus is clearly a common medium for amulets, but when a preference for metals is specified, they are usually exotic. The use of gold or silver slats, or animal skins, reflects a level of financial ease, and access to traded goods among practitioners. Occasionally, new magical terminology seems to be imported alongside such metals. The noun λάμνα (lamna, lamella) for instance, seems to be exclusively attested in magic papyrus.

These are generally used in the composition of the ritual or the magical remedy (sunthesis or summetria), but in different charm prescriptions. There is no attestation of λάμνα prior to the 4th century, and the GEMF prescribe four metals to make lamellas: gold, silver, tin and lead. These metals circulated throughout the Empire and, if Egypt seems to have exported gold, it probably had to import tin, as well as some of the money it needed. What we’re seeing is that the circulation of materials and their trade has necessarily caused the circulation of terms related to their use, namely, in the case that interests us, λάμνα for the stelle. Such a linguistic marker highlights the origin of the prescription and not necessarily that of its copyist.

The Spice Trade? From India to Egypt

The redactor of PGM XIII (c. early 4th century) cites a text known as a “Key of Moses”, containing instructions on how to become an “initiate” of the gods of the hours and days, without which the ritualist will be considered “uninitiated”. They then include a list of planetary incenses allegedly derived from this Key, but also reference a similar list they found in a Hermetic book called “Wing”, which “Hermes” is said to have plagiarised. Betz (1986: 172, n.5) proposes that the incense list is not the original, but one that was seemingly inserted by the redactor from another source, possibly the Hermetic book.

Now, one thing that struck me upon going over this section is that, for all the mystique and temple-adjacent rhetoric surrounding this list of planetary incenses, the majority of them are made from substances not actually native to Egypt. In fact, the majority appear to derive from India and the Himalayan regions, and thus are likely arriving via Silk Road trade routes.

Kronos: Styrax -Imported to Egypt primarily for embalming and incense but native to the wider Eastern Mediterranean

Zeus: Malabathrum -cinnamomum tamala (Indian bay leaf). Native to the eastern Himalayas and Western Ghats

Ares: Costus -sassurea lappa (Indian Costus). Native to elevations of 2,500 to 3,000 m (8,200 to 9,800 ft) in India; including the Himalayas, Kashmir, Jammu, Western Ghats, and the Kishenganga Valley

Helios: Frankincense -imported to Egypt historically, but native to the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa (Punt?) and parts of India

Aphrodite: Indian Nard (spikenard) -Nardostachys jatamansi, native to high altitude Himalayas, India and Nepal and China

Selene: Myrrh -some native species, but also imported to Egypt historically, largely native to the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa (Punt?)

The most likely reconstructed route for these incense materials are an arrival at the ports in the Eastern Desert like Berenike and Myos Hormos, before being transported to the Nile (via Coptos/Edfu, possibly stopping initially at Hermopolis) and finally being shipped north to Alexandria and the wider Roman World.

PGM XIII 24 also cites a Book of Manetho that lists “The 7 flowers of the 7 Stars”. It doesn’t attribute planetary qualities to the herbs, but interestingly, many of them are much more native to Egypt:

Marjoram -Origanum majorana is native

White Lilly -native

Lotus -Nymphaea lotus is native

Erephllinon (Ἐριφύλλιον) ?

Narcissus -Narcissus tazetta is native

Gillyflower -not native to Egypt, but to the Eastern Mediterranean

Rose -Rosa arabica is endemic to the Mount Catherine region in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula

So it appears we have two adjacent lists, one of which is derived from largely foreign materials -perhaps adding to its mystique- and another of local alternatives. My next step was to see what was going on in Berenike itself, and whether we could see any evidence of Indic-Egyptian relations that might support these trade routes of spices and herbs. It turns out, there are in fact two 3rd century C.E votive dedications at Berenike which confirm the presence of Indian traders (and deities) in the region.

The first, is a two-and-a-half-foot block of white gypsum deposited as a votive offering in the temple of Isis at Berenike in the 3rd century, which contains three lines of cursive Brahmi Sanskrit:

“In the sixth year of King Philip [the Arab]…the Kshatriya Vasula gave this image for the welfare and happiness of all beings”

This is joined with a crude Greek subscript repeating the phrase “Vasula set this up.” The reference to Emperor Philip secures a date of 204-249 C.E. The inscription is undeniably Buddhist, and Vasula identifies as a Kshatriya, i.e coming from the Warrior Caste. What business a Warrior Caste Buddhist would have dedicating a votive in a temple of Isis, and what the Egyptian priests would have thought he was doing, is an open, somewhat amusing, question.

The other votive is more explicitly religious and iconographic. It was also found at Berenike and is an arch framing Indic gods:

Both of these votive deposits leave open space for future research on exactly what Late Antique Egypt’s relationship with the Indian Subcontinent looked like. I have yet to look into any of the excavation reports from the Indian side, so that is something i’m working on right now. As I understand it, the most likely reconstructed route is via the Gulf of Aden and up the Red Sea -interestingly, passing by Andulis!-. The sites of Barbarikon and Baryaaza seem possible likely sources for this material. I suspect it may have looked something like this:

The prospect of Indian deities in the GEMF/PGM is something generally not considered, and there certainly isn’t any explicit or direct evidence for it. However, I do wonder whether some are hiding underneath certain voces magicae. For what it’s worth, the use of foreign deity names (or even simply foreign words) in Egyptian magic is not an innovation of the Roman period.

As Koenig (2017: 85) has pointed out, in the New Kingdom, the foreign names utilised in magical papyri are in fact often Nubian in origin. This is, perhaps, not surprising, and can be related to the extension of the Nubian conquests, which created a circulating opinion that the birthplace of Amun was thought to be located at Gebel Barkal. This Nubian Amun is adorned with local names, which are found in chapters 163 to 174 of the Book of the Dead composed during the Ramesside era. These Nubian names, particularly common in chapters 163-167, have been found in magical texts since the Ramesside era.

However, magical names in GEMF are applied in a very different context from that of the Pharaonic era. This was highlighted by Betz (1995, 161; also see Koenig 2009, 322-3). These names no longer designate divine people with a history, but the various manifestations of a transcendent, usually pantheist, deity that is connected to the world by way of various sympatheia (of which the names are sonorous components).

This talk by Dr Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, was a bit outside my area, but focused on a series of papyri from the period of Diocletian’s Persecution of Christians, primarily some attestations from Oxyrhynchus and the Acts of Felix. There was also a fascinating discussion of Optatus’ Against the Donatists, a text which the late 4th century Bishop of Milevis wrote to refute Donatist claims to be the one true and righteous church.

Sophie began her talk, however, by pointing out that, much to our collective surprise, ‘trade’ actually doesn’t have a Latinate etymology, but a Germanic. Our term originates from Middle English, and initially meant a “path, track, or course of conduct” (late 14c.). It is derived from Middle Low German trade (track, course), cognate with “tread”. It evolved from describing a “way or course” to a “habitual business” by the 1540s, and finally the “exchange of goods” by 1550s.

What’s interesting to think about with this, is that it opens up the idea of habitual courses and pathways associated with the movement of resources (material or ideal). Who was allowed to access which kinds of routes and how does this reinforce certain groups’ relation to the landscape, and ultimately their visibility in the archaeological record? This transition in the meaning of ‘trade’ from “path” to “business” evolves from the notion of following a “way” or “course” of life, or one’s habitual behaviour or business.

Among the Persecution Papyri Sophie cited were P.Oxy XXXIII 2673 and P.Harr II 208 and P.Oxy XXXI 2601, all of which deal with confiscations of Christian Church material under Diocletian’s reign by various ecclesiastical and administrative officials. P.Oxy XXXIII 2673 provides a good, all round example:

Note the assortment of ‘property’ assigned to the church -including slaves-. Also note the rather ambiguous categorisation at the end of this list -“bronze materials” (χαλκην ‘ύλην). There is a sense that Neilos and Ammonios are playing on plausible deniability, deliberately using a vague term so that any inspection of their documents would get passed over.

What becomes all the more interesting, is that when compared to the Acts of Felix, it’s clear that what authorities were really after were gospel books or other liturgical texts, not so much wealth as we conventionally understand it. That is perhaps why these Christians are so willing to give up items of material wealth -the bronze, silver and gold-. What exactly “bronze materials” refers to is ambiguous, but we can suppose candelabra, and probably Eucharistic vessels and chalices used in early liturgy. The valuation of objects may appear strange to a religious and cultural outsider like us.

A Christian community would sooner exchange -give up under duress- items of seemingly higher material value over their religious texts, materially composed on simple papyrus. We can understand the emotional weight behind this. On the surface, it isn’t too hard to conceptualise. But what it speaks to is the fact that objects can have different forms of value, many of which are not material. Bear in mind also, their very lives would have been at stake if they had not complied. Can life be traded? Does such an exchange still warrant the label of ‘trade’?

Our valuation of material items in early Christian liturgy is further complicated later on by Optatus. In Book VI caput III, he describes the Donatists’ actions after they seized churches from Catholics. He views their treatment of the altar and the sacred eucharistic vessels as a form of sacrilege, and levies the following attack against them:

Here he considers the melting down of religious objects (primarily bronze eucharistic vessels -ciborium- and silver chalices) an insult to the Blood and Body of Christ that rested upon/within them. His objection appears to be that allowing the divine, pure, matter of the metal to be melted down permits the raw material to re-enter mundane circulation. After it has been transfigured by exposure to Blood and Body, this is nothing short of sacrilegious and insulting. In a manner that would be easily recognisable even to Pagans, once the material has entered church ritual and undergone religious use, its matter/substance is transfigured such that it cannot re-enter circulation as a common item.

How does an occasion like this stand with how we think about trade and exchange of the raw materials behind items?

A large part of the reason we have so few Pagan statues left is that many were melted down, not out of spite or religious violence, but of sheer necessity, so that their metallic body could be repurposed for more mundane, efficient uses in times of crisis and economic hardship.

Magical Materials and the Trade Vector

Immediately here my mind goes to magical materia, especially that described in the GEMF/PGM. What exactly would a ‘magical’ perspective on trade and exchange look like when, routinely, very domestic/mundane materials can be transformed (traded in for?) into religiously charged items (wine and bread into blood and flesh, copper into gold or the bodily effluxes of deities etc)? I’m thinking here of the classic:

Mustard, you are not mustard, but the eye…the inner parts of the bull of Apis (PGM CXXVIa.15- 20)

You are wine; you are not wine, but the guts of Osiris (PGM VII 645)

Of course, we’re dealing here with what Assmann (2001: 89-92) dubs Sacramental Interpretation, whereby, in Egyptian religion:

Every object utilised in the cult can, by virtue of the sacred speech, stand in for the entirety of divine meaning that is contained within it. A single libation of water can be the entire Nile, while even the smallest herbs, plants and materials can be the bodily effluxes of deities that manifest the entirety of their presence. Put simply, as long as the essential form remains in tact, Egyptian cultic activity makes no real distinction of size, shape or intensity. The smallest of images on a heart scarab or carved gem are just as much a statue as a full-size one.

Incidentally, this principle of “He says x…this means y” is also the same formula utilised in the temple laboratories that constructed statues (of which we have remains at Dendera, Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo, Philae and Athribis) and wrote the formulas for their divine materials. We find an echo of this idea in hermeneumata code-word list of PGM XII 401-444, ascribed to the “sacred scribes” (Greek: ιερογραµµατέωϲ, Demotic: sẖ.w pr ꜥnḫ).

Thinking about the implications of this kind of principle for the trade and exchange of materials, does something like this affect the valuation that groups may ascribe to objects? One point that Sophie raised in our roundtable that got me thinking was whether there is cause to consider vertical and horizontal axes of value?

A vertical axis could be one that accounts for a classical economic framework, almost a Marxist one, of typical gradations of value (labour cost, social need, rarity, limited supply etc), while a horizontal axis could account for a product, item or idea’s potential, malleability, or capacity to be replicated in novel forms or contexts. Maybe something similar to what Appadurai (1986) would call the "social life" of things. For him, commodities as economic goods are only one vector of value. Objects have their own social lives, meanings, and trajectories that shift through exchange.

By tracing these "commodity paths," we can understand the cultural, political, and social contexts that create value. A given object’s “Commodity Situation” is the phase in a thing's life where its exchangeability (past, present, or future) is its most socially relevant feature. Since value is subjective, it is created through exchange, and changes depending on the context of circulation, such as through elite consumption, gift-giving, or international trade. By following an individual object or materials trajectory, uses, and transformations, we can reflect on the human transactions and social values that give them meaning.

Could an item or concept’s value be thought of as how widely it can be utilised, spread or reproduced, and how many contexts it can do this in?

I think there’s real methodological promise here for some good brainstorming. The more i’ve reflected on this idea of value axes though, the more I think the case of Optatus actively resists both axes simultaneously. The chalice that is melted down increases in horizontal mobility (it becomes raw metal, usable anywhere) and arguably remains scarce as silver. Yet Optatus treats this as a loss of value so profound it constitutes heresy. So the value being destroyed there isn't captured by either axis — it seems to be something like a relational or event-based value: the object has been touched by the sacred, and that event forecloses its re-entry into ordinary circulation permanently.

Maybe we need a third axis, one that accounts for a temporal or biographical dimension that tracks an object's ritual history? The chalice's (and really, any ritually used materia’s) past is what determines its present status. Equally, if we accept that logic, what does it do to our understanding of the etymology of "trade" as a path or track? It suggests that some objects can be permanently removed from the path by a ritual event. They are actively de-circulated. Is this de-circulation itself a form of cosmological act?

This talk was by Clair Pryor, and focused on the poetry (particularly poems 21 and 27, in honour of St. Felix’s festival day) of St Paulinus of Nola (who, as I discovered, is credited with the introduction of bells to Christian worship!). There was particular emphasis on what his writings can tell us about the relationships of 5th century bishops with their rustic illiterati who continued seasonal animal sacrifice in Italy according to the traditional agricultural calendar. Paulinus is certainly odd by the standards of 5th century Italian churchmen.

In one poem. he recounts three miracle stories about local farmers who are devotees of Saint Felix (his predecessor). Each one vows to bring a fattened animal – two pigs and a calf, respectively – to the shrine of Felix as a devotional offering. After much misadventure, and thanks only to Felix’s intervention, each one successfully performs his vow.

As Robinson (2021: 179) observes, “these animals take centre stage in the narrative as willing sacrificial victims, slaughtered on site at a Christian martyr shrine. The only authorial criticism (i.e from Paulinus) is directed at the human devotees who initially fail in their attempts to perform their offerings correctly. This is a remarkable attitude to find in a Christian author at any time, particularly a mere 15 years after Theodosius’ ban on public animal sacrifice in 392.”

Through his pastoral poetry, Paulinus effectively fashioned a new aesthetic — a deeply Christian appropriation of Classical forms. Dennis Trout (1995: 281-298) has argued that the above episode, on the contrary, shows Paulinus forming a pragmatic compromise with rural cult practices in Campania in order to promote Christianization in the local countryside.

Pilgrimage and cult at the shrine of St Felix was clearly quite the monumentous and communal endeavour. Paulinus (27: 25) tells us:

One can perhaps detect both a sense of pride in his local cult, and a feeling of nuisance at the furore of crowds here. Paulinus, at times, appears conflicted with how to handle his rustic crowd of illiterate plebs. One option that he seems keen on is the installation of rather ambiguous “images” in both domestic and cell localities as a source for his viewers to access the sublimity of the Gospel’s Message. It’s worth noting here for architectural context that, as Berenfeld (2024: 298) explains:

At 27: 511, Paulinus paints us a rather nice example:

The general impression here is something approaching Orthodox Icons, with all their embedded Logoi. In 27: 542, Paulinus outlines his reasoning for installing such images, and it is nothing short of patronising, and yet imminently fascinating:

He goes on (27: 580):

Aside from the patronising tone, almost likening these crowds to magpies, allured by shining colours, what exactly were these images that were inscribed? Who painted them? How were they interpreted by learned clergy versus seemingly ‘illiterate’ rustics? Clearly these ‘rustics’ aren’t entirely illiterate if they are capable of reading (or perhaps, having read to them) the inscriptions on these paintings. But how would such ideas spread or be interpreted in a community such as that of rural Italy? Are we perhaps looking at cases of mistaken interpretation that require correcting?

A little earlier on in the poem, Paulinus displays an objection that seems to me somewhat prefaced on the theme of Christian Universalism. Consider 27: 568:

Local deities, with their thresholds and domains of action could be far more localised in Hellenic and Roman Paganism. Access to them involved participation in the local cult and customs -what Porphyry refers to in Ad Marcellum 18 as τὰ πατρία-. One of the many innovations of Christianity was a sense of universal salvation -often characterised as a kind of sublime-. Simply put, access to salvation was not restricted to a certain class, ethnicity or locality. The acceptance of Christ and the Church entailed universal salvation for all, regardless of locality. Incidentally, this precise point incurred much of Porphyry’s ire, who seemingly devoted lengthy sections of Against the Christians to countering it, arguing instead for his own tiered soteriology based on the Neoplatonic Ladder of Virtues that aimed to account for the different metaphysical and ontological status of one’s soul.

Paulinus’ critique of his rustics strikes me as negotiating a tension between these two approaches. On the one hand, he is faced with a growing population still adhering to their localised practices that imbue defined landscape or shrine features with numinosity, while on the other, he is attempting to emphasise a universal message that God can be accessed from anywhere, irrespective of material offerings.

It seems his resolve is that the archetypal rustic pleb’s mind is simply not developed enough to grasp this, and so must be guided by Images that imbue the presence of the divine -or least, inform their viewers towards a kind of apophatic virtue that paves the way for it- and teach them what he, perhaps, struggles to do in sermons or by circulating the written gospel. His is an appeal, and perhaps, concession, to the affective passions.

This final talk by Dr. Daniel Alford was fascinating to me, mostly because I am woefully understudied on anything Zoroastrian. Daniel and I also continued the extensive discussion over dinner, along with the rest of the group, going into all sorts of tangents. His topic was largely centred around inheritance law in Sassanid Persia, as well as the Armenian Council of Shahapivan.

One of the things that really stuck out to us was that in various Middle Persian Law Codes, it is permissible to own half or three-quarters of a slave. This ‘share’ can then be bequeathed or inherited, but is restricted on what rights you exactly have over such ‘property’. This, again, gets to the root of the problem with trade. How do we conceptualise the commoditisation and owning of ‘half’ a person in the same sense as dairy, herbs or other material goods?

The idea appears to have been that divisible ownership of a person entitled you to aspects or their labour, or perhaps, their service only for set times out of the year. A few examples were given of legal decisions that were taken over people trying to sell off, or bequeath their rights. Simply put, if you inherited half a slave, it was not considered permissible for you to then sell that slave or move them off your property in their entirety, since you were only “entitled” to half the person. The other “half” seemingly could exercise more rights, or be owned by another person whom you had to consult.

There were also cases whereby if a slave converted to Zoroastrianism (“The True Religion”) of their own accord, they could (or perhaps, had to be) freed, but if they were born Zoroastrian, their status was maintained. Many families also seemingly required one of their members to study and become one of the Learned Priests, a class of readers and ritualists, again, often in the maintenance of cosmic order.

There was also a sense that if a person was born with disfigurements (particularly upon the skin) or disabilities, they would be prevented from entering religious service, but it was stressed that the family should not question their own sin as a cause for such a birth. In the dualistic religious worldview of Zoroastrianism, where Chaos and Order were constantly in flux and conflict, these things simply could happen as the result of the collateral damage of Thrashing Demons. Such occasions were unfortunate, yes, but it was imperative a parent not question the source of such things, and inadvertently contribute to the undermining of Divine Order.

In a somewhat more controversial idea, it was debated here that what if we are overthinking the concept of slavery in the ancient world? Certainly, in the face of 19th and 20th century moral progress, we rightly demarcate the concept out and treat it as worthy of condemnation. However, how informative is it for scholars to treat slaves as a morally independent category when the majority of law codes and regions group it, historically, as a phenomena alongside women, children, spouses or households as simply another kind of property? How much emphasis did ancient judges or thinkers even really put on slaves as a separate category of property? In this sense, I am certainly grateful for our modern moral progress, and think we should bring attention to the human experience, particularly the experience of The Silent Majority.

Conclusions

All in all, it was a great long-weekend that generated much to think about, so I hope I have been able to capture some of that spirit here. To return to my assertion at the beginning of this essay, how would we go about writing the next edition of a Cambridge History of Late Antiquity? One of the concluding thoughts we raised was the need for interdisciplinary communication beyond Academia. Take for instance, Pastoralist groups. Ubiquitous in the ancient world, and still widely practiced today by rural and tribal communities around the world.

Pastoralism, especially Transhumance, is defined by its mobility and transit between land-types and localities on a seasonal basis. In the face of Empires and States attempting the forced displacement or migrations of people, how effective can this really be when your entire way of life is already predicated on mobility?

Is there cause here for archaeologists and historians to consult modern Pastoralist groups for their insights and lived experience when writing such histories of mobility? Should we be consulting farmers when writing histories of dairying or relations with livestock? How much more body and substance would our thinking develop when we consulted the lived experiences of modern populations? I am thinking here in the sense of Lewis Binford’s attempts at an archaeological Middle-Range Theory predicated on modern ethnography. Of course, we would have to account for uniformitarian biases, but the potential to create new dialogues and, perhaps, new forms of heritage, deserves more explicit debate and theorisation.

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I’ve been on the cusp of something for a while, the more I’ve been studying Eastern Philosophy. It’s hard to articulate the sensation and kind of awareness that’s been coming to me in my practice of Platonic spiritual exercises derived from Plutarch & the Hermetica. I taught a class last Saturday on this topic of philosophical “exercises” in the Hermetica, mostly drawing from Anna Van den Kerchove’s 2012 thesis La Voie d’Hermes, in which she reads the Hermetica through the lens of Pierre Hadot’s essential thesis on philosophy as a series of spiritual exercises that lead the soul to embodied wisdom1.

In that lecture I reiterated the claim made by the late Algis Uždavinys that we have fundamentally misunderstood Platonic Philosophy, and perhaps the very concept of philosophy itself. In Western Thought, by mischaracterising Plato as solely a rational dualist, unanimously concerned with empirical and discursive reasoning or abstract logicism, we have lost the tradition of what Greg Shaw has referred to as Platonic Yoga.

In addition to the admonishment towards virtue in living and the cultivation of moral and ethical behaviour, meditation and contemplation are valorised in these traditions as essential means for the deconstruction of the empirical personality and consciousness. While the importance ascribed to practices that facilitate the emergence of Witness Consciousness is widely recognised in South Asian traditions, the overt intellectualism of the Platonic dialogues and of modern Plato academics has obscured the existential and embodied centrality of the practice of inwardness and tranquillity for philosophers who aspire to ‘become as like god as possible.’2

The way in which the Socratic elenchus works on the minds of the interlocutor in the early dialogues prepares them for advanced forms of concentration that are described in the later dialogues as revealing the Forms. While Socrates does certainly go after discursive/empirical (i.e subject-object) analysis, this kind of thinking is unanimously characterised as a prelude to deeper kinds of gnosis of the Forms. Dialectical language is characterised by Plato as simple repetition of “hope” (ἐλπίς).

Socrates often defends his metaphysics with philosophical argumentation and dialectic, but he only reveals his “true doctrines” after his dialogue partner has “suffered” aporia, the puzzlement and emptiness of the discursive mind brought about by his refutation of their false beliefs and habits of perception. In the Meno, it is only after Meno himself feels “numb” and unable to speak3 that Socrates introduces the idea of the soul’s immortality and ability to “remember” the Forms. Interestingly, he equally introduces his doctrine with the phrase “I trust this is true”.4

The full extent of the Method is on full display in the Sophist5:

As Bussanich has pointed out, the silencing of each false belief essentially empties the mind of one thought after another. By showing the witness consciousness -experientially and bodily, that its assumptions and perceptions can’t stand, the Socratic elenchus induces successive non-conceptual (i.e non subject-object) states, ending in an sensation that is phenomenologically and subjectively experienced as numbness and shame by the Ego.

Share Mystai -Voices in Fire

Repeated refutations parallel the initial stages of yogic practice in breaking down the Empirical Ego. The final aporia experienced by the characters of the dialogues indicates that no discursive account of virtue –even if someone could articulate it with logos – would be sufficient for actually being virtuous or containing this thing we call wisdom.

In other words, dianoia -discursive reasoning, can only ever gain representational knowledge of the Forms, never experiential, direct knowledge itself. It is therefore a prerequisite that is eventually transcended by a luminous vision of the Forms, that is phenomenologically experienced as intense bliss and happiness, which is likened in the Republic to living in the Isles of the Blessed6.

In a manner of speaking then, when wanting to experience a vision of the Forms, we are essentially talking about a different state of consciousness that is conceptualised as one that is a non-conceptual, unified state of being that transcends the distinction between subject and object. In other words, the philosopher has to attain an inward state of non-being, characterised by emptiness of mind that then prepares them for the luminous vision of True Reality.

Being & Non-Being in Parmenides

Of course, this notion of Being & Non-Being led me back, first, to Parmenides, the “ghost that haunts Plato”, and -as the father of logic, by extension the entirety of Western Philosophy.

Parmenides was a fascinating “philosopher”, least because he was never really characterised as one during his lifetime. His contemporaries identified him as an Iatromantis, a healer-prophet, who developed a practice of Incubation, a kind of ritualised visionary work. The remains of his famous poem On Nature, consists of about 160 lines of hexameter Homeric Greek, and is perhaps the most elusive and difficult thing to translate in western philosophical history.

Parmenides never claimed any philosophical thought as his own. His entire visionary experience in the poem is recounted in, what would have been, sung hexameter verse and relates everything that an unnamed -but likely Underworld or Mystery, goddess tells him about the “real” nature of reality. In this respect, as is noted by Peter Kingsley, Parmenides has much in common with Siberian Shamans, who engage rituals of soul-flight to spirits, and then relate their experience to the community once returned through song and dance.

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As Kingsley notes7, Parmenides' logic aims to demonstrate that reality is changeless, whole, unborn, immortal, and complete oneness—a description that matches the ways absolute reality is described in South Asian traditions, like Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Dzogchen, and even some schools of Sufism.

Parmenides’ "ultimate reality" is not some supercelestial plane, but rather the reality of the world all around us. For him, we live in an unborn and deathless world of oneness, wholeness, and changelessness—but we are unable to recognise it because mortal perception becomes -or perhaps, is dualistic, on account of its contraction when in a body.

The most enigmatic and difficult passage in On Nature that encapsulates Parmenides’ philosophy is Fragment 2. Using Burnet’s (1892) translation, we read:

Later on, in Fragment 6, the goddess clarifies:

That line in 2.3 -that It Is or It Is Not, is perhaps the most difficult and obscure sentence in the Greek lexicon. The original Greek is ἡ μὲν ὅπως ἔστιν τε και ὡς οὐκ ἔστι μὴ εἶναι. The goddess tells us that if we want to know the truth about reality, there is only one option available to us. The difficulty of translation of this line is captured very well by Hanegraaff8. He presents no less than 13 possible translations:

As he notes, the goddess’ central message is that humans do not see reality the way it really is because our minds can’t help imagining distinctions that in fact are not there. We think that some things exist while others do not, but that is false. In reality nothing unreal exists. 

That single sentiment, nothing unreal exists, has driven me to near insanity the more I’ve contemplated it.

Hanegraaff elaborates:

Being & Non-Being in Zhuangzi

Now, before your head explodes even more, I want to draw your attention a bit further East to what -in my view, provides a little luminosity and comfort in conceptualising this difficult subject. As I’ve been contemplating this topic, I ended up arriving at the philosophical dialogues of Zhaungzi. To cut a long story short, there has been some general scholarship in the past few decades that has drawn parallels between Zhaungzi’s style and Platonic dialogue, and his resonance with Parmenides’ questions of Being & Non Being have been utterly fascinating for me to think about.

It’s kind of a running joke in Philosophy to note the different ways Nothingness or Non-Being is talked about by Eastern vs Western Philosophers. Where Western thinkers tend to conceptualise Nothingness with a tenor of existential dread or chaos, Eastern schools such as Daoism paint it as Potentiality, a kind of unified void in which the sum total of all things that could, would, have and will happen exists prior to actualisation.

Share Mystai -Voices in Fire

In the collection of works that bears his name, The Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi’s second philosophical essay is the Qiwulun, 齊物論, conventionally translated as A Discussion On Making All Things Equal. The central theme throughout the work is a dialogue on the nature of categories, especially the concept of “thing-ness”. What is the “thing” that we call “thing”? Is there a conceptual “thing-ness” to things that makes them exist?

In a weird way, previous scholars of Zhaungzi have treated the dialogue with a somewhat Parmenidian lens. That is to say, the focus has been thought to be on how the pluarity things can be equalised in a spiritual state or perspective. In this way, a lot of the discussion assumes that “things” are beings existing independently in the external world and can later be equalised or unified subjectively. This is the position of A. C. Graham (1981)9 that Zhuangzi only proposes a kind perspective of how things can be perceived, namely, in oneness.

Following, Kwok10 however, this arguably mischaracterises Zhuangzi in this instance, who is actually attempting to elucidate a Philosophy of Being in the Qiwulun.

For him, as we’ll see below, the concept of “thing” or “being” is -in reality, a linguistic construction. By imposing this concept, people objectify objects from their living background and treat them as beings that embody facts. Before the imposition of the concept of “thing”, however, those beings were originally functioning in a whole that can be called ‘Oneness’.

Therefore, Oneness is not simply a perspective but is the condition for things being objectified.

What Zhuangzi is doing is reflecting on how things are separated from Oneness so that they become treated as “things”.

If we were to look to linguistic theory here, things may make a bit more conceptual sense. “Things” is a large-scale group naming convention. This means that ‘thing’ is the highest ontological category in our language that includes every being in the world, that can refer either to some “thing” independently, or collectively. A cup is different than a table, a table is different from a TV, a TV is different than the wall, but all of these can be called “things”.

When you get into ideas like Set Theory, Russel’s Paradox inevitably appears, and it quickly becomes apparent that Universal Sets cannot logically exist. To spare you the jargon, this essentially boils down to the question of whether the name given to the collective totality of things in the world is a thing itself. If this category itself is a thing, how can it refer to itself? If it is not a thing, then what is a thing and what is not a thing?

This kind of debate is also present in semiotics, where we have to question the relationship between signifier and signified. The Chinese Philosopher Gongsun Long explains this with reference to a white horse. In his view, the conceptual category that we use to point towards something is inherently different from what is actually pointed to. He thus insists that a white horse is not really a ‘horse’, the phrase simply designates a category of being or collection of sounds and vocalisations that we all agree “points to” a horse.

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It’s rather like how your own name isn’t actually “you”, it’s a collection of vibrations and sounds that are vocalised in your awareness that you and everyone around you agree designates “you”.

Gongsun Long actually gets quite existential with this concept, going as far as to say that “things” are those that exist in the world and “pointers” (attributes, signs, conceptual categories) are those that do not exist in the world. There is an inherent paradox in this. If ‘thing’ is the word we use to point to all things, this name cannot be a thing amid other things.

This “problem of things” is equally touched on by Zhuangzi. I’m using the Burton Watson (2003) translation11:

To put it another way, if we name everything universally by the term ‘one’, this word ‘one’ itself becomes another conceptual entity. This name together with what it designates forms two entities. If these two entities are to be named universally as a set, we would call this set of two “things”, ‘two’. This means that by the coining the term ‘one’, the extension of the concept of ‘one’ has changed. Renaming the two entities ‘two’ makes three entities and so on and so on, until it inevitably spirals out to infinity and is therefore semantically meaningless.

Where Zhuangzi differs from Long however is that he does not dwell on this dichotomy for very long because he picks up on an arguably even more implicit bias in our language use. He notes that when we say “everything can’t be named by a single word”, we’re still using the word “thing” implicitly. EveryTHING. His great insight here is that the conceptual category isn’t really the problem. The problem lies in the activity of naming things itself.

He cannot deny that words have conceptual power though, as he explains12:

There is an inherent linguistic tenor to this problem. For Zhuangzi, the problem of Being and “thing” is just as much a linguistic problem as an existential one. The word “thing” can’t be a universal category that designates everything because then the ontological status of the word “thing” would be undetermined. But, the word “thing”, at least when spoken, is not just a meaningless sound, we clearly know it’s pointing “to” something. What we can say for sure is that the word can’t function as a name, but it must have other linguistic functions. The question then becomes, what is actually happening to the “thing” when we speak about and name it (i.e the process of actualisation)?

Actualising Things

To help us understand what he’s saying, Zhuangzi gives us an “evolution” of the concept of Being in Chinese Philosophy. He tells us13:

In the beginning of human understanding, there was no “thing”. “Thing” -to Zhuangzi, only emerged when people began thinking “things” exist. Therefore, the conceptual category of “thing-ness” is a function of Being or Existence. The first characteristic we can say about “things” is that they exist, or at least, possess Being. If we chuck an “s” on there and make it into a plural -”things”, then we imply plurality and diversity. Therefore, the other characteristic of “things” is their boundaries -i.e a subject-object distinction, which classifies them into different ontological entities.

Once things are distinguished, they are measured or compared, and the value judgment in this final stage is described as a distortion from the Dao. His question at the end though -do such things as completion and injury really exist? Casts doubt on the category of “thing”, and seems as if he is making the point that just having the concept of “thing” does not imply that things really exist.

Here’s where things get interesting.

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Nearly all western philosophers hold that existence is not a property embodied in objects. Analytic Philosophy’s foundational position is that existence is a quantifier not a predicate. Put in more practical English, we can see a cup, a table, a tree and a house, but we can never see existence. Existence is not something that can be perceived but is a quality imposed onto things in some way by human beings. Zhuangzi sees this imposing existence on things as not imply that things objectively exist.

He then goes absolutely off the rails and becomes full Daoist Sage. This is the section that strikes me as the most similar to Parmenides above14:

As Kwok clarifies, what’s he’s essentially saying here is that if we were to say that some point of time is the beginning, then -by implication, there is a not-yet-beginning as well, because “beginning” begins from not-yet-beginning. However, if there is a stage called “not-yet-beginning”, this stage must have its own beginning and so on. In other words, we can’t really mark any single point as the “beginning” of existence. If we have to trace back to the point that something exists, that is, the beginning of Being, there should also be a preceding Non-Being. But what is the beginning of Being and Non-Being? Again, we’re back to the question of beginning.

For Zhuangzi, we say things exist, we don’t know “when it comes to being and nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing.” By saying things exist “at some point”, we are not sure if things really exist. In other words, conventionally, we tend to say that the “beginning” is the moment before which nothing exists -or rather, reality is characterised as Non-Being, Zhuangzi, however, is claiming that when we say there is a beginning, it implies that there exists a not-yet-beginning prior to that beginning.

As Kwok notes15, the not-yet-beginning prior to a beginning can be a logical consequent of the beginning but not necessarily a material consequent. It could theoretically be a logical predicate or distinction alone without having or possessing “existence” in the material sense. That’s where Zhuangzi deliberately sets the second premise to trip us up.

If we think that simply saying things exist really implies ontologically that they exist, then why does saying not-yet-beginning not affirm ontologically a not-yet-beginning of being? For Zhuangzi, language does not and cannot capture objective reality.

He nevertheless says that “Suddenly there is Being & Non-Being”, so clearly he acknowledges them as conceptual categories, but under the pretence that the terms have no reference to actual reality.

Note that Zhuangzi says “suddenly” here. It’s almost as if he’s taken by surprise at the prospect of Being & Non-Being appearing. This view is reinforced by his next statement that “I do not know when it comes to being and non-being”. I think what he’s getting at here is that Being and Non-Being occur only at the moment when we conceptualise, or perhaps yet, speak of them.

When the two conceptual categories are brought out in our speech, internally through our inner monologue and way of “perceiving” the world, or in speech with another person, they “suddenly” come into existence without referring to objective reality. This essentially means that Being & Non-Being are just linguistic constructions. They obtain their meaning simply from language.

The enormous consequence of this that i’m now contemplating in my meditation is this:

Words like ‘being’ and ‘beginning’ don’t report existence but impose existence.

Only when existence is imposed by language can the concept of “thing-ness” be constructed. Later on, Zhuangzi tells us16:

‘A road is made by people walking on it; things are made by people calling them so’

“Things” do not exist, they are created and imposed by uttering them. Language is a necessary condition for existence, and Zhuangzi is clear that we can’t live outside our linguistic constructions. We have to be careful though, Zhuangzi isn’t necessarily implying here that words or names literally create reality -as much as modern Quantum Quacks and Chaos Magicians would have you believe.

Instead, the construction of “things” in our awareness and the actualisation of them by vocalisation is changing the state of being of the “thing” we are signifying. For Zhuangzi, “things” are conceptually created by human action, or at least, human perception/action creates some effect on the state of the “thing” that then actualises it. In other words, “things” are “thing-ed” through human agency and engagement with reality.

To give you an example here, in daily life, the identity of a thing is denoted by the set of predicates that can be applied to it. Pens, tables, trees etc have their own attributes or “pointers” that designate them as ontological classes17. It is only through the actualisation of the “thing’s” predicates that it becomes a meaningful category. For Zhuangzi, there are “facts” of things (in this case, analogous to attributes like properties, characteristics, features, nature, time–space position or any other aspect of a “thing” that can be spoken of) but these “facts” are not grasped by intellectual knowing. Instead they are imposed by our language and naming convention.

Without imposing such attributes on things, things won’t have “embodied attributes” which are present for discursive knowing. For Zhuangzi, it seems things must have attributes or properties but these properties are imposed on them by language. Without property-asigning, things can’t exist. It’s therefore the act of naming in itself that is the action that ‘creates’ things, I mentioned above.

Zhuangzi begins to conclude with another insightful statement on Dao18:

In a way, if the properties of something are “that which make it so”, and therefore change its state of being, then there is no primordial substance that forms the core of things and contains all the properties. It’s not like a “thing” exists in some pre-formal state and then is suddenly created through imposition. Prior to subject-object distinctions and signifiers that assign properties to forms, there is simply the Oneness. As he concludes, “nothing is either complete or impaired, but all are made into One again”.

“Things” becomes “things” in their division and particularisation from the Oneness, and in a sense, become “complete” unto themselves. In classical Daoist fashion, the Oneness is the original state of being in which things are not yet created -in the sense of conceptualised or propertied. Once properties or attributes are imposed by conceptualisation -whether internally perceived or vocal, the One is divided and various things are created as a consequence. We should note however, that the essential presence and nature of the One is present in its particulars, as in Plato’s Parmenides.19

Kwok cites an incredibly insightful example of this non-dualist philosophy in the everyday, embodied experience20:

Zhuangzi similarly concludes his philosophical essay with a rendition of the Dao21:

In other words, the people who have profound understanding rely on the One and do not perceive the whole by objectification or conceptualisation. This ‘way’ of living in the whole is the Dao. In a way, I’m reminded of another part of the Zhuangzi, the infamous passage on his Butterfly Dream in which he highlights that the distinction between waking and dreaming is another false dichotomy. If we distinguish them, how can we tell if we’re dreaming or awake? As is common among his writings, "knowing" a thing is simply a state of mind, but even more importantly, it is not possible to determine whether "knowing" has any objective meaning in respect to reality and Being.

I’m sure you can see the parallels and insights into Parmenides yourself here. I think, this is why the famous sinologist Victor H. Mair compared Zhuangzi’s process of reasoning to Socratic dialogue—exemplified by the debate between him and the philosopher Huizi in the dialogue on the "Joy of Fish". Interestingly, Mair even characterises Huizi's paradoxes near the end of the book as being "strikingly like those of Zeno of Elea", who was in fact, Parmenides’ prime student.22

One of the things he mentions in his introduction caught my attention1:

In other words, in this theory what is “below” (i.e the generative world of nature) was used as a model to extrapolate and assign qualities to the planets and stars above, not the other round. This, of course, presents the “below” as superior -here equated with older, more antiquated wisdom, which has gone undiscovered or untreated until now.2

While I disagree with the central thesis here, there are things to like about Jake’s point of view, notably the adaptability to modern scientific knowledge and the keen observations on Khun’s utility of paradigm. The hermeneutical lens at play here is part of a long tradition of anti-progressivism and traditionalism that views the older and more ancient as lost but in need of rediscovery for the assumed betterment it will provide, especially in mitigating the “mistakes” of interpretation brought about by modernity3.

The Hermetic Maxim

I use this -somewhat adjacent, topic as an opener to frame my next line of thought, which it triggered. While not explicitly stated, Jake is obviously drawing on the archetypal Hermetic Maxim of the Emerald Tablet:

As Above So Below

This dialogue between the Below and Above, and which influenced which, got me thinking about how exactly we arrived at this popular phrase. Tracing back the lineage of translation in the Toledo School, primarily into the Latin & Arabic, reveals some interesting insights that I feel are often obscured by the generalising translation in English. In short, Latin can be a far more descriptive and accurate language than English, with its various cases, conjugations and declinations for verbs and nouns. You can include far more contextual information in a short Latin sentence or phrase than you can in English.

Until the early 20th century, only Latin versions of the Emerald Tablet were known, with the oldest dating back to the 12th century; the Liber de secretis naturae, translated from Arabic around 1145 by Hugo of Santalla4. The first Arabic versions were rediscovered by the English historian of science E.J. Holmyard (1891-1959) and the German orientalist Julius Ruska (1867-1949).5

The Tablet appears to have been appended to this Liber de Secretis Naturae, which was attributed to Apollonius, and has its origins in the technical Ps Aristotelian Hermetica.

As the text entered into Latin, it was taken up by various translators, and interestingly, treated and received quite differently. It’s these different Latin versions that give us a more nuanced significance to the meaning of the phrase.

Following Pereira (2000)6 the oneness of high and low is affirmed analogically in the vulgata text as it is in Roger Bacon's edition by the words est sicut and respondent, while its dynamics are instead stressed by Hugh of Santalla7:

superiora de inferioribus, inferiora de superioribus -The higher things from the lower, the lower things from the higher

The Latin translators are evidently struggling to reconcile a monistic interpretation made possible by Plato of Tivoli’s wording and to a lesser extent by Hugo's, and the overstated creationism of Bacon, which actually alters the original Arabic text. A third possibility, i.e. mutual possession, arises when we consider M. Plessner's modern translation of the Arabic text of Balinus8

Das Oberste gehört zum Untersten und das Unterste zum Obersten -the highest belongs to the lowest and the lowest to the highest.

Different Translations

Starting with the original Arabic, the earliest rendition of the text comes from the Sirr al-khalīqa (c. 750–850) attributed to Appolonius:

إنّ الأعلى من الأسفل والأسفل من الأعلى،

Following Ruska (1926)9 a literalist translation would be:

Indeed, the uppermost is from the lowermost and the lowermost is from the uppermost

The rendition provided in Sirr al Asrar around the 10th century is:

أن الأسفل من الأعلى والأعلى من الأسفل

Following Badawi (1954)10 this can be rendered somewhat similar:

That the lower comes from the higher and the higher comes from the lower

Moving into Latin, we have numerous renditions of this phrase, primarily by Hugo, Plato (of Tivoli) & Roger Bacon. Hugo of Santalla, as mentioned, in his edition translates it as:

Superiora de inferioribus, inferiora de superioribus / Prodigiorum opcratio ex uno11

As, Pereira notes, this rendition stresses the dynamics of the maxim:

The higher things from the lower, the lower things from the higher / The operation of wonders from the One

He makes use of the preposition (de) to denote from/out of implying a causal connection or even dependancy between First Principles and their manifestations, and vice versa. Note also the use of neuter plurals, and the use of the neutral term “One”. We should also remember that Hugo is translating the Sirr al-khalīqa here.

This is slightly different -but not awfully so, to the translation given by Plato of Tivoli12:

Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius / Ad preparanda miracula rei unius

Here, Plato is heading towards a monistic interpretation in his employment of est sicut -is like:

What is superior (above) is like what is below, and what is below is like what is superior (above). To accomplish the miracles of the one thing.

This seems to be the most popular rendition today and stresses the correspondence between the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (humanity) through a sense of likeness. Things down here mirror those up there because they emulate each other in such likeness. Note there is no direct suggestion of dependancy here as in Hugo.

The other popular rendition of this maxim was actually translated by none other than Roger Bacon in his commentary on the Secretum Secretorum13. He gives us:

Inferiora superioribus et superiora inferioribus respondent / Operator miraculorum unus solus est Deus, a quo descendit omnis operacio mirabilis

Now, I love Bacon, but he’s really up to something different here. He alters the original Arabic to such a degree that it’s overtly Christianised. The Christianising message stresses the unity and monism of the principle as well as subsumes it into the agency of the Christian God (which he adds into the text!). He is nevertheless doing some interesting things with the Latin, which actually makes it harder to translate into English than we might first assume.

First, he’s making explicit use of the dative plural (Superioribus/Inferioribus) to indicate a dependancy of the latter on the former in both equations. But what’s more, he’s the only one to add in this “respondent” to the maxim, which we can render colloquially as correspondence, but more literally as “to respond”. I can see what he’s getting at, but rendering it in English is somewhat clumsy and I’m not satisfied with the conventional:

Lower/Inferiror things correspond to the higher/superior, and higher/superior to the lower/inferior. The operator of miracles is one alone: God. From whom descends every miraculous operation

The central idea is that the higher is of the lower in the dative sense and vice versa, i.e the recipient or beneficiary of an action. This is re-enforced by his notion that the Above and Below “respond” to each other through the operation of God. In a way, even though his message is Christian, he could be argued to understand the Platonic notion of Sympatheia and Sunthenmata better than the others, who render the maxim in terms of simple likeness.

In a weird way, I both prefer and dislike Bacon’s rendition. Hugo comes close in his interpretation of influences coming “from”, the Above and Below, but Bacon -in my view, captures the active agency of the mechanic of sympatheia in rending the Hermetic Correspondence of the Macro-Microism as one in which the universe responds to us, and us to it.

As Hanegraaff has shown1, the idea -proposed most prominently by Frances Yates2, that the West saw a sudden revival and explosion of Hermetic ideas with Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum in the Renaissance, really has no firm basis. The Theurgic Astrological tradition of the Renaissance intelligentsia is rooted more directly in Neoplatonic, Iamblichean & Arabic Astral speculation than anything strictly hermetic -at least, in the sense of a continued “tradition” of practices that we can trace back to the progression of ritual & noetic illumination that Bull characterises as central to Classical/Late Antique Hermetism. The Corpus Hermeticum, after all, contains little in the way of what we usually class as “practical” ritual/magic -the occasional hymn or prayer aside3.

Ficino clearly seems to have been using his knowledge of the Asclepius -already circulating for centuries since the Middle Ages thanks to Augustine & Apuleius, as a model to translate his manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum; hence certain translation choices that present his edition as perhaps more theological than it actually is. The vast majority of Renaissance magicians/scholars are better identified as Platonic Orientalists than Hermetists, with the excerption perhaps being Lazzarelli -who is the first person in history to actually self identify as one:

Christianus ego sum o Rex: et Hermeticum simul esse non pude

Plethon & Ficino looked to Zoroaster as the source of the Prisca Theologia, while Pico restated the prominency of Mosaic Law in his founding of Christian Cabala. Nevertheless, Ficino & the others necessarily drew on conceptions of Hermes that had been long standing in the Western philosophical tradition.

Understanding Medieval Philosophy

To give a simple overview of the context and period here, it’s worth outlining the general scope of what we call “Medieval Philosophy”. Here I rely on the Oxford Introduction to Medieval Philosophy by John Marenbon. As a discipline, what we now anachronistically call “Medieval Philosophy” was a style of speculation, thought, and discourse that was practiced over an area of roughly ten million square miles, from the West Coast of Ireland to Uzbekistan and from Gothenburg to the Gulf or Arden.

Not only were there interconnected people practicing philosophy in these areas, as there were in India, China and other places, but the kind of philosophy done belonged to a single intertwined group of traditions, the majority of it going back to Classical Greece. While the roots of the Medieval Philosophical Tradition go back to Plato & Aristotle -with a pronounced emphasis on the latter thanks to Porphyry reintegrating him into the Philosophical Curriculum under the pretence that Aristotle spoke of the natural -sublunar, world, while Plato dealt with divinity & the truer world of Forms, the “trunk” from which the four main branches of the time developed lies mostly in the Late Antique Athenian & Alexandrian schools, from which all the Medieval traditions inherited a similar body of texts.

The four branches or climates of Medieval Philosophy can be understood as:

• Latin Christian philosophy -practiced mainly in Western Europe

• Greek Christian philosophy -developed in the Byzantine Empire and centred around Constantinople

• Arabic Philosophy -practiced throughout the territory of the Islamic Empire & Caliphates

• Jewish Philosophy -practiced in areas like Andalusia & Eastern Europe

Thanks to major movements like the Toledo translation project, these four branches were deeply interconnected through exchanges and translations of texts, mainly going from Greek into Arabic & Latin; Arabic into Latin & Hebrew, and Latin into Greek & Hebrew.

This is also why we call it “Arabic” Philosophy, not “Islamic” Philosophy. Both Jews and Christians, as well as Muslims dialogued in Arabic. But Jewish Philosophy -including that written in Arabic, sometimes by Arab Jews, is distinguished as a separate branch because of the way Jewish philosophy in Hebrew links back to Jewish philosophy in Arabic.

The other problem we might encounter is how exactly we define “philosophy”. Using the word “philosophy” in reference to the Medieval Period is anachronistic. In the Middle Ages there was no subject called “philosophy”, although many questions were discussed similar to ones we see in modern philosophy textbooks, along with similar argumentation and analytical methods. But none of these were considered a unified discipline -note the subject’s absence from the Trivium & Quadrivium. Everything discussed was intermixed with theology and branches of Natural Sciences like biology, psychology, astronomy, mathematics, music, grammar and rhetoric.

Hermes Arabicus et Latinus

Throughout the Middle Ages -let’s say conservatively between 500 AD - 1400 AD, Hermes was already fairly well known primarily as a philosopher, but also as a technical author, closely associated with Alchemy since the 12th century thanks to the Toledo School.

Notably, Hugo of Santalla, one of the most important figures of the Toledo Translation Project, is the likely first translator of the Emerald Tablet into Latin4. The text of the tablet was appended to the longer text attributed to Hermes known as the Liber de Secretis Naturae -the Book of the Secrets of Nature, which has its origins in the Pseudo Aristotelian Hermetica5.

The dissemination of hermetica in Arabic began likely in the 8th-9th century. In the mid 8th century AD, Iranian (Persian) astrologers first introduced Hermes into Islamic thought, drawing from Persian translations of Greek hermetica probably composed sometime during the Sassanian Period (224 AD to 651 AD). By the early 9th century, we’re seeing the emergence of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, attributed to Aristotle -who is said to rely on Hermes, but also drawing from Arabic translations of Plotinus’ Enneads (IV & V)6.

All of the Ps.Aristotelian Hermetica have Greek-ish titles in Arabic transcription, intended to mimic Aristotle’s known works. They are:

• Al-Isṭimākhīs

• Al-Isṭimāṭīs

• Al-Hādhīṭūs

• Al-Ustuwaṭṭās.

Together, these texts seemed to have formed a single work called the Kitāb ʿIlal al-rūḥāniyyāt. As Liana Saif has pointed out, to this core collection we can add Al-Madīṭīs (which itself is an abridgement of Kitāb ʿIlal al-rūḥāniyyāt), Kitāb al-Shuʿrā al-yamāniyya, and the Dhakhīrat Iskandar. Based on the these Hermetica (all of which are technical), an anonymous author ( known as Pseudo Apollonius of Tyana) composed the Kitab sirr al khaliqa (Book of the secret of creation), which contained the Emerald Tablet some time in the late 800s AD, which I mentioned earlier.

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Out of this tradition also grew the Sirr al Asrar, which was translated into Latin as the Secretum Secretorum (Secret of Secrets) and became a foundational medieval grimoire tradition of its own. In general, it was collections of technical hermetica rather than philosophical/spiritual that formed the basis of the Arabic reception of Hermes. Only in the 11th century do we find philosophical gnomologia attributed to Hermes in Arabic, but these are mostly ethical advice translated from Pahlavi Persian, Greek & Sanskrit.

Hermes seems to owe his basic position in the alchemical tradition to the fame acquired through the Liber de Secretis Naturae, as it -alongside the Secretum Secretorum, became the most popular book in the Latin Middle Ages7. Three main philosophical texts circulated under the name of Hermes in the 12th century: The Asclepius, The Book of 24 Philosophers and the Book of Six Principles of Nature -an excellent alternative to the Kybalion’s seven, if you ask me, alongside the maxims in SH 11.

The main body of scholarly work on the Medieval Hermes -aka Hermes Latinus, is found in the Corpvs Christianorvm, a subset of which is known as Hermes Latinus itself and was established by the late prof. Paolo Lucentini, and was intended to furnish the tools and editions for the study of the Hermetic tradition between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance.

Of the 5 (current) volumes, the first was published in 1994, and the most recent in 2019, under the editorship of David Porreca, Bruno Rochette and Antonella Sannino. An excellent database of the texts -all of which are in Latin, is found here and is also published by Brepolis, an excellent -but pricey, publisher of Medieval Scholarship that I thoroughly recommend.

The Book of 24 Philosophers

Dan Atrell over at the Modern Hermeticist has done an excellent video and write up on the Liber de sex rerum principiis here:

The Book of 24 Philosophers however, still doesn’t have a critical English translation, although a couple of versions have circulated online, mainly by Prof. Markus Vinzent, Ian Alexander Moore and The Matheson Trust. I actually love this text, and feel like it should be more well known, so I want to highlight their work and offer it here, along with some of my own amendments to the Latin & commentary. I am drawing primarily from Vinzent, alongside the Wikisource/Vicifons edition of the Latin.

The Text

The twenty-four philosophers having been gathered, only one question remained for them [which] was: What is God? By common counsel, having agreed on a truce and a set time to meet again, each of them would propose their own definitions of God, so that from their individual definitions they could determine something certain about God by common consent.

Precept 1

God is a Monad generating a Monad, reflecting in itself a single flame/ardour.

This definition was given according to the imagination of the first cause, as it numerically multiplies itself in itself, so that it is accepted as multiplying under unity, multiplied under duality, and reflected under trinity. Thus indeed it is in numbers: each unit has its own number because it is reflected over something different from the others.

Precept 2

God is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, circumference nowhere.

This definition is given as a way of imagining the first cause as continuous in its own life. The limit of its extension is above where and ending outside. Because of this, its centre is everywhere, having no dimension in the soul. When it seeks the circumference of its sphericality, it will say it is elevated to infinity, because whatever is without dimension is as it was at the beginning of creation.

Precept 3

God is whole in each part of himself.

This definition is given according to the consideration of the essence of divinity in its simplicity. Since there is nothing resisting it, it is wholly everywhere at once, and similarly above and beyond everywhere, not distracted by any defect of power within itself, nor limited by the power of another dominating.

Precept 4

God is an intellect generating speech, persevering in continuation.

This definition describes its own life according to the various aspects of the essence of deity. For it counts itself as the generator by generating; indeed, the generation verbalises itself because it is generated; indeed, it is made equal through the mode of continuation which holds itself by breathing.

Precept 5

God is the one beyond whom nothing better can be thought of.

This definition is given from the end. Unity indeed is the end and perfection. Therefore, what this implies is good, and the more so, the better. Therefore, the joy of truth is the life of every essence, indeed every life comes from unity, and this from inner indivision. Therefore, the more unified something is, the more it lives. Its unity is the highest.

Precept 6

God is that in comparison to which substance is an accident, and an accident is nothing.

This definition is given under the aspect of relation. The subject of an accident is also its own substance with something external. If that external thing withdraws, the accident, that is, the acting property, perishes. Therefore, in relation to the first cause, every substance is an accident, and an accident is nothing, and it stands under the nothingness of substance as something external: divine substance is as its own substance which does not flow.

Precept 7

God is the [First] Principle without a principality, the process without change, the end without an end.

This definition is given regarding the specific nature. What generates gets [labelled] ‘first’ concerning what it generates, but thus it is not first, as if he were not before. What is being generated comes forth by generation towards its end, but being of a medium nature does not suffer variation. Therefore this means that the end of what is truly called generator and generated, is the same, as it would not be divine life, unless such one middle one; yet, it is not end in the sense of acting, such as rest with regards also to motion.

Precept 8

God is love who, the more it is possessed, the more it is hidden.

This definition is related to the effect. In the first cause that from which life stems is also the one itself (stems is also the one itself) also the semen stems from which all life stems. Therefore this itself is the well, the well of love in that one. If in the created thing the oneness of what generates and is generated inclines itself most inwardly towards that one, reverting by way of regression, then this is itself the love of the creature to which creature has been ordained by It , and the more you unify (literally, live) yourself with It the more you will be exalted and the more he will be elevated. And this is how he himself hides.

Precept 9

God is the one who alone encompasses all that pertains to time.

This definition relates to form. The totality namely sees the parts in one look, whereas the part does not see the totality, unless from diverse perspectives and succesively. Therefore, the Godhead is the totality of successive things. Wherefore its intuition is unique and not the result of a process.

Precept 10

God is that whose power is not measured, whose being is not confined, whose goodness is not limited.

This definition is clear from the fourth and seventh definition. In the created power the number is both central and first found, where according to more or fewer actions bring the possible things to realised ones, because, were they infinite, it would be said to be impossible. Namely, the one from which things have been acted upon, this has limitless actions, with the result that it acts suddenly. Where, however, infinite number of planned actions are and where it overcomes resistance, it cannot succeed. All Being is called closure of something’s finitude. Wherefore from the centre to its being there are only finite future actions.

In the Godhead, however, Being is not alike, but infinite actions from the centre to the extreme. Therefore, its closure is infinite and action not impossible, if not even necessary. It follows therefore that also in returning, endless goodness is the way which is the more secure from being into the unity of the centre.

Precept 11

God is above being, necessity. He alone is Himself more abundant and more sufficient.

This is a formal, but relational definition. Being is said to be totally closed. Therefore, what is above being is not closed. And it is necessary, because it misses nothing, as it is not closed, but of infinite possibility. Thus neither it is drawn away, being itself above being, as it never moves away from itself, but returns to itself, and is not in need of the totality, but in excess of it.

Precept 12

God is that whose will is matched by divine power and wisdom.

Will, knowledge and power are principles, prior of action in creatures. They are not equal because will is more conforming to God compared to knowledge and power. Indeed, nature has confined power to me, practicing, indeed, knowledge, but will remains unrestrained for perpetual resonance.

Precept 13

God is eternity acting within Himself, without division or attribute.

The creatures act and acquire a disposition. Then act without continuity as they hit resistance. As a result, fatigue cuts down her strength. So it is not in the Creator. He is not transformed by aquiring a disposition. He does not overshade so that he gets tired and rests.

Precept 14

God is the opposition of nothingness through the mediation of being.

This definition creates the image of God being a sphere, in the centre of which nothing is imprisoned. And the divine sphere is continuously acting the divine work through which it detains eternally nothing to be in it, from which through exuberance of its goodness it calls into being the thing which is as if it existed around the centre. If it attracts it to Being, the sphere remains, if to potential being, it goes back to nothing.

Precept 15

God is life whose way is in form, and goodness is in unity.

There is motion from the middle and towards the middle: the first he gives to be, the second gives to live. In God, the first motion is through generating towards the generated to be, the second which is the converse way, is goodness.

Precept 16

God is that which is only signified by words due to its excellence, and which minds do not understand due to its dissimilarity.

The task of a name is to signify intellectual concepts, nothing else. The soul does not invent in itself the form or sample of God, because they themselves are innermost himself, not in the way he is in the things. Therefore as he is, he is totally dissimilar to them, also neither intellectually grasped. Is he intellect? Nor, therefore signified.

Precept 17

God is only the intellect of Himself, not receiving predication

A knot is not regocnised through a relation to a knot. With Predication in things diverse aspects unfold what is included in one single. Therefore, as there are not diverse aspects in God, such as prior and later, which would perfect him more or less, he does not receive predication, but he knows himself through himself because he himself generates himself.

Precept 18

God is a sphere which has as many circumferences as centre points

This [definition] follows from the second, because with him being totally without dimension, even without infinite dimension, the extreme (L: extenstion) did not exist in the sphere of his essence. Therefore there is no centrepoint in the extreme (no centrepoint in the extreme] L: point), unless the circumference (L add. of the circle) would be even further exterior.

Precept 19

God is [an] always moving Immobile

God is said to be unmoved, because he always is of the one disposition, and this is to be resting. He is always moving, because he is alive in itself, however without alteration. He knows himself according to simple knowledge, so that knowledge perfects what is known and what is known is the form of knowledge.

Precept 20

God is He who alone lives by His own intellect.

He does not live like bodies that receive foreign things in themselves, so that they convert them into their own nature. He does not live like supracelestial bodies which have motion from the spirits, nor does he live like minds, souls who, from unity with himself are sustained. Instead, he lives through knowing of himself and in himself, therefore is above Being.

Precept 21

God is the darkness left in the soul after all light has departed.

The forms of things which are at the soul which reveal what is in her, because of that it is said of her that she is somehow all. The Soul itself illuminates the soul. But after the detachment of all those forms, the divinity is contemplated. Through renouncing and the removal of all forms of things on herself, she turns herself beyond herself and wants to see the First Cause. And the Intellect of the soul is overshadowed, because it is not apt for that uncreated light. Therefore, when [the soul] turns towards itself, it says “this is darkness for me”

Precept 22

God is from whom all things exist without partition, through whom all things exist without variation, in whom all things exist without mixture.

By applying his threefold essence to nothingness, he brings those things to be which are, so that out of the generated there is a generator, and they perceive the beginning of their Being, and exist through being generated, being kept alive in unity, they remain. However, thus they are from being generated that he himself is undivided, and does not donate something of his own being which would adhere to them, neither the divine form, but the form for things, given through himself, not through another, without altering himself, neither as if the life giver, by collecting/attracting them in himself, suffers mixture from interception or impurity.

Precept 23

God is He who is known only through ignorance of the mind.

This definition is known through the twenty first definition. Accordingly, nothing is known by the soul, unless she can receive the form of him according to habit and compare it to the sample of him that is in her. Yet, the soul has no sample whatsoever except those that through herself flew from the First Cause into being. Therefore, she has no knowledge of what is above her, hence, not of the First Cause. Now, once she has contemplated all knowable [things] of others, and by extracting the First Cause itself from the things and by understanding the opposition to nothingness, as far as she can aquire it, so she will gain Cognition. And this is true ignorance, namely to know what she is not, and not to know what she is.

Precept 24

God is the light that does not shine through division, which passes away, but only the divine form in reality.

This definition refers to essence. Created light falls upon a dark thing  into which fits such darkness that such light might not be able to clear the darkness, because of its strong density, then the light fractions in radiation, mostly where it is most intense and multiplies itself, and it goes over into accidents. As it is an essential fraction, the accidents multiply. And this is what shines. The divine light does not find in created things such possibility which fractions it in its action; therefore it goes through everything. The deformity alone in the thing multiplies and generates shining light in the thing, yet not in itself. That is what he says. But as there is in the thing a deformation with respect to its creator, then it generates in it a sort of clarity, none however, in itself. Thus, there is 'pure ignorance' of the created intelligence.

This, accomplished by the grace of God, may suffice.

Reflections

I’m sure some of you can see why I love this text. Precept 21 that God is the darkness left in the soul after all light has departed, really sticks out for me as something to contemplate. While not necessarily a practical text in the conventional sense, I see these Definitions as somewhat similar in utility to the Armenian Definitions or the maxims of SH II. They can be memorised, sat with, meditated upon through a kind of Lectio Divina or otherwise contemplated for insight.

Part of the importance of texts like this -and engaging them with Theoria, lies in theurgic purification of the mind & soul. As I mentioned in one of my other articles, we tend to have a technical ritual bias in modern spirituality and occultism. It’s almost “standard” to default to ritual action like khernips or some variant of the LBRP when we speak of catharsis or purification. We purify the body -and theoretically, the “energy” or “soul”, but little is often spoken of purifying the Mind through sound knowledge and contemplation. “Thinking” is seen as a passive activity, or even by product of Being.

Given that ethical and moral education -mediated through a curriculum of reading philosophy, formed a central part of Iamblichus’ school, it’s no stretch to consider that meditating and thinking on Definitions or Aphorisms such as the above can be an intensely practical endeavour that -I think, can be considered a kind of interiorisation of ritual.

Definitions like the famous Precept 2 (God is an infinite sphere etc), also lend themselves well to visualisation, as do some others, which I’m curious to experiment with.

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Her definition is essentially tripartite; theurgy consists of three key areas or pillars -both in theory and practice, 1) Ritual Practices, 2) Ethical (and by proxy, Moral) Education and 3) the cultivation of Intellectual Capacities, most usually through philosophical study2, all with the primary goal of gradual assimilation to (and imitation of) the divine during life, culminating with henosis, otherwise considered the standard teleology of Platonism as worked out by the 1st Century Neopythagorean, Eudorus of Alexandria.

These categories map fairly well onto Valantasis’ dimensions of the role(s) of spiritual guides in the 3rd century in his study on Semiotics3. He notes, in lieu of Ilsetraut Hadot’s work on spiritual exercises in the Late Antique Mediterranean4:

I’m fairly content with this definition, although I might add alongside the mental and emotional self, the guide imparted knowledge of the subtle (usually planetary) body -at least in Platonism derived currents, as a framework for working with and facilitating catharsis.

I’ve written elsewhere5 about the caution of considering Addey’s categories as robust or separate dimensions, though. As a holistic, ritualised philosophy, a theurgic ritual and exercise can incorporate all three of these categories at once, and most usually does. So, like Greg Shaw’s distinction of the different kinds of suthenmata (material, intermediary & noetic)6, these are to be considered logical distinctions only. In practice the categories overlap, interweave, and often depend on each other.

The basic theory at play for Iamblichus in theurgy (which differentiates it from magic, for example), is that such practices are engaged to enhance the fitness of a receptacle to receive the gods, most usually -in the case of our own soul, by means of possession of the imagination; which itself has been amplified or purified through engagement with suthenmata (correspondences/tokens). A theurgist does not compel or evoke the gods, not only out piety, but also practicality.

There is simply no reason to. Not only are noetic First Principles above and beyond the realm of generation, and therefore not susceptible to passions or whims of emotion -being wholly and unchangingly good, but Iamblichus is clear that the gods are already omnipresent as subtle divine light all around us. They are embodied in the subtle logoi, reasoned principles that give meaning to and make reality intelligible. I always prefer the analogy that we are “tuning” our perception to a certain wavelength of light by polishing our windows to let the sun in. We can’t control whether the sun shines, but we can filter it like stained glass to allow certain bands in. This is what you’re doing with suthenmata.7

As Greg Shaw notes in his Hellenic Tantra, when asked by his student to come to the temples for the festivals of the gods, Plotinus responded that "they should come to me, not I to them." Plotinus isn't so much being impious/blasphemous here, actually quite the opposite.

He appears to have considered it impious to pester the gods with material things or bother them by continually reaching out and trying to grasp at them for things that are well within our own power to accomplish. Instead, our focus should be on cultivating a state of self in which we are receptive to them. In other words, we shouldn't devote our time to attempting to grasp at the gods, but should focus on increasing our own spiritual fitness so that we provide a state in which we can be grasped by them.

Now, of course, by this logic, a large amount of what are generally titled as Systasis or Ph Ntr in the PGM/PDM would actually qualify as theurgic prayers for Iamblichus, especially the rites to acquire divine favour. It comes down to attitude and approach8. Most of all, one should take on a core understanding that it is the Gods driving the operation.

Greg Shaw put this idea best in a recent talk I attended of his. It’s essentially that experience one has when they’re in meditation, chanting mantras or visualising and come to an awareness that they are not really the one doing anything. You are simply a conduit or vessel for the mantra or experience to chant through you, in the same way people undergoing intense visualisation often report a clear singularity moment in which the Active Imagination takes over and they begin seeing things that they are not consciously creating.

Iamblichus clearly and succinctly explains this process in De Mysteriis9:

Note that first sentence, it’s not our intellectual faculty alone that brings the divine in. Good Intellectual Formation and “the best condition of the soul” alongside ritual purity are necessary perquisites/auxiliary things to do so, but do not complete the operation.

I’ve written a fair bit already on the ritual portion of theurgic work, but the Ethical Education is just as, if not more important, especially for preparing and strengthening the soul for divine reception. Without a thorough grounding in Platonic (or, as I hope to argue, Hermetic) Virtue Ethics, the presence of the divine will undoubtedly overpower the mind and body of the practitioner, or, the individual will be led astray by “barking daimons” (to quote the Oracles10) and false phantasmata (Imaginary Images) derived from the Astral Passions.11 The consequences of such practice is stated fairly well in CH I.23:

More than anything, I am interested right now in Hermetic theurgy, and the ways in which it conforms to & differs from Chaldean or Iamblichean.

So I’m going to take Addey’s three categories of theurgic practice and work them out in Hermetic contexts to see if we can find equivalents or justifications. Hopefully this will present us with some points to compare and contrast with Iamblichus’ view of theurgy and aid in elucidating both systems. To begin, I want to focus on what, I suppose, we can dub as Hermetic Ethics.

From the current philosophical and spiritual Hermetica that we have, what kind of ethical system can be gleaned? What was considered “good behaviour” to a Hermetist? What is the Hermetica’s solution to the problem of evil? What was the theoretical and moral system in which their practice was grounded and worked out, and what was the framework that gave motivation and encouragement to practice Virtue?

I’m not so concerned with specific ethics or behaviours, more the ethical framework that provided the justification. and motivation to practice Virtue.

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Eusebeia & Virtues in the Corpus Hermeticum

Plenty is often written about the Corpus Hermeticum, and there is certainly some implied ethical behaviour in there, most centrally the Virtue of Eusebeia, which -as far as I can see, seems to be the Cardinal Hermetic Virtue. Eusebeia in a Hermetic context is essentially reverence for the divine. Although, I will admit, I find Hanegraaff’s argument12 that it is perhaps better understood as a feeling of childlike astonishment at the Form of Beauty & God’s Presence very convincing.

Quoting Anna Van den Kerchove’s fascinating thesis, La Voie d’Hermes13, Hanegraaff points out that the Hermetica never stop praising the astonishing beauty of creation14, while at the same time lamenting the irreverence (asebeia) of those who seem to have lost their sense of wonder and admiration. Notably, Van den Kerchove’s insights are pivotal here:

I am reminded in her discussion of Socratic Eros as the driving force behind the soul’s ascent in dialogues like the Phaedrus, Phaedo & Symposium. Philosophia for Socrates is perhaps even better characterised as Erosophia, a desire for knowledge and perception of the Forms driven by passionate love, not simply friendship (philia). Eros can help the soul remember the Form of Beauty in its purest ideal because we are driven to pursue or court it like a lover. It follows from this that, for Plato, Eros directly contributes to an understanding of truth; something that lies at the very foundation of Platonic Love.

Back with eusebeia though, the Greek root σεβ from which eusebeia comes, denotes a sense of awe at sacred things, and during the Classical Period, the word denoted actions appropriate to the gods. Originally it seems to have meant behaving as tradition dictates in one's social relationships and divine matters. We demonstrate eusebeia to the gods by performing the customary acts of respect; things like festivals, prayers, sacrifices and public devotions.

An interesting parallel is Theoria. The term originally denoted an act of pilgrimage to a temple or sacred site with the intention to view the sacred cult objects of the deity15. Under Plato’s spiritualisation of the term, the “sacred objects” or idols of viewing and contemplation became the Forms themselves. However, the original context still subtly remains. Theoria as a kind of contemplative “journey” to the “cult objects” of the Forms is -in my view, still to be considered part of the “right conduct” paid to sacred things espoused by traditional eusebeia.

In a Platonic context, it simply denotes the “right” conduct paid to gods, and to the Stoics, it meant knowledge of how God should be worshiped. The “act of respect” and “right conduct” for the Hermetic Pēgē then, is simply admiration, love and awe at its creation, which takes on a central and cardinal position in Hermetic Spirituality as the highest Virtue.

It is also interesting to note that Eusebeia was personified in myth as a daimon herself, one who ruled over piety, loyalty, duty and filial respect in opposition to Dyssebeia, the daimon who ruled the opposite16.

Hanegraaff is correct -I think, in asserting that eusebeia is characterised as an attitude of profound respect or awe that can be captured along an ascending scale of intensity by terms in English like “reverence”, “admiration” and “veneration”, which are all modalities of love. We are dealing not with fear of the divine, but with a spontaneous positive response to things that participate in the Form of Beauty.

For the Hermetica, such things are assumed a triadic conception. That is, it is taken for granted that what is Beautiful exists in a trinity of what is Good and True. This transcendent triad of The Good, the Beautiful and the True and their essential unity is assumed essentially as a given in CH VIII.3 and XI. 13. As a nuance though, Hanegraaff poignantly asserts that17:

While this reality is held to be both Good and True, it is experienced as Beauty. For those who were previously confused or blind, their initial response to such experiences is captured most clearly by the verb θαυμαζειν, referring to noetic experiences of astonishment and wonder.

This view makes sense when we understand the semiotics and intended reception of the Hermetica.

If we examine the relationship between Hermes & Tat (or Asclepius), it’s abundantly clear there is an idealistic tone the dialogues. That is, with the Corpus Hermeticum, we’re not necessarily dealing with a Hermetic Paideia as it worked in practice, but the idealised form of its teaching. Both Christian Bull & Wouter Hanegraaff have lent discussions to the portrayal of Hermes as the Model Teacher and Asclepius as the Model Student. We have to therefore be aware of numerous filters and lenses placed over the texts. Not only are we dealing with the Byzantine filter in terms of editorial decisions, but also an idealistic one on the part of the authors.

While Hermetic dialogues are undoubtedly modelled off the Platonic style, we are not dealing with rational interlocution or philosophical arguments here. Hermes as the teacher is presenting Revelatory Knowledge, especially that gleaned through Gnosis -personal, transcendent insight of the Source, and Asclepius willingly submits and reveres such wisdom, oftentimes without question. The occasions in which the student questions the Master are few and far between. The Hermetica therefore have much more in common with Revelatory Discourse than they do with Philosophical18.

This is part of the reason that honestly…philosophically speaking the Hermetica aren’t really that interesting or unique. In a weird way, I actually find myself agreeing with Father Festugière. If read as philosophy, the Hermetica certainly pale in comparison to Plato and fall far short of other contemporary philosophical systems. But they aren’t meant to be philosophical in the Classical sense. They are revelatory dialogues with a soteriological aim that use philosophy (and spiritual exercises) as a medium to communicate their wisdom.

We do nevertheless glimpse an aspect of the model student here. Asclepius reveres Hermes as a divine sage presenting unchanging wisdom. His attitude is characterised as one of reverence, receptivity and acceptance, with gnosis as his highest desire and goal. The times in which he does question Hermes are merely requests for elaborations and expansion. Even in the Nag Hammadi collection, things like the Prayer of Thanksgiving espouse the gratitude for Mind, Understanding & Wisdom and ask -maybe even better characterised as wish, not to “stray from gnosis while in life”.

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Virtue & Ignorance in the Asclepius

Another series of key passages to examine come from the Logos Teleios, known under its Latin translation, the Asclepius. Ascl 11 is a fascinating insight into aspects of Virtue:

I’d also give attention to the next section in which our goal and purpose as embodied humans is outlined:

There’s a few things in here to pull out. Notably, in the first few lines we glimpse some descriptions of Virtues, namely eusebeia -as usual, but also Goodness and Disdain -said to fortify or improve our perception19 of Goodness. On the surface this seems odd, how can disdain be a Virtue, given it -on the surface, implies a dualist anti-matter view that seems antithetical to Hermetic Embodiment? Well, to me the Disdain which “repels every alien thing” -most importantly a sense of desire or yearning for material things, reads more like the sense of Non-Attatchment (nekkhamma) we read about in Buddhism.

We’re talking about a state in which a person overcomes their emotional attachment to or desire for things, people, or worldly concerns by emphasising the temporary nature of the physical body and the true nature of matter. In Zen Buddhism, the Chinese term wú niàn (無念) is often used for it and literally means "no thought." This doesn’t signify a literal absence of thought, but rather a state of being "unstained" bù rán 不染 by one’s thoughts. Detachment then, is being detached from our thoughts; separating ourself from our own thoughts and opinions in detail so we are not harmed mentally and emotionally by them. In this sense it is more or less identical to the Stoic apatheia, i.e equanimity.

It’s no small thing that Yearning is specifically identified as a Vice here too. But notice the role of Humanity here. We are granted embodiment:

To serve the lower or earthly world; and with those four faculties of Thought, Consciousness, Memory and Foresight by means of which he knows all things divine and looks up to them

The ideal Hermetic practitioner should aim to ‘give birth in beauty’ and contribute to the maintenance and beautification of the world to make it better reflect God’s Image, which we are capable of perceiving -or at least, contemplating, through our mental faculties provided the negative constraints of matter and the sub lunary astral forces are overcome. Notably, we are told that:

One who attentively preserves and enriches [the world’s] beauty conjoins his own work with God’s will when, lending his body in daily work and care, he arranges the scene formed by God’s divine intention

So, we cannot be taken out of the world, since we are the ones responsible for bringing the Divine Light of the Gods into it. It’s difficult stuff, we are constantly slowed down in our mission by the “heavy and excessive vice of the body”, which impedes our ability to perceive God’s will. A nuance could be argued here though. The body qua body does not slow us down per se… the Vice of the body does. It is the Harmful Passions of Yearning, Lust, Ignorance and Desire that are the problem, not the body itself, a conclusion Hanegraaff equally espouses.

There’s a natural tendency to assume Christian ethics when we think of morality, especially with notions of sin. But there is no sin in Hermetica, just as there is no hell or, really, Divine Fall.

The Astral Passions, False Images & Non-Dualism

The other seemingly obvious sections in what we can assume comments on Virtues or Vices are the numerous references to Passions throughout the corpus, most notably in CH XIII. As a monist panentheistic system, everything in and out of Existence is contained within the One variably as within its essence or as present in its Incorporeal Imagination (cf. the Aiōn of CH XI).

Other online Hermetic commentators have already noted the distinction between Moral & Philosophical Evils, so I refer my readers to them for that. Needless to say, the Good, Beautiful & True are within God alone, and philosophical corruption lies with the realm of Generation that the SH describes as shadowy appearances, phantoms of falsehoods, masking the “true reality”. Our perception of change, corruption or distinction are merely that, perceptions. They are a product of warped human awareness and alterations of consciousness, not a reflection of things as they truly are.

I’m reminded here of the excellent discussion on Evil in theurgic Neoplatonism by Jeffrey Kupperman (2013), which I will paraphrase here20.

For someone like Iamblichus, who views not only the Good & Demiurge, but all the gods, daimons, angels and other members of the Greater Kinds as wholly and unchangingly Good, wanting Good and making Good, where can evil even fit into this schema?

Plotinus is clear in his admonishment of matter as being Evil. He does however admit that it’s impossible for evil to have self-existence in the formal sense of the world, because the Good is not only the source of everything it emanates but also that which is beyond it. For Plotinus, “evil” is simply an accident of language, not any real description. Evil’s nature is simply the opposite of existence, that is, non-being.21

In typical Iamblichean fashion, we should nuance things a bit and differentiate between something that is participating in evil and that which is the source of evil. For Plotinus, this source is the Absolute Evil, and opposite of the Good. Despite his defence of the Demiurge of the Timaeus as Good, Plotinus views matter as inherently evil, containing no true Form, being lifeless, lacking any part of the Good and is nothing but a hinderance to the proper functioning of the soul.

As Kupperman notes, while Plotinus is relying on the descent narratives of the Phaedo and Phaedrus for this view (which both present the soul’s embodiment negatively), he seemingly ignores the role of the Demiurge in the Timaeus as a fashioner of matter with the intention to make all things Good22

Late Platonist Metaphysics relies on models of emanation. Each level of reality is ontologically “less” than its former in the sense that it has less Being. For the later Platonists like Iamblichus, Proclus & Dionysius, matter (and embodiment) cannot be absolutely evil since -on account of Tim 36, it must participate in the Good through the agency of the Demiurge. Our physical world is still at the respective “bottom” of the Chain of Being though, and while the immaterials are present constantly to the materials, matter’s capacity to hold the influences of the Good is significantly reduced in comparison to everything preceding it.

I’ve written a previous post on the nature of matter already, so I won’t go into the specifics here, but the ethical overtones of this around the nature of Evil would undoubtedly been known to the authors of the Hermetica.

On account of the immaterials being present to the materials, matter and the world cannot be Plotinus’ Absolute Evil, but that doesn't necessarily make it all Good either, even if it does participate in the Good in some capacity. Matter, the Body and Existence isn’t evil qua evil but it is nevertheless a hinderance to the ascent of the soul, as the Good & unchanging beauty can only exist in God alone.

To elucidate this, I again turn back to Kupperman. Iamblichus uses Aristotle’s hyle to refer to material “stuff”, as it were. The cosmos and matter are creations, and therefore under the direction of the Demiurge(s), meaning that all of reality is penetrated by its logoi (reasoned-principles), which give form to things by communicating the Platonic Forms to them23. As I mentioned in the last article, these Logoi of the Demiurge “in-form” the Pre Existent matter and direct it to take shape, and therefore cannot be separate from it.

In this sense, matter acts as an accretion and substance (cf. substantiality & materiality in my prior post) to noetic suthenmata/symbola sewn throughout the cosmos. It is the effects of this matter-accreation that can be harmful and produce harm if self-identified with over the reasoned-principles themselves. Matter forms a kind of shell around the Pneumatic Ochema, especially for humans and sub-lunary daimons (usually conceptualised via planetary qualities). But again, strictly speaking, matter is a neutral consequence of embodiment. It is not evil, but the effects it has on certain noetic principles and beings can cause what we consider evil things.

This is not because matter “corrupts” generation, or that Vice is inherent in the embodied world, but because the accretion of hyle around something’s Ochema makes it harder for the emanatory power (and thus, the Good) of the prior ontological realities to penetrate it. This makes it naturally difficult for such things to participate in the Good, which -again, is the source of all Being. Unable to truly see through the accretions or false images causes such afflicted beings to deviate from their essence, and it is this going astray that produced what we call “evil” or “corruption”24.

This view is echoed by Proclus in his commentary On the Existence of Evil, where he described it as a parasite, having no real existence of its own. For him, on account of the mixed Good and mixed Evil, even things we perceive as wholly “evil” are in fact -at worst, mixtures of Good and Evil because the Good itself IS pure Being, and therefore the source of all things own Being.

Evil for Proclus is a misalignment of the proper reasoned ordering of something’s system. This is vital to understand as it implies that only certain kinds of beings are capable of evil or vice. Pure Intelligables or gods for example, are perfectly ordered above the Divine Intellect and so are incapable of it. Only pluralised parts can participate in evil, which occurs when the balance of soul is disrupted and not lead by Wisdom or Reason.

As a consequence, evil is not found inherently in any part of the soul, as that would give it self-existence. It is only to be found in the relationships between parts. That is, it only exists in the processes connecting things when such processes fail or misalign in some way. “Curing” evil then, is a process of restoring the proper relationships between ontological levels. Bodies are subordinate to Nature, Souls are subordinate to Intellect, and Intellect is subordinate to God.

A further nuance is outlined by Dionysius in his The Divine Names.25 In a discussion on the nature of evil daimons, he questions the very nature of evil itself. Iamblichus originally argued that some daimons, especially ones that intercede more frequently or closer to matter can become evil, even though they aren’t originally. In the same way, our soul, while not evil, can incline towards the physical/generative world where evil occurs, and begin to self-identify with it, thereby causing evil itself. Note that the generative world is not strictly evil, only the domain in which it has the potential to occur.

Evil can’t come from the Good, because it would then participate in the Good and not be truly evil. In the same way, evil can’t inherently exist in beings, because all Being derives from the ultimate Being itself, which is the Good. We know this by virtue of the fact that things exist at all, existence being derived from the principle of Being. The consequences of this are major. If something exists, it participates in Being, and if the Good and Being are synonymous (or in the very least coexistent and dependant), then by existing, something equally must come from the Good, and the Good cannot create evil.

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It is impossible to be completely cut off from the Good, because to be so would also cut something off from Being, meaning it has Non-Existence, and therefore didn’t exist (at least in a capacity we can actually experience). For Dionysius evil is impermanent and only an appearance (parahypostasis) because only the Good is eternal26. Humans can certainly engage in evil things, but does that make them inherently evil? At any given time we may lack some element of the Good or Virtue, but evil as itself does not exist.

Evil is simply a lacking of the Good (Beautiful-True). To whatever extent something fails to participate in the Good, that process can be called evil. Thus, anything capable of not participating or receiving the Good has the potential for evil. Even things we perceive as completely evil though, still desire existence and being as a foundation, and therefore -albeit unknowingly, desire the Good.

One of the great many things I like about Dionysius is his differentiation of this lacking in relation to the evils of particulars, which helps transition us into the notion of moral or behavioural evils. For him, different categories of being can participate or tend toward producing evil in different ways. Notably27,

For spirits -such as daimons, evil is:

What is contrary for the good-like Mind

For humans, evil is being or acting:

Contrary to reason

For bodies, evil is:

Being contrary to nature

All of this in mind, it helps us understand what is meant by the enigmatic passage in CH II.14-15:

The idea here is that because God is the Good, the Good only exists AS God, and cannot be applied to anything independent of it, not that the rest of the universe is necessarily evil per se, except as mentioned above wherein certain particulars are limited in their ability to receive and contain the Good. Later on this is made explicit in CH II.16:

When it comes to Hermetic Moral Evils, we have a fairly standardised moral list outlined by Poimandres in CH I 22-23 that gives us an insight into what was considered good and bad behaviour for Hermetists:

So, blessedness, goodness, purity, mercy, reverence and an attitude of detachment from senses on account of “seeing their effects” are all listed here as behaviours befitting a devotee. Interestingly, we see here one of the consequences of engaging in vice/poor behaviour:

I will refuse entry to the evil and shameful effects, cutting off the anxieties that come from them

Poor behaviour and vice is its own punishment, as it produces symptoms of anxiety, which cuts us from seeing and experiencing the beauty that is God present in the world. In the same way, thoughtlessness, evil (to be conceptualised as an absence of virtue or the Good in our daily actions), envy, greed, violence, irreverence, lawlessness and an insatiable appetite are all characterised as behaviours which keep the Divine distant from us.

We then also have the interesting list of “Tormentors” and corresponding Divine Powers outlined in CH XIII:

On the surface, these look like a good moral framework for a practicing Hermetist, but i’ve mentioned elsewhere in classes the danger of taking this list as any kind of canon. They also aren’t technically Moral Virtues, although they could theoretically serve as a framework to aspire to in terms of one’s actions. They are Divine Powers that constitute the Reborn Body free from the Passions.

While the Doctrine of Passions was central to Hermetica, it is not in itself a Hermetic concept, being attributed in origin more to the Stoics and was largely ubiquitous in philosophical circles in Late Antiquity.

Zosimos in his Final Quittance28 seemingly alludes to this treatise, but interestingly lists slightly different harmful emotions as Passions or vices that stand in the way of calling the Divine Powers into you:

Some of these are familiar to those we see in CH XIII; mainly Sorrow and Anger. Desire could be argued to be equivalent to Lust, but not conclusively. He lists the first four Passions as separate to the “Twelve Fatalities of Death”. Are we to assume he includes them in that list, implying there are 8 further ones? Or are the prior 4 considered separate to another (different) list of 12?

In such a case, while the essential Doctrine of Passions may be shared among Hermetic practitioners, which Passions or Harmful Emotions were considered obstacles or vices may very well differ between communities or lineages.

Regardless of specifics though, what was the overarching framework that lay behind why one should practice Virtue in Hermetica?

On the one hand, we can turn back to Ascl. 11 for a fairly succinct justification:

This is a fine justification, but I’m still not satisfied with it as a framework or model of ethics. To understand more of that, I turn to the Korē Kosmou, preserved by Johannes Stobaeus .

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Ethical Frameworks & Schemas in the Korē Kosmou

Stobaeus is incredibly important in my opinion, as he shows no signs of Christian identity, and was explicitly only interested in non-Christian writers29. As a necessary aside for a moment, I must say this is one of the major areas where my opinion diverges from Wouter Hanegraaff’s in a big way.

In his recent Hermetic Spirituality book (which I adore, and consider absolutely necessary reading if one is interested in Hermetica) he attempted a reconstruction of a “Hermetic Spirituality”, in which he groups various treatises -accounting for Christian interpolation, by their “weirdness” and how far they correspond to his notion of

What the Hermetic path was really about

Which most commonly is presented as a path of spiritual exercises, philosophical contemplation and ritual practices designed to heal the soul and free the body from the Harmful Passions to enable us to “give birth in beauty” and achieve Gnosis of the Pēgē30.

He clearly advocates that the “centre” of Hermetism in Late Antiquity is thought to be this Hermetic Spirituality, which was concerned with:

A supra-rational gnosis that can be accessed only by an enigmatic faculty called Nous31

Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with this. I actually think he’s spot on when it comes to things like the Passions, Spiritual Exercises & the role of the Imagination and Altered States of Consciousness. Where I take issue is his exclusion of certain Hermetic texts on the grounds that they have:

Little or no relevance to Hermetic Spirituality32

The main collection he argues were “central” in his view are CH I, XIII & NHC VI. But he excludes CH III (itself perhaps better characterised as proto-hermetic) and XVIII on the grounds that “only the title is Hermetic” for the former, and “[CH XVIII] is a piece of rhetorical praise of God and Kings, without any clear connection to the Hermetica”33. Given Reitzenstein’s findings34 that the “kings” in question in CH XVIII are the Augusti, Diocletian and Maximian and their Caesars, Galerius and Constantius, he is perhaps more justified in the latter. Although I’d question the notion that discussions and praise of Royal Souls and Kings have “no clear connection to Hermetica” given the Doctrine of Royal Souls’ centrality in the Korē Kosmou.

But this is the much bigger issue for me. Hanegraaff equally excludes SH 23-27 as part of the [Spiritual] Hermetic Corpus on the grounds that:

They are sharply different from the rest of our treatises in terms of their alleged authors, contents, worldview and literary style. Hermes does not appear either as a teacher or as a pupil, instead, we read conversations between Isis and Horus in which the All Knowing Hermes is presented as a Divine Ancestor. The mythological narrative describes God as an anthropomorphic, and authoritarian Craftsman who punishes souls he has created for transgressing his commands. The great beauty of the higher world does not inspire love and admiration but fear; and when the souls are disobedient, they are punished for their sins by imprisonment in the “dishonourable and lowly tents” or “shells” of material bodies. Throughout, the emphasis is on God’s despotic power and his creatures’ fear of him. I see all of this as incompatible with what we find in the rest of our corpus. I assume that these Isis-Horus treatises represent a separate tradition.

I completely agree with Hanegraaff’s assessment that the Korē Kosmou constitutes a different tradition and intellectual climate, and it almost feels to me that it potentially came from a different -perhaps rival, Hermetic community to the one that composed the Corpus Hermeticum. Notably, one that represents as offshoot of the classical Hermetic lineage (from Hermes to Asclepius/Tat) and sought to emphasise the teachings that were passed to Isis via Agathodaimon and elucidated by Hermes35.

But I struggle with the notion that the text (and in turn, the community/climate that composed it) is any less Hermetic.

The Korē Kosmou clearly contains native Egyptian elements, I’d even argue more explicitly than our Corpus Hermeticum in its preservation of two Egyptian creation accounts. It is known to have been composed from several different sources to form an episodic format, given that it contains internal tensions.

Hermes does indeed appear as a central character in the narrative, not only occupying a central role as the creator of human bodies, but God also identifies him as the “soul of my soul, Nous of Nous” who gathers all the planets together in council36. Hermes is equally the originator of the entire dialogue that Isis is giving to her son Horus. We see the characteristic Hermetic Lore myth of Hermes inscribing his wisdom on secret stele in Egypt that are later found and used for instruction in the present text37:

Later on this is made even more explicit in SH 23. 67-8:

I also disagree with the notion of a damnation style punishment for the souls, and that the presentation of God in the Korē Kosmou is as a “despot” or authoritarian figure. God is depicted more as a loving father who isn’t afraid to teach his children hard lessons if it means they will come to appreciate Beauty & understand their role in creation. I think it’s important to point out that souls initially stray from their stations out of curiosity and “daring” -itself reminiscent of Plotinus, not really any kind of sin or direct disobedience.

Souls are embodied as a “punishment” for straying from their Astrological Stations, yes, but it’s really more of a chastisement designed to train and improve our soul, not any kind of eternal damnation. The point is not to degrade into nothing or for a sadistic God to separate us from himself, but to give us a chance to improve our essential quality through humility and experience. Improvement in this context means learning to fulfil our original function as overseers of the stars and become whole.

A general reading of SH 23.25-30 makes it clear the point of embodiment is to make the cosmos an object of admiration for souls, not just something we are part of the machinery of.

It’s in this essential section that, I feel, we find a much deeper elucidation of a Theory of Hermetic Ethics.

On the Purity & Quality of Souls: A Summary of the Korē Kosmou

Now, it’s worth recounting a brief summary and context of what the Korē Kosmou contains for my readers who haven’t read it yet. A large amount of the theme in this collection focuses on Transmigration.

The account of the creation of souls in SH 23 is absolutely fascinating. God makes Soul (likely identified here with the World Soul) by mixing his own breath with the purest type of fire and other “unknown elements”. He does so in a mixing bowl, pronouncing “sacred and secret formulas” over a bubbling mixture, stirring everything together vigorously like an alchemist until it bubbles/foams, which Father Festugière noted bears a resemblance to the process of refining philosophical Mercury38.

It’s these secret formulas (perhaps to be interpreted as nomine magicae) that unite the soul’s composite elements together and imbues them with light and imperishability.

This soul-material (not yet distinguished into individual souls) is called Psychosis39. This Soul-Substance is split off into 6040 different grades of purity, implying souls can be of different qualities, even before incarnation, although Hermes is quick to point out that41:

Still, the Craftsman legislated that all souls be eternal, since they were from the same substance which he alone knew how to perfect

So, despite the grading system, all souls are of the same material, differing only in quality or grade, which is malleable and within our own remit to perfect. Souls are then given stations to control the stars. This is important, as in their origin, astral bodies are inferior to the human soul since they also contain earthly and watery elements, whereas our soul is pure divine fire and breath (pneuma).

Souls are charged with creating animals, for which they follow the Forms of the Zodiac, created by God using a diluted form of the Psychosis/World Soul. Souls are eventually “punished” for being disorderly and idle in their stations. There is also an added suggestion that our souls are naturally curious and desire to pry into God’s creation before they are at a sufficient quality or receptivity to actually understand it.

The chastisement for this act is embodiment, conceptualised not necessarily as a Fall, but as being surrounded by denser, coarser and sluggish elements. Interestingly, Hermes is the one who makes the human body from a diluted and degraded form of the Psychosis. I want to restate that, because it’s vitally important.

Our body is made out of the same substance our soul is.

The only difference is that our soul is a higher grade of purity & isn’t watered down. I actually mean this literally. When making our bodies, Hermes attempts to use the same Psychosis mixture, but finds it has dried up, so he adds copious amounts of water to make it malleable again42:

Transmigration in this dialogue is seen as a method of training our souls, and the generated Cosmos is essentially one giant boot camp for learning virtue and preparing our soul. In theory, if we learn the lessons in a single lifetime, we won’t need embodiment again, but most people will require multiple trials. Again, there is no hell here, embodiment is simply an opportunity to improve the quality and grade of our soul.

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Souls who need more intense training (i.e tyrants, murderers etc) pass into animals and have rougher, shorter and more brutal lives. Interestingly, the pejorative tone present in Ascl. 12 that speaks of a “vile migration” isn’t present here. Even if it were, the “vileness” can still be implied in comparison to a human incarnation, even if it isn’t permanent.

Souls who have learnt their lessons and practiced virtue go into purer bodies, ones more endowed with Reason, which also translates to higher occupations during earthly life; things like Kings, Philosophers and excellent Musicians. In fact, we get a rare look at some professions that are esteemed in a Hermetic author’s eyes in SH 23.4243:

The goal is eventually for our soul to return to a body with such a degree of purity and subtlety that it can retake its place among the stars and fulfil its original position, commanding and directing the planets & machinery of Fate -in theory, with all of the knowledge and experience it has amassed over lifetimes to mediate such Fate justly44:

When souls are initially embodied, they go berserk and shriek because they’re not used to it45. To tame the souls, Fate (which is the combination of Decanic & Astral Energies) is introduced to control the human body. Notably though, Fate can only control the Body (and the Passions) since our original soul is of a higher grade of purity and therefore above its influence.

This cosmology and anthropology matches Iamblichus’ discussion of “the Egyptian account of souls” in DM 8.6:

Isis & Osiris then come into the world in ancient times (and are conceptualised as souls not in need of embodiment, but are sent to educate and civilise, directly from God) and its from their religious and spiritual teaching -based on that of Hermes, that all religions and cults are formed and the “way that leads above” is rediscovered.

Soul in this Hermetic tractate is composed of divine breath. It is a distinct entity and a unique energy in the Cosmos46. We are Good and our “good” is held within us because we are literally the breath of God. We are here, in bodies, training to take back our original function of controlling the Cosmos and being higher than the stars, consequently attaining a body that is not subject to the passions, death, disease, fear etc.

The implications are that all living beings have souls (incl animals)47, and that souls can be transferred from body to body. All creatures then deserve respect on account of their souls, and this grounds our ethics towards animals48. Souls are also neither male nor female (although described with feminine pronouns before embodiment), gendered definition being a generated quality, and the kind of life energy that humans have is the same in all animals.

The practice of virtue is essentially rewarded with grades of freedom from heavy, mortal elements, conceptualised as changes in the grades of our soul mixture. Virtuous humans eventually return to their Stellar Bodies, by exiting the gross elements and constructing a body out of their Purer Materia49, likely implied to be Aether or the highest Air.

Horus then gets interested in the idea of Royal Souls, that is to say, the souls of kings & rulers. This is where things get interesting.

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The Doctrine of Royal Souls

Here, we’re looking clearly at a justification for an Egyptian Kingship system. Isis tells us that each realm of reality has a ruler:

Heaven (Nous) is ruled by God and populated with Noetic Beings

Aether (the purest form of air) is ruled by the Sun & populated by the Visible (Encosmic) Gods

Air is ruled by the Moon & is populated by daimons and the vast majority of souls

Earth is ruled by a King & is populated by embodied humans

The king here is assumed to have a higher, purer soul, more closely associated with God, and perhaps Heroic Daimons, originally coming from the highest level of the Air (just below the Aether). The King is therefore the lowest of gods and highest of humans, and bridges, ontologically, and overlaps these two domains. This doctrine of the lowest of one ontological category overlapping with/being identical to the highest of the one below it is equally attested by Iamblichus in many of his known works.

Noble people, or those who excel in their profession or art also appear to have higher grades of souls, derived from ontologically higher realms in this Chain, because there are many grades of soul that live in corresponding grades of Air outlined in SH 25 11. The Air and Sublunary divisions also appear to have been considered the domain of human souls after death while in a kind of intermediary state, awaiting transmigration, reminiscent of the restless dead often called on in magical papyri.

Souls after death go to one of these 60 levels of the Air depending on the quality of their Psychosis -that is, soul mixture, not mental state, and virtue. Quite simply, the higher you go, the purer the Air becomes, which equally has an effect on the quality and perception of the soul, almost as a correspondence. In theory, the higher through the grades you move, the more of your noetic perception you have access to. Therefore, this can be seen as the classic Hermetic trope that alterations of state or quality coincide with alterations of consciousness and perception.

This idea that air quality affects intelligence or perception is equally found among the Stoics, for instance, in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods 2.3–164:

The modern environmental/climate crisis overtones of this aren’t lost on me…it brings a whole new consequence to pollution in cities.

The purest, most translucent air at the height of this system is Aether, while the lower, denser air is closer to the Earth. Most souls abide in the median Air, within the Sublunary Zones after death, in the same location as aerial daimons. Interestingly, both are ruled over by the Moon in SH 24. 1, and from some quick correspondence research outside of the SH, looking at the PGM for example, it’s really not a leap to suppose Hekate mediates and rules this group.

Our world system is ultimately a meritocracy in this cosmology. Our soul’s quality, although initially predetermined before incarnation is also determined and affected by our practice and profession in life. In a nutshell, the more that we do what we’re supposed to do while embodied, the purer the quality of our soul becomes, increasing its receptivity to and perception of the divine. 

To help mediate the right souls being in the right bodies and under the right rulerships, we are told there is a kind of middle management system of celestial rulers, notably Memory & Experience in SH 26.4, who ensure that souls are matched up with the right kind of bodies to fit their quality, receptivity to the divine, and presumably, who’s life trajectory will contain the lessons required for further improvement.

As an aside, this does remind me of the discussion that Hermes' has with God in SH 23.28 just before the creation of human bodies and the whole embodiment process begins. While discussing the imparting of qualities to the body (and, theoretically, the Pneumatic Vehicle alongside it), we have a really interesting list of “Gifts from the Planets”. Importantly, these gifts are largely positive in stark contrast to the sheaths that are shed upon ascent in CH I.

Hermes -here acting as Mercury, we are told50:

Christian Bull notes a pivotal point in reference to this section51:

To me, this reads almost as an archetypal, aspirational framework. Hermes as the Divine Model of the Philosopher-Sage presents the initiate born under his rulership (and thereby endowed with his qualities) with the Form to aspire to. In theory, each Encosmic (Planetary) Deity does this, and the Planetary Intelligence/Deity itself perhaps serves as a model patron, who’s behaviour one should seek to emulate as far as they are able while in the body.

In other words, the ruler(s) of our Natal, alongside our Personal Daimons provide a key insight into our purpose in life and the means by which we acquire our Perfect Nature.

Coupled with the idea in the Asclepius that the point of our embodiment is to give birth in Beauty and align our little portion of the world with the Ideal Form and God’s Will, that is, to contribute to the creation of Beautiful (Good & True) things within our remit of influence, perhaps our Natal and Planetary Rulerships gives us an insight into what that is, and the deity(s) who rule over us provide us with a framework to aspire to -in terms of behaviours, ethics, mannerisms etc, in order to fulfil it and achieve higher transmigrations.

Hermes himself is presented sometimes as a human, sometimes as divine, and sometimes in between. But here, his role becomes clear. He was a human who attained apotheosis based on the principles of Mercury -those of the Philosopher-Sage, and now occupies that Formal Reality himself as the planet Mercury, serving as a semiotic figure and archetype for the model ethical behaviour of the philosopher -one born under Mercurial influence. And presumably, the other planetary gods are the same.

Such an idea is perhaps supported by SH 26.9:

We must also remember that transmigration also includes animal bodies. We’re not sure if all animals were human souls, or only specific ones, but clearly a lot of them are.

So what are we to make of all this?

All human occupations fit into a natural hierarchy depending on the quality of soul incarnating. Certain professions or occupations are clearly more important to the hermetic author, which are filled with purer souls. Each occupation has a ruler, usually a planet or deity who is always available to aid those who come under their remit in terms of soul and profession.

The substance of our soul doesn’t change, but its quality is modified by various elemental vapours that surround it like a sheathe, as well as our behaviour and the practice of virtue.

Egypto-Centrism: On the Purest Air & the Temple of the World

Something that I think is missed often is that this text is very ethnocentric. Egypt is coded as the centre of the world, which to a Graeco Egyptian author, makes sense because on their maps Egypt is in the centre. Sacredness is coded in its centrality, almost as a kind of World Axis or central pillar. Egypt has the most temperate climate, which produces the most receptive intelligence.

The earth is conceptualised in SH 24.11 as an upside down woman, lying on her back, whose heart is resting over the location of Egypt:

This is consistent with native Egyptian theological understanding of Geb, the earth god as being supine, gazing up at the Sky (Nut).

Egypt as a country is placed on the heart of the World-Human. According to Egyptian tradition the heart was the centre of intelligence and soul, not the brain, which is the reason Egypt is the temple of the whole world. The country literally occupies the space of the heart in the bodily proportion of the World-Human.

Conclusions

So what are we to make of all of this in terms of an ethical framework in Hermetic literature?

The schema on display in the Korē Kosmou is one of ethically and virtue dependent transmigration. It’s essentially a kind of Hermetic Karma.

Our behaviour, actions and -to some extent, profession (in the sense of how we contribute to the world), during life directly affects the grade and quality of the substance of our soul. By engaging with virtues and avoiding vices, we gradually improve the quality of our soul -alongside intellectual cultivation and ritual practice, which secures -or even perhaps creates, finer and purer Pneumatic & Luminous Ochema that we inhabit upon a new incarnation, until we eventually develop one that resides back in its original, pre-embodied state, which is above the Decans and Stars so that we can fulfil our purpose of admiring the universe and maintaining it as a direct child of God and, if the Corpus Hermeticum is anything by, a sibling of the Demiurgic Intellect.

Important to remember is that the actual substance of our soul doesn’t change here, but its quality is modified through our actions.

Every soul is created equal and Hermes is clear in his assertion that every soul is a Royal Soul. So this also isn’t as classist/elitist as it may first appear. Everyone’s destiny is as a Royal Soul by virtue of the fact that we are all created from the World Soul/Psychosis. The differentiation of souls by quality serves a purpose, whether it be to rule and direct, create or whatever else. We all progress through different bodies depending on what specific lessons we have to learn to attain a higher position in that cosmic hierarchy at any given moment.

It is the practice of Virtues like eusebeia, goodness, reason, self control, and mercy that helps secure a new kind of Reborn body, free from Vices like ignorance, grief, selfishness, greed, envy and other harmful emotions. However, this generative Cosmos is precisely the training room in which we learn to overcome the Passions and secure that virtue, and we will incarnate into different bodies until we learn. Importantly, this is not to be considered a kind of Samsara or Prison, we are not stuck here, by any force other than our own unwillingness to learn or appreciate the Beauty of the world & God.

As guides on which to model our behaviour and actions, the gods exist in a state of unchanging goodness, virtue and generosity, and are always available to assist those born under their remit to become, well….themselves.

Future Questions & Directions

I will say, on a practical level, the 60 Zones of the World Soul are pretty underutilised in modern occultism as a cosmological framework, so I’d really like to see more people engaging with the Korē Kosmou as a practical text. The discussion of souls sharing the same space as aerial daimons and being ruled by the Moon has obvious links to lunar and necromantic rites in the PGM associated with Hekate, and She equally holds the position of Power and membrane of the World Soul in the Chaldean Oracles. Further work with her would yield interesting results, i’m sure.

The schema of Planetary “Gifts” outlined in SH 23.29 is unique in Hermetic cosmology for showing a positive side to planetary physiology and the qualities imparted to our Subtle Vehicle. Combined with the hexameter poem On Fate, in SH 29 we have a much fuller map here of planetary qualities to work with other than those negative ones listed in CH I. Further experimentation with corresponding suthenmata in this framework would be necessary, but I think, fruitful.

Similarly, Dillon defined theurgy, in his understanding, as the premise that:

The physical world has in fact been sown by the gods with a great variety of symbola, or ‘clues’, which, if put together correctly and respectfully, can draw down the power of gods or daemons and achieve many practical advantages

He went on to point out that such a view of Nature as being divinely orchestrated & sown by a generative Monad necessitates an increased respect for the way our world is put together. He implied that the theurgic view of Matter should stand as the basis for a modern ‘ecological’ approach to our environment, which, he argues, would equate to a modern form of theurgy, and act as a potential antidote to our climate crisis.

I’d also add, I think, that theurgic philosophy would be equally soothing to the Meaning Crisis as defined by John Vervaeke2.

I’m cautious about going as far as to equate environmental respect with theurgy in its totality, but I definitely do sympathise with Dillon that the theurgic attitude to Matter -and I would add, embodiment in general, is in deep contrast to previous generations of Neoplatonists, and by implication, the Christian tradition that took so much from them, which of course, ultimately culminated with the modern scientific mindset of Nature as simply an inanimate, mechanistic model existing to be exploited or somehow “overcome.”

If anything, the Euro-American founding myth predicates itself on our “progression” as a species away from nature. Primitive Barbarianism is associated with the “wild”, which is inherently perceived as untamed, uncivilised & somehow un-human. Our achievements as a species -at least, in the Post-Enlightenment West, are measured against our capacity to tame nature and somehow transcend above or otherwise master and dominate it3. This founding belief is the very raison d’être behind our focus on technological advancement & our tendency to associate such a thing with Progressivism.

I find similar sentiments being echoed by Gregory Shaw throughout his recent Hellenic Tantra (my read of the year by the way), albeit with respect to our modern attitude towards education and the academic curriculum -which I should point out, was equally one of Iamblichus’ primary concerns4:

Given the seemingly radical departure that Iamblichus has in his view of Matter then, it is somewhat surprising to me that Adrien Lecerf claims “Iamblichus’ notion of Nature displays little originality when compared to that of other Neoplatonists” in his entry for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.5

Nevertheless, I am grateful to Lecerf & Chiaradonna for highlighting the measure of continuity between Iamblichus & previous generations of thinkers. It seems to be common today to assume Iamblichus’ association with Hermetic ideas is somehow to the detriment or diminishing of his Neoplatonic background, and that he fully embraces Matter without question. This would be a gross oversimplification of his system.

The Nuance of Iamblichus On Matter

As Lecerf points out, Matter in Iamblichus’ philosophical system acts as a productive power for cosmic beings, originating in the celestial gods.6 It nevertheless still operates without Logos. His position is therefore ambiguous. Depending on the context of discussion, Matter can be a positive entity when governed by Providence and inseminated with Reason, but it can equally become deceitful and a hinderance. Although, it’s worth pointing out according to the testimonies of Simplicius7, Iamblichus attributed no real existence to Evil, considering it only a kind of parhypostasis -that is, an accident or pseudo-resemblance; an incidental by-product which falls outside the intention of the originating agent.

Like astrology, Nature -properly speaking, only has power over Corporeality, i.e bodies. One of the things the Stobaen Hermetica makes clear is that Fate only has power over bodies & the generative soul. The divine soul, our Noetic Essence, is constituted of a substance regarded as a higher degree of purity than the stars and is therefore beyond the reach of such influence. Iamblichus -to an extent, echoes this. His fullest surviving discussion on Fate occurs in his Letter to Macedonius on Fate, but he equally references it in De Mysteriis.8

As Dillon points out, while he affords a more conservative and limited view to the powers of the soul than Plotinus & Porphyry, Iamblichus grants Fate power only over the second soul -which Dillon identifies as the Ochema, and acknowledges that the Pure Soul can free itself from such influences through the practice of theurgy.

His position on the notion of dual souls is also reminiscent of Hermetic literature9. I find one of his most succinct theories of soul outlined in DM 8.6:

Matter for Iamblichus can display both a positive expression & a negative, harmful one. There is certainly no shortage of sections in De Mysteriis in which Iamblichus is cautious of Matter. For instance, DM 6.4:

One of the sections that nuances things to the extreme though is a discussion that takes place in DM 5.12, in which Iamblichus regards material fire as necessary in sacrifices to “purify and free them from the bonds of matter, and render them suitable, through the purification of their nature for consorting with gods”:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I am drawn especially to the notion of the “immaterial elements” present but “imprisoned” in Matter. He’s clearly inheriting the anti-matter views of previous Platonists such as Numenius & Plutarch here and considers Matter -at least in the conventional sense as we experience it, a kind of prison for the Noetic (?) essence inside.

As noted by Lecerf & Chiaradonna though, interpreting his view of Matter in a Monistic (and therefore positive) sense is still relatively possible given evidence from his Platonic Commentaries & various testimonies, in which he almost seems to contradict -or perhaps, nuance, his view.

One of the more notable examples is a fragment preserved by John Lydus, seemingly from Iamblichus’ enormous -but now largely lost, Chaldean Theology. For context, John himself appears to echo an Iamblichean (and, it must be said, reflexive Egyptian) view:

John begins De Mensibus 175.1 by explaining:

The linguistic wordplay on Hades & Matter here seems to be that the Greek term Hades, Aidēs, derives from the same etymological root as the term formless, aneidos. John then introduces a fragment from Iamblichus to back up his point, claiming that “The Chaldean names Matter as “Father--Originated in the Oracles.” According to Iamblichus then10:

My gentle but keen-eyed reader will undoubtedly notice some parallels to the cosmology outlined in the Poimandres (CH. I) here. It may be worth however, to tangentially discuss the emanation and procession of influence in Iamblichus’ view.

To do so, I refer to Fr.8 of his Commentary on the Alcibiades & Dillon’s accompanying notes.

We’re essentially looking at a difference of opinion regarding the nature of Procession here, and how exactly the various hypostases mediate their influence throughout the Cosmos. Proclus expounds his view in his own commentary, but treats it more fully in proposition 57 of his Elements of Theology.

As Dillon notes11:

The Context on the Debate of Matter

Now, for context, the primary debate around Matter among Late Antique Platonists regards its generation. Specifically, as we’ve seen, there was disagreement whether Matter should considered generated or ungenerated. It can be considered generated in that it is caused by a superior Fist Principle either outside of or within time. It was considered ungenerated either because it had no beginning in time, but was nevertheless generated in relation to a Cause, or because it didn’t have a Cause.

Iamblichus is clear in his choice. Matter is generated in the sense that it’s caused by a Superior First Principle existing outside of Time, and this principle is identical to his Absolute First Cause. It’s worth noting that he comes to this conclusion based on primarily Platonic, Hermetic & Chaldean material.

The question arises, as Taormina (2016)12 has formulated, around the specific role of Hermetic materials and exactly where Iamblichus refers to his views on Matter. It’s unclear -as we’ve seen, whether he expounds his doctrine exclusively in De Mysteriis, or whether he mentions it in his lost commentary on the Timaeus, quoted later by Proclus,13 or elsewhere. Whether he is in fact the author of De Mysteriis aside, the majority of our knowledge regarding Iamblichus’ views on Matter come from fragments of his commentaries or snippets of quotes by later philosophers.

One of the fragments preserved by Proclus in his own commentary on the Timaeus reads as follows14:

Both Dillon & Taormina note that Proclus is likely drawing on Iamblichus’ own commentary on the Timaeus for this rather than De Mysteriis, but that linguistic similarities & the tendency of Iamblichus to repeat or quote himself in his other works, strengthens the proposition that De Mysteriis was in fact written by him.

Notably, this section in Proclus is almost parallel to what Iamblichus tells us in DM 8.3, in response to Porphyry on the same question of whether Matter is ungenerated or generated:

Comparing & Contrasting Views

For Proclus, it seems the Origin of Matter is as a product of the highest intelligible. We are told it15:

This “Unlimited prior to the One Being” must -I think, be understood as the First Unlimited, placed at the height of the Intelligible Realm. Proclus draws on three sources for supporting this idea, Plato in the Timaeus & Philebus, Orpheus & Hermes (via iamblichus). He tells us:

Matter therefore receives Being from these principles.

According to Iamblichus, Materiality is derived “starting from Substantiality” . Proclus’ position is that Materiality is equally derived from Substantiality and therefore, to an extent, we can equate Matter and Materiality. From this perspective, Substantiality is only the point from which Materiality comes, and the latter is presented as a simple derivation from Substantiality.

On The Hermetic Notion of Matter

It is now to the Hermetica that I turn to further elucidate some of Iamblichus’ views, and ultimately get to the core of this post, which is to try and discover & reconstruct -however loosely, a Hermetic view on Matter.

Of the Hermetica, ones that specifically discuss Matter are: SH 9, FH 45 C (Nicholas of Cusa), SH 23. 14-15, CH 8.2, CH XI. 22.16 My thoughts on each now follow. I would like to greatly acknowledge Daniela Taormina here, who graciously sent me a copy of her wonderful paper on the topic of Iamblichus’ fragments regarding Matter in Proclus.

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De Mysteriis does not explicitly recall Egyptian tradition in its discussion of Matter, but the context shows it’s completely immersed in it.  Porphyry’s question is on the ontology of the Egyptians, and Iamblichus starts responding by relying not on generic Egyptian “tradition”, but by specifically recalling Hermes as his authority.  The structure of his argument moves from the generation of Matter among the Intelligible, towards the formation of corruptible bodies via the demiurge receiving, in transmission, the Prima Materia and using it to model the incorruptible spheres of the planets.

Hermetic ideas are clearly at play here, especially in the linguistic form of υλοτης και ουσιοτης (Materiality and Substantiality), which only tend to appear in specifically Gnostic and Hermetic literature. Oυσιοτης does show up minutely in Albinus17 as an epithet of the First God, and it seems the Gnostics were using the term υλοτης during Plotinus’ time as he references it in connection with them in Enn.II, 9.1018, specifically to call attention to the fact that they often use multiple names for concepts, thereby “darkening” their doctrine.

The Corpus Hermeticum however, has a far more detailed account of Matter that incorporates these terms, which, combined with Iamblichus & Proclus’ identification of them as “Egyptian” & Hermetic beliefs leads me to believe they are more distinctly of that current.

CH 8.3 reads:

A perhaps more substantial parallel, especially to De Mysteriis, can be seen from CH. XII 22-23:

This reads remarkably similar to what we see in Ascl 14-1519:

Importantly, note that Hylē is co-existent with God here, presumably as a pre-principle in it’s non-existent form.

Litwa notes two Fragments of Hermes that support this view, which ultimately traces its origin back to the conception of Nature as an Empty Spirit, ready and willing to receive and nurture the Forms as described in the Timaeus. First is a reference by Nicholas of Cusa20:

Hermes said that Matter was the nurse of bodies and formlessness the nurse of souls

The second is a fragment recorded by Hermann of Carinthia21 which he attributes to “Hermes the Persian”:

Form is the adornment of Matter, whereas Matter is the necessity of Form

A fuller, and -in my opinion, far more succinct explanation and treatment of the Pre-Existent Matter is found in SH 922:

The core concept being communicated here -as with Iamblichus, is about the origin and nature of matter prior to the world-creating actions of the demiurge. From what we can see, Matter depends on the action (read: energeia/energy) of God and finds its pre-principle in the principles of Substantiality and Materiality.

How can Matter both exist and pre-exist though? And are these types of Matter the same? Well, no. Our definition of “existence” is a bit skewed in the modern world. We tend to equate existence with something’s absolute reality, so it’s impossible to conceive of something as “existing outside of existence”. But as demonstrated by Socrates in the Republic23, there are degrees to reality and existence.

For Late Antique Hermetists, “existence” or “becoming”, properly situated, referred only the generated cosmos. That is, the Cosmos up to the realm of Fixed Stars, which were considered the zenith of the Existential Model. In light of this, the Ogdoad, Ennead & Pēgē are “outside” of “existence” because they are unformed, even pre-formal and beyond any notion of time or space. They nevertheless “exist” in the sense of having reality, but they are of a more absolute & noetic reality and cannot be said to “exist” in the sense other things do.

So when a Hermetist says something has “come into Being”, they are implying it has been actualised from a First Principle into the sphere of the Fixed Stars or below and therefore has come into generative existence.

In the exegesis of SH 9, Hermes adopts a “both/and” approach to the generative question. In its unformed, pre-existential state, Matter is eternal & divine, it is in fact, nothing less than “the sphere of activity for the Unborn and Preexistent Being, namely God” but when it “receives the seed of Becoming”, Matter “comes into Being” (i.e is actualised in a physical form and enters the generated cosmos). Alluding to Plato’s Timaeus24 & perhaps also CH I, it is the Female Demiurge -which Litwa notes is perhaps synonymous with Nature herself, who forms Matter according to the Platonic Ideas.

It is the pre-existent, unformed Matter combined with and constructed according to the Platonic Forms that actualises into our physical matter as it enters the sphere of existence. Litwa draws attention to the double entendre in the language here. Non-Existence (perhaps better understood in our modern setting as Unmanifest), is characterised not only by an absence of Being, but also Formlessness. Therefore, when Matter receives the Forms, it can be said to be “born” and come into being.

Some Reflections of Terminology Between Iamblichus & Proclus

Substantiality is probably identified with Iamblichus’ notion of Intelligible Being as distinct from its principle, which he already used the idea of when presenting Hermes’ hierarchy of principles, which he placed at the third rank after the One and the Monad which proceeds from it. For instance, in DM 8.2:

From Him (ie the self sufficient God/Principle of himself = the Monad that proceeds from the One) in fact Substantiality and Essence proceed

The process of emanation has God playing the role of the subject in DM. Note the “He” who “derived Mater from Substantiality” and this derivation occurs through the separation of Substantiality and Materiality; a separation which is described metaphorically with the verb υποσχιζω (hyposchizō), meaning “to split or divide [from] under”.

This verb usually has a sense of losing cohesion of a whole through a process of tearing away a part that constitutes it (note the similarity to suthenmata/symbola, described as ‘paternal tokens’ in the Oracles that together make up a collective whole), and it seems it’s being used here to account for a kind of internal cutting away, that deprives the Substantiality of a Materiality that underlies it.

What causes this tear, and therefore the detachment of Materiality from Substantiality isn’t actually made explicit by Iamblichus, but I’m inclined to refer back to the Hermetica in thinking it is the energeia of God.

It’s here that we see some marked differences in Proclus & Iamblichus’ views on Matter.

For Proclus, it seems possible to say that Materiality is equivalent to Matter itself, since -for him, investigating the generation of Matter means clarifying the way in which Materiality comes from Substantiality, while for Iamblichus, Substantiality is the Principle (or perhaps, Form) of Matter but not Materiality since the Materiality clearly needs to be torn from the Substantiality in order for Matter to be produced.

Proclus presupposes that Substantiality pre-exists Materiality, while for Iamblichus, Materiality coexists with Substantiality and Matter is produced at a later time.

In Proclus, the Substantiality is the point from which the Materiality comes, but there is no mention a productive cause. Iamblichus instead explicitly mentions the productive cause is “the God”, who does not cause the detachment of Materiality from Substantiality but generates Matter from Substantiality, once a certain Materiality has been separated from it.

Asclepiades & Heraiscus

While their position as Hermetists is not officially substantiated, the Late 5th century Egyptian Neoplatonist family from Panopolis that included Horapollo, Heraiscus & Asclepiades is equally relevant here. They are all mentioned together in the same three primary sources. The first is Damascius’ Life of Isidorus, which was composed in the early 6th century, and offers information about the family’s role as a pagan religious figures.

The second is the Life of Severus, preserved in Syriac and written by Zachariah of Mitylene, which seems to suggest all three of them were part of a group of 6 Neoplatonists connected with an outbreak of religious violence near Alexandria in 485 AD, and finally, there is a papyrus letter composed in Greek by Horapollon himself which was found at Kom Ishqaw, which confirms that Asclepiades was Horapollon’s father, and Heraiscus was his uncle (and therefore, Asclepiades’ brother).

Asclepiades & Heraiscus appear to have been Egyptian priests serving at the local temple in Alexandria as well as a Neoplatonists who were teaching out of the Mousion there. According to Damascius' commentary On First Principles25 both Asclepiades and his brother were native Egyptians who used Egyptian mythology as a medium for philosophical speculation on First Principles in the same way as Iamblichus.

Damascius claims that they found “truths” hidden in Egyptian myths, especially the tradition that “Unknown Darkness” was the beginning of all creation.

Heraiscus seems to have composed an exegetical tract and sent it to Proclus, in which he claimed that he disagreed with his brother about the nature of Nous & the Intelligible Cosmos; a fact that Damascius uses humorously to comment on the fact that even Egyptian Philosophers disagreed and squabbled.

We are nevertheless told by Damascius that:

[Heraiscus] revived the ancestral rites not just in Egypt, but also abroad wherever any such customs might have survived, and put all his efforts in the collection of information on the secret worship of the gods

Supposedly by simple observation, while approaching a statue, he could sense whether it was divinely animated through telestike, and if it were, he would experience a “leaping sensation and ecstasy in his soul as if possessed by a god”, something which prompts Christian Bull26 to remark that:

It is at least possible that such a person could have been an inheritor of the Hermetic tradition, especially since it is implied that he had undergone a Rebirth rendering him divine

The Hermopolitan Ogdoad

All this discussion of Unformed or Pre-Existent Matter along with Unknown or Continuous Darkness as the abode of God signals inspiration from one Egyptian Mythical Tradition in particular, the Hermopolitan; the City of Thoth-Hermes.

The Hermopolian Creation Myth is unique among Egyptian narratives in its focuse on the nature of substance rather than other creative principles like we see in the Heliopolitan Ennead.

The principal stages in the cosmogony involving the Ogdoad (the eight primordial gods of the Primeval Waters) are typical of all Egyptian cosmogonies; we see the appearance of solidity amidst a watery abyss, largely in the form of a primeval mound of earth, followed by the coming forth of light.

The deities of the Ogdoad, uniquely, are the agents of cosmogenesis. We meet with the eight personifications of preexistent Chaos in whose midst the sun-god is emerging from the mud on a lotus-flower or from the primordial egg. These deities are:

Nun and Nunet, “Abyss”

Heh and Hehet, “Unlimitedness”

Kek and Keket, “Darkness”

Amun and Amunet, “Hiddenness”

In later periods, Tenem and Tenemet, “Nowhereness” were substituted for Amun and Amunet, the latter being increasingly distinguished from the rest of the Ogdoad with the rise of Theban & Ramisside theology. The Primeval Waters were considered part of the creation process, so the deities representing them are seen as creator gods. In fact, the Ogdoad were divided into the male and female groups above and depicted as aquatic creatures because they swam within the water: the males were represented as frogs, and the females were represented as snakes.

These two groups eventually merged, pushing the Waters together which resulted in a great upheaval, which produced the pyramidal mound. From it emerged the sun, which rose into the sky to light the world. Since the Ogdoad pre-exist the first tangible event in the cosmos (the advent of light) they can theoretically be seen within the generated cosmos as being “deceased” and, interestingly, they did in fact have a necropolis cult at Medinet Habu along with Kematef -Iamblichean Kmeph.

This idea that the Ogdoad were in some way ‘deceased’ on account of their Pre-Existence highlights their incorporation into the framework of the generated cosmos as passive or inert elements, something which sounds familiar to me to the Hermetic conception of Formed Matter.

So where does that leave us with regard to the Hermetic conception of Matter?

Conclusions

The Hermetists are clearly drawing from Aristotelian ideas regarding the Forms as final causes in Matter that somehow bring the pre-formal hylē into existence. Nevertheless, the core staples appear to be:

• Matter -in its Pre-Existential state, is co-existing with God, and is in fact the sphere of its activity, and therefore fully divine and eternal

• As a pre-principle, Matter exists prior to the Platonic Forms, which are inseminated into it. Matter/Nature therefore serves as the Womb of Generation -necessarily presupposing generative existence, and acting almost as a Midwife for the Forms’ maturation.

• Matter is derived primarily from the First Principles of Substantiality & Materiality

• Formed or Existing Matter, as we experience it, still nevertheless can be considered a prison for the immaterial noetic essence within it. But this need not necessitate a negative/dualistic view of Matter as long as nuance is applied. The Principle of Matter is pre-existing and divine. It is only once things come into the Realm of Becoming that they are subject to generation, decay and the Harmful Passions of Fate

• Matter as a corporeal body is brought under the same influence that our physical bodies are, that is, astrological (Fate). But Fate cannot affect the higher Prima Materia in the same way it cannot touch our Noetic Essence

• While not mentioned in this essay, the Kore Kosmou’s discussion of God with the Mixing Bowl27 creating the Substance of Soul (what Litwa translates as Animatrix) implies that souls and bodies are in fact made of the same substance. The only real difference is the degree of purity. When Hermes comes to create our bodies, he does so from a diluted version of the substance from the Mixing Bowl. There is therefore no real distinction between the body and soul except in degree. The core substance doesn’t change, only the quality is modified under generative or elemental conditions. I think a similar thing can be said of Matter.

If you’re interested in learning more about Hermetism as a lived practice & ritual tradition, I’m currently teaching a lecture series on it and would love to see you there.

Follow the Way of Hermes

The original idea among groups like the Illuminates of Thanateros & Caroll’s practitioners was that a focus on pure technique would enhance our understanding of older traditions rather than leaving them behind as some kind of relic that was incomprehensible to moderns. The hope was that with new insights into the subconscious -still a shaky concept even today, a continued streamlining of techniques, continually providing insight into the workable mechanics of ancient systems would take occultism forward and allow us to adapt older systems and make them more efficient.

We see this in Caroll especially, who -while advocating for the ability of a practitioner to adopt different worldviews and paradigms depending on utility, still advocated for completely immersing oneself in the techniques and causal reasonings of whatever tradition they were working with. Only once you had mastered the paradigm on its own terms could you then start streamlining and searching for utilities.

This is essentially the complete opposite of how I see modern Chaos Magicians approach things; looking at ancient systems and arbitrarily deciding which areas they think are important based on their own pre-understanding. There’s a tendency to dismiss older methods that are inherently more elaborate not because they don’t have utility but because people just don’t understand the rationale and unconsciously assume we have made “progress” since then and so they can simply discard it.

Psychogeography

One of the areas that I have taken quite a shine too in recent years however is that of Psychogeography (PG). Now I will say, this isn’t inherently a Chaos Magic practice, but I have seen it absorbed into the practice of some of the bigger names in that current. PG has its origins in -predominantly French, radicalism and artistic movements of the 1950s & 1960s who were heavily influenced by Marxist and Anarchist Theory, namely the Letterist and Situationist International movements.

PG is essentially a kind of landscape experience about the interconnectedness of nature. There is therefore a distinction between Urban PG and Wilderness PG, which grant entirely different spheres of insight. It is a process of exploration and situating oneself in your local landscape and interacting with it, or perhaps more poetically, it is a process of placing oneself into the land, not just on it. Guy Debord, the French Marxist theorist defined it as1:

In other words, Psychogeography is a practice of observation & mental de-centralisation in which you observe how you feel when you move through certain places; your sensations, emotions or reactions to your environment.

It is the relationship between Mind, or better, Soul, and space. The Greek ψυχε, psyche, is often translated as Mind in modern discourse, but originally denoted the idea of a soul. As Richard Seaford has pointed out2, what modern Neuroscientists tend to identify as mental activity would have come under the banner of the soul for Plato. To keep matters simple, I am essentially referring to the bounded inner “self” in which your perception takes place here.

Psyche denotes our internal reactions, responses and insights to things, our feelings and emotions. Psychogeography is therefore an exercise in somatic contemplation on how a relationship forms with the spaces in which we find ourselves, and our internal reactions to those spaces (i.e the impressions and images formed in our soul).

It doesn’t feel right to describe it as a topic or field. PG is a territory with a bunch of confluences and deviations to it. It is a Landscape of its own. As a practice and theory, it has influenced a huge amount of cultural actors and revolutionaries, including artists, activists and academics.

The first published discussion of Psychogeography was in the Lettrist journal Potlatch in 1954, which included a 'Psychogeographical Game of the Week':

Depending on what you are after, choose an area, a more or less populous city, a more or less lively street. Build a house. Furnish it. Make the most of its decoration and surroundings. Choose the season and the time. Gather together the right people, the best records and drinks. Lighting and conversation must, of course, be appropriate, along with the weather and your memories. If your calculations are correct, you should find the outcome satisfying. (Please inform the editors of the results).3

The subtle air of sarcasm never disappoints me in these French radicals, the humour even feels slightly French.

One of the great utilities I have found in PG is that it illuminates the trackways and subconscious assumptions that you have about the land you’re in. While we seldom think about it as a species, many of the trackways experienced by humans are utilitarian in nature. The majority of our interactions with the Land are rooted in pathways designed to engage work, food or survival.

In instances where religious or symbolic aspects of the Land are acknowledged, it’s common for people to invest them with an animistic sense of being, attaching deities, spirits or forces to prominent features and giving such forces locations. Temples, churches and prominent features of the landscapes such as mountains, rivers and hills are some of the most common investitures.

I remember talking to Dr Lyne Kelly about this process in the context of Aboriginal Australians4. She explained to me how, while not living in the biological sense that we understand it, landscape features can be alive with memory & cultural influence, in the sense that they can retain information almost like biological codices. When an Aboriginal Native is engaging a landscape walk across a region of the Outback, they are not simply walking on the ground and gazing at the nature around them.

Every step they take, every fissure they cross or tree they see holds a story that is alive with cultural memory, information and insight. They can even use this to radically improve memory function and remember details such as trackways and routes for thousands of miles. I remember Dr Kelly showing me a small wooden box that had been given to her with a variety of beads and shells drilled into it.

She explained that, while it looked like a simple decorative ornament on the outside, this small wooden box was in fact a codex that contained the names, colours, notated cries and nesting locations for birds within a few miles radius of her house, all encoded in tactile form that she could receive by running her fingers across the beads in various ways.

I bring this up because Pychogeography is making use of a similar part of the brain. A lot of the time, it is the journey itself that matters and provides us with revelation and insight into our own condition. It is the path we take through the space that moves us. In the hero’s journey, the hero only becomes the hero because they go through the stages of their journey, end up in the underworld and then return to the status quo. The MEANING they gain is not from the destinations they go to (although they play a part), it lies in the experience of journeying itself.

In occult contexts, PG invites us to consider the spaces we inhabit, both physically and mentally.

Dérive

One of the core practices to engage this mode of experience outlined by the Situationists was known as Dérive. Meaning “to drift” in French, dérive is a practice of quite literally drifting through a given space to explore how a landscape, usually a city, is constructed, as well as how it makes you feel internally. Debord defined it as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances”5

He actually gave an expanded definition in his Theory of Derive6, published a couple of years before this, explaining that:

As a practice, it is mostly about walking, as this is our primary mode of movement through a landscape. To engage the practice, we must change the orientation of the places we move to, or rather, our orientation to them. It is a way of encountering the mysterious, unexpected and spiritual dimensions of the world by taking note of your surroundings. Psychogeographical experience can happen in any location, even urban ones like supermarkets and towns, it is simply a matter of re-orientating our awareness of them.

Exercises & Insights

So with that. Here are some suggestions from my own explorations of PG for you to experiment with.

As a simple start, go for a walk in nature or a city and take time to explore the landscape with the intention to see it in a new way. Some of this is about finding ways of tricking and shocking your mind to deliberately induce a state of aporia. One of the early collaborations between Debord and Asger Jorn had them create The Naked City: A Psychogeographic Map of Paris in 1958, for which they cut apart a typical map of Paris and repositioned the pieces before following it (think along the lines of Spare’s cut up sigil method, but for a map of a city that you then follow).

The resulting map corresponded with parts of Paris that they -in theory, subconsciously considered ‘stimulating’ and “worthy of study and preservation.”

As an adjustment to that practice, I also heard that they ended up walking around Paris with a map of Berlin, following and looking for road names in a deliberate attempt to unlock esoteric meaning in the Parisian street layout.

Another modern technique I’ve often had fun with is taking a coin or dice with you when venturing into a city and using that random probability to decide where you will walk next, never letting yourself know your next step. This idea of walking through a landscape without any particular purpose or sense of time is very useful and I’ve found it enables entry into a liminal state of state of mind in which insights about your local area come more readily.

In the spirit of disrupting those utilitarian pathways I mentioned earlier, try going into a place when there is no utilitarian reason to go there. The point is to transition from Mundane Geography to Psycho, by which you get lost in this new complexity and richness of the landscape brought about by your own dissociation. While on this walk, you want to disrupt your bounded inner self by using different methods like random maps, changing your destination mid stride, and bringing your attention to the walk in different ways.

Some things to look out for while slipping into the Psychogeographic Land are things like Simulacra -things that look like other things, faces, patterns or abstract principles and the like. Make an effort to dwell on those things that we noticed as kids but ignore as adults. We want to create those novel connections and in doing so, trigger a sense of astonishment and wonder at the beauty of the world. Truly get lost in and give yourself to the Land.

If you’re walking through glassy urban areas with many windows (or even puddles and water sources!) notice the reflections -how do things reflect? How do such reflections distort the landscape and the image within them? What would it be like to step into that puddle and traverse the shimmering, ghostly image?

Notice the cracks and breaks, whether they be concrete cracks, edges, broken branches or scruffy patches of dirt; the details of the space that you disregard and the way they interpenetrate. One other adjustment to this that i’ve found interesting is to alter my movement pattern in line with cracks or fissures in the landscape. Spend some time avoiding stepping on cracks, follow the perpendicular lines you notice in the floors and buildings or zig zag through the landscape.

Notice the shadows and the way the light envelopes things…bends round corners & illuminates your environment. Understand the weather & what it does -to the land, the trees and the buildings. Observe how the Land is weathered.

As you walk, pay attention to changes in height -both your own and in the landscape. Feel the slopes of hills and dips, the gradients on pavements and the force of gravity as you step off curbs. Take time to alter you walking pattern. Deliberately step off with the other foot to confuse your subconscious programming. Walk on the balls of your feet and walk slowly -especially in a city, slowing down your speed, and you’ll find there’s a bunch of people who walk slower too and you’ll notice them more.

Engage Somatic Stimulation as you navigate the landscape like a hunter. Keep humming, singing or whistling -all of which relaxes the vagus nerve and triggers the rest and relaxation response. It’s no secret that our cognition is calmed by such sounds as vowel utterance. mantras, songs or chants.

Every once in a while, stop and look around and look back -periodically stop, take a breath, breathe out and look around ALL of your horizon line before continuing on. One of things that I persistently notice more as I do this is colours -particular single ones or groups. I often find myself looking across my horizon line and seeing the stone pavement, but take time to look at the different shades, perhaps influenced by interplay of the light and shadow.

Another fun one that I ended up talking to Julian Vayne about is the act “as if” method. This is where you walk around the landscape as if you’re doing something else. Go into an open space, close your eyes and centre yourself and visualise the British Museum (or any museum you’ve been to) and walk around it as if you were inside it. Now of course, you’re not materiality inside it, but as far as Pyschogeography is concerned, a part of you is. Walk through visualised landscapes overlayed onto physical ones, and use that imaginative faculty to gain insights into your physical space.

Taken to another level, try inhabiting a space as if you were lots of different things. Inhabit a space as if it were your last day on earth, as an alien etc. Notice how your psychic state influences your connection and perception of the land your physically in.

Sight & sound are our active senses, but touch and smell is equally important -PG is an opportunity to come into a deeper relationship with your space. So equally, make attempts to view the space through your other senses. Touch the space, engage your environment through all your senses and acknowledge it. Move your body as if you are like the object you’re sensing.

You can engage things like hand positions/mudras/touchstones for this-the Default Mode Network will often get back in the way at some point, so its important to have some kind of gesture or action that returns you to the subjective state. This can be a mudra or hand position.

One of the weirder ones i’ve found is the act of making shrines or in some other way integrating with the landscape. This can be a powerful way of integrating your connection with the land and can also include things like photography or artistry.

There’s an old Greek concept known as Omphalos. This was originally a religious stone artefact that designated the “centre” of a space of worship. According to myth, Zeus originally placed the Divine Omphalos at Delphi, considered by Greeks to be the centre of the world. In more personal contexts, the Omphalos as a centre of space also applies to the human body.

For the body, the Omphalos it is the belly button (the navel), or main Dantein in Taoist Medicine. It’s our physical centre as well as our energetic one. With this in mind, I’ve found it to be an interesting practice to identify the Omphalos of a place and mark or interact with it in some way.

In any given space or land, what -to you, speaks out as the living hearth or world axis around which everything is centred? What does that thing tell you about the place? How do you relate to it?

Once you have the Omphalos of a space, try making a Psychogeographic map of it. Maps stylise and simplify things. As an exercise, create a magical map of where you live. Think about the important places to you and what their symbolic meaning is and design a blueprint for you to follow your own Hero’s Journey. The core idea is to make your own landscape magical.

Final Thoughts

I often find myself thinking about communication as a concept and how it factors into things like this. This whole practice is essentially an act of communicating with yourself (or perhaps different aspects of your Self) in new ways, which many times begin as confusing and disorienting.

Take a moment and look around you, or think back to a time or place where you feel intimately connected. Where in this landscape/space for you embodies the abstraction of communication? Often, when in a city or urban area, it is communication masts/towers -i.e where all the data is being transferred and migrated or moved through.

So if you were to create a Psychogeographic ritual, it may be to take a pilgrimage/walk to such a place with the goal of eventually arriving at the closest Communications Tower and then reading a piece of poetry or doing something as an offering while in that environment to enhance or gain insight into your own communication.

In another vein, perhaps one could connect to the archetype of a healer. For me growing up in England, when I think of healing spiritually, I default to the Springs of Sulis at Bath. But in more modern day scenarios, we automatically assume things like hospital or doctors offices. As well as finding these qualities within ourselves, I encourage you to explore how you can journey to them in the landscape.

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As part of a consistent contemplative practice in lectio divina recently, I have been re-reading the Divine Iamblichus’ Response to Porphyry. I have never been very good at announcing or publicising my personal praxis, hence the longer time frame between posts on here while my group works on translation for the next few texts. Still, I tend to write when I’m inspired or come across something I feel is worth mentioning that I have either:

1) Integrated into my personal praxis and had experience with or 2) Have had verified from another experiential source that I trust

As many of you know, my personal praxis is a triadic mix of primarily Hermetic Theurgy -admittedly with a strong Iamblichan leaning, British Cunning Craft, predominantly 16th & 17th century & local deity veneration, which -for my area and ancestral background, is largely a mix of Insular & Alpine Celtic.

On the surface, these systems seem mutually exclusive, one being concerned with the intelligible cosmos, noetic reality & immaterial gods and another being intensely practical, client-oriented & mostly materialist. I don’t necessarily deny the contradiction, but in all honesty, the system works in practice. I can fairly justify Cunning Craft under the rubric of application of material suthenmata for gradual assimilation and familiarity to the Divine.

There are some initial concepts here that should be familiar to any Late Platonist or Theurgist, but i’ll cover them briefly for those who are not.

Theories on the Causation of Theurgic Sacrifice

In a discussion on the efficacy of sacrifice in DM Book 51, Iamblichus elaborates an earlier discussion on the encosmic gods and points out that:

Of notable importance here is Iamblichus’ frequent allusion to the Divine Administration, notably that there is not only a distinction between Material & Immaterial Gods, but that the kind of ritual and sacrifice accorded to each should suit the subject. Material Gods are more closely associated with Matter, and, as he elaborates later, more directly intercede in the Sublunary World, and so should be the object of material sacrifices. While Immaterial Gods, separate from matter, are more reserved for contemplative or immaterial activity on the part of the theurgist.

He continues2:

He makes a point of saying that even if they transcend matter in being and principle, the Material Gods are nevertheless “present to it”, even if by virtue of some immaterial power, they subsist as in combination with it. In typical bureaucratic language, he reminds us “administered entities are not alien to their administrators.”

His other major contribution to the theurgic theory of sacrifice is from earlier in Book 5 where he arguably refutes Theophrastus’ reasons for engaging in it3 namely: conferring honour, acknowledging graces, showing gratitude for divine gifts and the giving of first fruits or general Du ut Des. Iamblichus explicitly rejects these reasons for engaging in sacrifice on the grounds that they are motivations “borrowed from vulgar social relations” and “do not at all preserve the utter superiority of the gods and their status as transcendent causal principles.”4

Interestingly, Iamblichus also seems to reject the Stoics theory of cosmic sympathy as a cause of the efficacy of sacrifice: “For it is not in nature, nor in physical necessity, that the essence of the gods resides, so as to be roused up by natural influences or by powers which extend throughout the whole of nature, but it is defined in its own terms, external to these influences, having nothing in common with them either in essence or in potency or in any other respect”5

His subtle cause behind efficacy is revealed a little later and is in fact Divine Philia, i.e love and friendship of the Gods and their creations. As he explains6:

So, in a manner of speaking, choosing and engaging the right sacrifice is a way of offering a deity themselves, which is itself an expression of the divine friendship and love that binds the cosmos together. Naturally, their essence is immaterially present in all material things. In Classical Iambli fashion, we see that divine bureaucracy rearing its head again. Such relationships are numerous, he says, and the ones closer to us -the daemonic, have more immediate sources of influence. So each chain of sacrifice is headed up by its own lane, which the corresponding entity topology stays within.

There are also clearly differing degrees of sacrifice for him, as there are types of prayers and visions of deities. Notably, even imperfect sacrifice7 can still be successful, but it will only reach a certain level of the cosmic hierarchy and go no further.

On Indigenous & Ancestral Gods

Towards the end of Book 5, Iamblichus brings up a discussion that really captured me, and ultimately inspired the writing of this article. In 5.24.234-5.1-15, he points out another supplementary way of understanding what he’s talking about with the whole idea of Divine Friendship & material expressions preserving the ideas and intentions of their makers:

He then continues in the very next section, elaborating what -to me, provides an insight into his line of thinking at the Incident of the Spring at Gadara where he asked his students to inquire about the local gods:

This section, to me, is absolutely fascinating and has become instrumental in my own practice of theurgy. In line with Plato’s Parmenides and the idea of the One expressing itself through Plurality and yet remaining undivided, Iamblichus appears to take this literally and acknowledge the importance of engaging with the local/indigenous gods of any given land as a way of understanding the Divine Philia. Naturally, the background here is the typical Greek attribution of deities to ethnic groups (Athena ruling the Athenians for example), but Iambli seems to extend it to every clime and region of the earth.

In his hierarchy, it’s not entirely clear which God he is referring to here when he says “the initiator of all things” but given that the next sentence expounds a proliferation of lesser divinities attend it, I’m inclined to agree with Clarke & Dillion that its probably the Intellectual Demiurge.

Next, as part of that divine bureaucracy, he tells us that every region of the earth -and in fact, every holy place or temple, has its own deity(ites) assigned to it as a kind of Spiritual Supervisor who oversees the administration of sacrifices in that region. Not only that, but it seems every region has its own classes of Intelligibles, whether they be Angels (read Messengers), Daimons or Gods. Combining this with the previous section we can infer that the primary way in which a theurgist can connect with the gods of their own country or locale is to trace the sympathies of that region through their understanding of correspondences and various invocations and offer suthenmata that are from that land in itself. After all:

The products of those regions are the most suitable to bring to sacrifice

As Clarke & Dillon point out in their notes, Iamblichus seems to have taken this advice himself and actually begun a contribution to the topic in the form of commentaries on his native gods of Syria. Hypothetically in his lost treatise On the Gods, they note that Emperor Julian cites him as having discussed the precise identity (in Greek terms) of the gods Monimos and Azizos, whom he equates with Hermes and Ares respectively.

Monimos is of course the Hellenised form of the Aramaic Mun’im, a deity native to Iamblichus’ Syria and Northern Arabia, identified as the god of the Evening Star and equated with the Palmyrene deity Arsu. Ridgway (2001) notes that Arsu was equated with Mercury early on, and along with his twin brother Azizos was considered the patron and protector of trade caravans, which are inherently commercial and therefore mercurial. Azizos respectfully was the Morning Star.

Implications for Practice

So what does this mean? Iamblichus is pretty clear with respect to the offerings and suthenmata required for operating in your own locale, so I won’t address that. The important thing here is the effective justification to form relationships with the local and indigenous deities and spirits of your native land and community as a means of fostering our receptivity for the Gods and further understanding Divine Philia.

As I mentioned, we see this principle in action at the spring of Gadara where Iamblichus asks his students to find the names of two local daimons belonging to the spring in which they are bathing. I find it interesting that he goes to lengths to evoke a local spirit over an arguably more familiar Hellenic one for his students.

For me, living in Southern England surrounded by the Weald and South Downs, there is no shortage of old place names that give clues to indigenous Celtic deities, or sacred wells that were later overtaken by Christian Saints. To see Iamblichus not only justify but actively encourage the cultivation of a relationship with local deities is -to me, a sign of the inclusivity, natural diversity and advantage of a Soft Polytheist worldview.

Background & Introduction

I’m actively making my way further through Codex 33 in the appendix of Boll’s Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum VII, and by popular request, I thought i’d finish off the Hermetic botanical sections of Erlangensis 89. My previous post was on f. 175v, which included a Zodiacal Botanical on the herbs attributed to the various Zodiac signs, attributed to Hermes. According to Boll & the others, they originally appended the previous Zodiacal work to the one below, and reproduced:

“again the chapter on the plants attributed to the seven planets from codex E(rlangensis 89) in a better and more complete form, having prefaced it with an excerpt on the plants of the twelve signs, so that nothing in our burden of context would be entirely missing.” -p.231

I didn’t have a chance in my previous post to trace the manuscript providence properly, but having now translated the introductory sections & notes alongside the following text, some general background information can be discerned.

Erlangensis 89

Aside from supplementing comparative sections from Codex Neapolitanus (Naples) 19 and Vindobonensis (Vienna) 3, the primary manuscript they are drawing from is Erlangensis 89. The manuscript itself is cataloged in the Handschriftenkatalog der K. Universitäts-Bibliothek zu Erlangen by Irmischer (Frankfurt a. M., 1852), on page 16 here and is also mentioned in the Sitzungsberichte der Münchener Akademie in 1899 on page 107, but I couldn’t for the life of me find a digital copy, so I’ll take them at their word for it.

From what I can gather from their translation and some background research on the Universitäts-Bibliothek zu Erlangen digital archive, the manuscript is made of paper and contains around 283 folios (ff.). It appears to date to the 15th century (saec. XV) and shows clear signs of multiple ownership & handwriting by at least 5 different hands:

• folios 1-99 are written by the first hand

• folios 103-146 by a second hand

• folios 147-208 by a third hand (which Boll et al say is questionably identified. This is also the area our Hermetic sections come from)

• folios 209-264 by a fourth hand

• and folios 265-283 by a fifth hand

• Folios 17 and 100-102 are blank

Just before the first page there’s a scribal note apparently from the late 18th century (saec. XVIII exeuntis) which states that the manuscript was from the library of Ludwig Camerarius [1573-1651], a German statesman, lawyer, minister and head of Frederick V's government-in-exile in the Hague. He seemingly received the manuscript as a gift from the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, around 1620.

Another 19th-century (saec. XIX) note (echoed and expanded in the Sitzungsberichte from 1899) informs us that after the death of one Professor Reinhard at Erlangen (a professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and chief librarian) in 1779, the manuscript was acquired by the public library of Erlangen through purchase at an auction. I can’t find a trace of it after that, and the university doesn’t appear to have digitised the manuscript, so the trail is cold, unfortunately. If anyone can help and knows where I can find the original manuscript, please let me know!

Marginal annotations were made on folios 1-99 by the author himself according to Boll, and from folio 103 to the end of the manuscript by an unknown hand, possibly Ludwig Camerarius.

For simplicity, I include the transcription of the text on Planetary Herbs from the CCAG VII here. As with my previous translation standard, I’m using a few Greek dictionaries and lexicons to cross reference things, mainly LSJ (1940s) & Bailly (2020) on Eulexis-web, along with some Greek herbals, mainly Dioscorides’ De Medica Materia & Theophrastus’ Historia Planatarum. The
[ ]’s are my editions to make for easier readability.

I will say, there seems to be some interesting parallels with certain PGM stuff here, notably the attribution of asphodel to Saturn & the instruction to mix it with Storax, the incense of Kronos in PGM XIII. The herb for Mercury is described as “Hermes’ Finger”, similar to PGM III, and the closing instruction for picking herbs bears striking resemblance to PGM IV 2967-3006.

On the Herbs of the Seven Planets -Greek Text

[Symbol for Sun]: “Βότανον ‘Ηλίου πολύγονον. `έλαβε δε τέλος προσηγοριας εκ του τον ‘Ήλιον των πάντων είναι άρχηγετην και σπορέα. Τίνες δε χαμαιλέοντα λέγουσιν εκ του τον ουρανον και την γην τα μέρα λελαχέναι. Πινόμενος ουν ‘ο χυλός αυτής ετοιμότερον προς γόνον <παριστησι> και αφροδίσιων ποιητικός. Περιαφθεισα δε μετά του ηλιακού ονόματος πασαν οφθαλμιαν απαλλάσσει. Ει δε τις περιαπτηται, ουδέποτε οφθαλμιασει, επειδή τα φώτα ο ‘Ήλιος λέλαχεν. Διοπερ εάν αναφέρεται κακώς, επιληπτικούς, φρενητικους, ληθαργικούς καθιστησι. Συμβαίνει γαρ εκ της καρδιάς αυξεσθαι τα πάθη ταύτα. Ιαται δε και τους αμβλυώττοντας θαυμαστώς περιαπτομένη και τους εν καταρχαις πειραζομένους ταις αποχύσεσι.”

[Symbol for Venus]: “Βότανον Αφροδίτης περιστερεών. Ταύτας ή ρίζα περιαφθεισα ιαται ‘όσα εστι περί τον τραχήλον πάθη. Χοιράδας, παρωτίδας, φύματα τραχήλου, βουβώνας. Καταπλασσομέν, σταφυλήν και παρισθμια μαραίνει παραχρήμα. Συμπάσχει γαρ μάλιστα τούτοις τοις μέλεσινιάται δε και σύριγγας, κονδυλώματα τα [f.176] εις τοὺς τόπους τούτους γινόμενα. Θεραπεύει δε τας αιμορροΐδας ο χυλός αυτής μετά μέλιτος και νίτρου κλυζόμενος. Πινόμενος δε μετά μέλιτος συν ύδατι λεπτύνει τα περί τον πνεύμονα, ώστε εύπνοιαν παρέχει. Δοθεί γαρ ‘Αφροδίτη επεχειν τον του πνεύμονος τόπον, επειδή πρώτος ούτος εν ημίν φύεσθαι νομίζεται, η δε ‘Αφροδίτη αρχή γενέσεως έστιν. Όθεν και αφροδίσιους η βοτάνη αρμόζει, περισσοτέραν γαρ ηδονην ο χυλός αυτής παρέχει τοις συνουσιάζουσιν, εάν περιχριση προ της συνουσίας. Έπειτα προς τους αυτούς ερρωμένους εις το συνουσιάζειν φυλάττει. Και το μέγιστον, κύειν αναγκάζει περισφθείσα, εάν μηδέν έτερον μαρακειται. Αντιπάσχει γαρ. Έτι δε η ρίζα παρακείμενη εργαστηριω η οικία εργασίας και προσόδους και πραξιν παρέχει. Ευθετει δε και προς οδούς και καθαρίσεις επελαύνει και πάντα δαίμονα. Ευθετει δε η ρίζα περιαπτομενη τοις φοιτωσιν επά παιδιω και επιχαρεις και αβασκαντους ποιει.

[Symbol for Mercury]: “Βότανον ‘Ερμού πενταδάκτυλον, οι δε πενταπέταλον, οιδ δε ευπατόπιον, οι δε ανθρωπόχειρα, οι δε πεντάφυλλων, οι δε ψευδοσέλινον. Κουφοειδες λεπτον σπιθαμιαιον. Φύλλα εοικότα ηδυόσμω πέντε κύκλωθεν εσχισμένα, άνθος ωχπρόν. Φύεται δε εν ανύδροις τόποις. Και την ριζών έχει υπέρυθρον. Ιαται δε τα εν αρθροις γινόμενα πλήγματα και τα πυρώδη και εκ πληγών συνιστάμενα. Κοπτομένη και καταπλασσομενένη και τους της κοιλίας στρόφους παραχρήμα λύει. Ο χυλός αυτής πινόμενος μεθ’ ύδατος μέχρι κοχλιαρίων δύο άριστα αρμόζει πινόμενος προς τα εν φάρυγγι και γλώσση γινόμενα πάθη. Άπονους γαρ και υγιείς καθιστησιι. Παύει διακλυζομένη τοὺς των οδόντων πόνους και παν το εν τς στόματι πονηρον αποξαθαιρει και απαιρει και θεραπεύει. Ει δε τις προ του παθειν περιάψηται, άπειρος εσται τούτων. Ευθετει δε και η ρίζα περιαφθεισ μάλιστα εις επιτυχιάν λόγου και δημηγοριας όχλων και ρητορσι και γραμματικοις. Ευχερείς γαρ και ευομιλους η ευπιτεύκτους καθιστησι. Ευρεσιν γαρ λόγων παρέχει και έυημεριαν. Όσοι δε νύκτα φορήσουσι την βοτανην, ούκ εμπεσούνται τοίς κακώς αυτούς θέλουσι.”

[Symbol for Saturn]: “Βότανον Κρόνου ασφόδελος. Ταύτης ό χυλός και ή ρίζα αρμόζει καθ’ αυτήν και μετά στύρακος τοις τα γόνατα πάσχουσα. Και γαρ πόνον και κόπον ιαται. Διδοται και ο της ριζης χυλός εψηθεις ολίγον τοις τους νεφρούς αλγουσι. Αποκαθαιρει γαρ και υγιαίνει. Τους δε δαιμονιζομένους και καταβιβάζοντας υγιαίνει περιαπτομέν. Τοις μικροις παιδιοις οδοντοφυουσιν άπονος. Και προς τους νθκτερινους πόνους περιαπτομένη ευθετει”

[Symbol for Mars]: “Βότανον ‘Αρεως αρνόγλωσσον. Αυτής η ρίζα προς κεφαλήν εστι του κόσμου. Τα εν αιδοιοις κακοήθη και ρυπαρά έλκη ιαται, καθα και Σκορπιός υπάρχει οίκος <αυτω> ο ‘Άρης γαρ τούτο το μόριον επέχει. Το δε σπέρμα της βοτάνης καταπλασσόμενον <προς> τα σηπόμενα έλκη και δυσκατούλωτα τούτο το μέρος ιαται. Και προς κεφαλής πόνον αρμόζει περιαφθεισα, επειπερ οίκος ‘Άρεως ο Κριός, ό έστιν η κεφαλή του κόσμου. Ομοίως δε ευθετει εις δυσεντερικους αιμοπτοικους, αιμορροικους ο χυλός προσκλυζόμενος και πινόμενος, καθα ο Άρης του αίματος τόπον επέχει. Έστι δε τούτο εν ημιν πυρωδέστατον, και τον Άρη ου μόνον πορώδη αλλά και φθοροποιον ενόμιζόν τινες είναι.”

[Symbol for Jupiter]: “Βότανον Διός σακχαράνιον. Τούτου ή ρίζα ευθετει προς βουβώνας περιαφθεισα, αφλέγμαντον γαρ τον τοπον τηρεί. Ει δε τις προ του παθειν περιάψηται, ουδέποτε βουβώνος πειραθήσεται. Και επι ποδάηρας δε η ρίζα αυτής ευθετει. Αυτή κοπτομένη και καταπλασσομένη τας φλγμονάς και επιτάσεις αναστέλλει. Συμπάσχει γαρ μάλιστα τα μέρη, καθότι ο Αστήρ λελόγισται, του Τοξότου και των ‘Ιχθύων. Ταύτα γαρ τα ζώδια κεκλήρωται μηρούς και χείρας και πόδας. Οικείως ουν τοις τόποις αρμόζει. Ο δε χυλός αυτής πινόμενος μετά μελικράτου τοις το ήπαρ αλγουσιν ωφέλιμος δια την συμπάθειαν, επειπερ ο Ζεύς τον του ήπατος τόπον επέχει. ‘Οθεν και ο μύθος αυτόν ερωτικον έπλασαν, επεί από πολλών ήπατος λέγεται, το δε σπέρμα δια φλεβος εις τους γόνιμους τόπους εισέρχεται. Κακωθεις γαρ επι των γενέσεων κύτος ο αστηρ ηπατικούς και κρόκου τοις συνουσιαζειν βουλομένοις απμόζειν, επιζαριτους γαρ καθιστησι. Μοιχός δε παρακείμενης ταύτης ουποτε εμπεσειται”

[Symbol for the Moon]: “Βότανον Σελήνης κυνόσβατος. Αποκαθαιρει τους επι θώρακος και στομάχου και πλευρών, επεί η Σελήνη έλαχε τον Καρκινον, κύτος δε <τώ> θώρακι και ταις πλευραις επιτέτακται. Το δε της βοτάνης άνθος πινόμενον καθαιρεί σπληνικούς, ώστε δια κοιλιάς και ούρων κενοί. Ενεργές δε δοθεί προς σπλήνα, επειπερ ο Αστήρ τον του σπλήνος τόπον δοθεί έχειν. Εύθετος δε και προς οξυδρακιαν ή ρίζα της βοτανης περιαπτομένη. Τοις δε αμβλυωπουσιν ακριβώς βοηθεί και επιτετευγμένως, επεί τα φώτα των οφθαλμών ή Σελήνη μετά ‘Ηλίου λέλαχεν. Ευθετει δε και τοις τον στόμαχον κεκακωμένον εχουσιν. Έτι τε αρμόζει και ταις από κολών πειραζομέναις και στροφουμέναις”

Addendum: “‘Ιστέον ουν ότι ούτως αρμόζει αιρειν τας βοτανας κατα την ημέραν και ώραν του πλανήτου, εις όνομα δε του τοιούτους αστέρο, και παροπύσσειν την βοτάνην και κρατειν αυτήν και λέγειν περί της θεραπείας αυτής δουναο βοήθειαν, καθώς προεγράφη περί ενός εκάστου θέσεως. Και άλλα όσα λέγειν επιτυχώς και επιτευκτικώς. Έστω δε και ή Σελήνη πανσέληνος. Επαν δε ανασπαν μέλλης την βοτάνην, αντ’ αυτής βάλε εις την τοποθεσιών της ριζης αυτής κόκκον σίτου ή κριθής.”

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English Translation

[Symbol for the Sun]: “The plant of the Sun [is] polygonum1. It received its name because the Sun is the leader and sower of all things. Some call it chameleon2 because it has received parts from both the heaven and the earth. Therefore, when its juice is drunk, it more readily prepares [one] for conception <and acts as> an aphrodisiac. When anointed with the solar name3, it dispels all forms of eye disease4. And if one wears it as an amulet, they will never suffer from eye disease, since the Sun has received the lights. Therefore, if it is mentioned negatively5, it makes epileptics, frenetics, and lethargics. For it happens that these passions increase from the heart. It also wonderfully heals those who are dim-sighted when worn as an amulet and those suffering from oedema at the beginnings of their trials.”

[Symbol for Venus]: “The plant of Aphrodite [is] verbena6. It’s root, when anointed/smeared over7, heals all ailments around the neck; swollen glands, parotids, neck tumours [and] groin swellings. When applied as a poultice, it immediately withers swellings and parotid tumours. For it especially [suffers] with these parts and also heals fistulas, condylomas, occurring in these areas. Its juice, when used as an enema8 with honey and natron, cures haemorrhoids. When drunk with honey and water, it thins [fluids] around the lungs, providing easy breathing, for Aphrodite is believed to hold the place of the lungs; since this [organ] is thought to be the first to grow in us, and Aphrodite is the beginning of generation. The herb suits aphrodisiacs, for its juice provides more pleasure to those having intercourse, if anointed before intercourse. Then it preserves those [who are] strong in intercourse. And most importantly, when smeared, it forces conception, unless something else is withered, for it9 suffers in return. The root, when placed in a workshop/laboratory10 or a house of work11 provides income and transactions12. It is also suitable for roads and purifications, driving away all daimons13. The root, when worn by those going to school makes them joyful and sheltered from envy14.

[Symbol for Mercury]: “The herb of Hermes [is] called “five-fingered”15, but some call it “five petaled16”, others eupatorium17, others “man's hand”18, others “five-leaved”, others “false celery”19. [It is] lightweight, slender, a span in length. [Its] leaves resemble mint, five split around, with a pale flower. It grows in dry places and its roots have reddish [colour]. It heals wounds occurring in joints, fiery conditions, and those composed of wounds. Cut and applied as a poultice, it immediately relieves cramps of the belly. Its juice, when drunk with water -up to two spoonfuls20, best suits treating conditions occurring in the throat and tongue21. It makes them painless and healthy. When rinsed [in the mouth], it stops tooth pains and removes and takes away and heals all that is harmful in the mouth. If someone wraps [themselves] with it before suffering, they will [have no experience] in these pains. Subsequently, the root, when prepared, is well suited for success in speech and public speaking before crowds, for orators, and for grammarians22. For it makes [them] fluent and eloquent or easily understood. It provides the ability to find words and well-being23. Those who wear the herb at night will not fall into [the hands of] those who wish them ill.”

[Symbol for Saturn]: “The herb of Kronos [is] asphodel24. Its juice and root are suitable for treating the knees, both on their own and mixed with storax25. For it heals pain and fatigue. The juice of the root, slightly cooked, is given to those suffering from kidney pain. For it cleanses and heals26. It heals those possessed by daimons27 and those brought down, when worn as an amulet. It [alleviates] pain for small children teething. And for nocturnal pains, when worn as an amulet, it is suitable.”

[Symbol for Mars]: “The herb of Ares is lambs tongue28. Its root is considered the head of the cosmos. It heals malignant and filthy ulcers in the genitals29, just as Scorpio exists as a house <to it> for Ares governs this part30. The seed of the herb, when applied as a poultice to rotting ulcers and hard-to-heal parts31, heals them. And when prepared, it suits headaches, since the house of Ares32 is Aries, which is the head of the cosmos33. Similarly, it is suitable for those with dysentery, spitting blood, and hemorrhoids when the juice is used as a wash and drunk, as Ares holds the place of blood. This is the most fiery within us, and some believe Ares to be not only porous but also destructive.

[Symbol for Jupiter]: “The herb of Zeus is Henbane34. Its root, when prepared, is suitable for groin swellings, for it keeps the area un-inflamed. If someone wraps themselves with it before suffering, they will never be afflicted by a hernia. And for gout, this root is suitable. When cut and applied as a poultice, it relieves inflammations and tensions. It especially sympathises with the parts, as the Star has been considered, of Sagittarius and Pisces. For these zodiac signs are allotted thighs, hands, and feet. Thus, it fittingly suits these places. Its juice, when drunk with honey-water, benefits those suffering from liver pain due to the sympathy35, since Zeus holds the place of the liver. Hence, the myth has fashioned him as erotic, since from many [comes] the liver, and the seed enters through the vein into fertile places36. For the star, being adverse to the genesis of the liver and saffron, dispenses to those wishing to copulate, for it makes them more eager. But a man with this [herb] laid beside [him] will never fall into adultery.

[Symbol for the Moon]: “The herb of the Moon is evergreen rose37. It purifies those with chest, stomach, and rib [conditions], since the Moon was allotted Cancer, and the chest and ribs are assigned to it. Drinking the flower of the herb cleanses those with spleen [conditions], so that [they are] emptied through the belly and urine. [It is] given actively for the spleen, since the Star is given to have the place of the spleen. The root of the herb, when wrapped, is also suitable for acute inflammation. It precisely helps those with weak eyesight effectively, since the lights of the eyes, the Moon has taken with the Sun38. It is also suitable for those with a troubled stomach. It also fits those suffering from and spasming from colic.

It is therefore known that it is fitting to pick herbs according to the day and hour of the planet39, in the name of such a star, and to whisper to the herb and hold it and speak about its healing to seek aid, as was prescribed for each position40. And whatever else to say successfully and effectively. Let the Moon also be full. When you are about to uproot the herb, in [place] of it, place a grain of wheat or barley41 in the location of its root."

A copy can be found here on archive.org. Among some of the famous authors whose works are preserved in the catalogue are Appolonius, Thessalus & of course, Hermes Trismegistus. In fact, volume 7 contains quite a few of the so-called ‘Technical Hermetica’, especially the astrological divinatory texts like the Peri Seismon, Brontologion & a few others. While I am told Christian Bull is now currently working on a critical edition of many of the astrological Hermetica, I got to thinking that I would love to integrate a lot of them into my own practice, if only I had the time to sit down and translate them.

Thankfully, I’m having a slow month and have some free time to take a whack at it. Now I will say, while I did do Classics at A Level, which included a study of Greek and Latin (which I continued during my undergrad alongside Middle Egyptian), it has been a few years since I last got my Greek textbooks out. So I’m pretty rusty. Consider this almost like a provisional translation that I will rework and update as I re-learn Greek :) I hope it’s helpful.

The Background

A brief note on the manuscripts used. As far as I can, I’ve attempted to trace the original manuscript locations mentioned by citations in the text, predominantly in Latin, and cross reference them with the scan of the Greek in the Catalogue. This wasn’t easy, and the authors certainly didn’t make it so. As far as I can tell from the Latin, they’re drawing from multiple manuscripts, the first of which was sourced by Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Pitra in his Analecta Sacra et Profana, Volume 5.

This was followed by Aemidius Martini & Dominicus Bassi and Wilhelm Kroll, who appear to have worked from Codex Naples 19 & Vienna 3 respectively. Apparently, these earlier works didn’t do a very good job, so the current editors had to supplement the chapter about the plants attributed to the seven planets (in question) from Codex Erlangensis 89, in a better and more complete form. Eventually, in the first note to the text they explain that: “This chapter was published by Pitra in 'Analecta Sacra et Profana', Volume 2, page 991, from manuscripts Moscow 415 and Vindobonensis med.23”.

My Approach to the Text

As well as working from the Catalogue scans and manuscripts, to translate and make sense of the herbs in question I am drawing from a few core Ancient Greek & Latin Herbals, mainly Dioscorides’ De Medica Materia, Theophrastus’ Historia Planatarum, Philumenus’ De Venenatis Animalibus and a few others. Where relevant I have also consulted Plutarch & Pliny’s discussions on Natural History, Plants & Materia. I’m using a few Greek dictionaries and lexicons to cross reference things, mainly LSJ (1940s) & Bailly (2020) on Eulexis-web. The Perseus Digital Library of Classical Texts has also been immensely helpful, which you can access here.

I can’t be sure on a few of the translations of herbs, but have done my best to provide footnotes for possible explanations. Anyone who reads better Greek, please get in touch or leave a comment to correct me!

The Text (ff 175v, Erlangensis 89) Greek Version

‘Ερμου του Τρισμέγιστου περί βοτάνων των ιβ΄ζωδίων.

[Symbol for Aries] ἐλελίσφακον, [Symbol for Taurus] περιστερεών ορθή, [Symbol for Gemini] περιστερεών ΰπτιος, [Symbol for Cancer] σύμφυτον, [Symbol for Leo] κυκλάμινον, [Symbol for Virgo] καλαμίνθη, [Symbol for Libra] σκορπίουρον, [Symbol for Scorpio] `αρτεμισια, [Symbol for Sagittarius] `αναγαλλις πυρρα και κυανή, [Symbol for Capricorn] λάπαθον, [Symbol for Aquarius] δρακόντιον, [Symbol for Pisces] `αριστολοχια μακρα και στρογγύλη. Ταύτας γαρ τας βοτάνασ δεί συλλέγειν και χυλοποιείν ‘όταν ‘υπάρχη ‘ο ‘Ήλιος είς τον Κριόν. ‘αλλα δεί και είς ‘έν ‘έκαστον Ζώδιον του καθ’ ‘ενος βοτάνου <αυτου> ‘υπάρχοντος και της Σελήνης είς το τριγωνον του ‘Ηλιου ‘ή είς τον ‘ωπροσκόπον αυτου. ‘έστω δε και ‘η ‘ημέρα και ‘η ‘ώρα του οίκοδεσπότου του ζωδίου. και ούτως ίνα ευδοκιμήσης καθώς ‘ο διδάσκαλος λέγει, κατα την κοσμικην και φυσικην ‘αποτέλεσιν.

Notes to Text (in Latin)

1. Hoc capilulum edidit Pitra, Anal. sacra el prof.. V2. p. 991 ex codd. Mosquensi 415 et Vindobon. med. 23: repet. Riess, Nech. et Pet. fr p. 382.

2. ‘ορθή etiam Pitrae codd.

3. ύπτια Pitra.

4. αύαγαλις E.

5. άριστολοχιαι Ε

6. γάρ E δε Pitrae codd

7. Κριόν nominat auctor nam in hoc sirno Solis exaltalio: αι ουν βοτάναι τότε δυναμικωταται (Hermes apud Roetherum, I. c., p. 315); είς τον X se legisse contendit Pitra, qui scripsit είς τον δεκανόν

8. αυτου add. (αλλα δε και ‘οταν υπάρχη είς ‘έν ‘έκ. Ζωδιον μιας ‘εκάστης βοτάνης Pitrae codd)

9. p. 233, 1 ούτως ‘άν εύδοκιμήσης Pitrae codd

Text in English Translation

Hermes Trismegistus “On the Plants of the Twelve Zodiac Signs”.

• Aries: Greek Sage/Oregano1

• Taurus: “Upright Dove”. Probably Holy Vervain*2

• Gemini: “Supine Dove”. Probably Supine Vervain* (see note 2)

• Cancer: Comfrey/Coris3

• Leo: Honeysuckle/Greek Cyclamen4

• Virgo: Calamint/Mint5

• Libra: Scorpion’s Tail6

• Scorpio: Artemisia/Wormwood7

• Sagittarius: “Red and Blue” Pimpernel8

• Capricorn: Dock/Sorrel, potentially Monk’s Rhubarb9

• Aquarius: Dragonwort/Dragon Lilly10

• Pisces: “Long” and “round” birthwort.11

For these herbs must be gathered and made into a juice12 when the Sun is in Aries13. But it is also necessary for each herb to be collected when the Moon is in a trine aspect to the Sun or in its horoscope, each according to the zodiac sign it belongs to and the Moon's position14. And let the day and hour be of the ruler of the zodiac sign15, so that you may prosper, as the teacher says, “according to the cosmic and natural outcome."

Notes (In English)

1. This chapter was published by Pitra in 'Analecta Sacra et Profana', Volume 2, page 991, from manuscripts Moscow 415 and Vienna med. 23; repeated by Riess, Nech., and Pet. on page 382.

2. 'Upright' also in Pitra's manuscripts.

3. 'Lying down' [is mentioned by] Pitra.

4. 'Agallis' in Erlangensis

5. 'Aristolochias' in Erlangensis

6. γάρ also in Pitra’s manuscripts

7. The author names 'Aries' because in this sign the sun is in exaltation: 'So then, the herbs at that time are most powerful' (Hermes according to Roether, in the cited work, page 315); Pitra contends to have read 'into the X', who wrote 'into the decan'.

8. <αυτου> is his own addition (but also “when there exists in one of each zodiac [sign] of each herb” Pitra's manuscripts)

9. Page 233 'thus you may prosper' in Pitra's manuscripts."

One thing in particular caught my eye as someone often interested in the material culture of magic & ritual, which was the discussion of the onomata at play in NCH VI, specifically the central ones ΖΩΞΑΘΑΖΩ & ΖΩΖΑΖΩΘ and how variants of this name appear not only in the Leiden Kosmopoiia (Leiden Papyrus J/PGM XIII, which itself has links to the cosmology of Mehet-Weret at the temple of Esna & the cosmology detailed in the Poimandres) but also on four magical gems (Abrasax stones) associated with Harpokrates (Horus the Child/Younger) & the Celestial Horus. I’ll produce a brief summary of Bull’s arguments below for those who haven’t read the paper and then get into the sources for the gems themselves.

Right off the bat, I find these gems fascinating as they are probably the closest things we currently have to archaeological evidence of Hermetic-influenced ritual practice, as the hypothesised ‘Hermetic Lodge’ in Alexandria still has no discernible basis in the material record. Of course, it would be a huge leap to say these gems were carved or used by practicing Hermetists, and I don’t necessarily think they were, but the presence of the divine name along with the style & iconography of the gems, does show the sharing of ideas that were -in the least, accepted and used by Hermetic practitioners and what the material culture manifestations of them looked like.

A Summary of Bull’s Argument

Before the ascent, Hermes first prays, praising God’s creative and ruling power and calling him “the invisible god to whom one speaks in silence” (which I should note is a common turn of phrase associated with the Theban god of hiddenness, Amun, which becomes significant when you consider the provenance of the Theban Corpus of the PGM & their proximity both geographically & temporally to the Nag Hammadi Codices), and then sings the first string of vowels framed by the two onomata. After this, Tat receives the vision of the Ogdoad and Ennead, which are described enthusiastically along with depictions of his other brethren currently residing in the Noetic spheres.

At the end of the visionary ascent we see a second string of vowels, this time with no onomata. In the original papyri the vowels are not divided into separate lines and just flow continuously horizontally across the page:

Figurative arrangements of similar vowels strings can however be found in the Greek Magical Papyri and it is likely they would have looked something like this:

ⲍⲱⲝⲁⲑⲁⲍⲱ
ⲁ
ⲱⲱ
ⲉⲉ
ⲱⲱⲱ
ⲏⲏⲏ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲏⲏ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲟⲟⲟⲟⲟ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲩⲩⲩⲩⲩⲩ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲍⲱⲍⲁⲍⲱⲑ

And then:

ⲁ
ⲱ
ⲉⲉ
ⲱ
ⲏⲏⲏ
ⲱⲱⲱ
ⲓⲓⲓ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲟⲟⲟⲟⲟ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲩⲩⲩⲩⲩⲩ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱⲱ
ⲱ

As pointed out by Bull, there seems to be a bit of confusion regarding the iotas (ι) where the original author recorded them incorrectly (or there was a post script correction by a later scribe): the two etas (Ⲏ) in the first series on line 8 should in fact be four iotas (ⲓⲓⲓⲓ), and the three iotas in the second string on line 7 should be four (ⲓⲓⲓⲓ).

Interestingly, we find the same problem with iotas in the PGM, which tells us that the original series should have had four iotas in both strings. It seems to be a common mistake encountered by copyists. The seven vowels are in Greek popular philosophy connected to the seven planets3 and according to the Pythagorean numerology of Nicomachus of Gerasa, vowels are unspeakable and related to the consonants as the soul is related to the body4. They likely follow the Chaldean/Ptolemaic Order5:

Moon (ⲁ/α)/Ā)-Mercury (η/ⲏ/Ē)-Venus (ε/E)-Sun (ι/I)-Mars (ο)-Jupiter (υ)-Saturn (ω/Ō).

Since each vowel is followed by a string of omegas Mahé claimed that the omegas represent the Ogdoad6, but Bull argues here that the omegas in fact represent both Saturn & the Decans/Fixed Stars, which in the cosmology of the Stobaen Hermetica represent the boundary between the Planetary Spheres and the Ogdoad, being interposed between the Zodiac and the “circle of the all,” separating the two.7

Bull supports his argument of the double function of the omegas with reference to Letter Omega by Zosimos8, in which the alchemist distinguishes the letter as a bipartite symbola, comprised of corporeal and incorporeal parts, assigning it to both Saturn & Okean -“the birth and seed of the Gods”. Going back to Homer, Okean -as the primeval ocean, encircled the entire world in Greek mythology, with all constellations and stars diving into it, and returning in their cycle of orbit.

Similarly, the Esna cosmology mentioned earlier as an influence on PGM XIII, centres around Mehet-Weret, whose name literally means ‘Great Flood’. She embodies the celestial waters navigated by the heavenly bodies. Similarly, Egyptians saw the upper atmosphere and the heavens as a body of water with the horizons as its banks. Mehet-Weret is usually shown as a cow, with the solar disk between her horns, lying on a reed mat or atop a shrine, with a blanket draped across her back.

Spell 17 of the Book of the Dead describes Ra as being born each day “from between the buttocks of Mehet-Weret,” and she is also said to lift Ra up between her horns. Either way, this universal ocean is a good symbol of the outer limit of the Ptolemaic spherical cosmos, containing the fixed stars. So if we view the string of vowels in NCH VI as an ascent through the planetary spheres, with each vowel serving as a divine utterance that encodes numerical information, therefore serving as a noetic symbol, then the natural assumption once you reach Saturn (i.e the edge of the planetary system), is that you enter the sphere of the fixed stars and encounter the Decans, which dwell within Okean, symbolised by the letter ω.

Following some more complex math and well rounded assumption, Bull argues that the scribe should have started with one omega before the alpha, in which case by adding together every number up to eight he would have arrived at the number thirty-six. Either the first omega was forgotten, or there was a desire to start with an alpha, in order to go from alpha to omega, possibly a later correction from a Christian scribe.

With the vowels complete, this brings us to the onomata. In the Leiden Kosmopoiia the creator god laughs seven times, and each laugh produces a new divine hypostasis. The fourth hypostasis is Creative Force which governs Procreation. This hypostases is also given the onomata ΒΑΔΗΤΟΦΩΘ ΖΩΘΑΞΑΘΩΖ9, the latter of which is close to onomata in the Disc. 8-9, ΖΩΞΑΘΑΖΩ and ΖΩΖΑΖΩΘ.

That’s when Bull -in the context of a refutation of Mahé, cites four magical gems that contain a palindrome inscription of another variant of the name: ΘΩΖΑΞΑΖΩΘ, all of which are associated with the Celestial Horus, which will be the subject of the section below.

Alongside this, he cites the thesis of Michela Zago10, where the onomata ΖΩΘΑΞΑΘΩΖ in PGM XIII is argued to relate not only to Disc. 8-9, but also to a spell to gain a leontocephalic Horus as a paredros in PGM I, where the onomata ΖΩΝ ΤΑΖΩΤΑΖΩ is found11. In this spell, a falcon is said to drop a stone to the magician, which should then be engraved with the figure of the leontocephalic Helios-Horus, described as an aerial spirit, encircled by an ouroboros.

Finally, while not in the main body of the text, he notes that a similar name also appears in the Books of Jeu, B 26 (64) as ⲍⲱⲑⲁⲍⲁⲍⲁⲍ and in an invocation of the “father of all paternity.”

His conclusion is ultimately that in light of the invocation in the Disc 8th-9th, (“Give us, through the spirit, that we might see the shape of the image that has no deficiency”12), and the words spoken after the ritual embrace (“Rejoice over this, for already from them the power which is light has come to us”13) the vowels and onomata are part of an invocation necessary to bring down a pneumatic spirit associated with light that will enable the practitioner to see the Ogdoad and Ennead -the domain of Nous, the pure and subtle light, in Hermetic cosmology.

In theory, similar to Iamblichus’ descriptions of material theurgy that aim to purify the imaginative faculty of the soul (which itself is solar in nature), it seems to me that we’re looking at a sympathetic invocation in which a solar force/power is invoked to purify the Noetic Perception & therefore grant vision of the subtle light of the gods/the true Noetic reality by increasing the fitness (ἐπιτηδειότης) of its corresponding faculty. The result being a visionary ascent, perhaps not only through the planets, but through different states of consciousness, themselves associated with the various hypostases.

The two onomata in the Coptic Hermetica, and their parallels with PGM I and XIII and the gems, make it likely that this pneumatic power was associated with Horus, the scarab, and the ouroboros, all symbola & suthenmata of the sun and the cosmos.

The Four Gems

Having summarised the core arguments & my interpretation, we can look at the gems. Bull gives the following description in his paper14:

My process for this was pretty simple. I wanted to track down each of these gems in their original publications and see what they looked like for myself. As primarily an astrological magician, these so-called Abrasax Stones form a fairly decent part of my practice, so any kind of new iconography I get to see is always fun. Plus, I would get to see the original comments by the authors. This turned out to be pretty vital, as comments on the materia proved to be quite enlightening.

Bull is primarily citing a few sources for these gems, the first is S. Michel’s (1965) survey of magical gems in the British Museum’s collection: Die Magischen Gemmen im Britischen Museum, 2 vols15. & his (2001) Bunte Steine –Dunkle Bilder. Magische Gemmen, Biering & Brinkmann, München, which covers the Hamburg Skoluda Collection.

The other is the monumental Studies in Magical Amulets: Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian (1950) by C. Bonner16, published by University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. So these are the main texts I’m using. Bonner’s text covers numerous collections, including the gems in the Walter Art Gallery. He does also cite a gem in the Newell Collection that is relevant here, which was originally referenced in Ancient Oriental Seals in the Collection of Mr. Edward T. Newell (1934), published by the University of Chicago17.

Gem No.1: Celestial Horus with a Staff & Ankh BM G 050199

The first gem mentioned by Bull is classified as Inv. BM G 1986,0501.99 in the British Museum Collection by Michel in vol. 1, p. 90, no. 139:

Michel’s notes are as follows, which i’ve translated from German (the [ ] are mine used for emphasis):

Bull notes that this description appears similar to a gem described by Bonner, which he identified as D. 187 in the Newel Collection. However, Bonner unfortunately describes a process in which the physical gem has been lost or is currently in a private collection somewhere in New York or Brooklyn, and is therefore unreleased to the public, and its current whereabouts are unknown. Bonner was however able to get a glimpse of a seal impression of the gem before it disappeared and described it as:

As Bull remarks, Bonner does not mention that this gem has the name [Σ]αβαωθ in addition to [Α]βραζαξ on the obverse, and he states that the name Αβρασαξ is also on the reverse, which is not the case with the Michel’s BM gem above. Bonner has either given a faulty description (since he admits his notes were made in haste), or this is a separate but very similar gem which has been lost.

Gem No.2: Hamburg Skolouda Collection M040 -Horus with Staff

The second gem in question is classified as Inv. M040 in the Hamburg Skolouda Private Collection, published by Michel (2001) in Bunte Steine -Dunkle Bilder. Magische Gemmen, Biering & Brinkmann, München, p. 36 no. 25.

While I couldn’t get a hold of Michel’s text for this directly, Bonner’s magical gems database18 does contain an entry for it with the following comments (edited for prose reading):

Gem No.3: Walter Art Gallery 42, 872 -Ouroboros Spiral with Scarab & Harpokrates

The third gem is classified as Inv. 42, 872 in the Walter Art Gallery and is found in Bonner, Studies in Magical Amulets, pp. 294-295 n. 251. This is honestly one of my favourites in terms of style. I’m definitely stealing this design:

Bonner has the following comments:

Gem No.4: Mich. 26148 -Pantheos with Four Wings

This final gem is classified as Mich. 26148 and is from the collection of the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and is found in Bonner, Studies in Magical Amulets p. 296 fn. 258.

Bonner has the following notes:

Bonner equally notes19 that the Pantheos iconography itself probably derives from Horus being combined with other deities:

This tendency may have had a political or a theological motive, and often both were at work; but it was taken up and given additional force by the practitioners of that magic which was inextricably interwoven with the religious life of the country. Theological syncretism may account for such a form as that which Budge calls "The god comprehending all gods," in which the basic figure seems to be that of the young Horus with the addition of attributes borrowed from Re, Amon, and various other gods. A compound statuette in Berlin, with characteristics of Horus, Bes, Bastet, and others, is almost certainly magical in intention. Just as the adept sought to make his spells powerful by invoking many gods and demons with their manifold names and epithets, so it became natural to an artist in the service of magic to combine in one figure the marks and attributes of all the gods whose aid was invoked, or at least as many as his skill could blend together; and no aesthetic consideration deterred him from fashioning what we should call a monstrosity.

The precursors of the compound figure that appears most frequently on gem amulets have been recognised in a class of objects known as magical stelae, which have been discovered in great numbers; they date from the late dynastic period, but continue into Ptolemaic and even Roman times. They are small stelae with rounded tops, the largest running to about twenty to twenty-four inches in height, the smallest only two or three inches, and so, small enough to be carried on the person but they seem usually to have been placed in houses and gardens, or buried in them, to protect them from snakes, scorpions, and other noxious creatures.

The front of these objects regularly represented Horus standing on two crocodiles and usually grasping snakes, scorpions, or dangerous quadrupeds. The reverse and, sometimes, other vacant parts of the stones were covered with magical inscriptions and often other magical figures. In many examples a mask of Bes is placed just over the head of the young Horus

To reiterate the conclusions reached by Bull, it seems clear that the onomata used in the Disc 8th-9th are related to the Celestial Horus, and the common inclusion of a scarab, symbolising the rising sun, and the ouroboros, symbolising the eternal circuit of the universe, underlines his character as the cosmic god, perhaps associated with the fourth hypostasis created by the god in PGM XIII. The name forms part of an invocation that bring down a pneumatic spirit of light which cleanses the solar function of the imagination, enabling the practitioner to ascend to Ogdoad & Ennead.

Some Thoughts on the Materia

The first gem appears to be yellow jasper, and the lost gem mentioned by Bonner is described as an “olive brown stone…apparently jasper”. This is matched by the second gem, also yellow jasper. Gem 3 is described as Hematite, a common gemstone associated with Helios in the PGM & the 4th gem is said to be green jasper.

Jasper has a pretty well established tradition of magical and spiritual use. Following Rankine’s Grimoire Encyclopaedia20 we find the following:

In the Bible, it is counted among the stones implanted on the breastplate of the High Priest in Exodus 28:20, and is referenced in the revelatory appearance of God in Revelations 4:2-3:

“At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby. A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne.”

It’s also mentioned extensively as an adjective to describe the radiance & walls of New Jerusalem in Revelations 21 (11, 18, 19).

In more distinct magical texts & grimoires, we find Jasper mentioned in the Testament of Solomon (Recession C) as a gem that can be engraved to control demons. Elsewhere in the PGM, we find varieties of blue & grey Jasper being set in magical rings for “success in everything”21.

In later texts, we find in the Key of Solomon it being used to capture wild birds. In the Dictionaire Infernale it acts as a gem that can remove fever & oedema. In the Jewish Tradition of the Sepher Raziel we find it mentioned as a gem that protects the bearer from fever & poisons, although inscribed with signs for Aries, Leo or Sagittarius.

Astrological Rulerships

While it might be easy for us to assume a solar rulership for the gemstone given its Classical & Late Antique usage, the astrological tradition almost never agrees on a single definitive rulership. The Summa Sacrae Magicae assigns it to Jupiter, the Key of Solomon generally to Mars (but notes that brown jasper is ruled by Saturn, and green by Jupiter). The Secret of Secrets assigns it to Venus, while the Petit Albert gives it to Saturn.

Agrippa isn’t much help either here, assigning it sparingly to Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Leo & the fixed star Arcturus, but does claim it assists with birth & fertility.

Both Barrett (the Magus) & the Book of Saint Cyprian assign it to Leo, which somewhat makes sense given the sun is in exaltation.

The Images and Figures of Hermes, a text often included in collections of Renaissance and medieval talismanic and astrological images such as the Seals of Thetel, the Seals & Sigils of Chael and the Seals of Stones of Solomon cites the following:

The Figure of Aquarius, (one of the Signs of the Zodiack) being graved in a green Jasper, and worn, causeth Profit in buying and selling

The Incipit liber Hermetis de 15 stellis tractans et 15 herbis et 15 lapidibus et 15 figuris22 has jasper under the fixed star Arcturus (at 24 Libra, 33) and -especially green jasper, “carries away fevers and restrains the flow of blood.”

The Fixed Stars from Gower's Confessio Amantis has it under the rulership of the star Almareth, which is described as Jovial & Martial.

Interestingly, Proclus in his work On the Hieratic Art mentions Jasper in the context of statue animation & material theurgy as sufficing for contact with a personal daimon or guardian spirit:

“But there are times when one plant or one stone suffices for the work. Flax-leaved daphne is enough for a manifestation: laurel, box-thorn, squill, coral, diamond, or jasper will do for a guardian spirit”

Astrological rulership is determined by which quality we are observing, so it’s perfectly feasible to assume different varieties of the gem being ruled by different planets, or even different aspects such as its shine or weight. Given all of the above however, i’m inclined to opt for a solar or jovial rulership. I intend to pursue Proclus’ usage a bit more to see if there is any link.

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