Platonic Mystagogy – the Path of Transformation

Gregory Shaw | Edited by Aaron M. Ullrey

For later Platonists from the third to the sixth century CE, Plato was far more than the abstract thinker we are familiar with today. Plato was a divine man, a hierophant, whose dialogues provided an initiation into the mysteries. To study the dialogues of Plato was to be initiated into one’s own divinity. Proclus (fifth century CE) praised Plato as a mystagogue (one who leads us into the mysteries):

The divine mystagogy—established eternally by the Gods on a pure and sacred foundation—was revealed to those of us in the temporal world by one man [Plato] whom I would not be wrong in calling the primary leader and hierophant of the true mysteries.[1]

To say that Plato was the “hierophant of true mysteries” may not describe the Plato that is taught in our universities, but neither would our classroom Plato have been recognizable to the Platonists of antiquity. The Plato we have inherited is an invention of our own habits of thought, a superficial caricature of Plato that elides the transformative power of his dialogues. Since most scholars don’t believe in the transformation of the soul or even the existence of souls, they assume that Plato was engaged in conceptual puzzles and rational analysis. But for the ancient Platonists, the dialogues led to profound transformations, and their author was revered as “divine and Apollonian.”[2] Philosophy was conceived as a sacred rite, and Plato was seen as a visionary who revealed the world as a theophany. If this makes Platonism sound like a religion, it is because it was the most sacred of religions. The disciplines of the mind and the exercise of rationality that we associate with Plato’s school were integrated with what Socrates described as an erotic ascent to divine Beauty, so that our desire (eros) for Beauty should infiltrate and transform our thinking. For the great Platonists of the third to the sixth centuries, the exercise of the mind outlined in the dialogues was the path to holiness in which those most deeply initiated became theioi, divine men and women.

It was this deep synthesis of rational thought and erotic experience that made Platonism the most influential tradition of the ancient world and one that continues to have a powerful influence today.[3] Its transmission by the Neoplatonists emphasized the spiritual and transformative elements of Platonism. These were not a later interpolation but were already an integral part of Plato’s Academy in the fourth century BCE. At risk of oversimplifying the complexities of this tradition, this article focuses on the example of Plato’s great myth, the Timaeus, that describes the creation of the cosmos and human souls. The Timaeus, however, would not have been the first reading in the curriculum of the Platonic schools. In the late third and early fourth centuries, the Syrian Platonist, Iamblichus (c. 242-325), established the curriculum for their mystagogy. One would begin by reading Iamblichus’s Exhortation to Philosophy and then move to his Pythagorean studies, from On the Pythagorean Life to The Theology of Numbers. After the Pythagorean sequence, Iamblichus laid out a specific order of reading twelve of Plato’s dialogues beginning with I Alcibiades. It was a self-consciously mystagogic curriculum, with each dialogue corresponding to a level of the soul that was being transformed. The culminating dialogues in the curriculum were the Timaeus and the Parmenides, which revealed the mysteries of the natural and spiritual worlds.[4] Although the Timaeus does not begin the Platonic curriculum, we start with this dialogue because it describes the challenge human beings face as embodied souls and outlines the goal of all Platonic education: a realignment of the particular soul with the divinity of the World Soul. The Timaeus places us in the Platonic world, but to enter this world, we first need to understand how we moderns resist it.

Iamblichus’ Platonism presents a problem for contemporary scholars because he integrated the conceptual and erotic elements of Plato with the rituals of Chaldean priests. Iamblichus called this ritualized Platonism “theurgy” (divine action: theion + ergon), and with it he made Platonism accessible to the common man. This synthesis of philosophy and theurgic ritual defined later Platonism—Emperor Julian wanted to use it as the framework for his empire—but it has been largely ignored by contemporary scholars. Modern academic disciplines prioritize discursive thinking, making considered judgments, and pursuing questions using logical arguments. The introduction of rituals to Platonic philosophy has struck certain scholars of Platonism as backward and primitive. With a few notable exceptions, the scholarly custodians of our culture are at a loss to explain how a Pythagorean and Platonist such as Iamblichus could practice rituals that diverge so radically from the path of rationality.[5] The solution has been either to reject him as an irrational and second-rate thinker or to find ways to explain how his theurgical teachings fit into our history. The second option is tempting for those of us sympathetic to Iamblichus, but it leads to a misrepresentation of theurgy as merely an intellectual achievement. There is, however, a third option. We might engage Iamblichus’ thought in a more immediate and primitive way, one that is consistent with his vision. Iamblichus speaks with an aboriginal voice that evokes primal yearnings, but such yearnings can be fulfilled only if we take a path that has become both hidden and forbidden to us. 

This path was once a critical part of our heritage, and although it has been lost, it may be recovered, not by translating the aboriginal into a more sophisticated language but by learning to speak the ancient tongue ourselves. Iamblichus honored the aboriginal. He refused to Hellenize his Syrian name and heritage; he ensured that philosophy remained rooted in our aboriginal nature, one that allows the gods a place in the world. Iamblichus’s teacher, Porphyry, had disowned his Syrian name, Malchus, to become Porphyry, the Greek philosopher, and he opposed Iamblichus’s synthesis of Platonic philosophy with ritual. For him, theurgy represented a deviation and regression, and Porphyry’s view has become our own. Yet Iamblichus speaks for a tradition that was once integral to our western history.

To consider one example, the most revered religious rituals in the ancient Greek world were the mysteries of Eleusis. These rites of initiation had a profound influence on Plato’s thinking both in terminology and imagery, yet the initiations themselves could not be explained or understood discursively.[6] Like theurgic rites, the Eleusinian rites provided immediate experiences induced through ritual. Aristotle makes this clear when he says that those who enter the initiations at Eleusis do not learn anything (ou mathein ti) but experience (pathein) something by being put into a changed state of mind (diatethenai).[7] In the fifth century CE, Proclus explains this change. He writes:

Initiations bring about a sympathy (sympatheia) of souls with the ritual actions in such a way that is incomprehensible to us yet divine (agnoston hemin kai theion), so that some of those initiated are stricken with fear, being filled with divine awe; others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols and, having left their own identity, become completely established in the Gods and experience divine possession.[8]

The rites of Eleusis effected a fundamental change in awareness, not by a process of intellectual learning but by “being put into a state of mind” through an ecstatic assimilation to symbols and ritual actions. 

We might allow such language for the Eleusinian mysteries because these rites were a venerated part of ancient Greek culture, but we assume that philosophers were wedded to a more rational path. When Proclus says that initiates experience an ekstasis and become established in the gods, we assume that he is speaking only metaphorically or is indulging in the florid language of theurgists. This accounts for why many scholars have split figures like Iamblichus and Proclus, speaking of their philosophical and mathematical interests on the one hand and of their theurgical and magical interests on the other,[9] as if the latter represents an element from which our rational trajectory was eventually cleansed. But this split is in us, not in the philosopher-magicians whose theurgical and discursive practices were integrally connected.[10] Peter Kingsley points to the claims of divinity by Empedocles to exemplify this problem. When the Presocratic philosopher, whom we imagine as an early scientist, claims that he is “an immortal god, mortal no more,”[11] his statement must either be dismissed as fraudulent or characterized as part of the magical beliefs prevalent in antiquity but having nothing to do with his genuinely scientific writing.[12] Kingsley has demonstrated how deeply misguided we are in trying to split these philosopher-magicians, and he urges contemporary readers to re-enter their ancient healing tradition, one that culminates in making its initiates into gods. But to enter we must first recognize our own dividedness. We must see how our worldview has anesthetized us. We must again feel the deep wound of having been cut off from our primal yearning.[13] 

Some caution may be in order here. To re-enter this tradition and pass the threshold of initiation, we need to understand what causes some initiates at Eleusis to become gods and others to become terrified. What allows some to be lifted beyond human knowledge, while others become mentally unstable? According to the theurgists, it is our receptive capacity, a capacity determined by the degree to which the soul has been purified. This was hardly an innovation by theurgists but was the ancient pattern of all the mysteries: catharsis, followed by esoteric transmission (paradosis) that culminated in the initiate’s deifying vision (epopteia).[14] This was the spiritual tradition in which “Gods reveal themselves through human souls,” and allowed theurgists to “take the shape of the Gods” in their sacred rites.[15] To understand and re-enter this tradition, we must take seriously what its masters taught. Before we enter the sacred cosmos of the Timaeus, we must first be purified.

Catharsis means that our next step is not forward but backward, not up but down; it means that we will lose understanding, not gain it. In catharsis we do not enter clarity and light but darkness and confusion. My own response to this step is not to take it, or better, to proceed—as is our habit—with an explanation about catharsis and hope that it will be accepted as the equivalent of genuine understanding. This is the kind of counterfeit coinage that sustains the business of scholarship, but it tells us little or nothing about the lived experience of those who practice mysteries that begin with catharsis. In our rationalized view of this process, we have come to understand catharsis as the elimination of all passions tied to material life. The exemplary sage for us is a virtually emotionless, cerebral bachelor, or perhaps an almost robotic android, like Star Trek’s half-human Spock or a disembodied AI bot. Scholars have become a community whose status is measured by the amount of information we hold. And when we impose this model on the sages of antiquity, we deny to them the very emotions that make them human and allow them to become gods. 

Catharsis is not the elimination of passions but rather their recognition and the difficult work of giving each its proper place. As Jean Trouillard explains in The Plotinian Purification,[16] catharsis is not elimination but inclusion, a process of embracing all things from a deeper perspective.[17]  The primary focus of catharsis, he explains, is not with the body but with our habit of thought that results in what he calls a moral and metaphysical impurity; to cure it, he says, we must “gradually dissolve it.”[18] Yet it is difficult to recognize our need for a cure. As Trouillard put it, “reason habitually seeks to enclose itself in a circle of definitive constructions … it substitutes its abstractions and images for reality without realizing it.”[19] 

Our aversion to undergoing the catharsis that Trouillard describes is not new; it reflects a fundamental human condition. Most of us are not eager to “gradually dissolve” the world of abstractions we take for reality. On the contrary, we want to strengthen it all the more because we sense its emptiness…and our own.[20] The mysteries demanded a preliminary dissolution, for without first recognizing the nothingness of our reality we cannot hope to enter what is truly real.  Any discussion of divinity without first facing this nothingness is misguided, a self-deception. In Socrates’ debate with the know-it-all Callicles, he mocks him for just this point. After being rebuked for asking penetrating questions that were dismissed by Callicles as trivial and useless, Socrates pointedly replies:

You, Callicles, are lucky in having been initiated into the Greater Mysteries before the Lesser; I didn’t think it was permitted.[21]

Socrates knew full well that it was not. The lesser mysteries of Eleusis were cathartic; they were required before initiates could enter the greater mysteries of divine vision and deification. Yet, like many of us today, Callicles presumes to speak with real knowledge without having taken the first step into darkness, into Persephone’s world of death and dissolution. He has not yet begun to be cleansed of his habit of thought and the falsity of his world. Like most of us, he lives in a world of abstractions and speaks words without power. What is it that we need to be cleansed of? Reason, says Trouillard, taking our conceptual abstractions for reality. Iamblichus tells the rationalizing Porphyry that he needs a talisman (alexipharmakon), a counter spell, to protect him from the spell of rationalizing that prevents us from receiving the gods.[22] This is a critical point. For Iamblichus, it is not merely that our theological assumptions are mistaken (and could be corrected); our thinking itself is mistaken and keeps us alienated from divinity.

Let us return to Socrates. He has been incorporated into our rational trajectory as a seminal figure who demanded rational explanations from his interlocutors. Socrates exemplifies for us the way of reason and the triumph of logic over the emotionalism of myth and superstition. But this picture of Socrates is a caricature shaped by our need to place him in our trajectory, and it requires that we overlook an abundance of countervailing evidence in the Platonic dialogues and elsewhere. This evidence suggests that Socrates was hardly a rationalist but was a mystic who maintained that his exercise of reason was rooted in divine revelation and guided by eros.[23] With respect to his own wisdom, Socrates’ attitude reflects a profound experience of catharsis, in which he sees his own understanding as worthless. Far from sounding like a spokesman for the triumph of reason, Socrates states “human wisdom is of little or no value,” “real wisdom is the property of god,” and that his own wisdom is “worthless” (oudeneia).[24] Our purported avatar of reason states plainly that his philosophical way of life “has been commanded to me … by the god through divinations (manteia) and through dreams (enupnion) and by every other means through which divine allotment has ever commanded anyone to do anything.”[25]   

Dreams, divinations, and divine allotment hardly sound like the basis for a rational worldview! Yet, as John Bussanich has shown,[26] the difficulty we have in accepting the testimony of Socrates is that he has become what we have made him: the first great rationalist who, through his practice of elenchus and moral example, put Greek thought on a firm and reasoned foundation. Since this happens to be our foundation, to question the rationality of Socrates shakes the ground we stand upon. Socrates himself claims that his cross-examination of others was directed by the promptings of his daimon. The elenchus, seen as the key to Socratic methodology, emerges from divine darkness, from dreams and divinations. It was a method of discursive catharsis, and the state of hopeless aporia into which he led his interlocutors was the direct result of their initiation at his hands. Socrates was the hierophant of mysteries every bit as transformative as those celebrated at Eleusis, and anyone who wished to enter these mysteries, to live, as he put it, “the philosophical life in the right way” (Phaedo 69d), was required to undergo his withering catharsis. Plato’s adoption of the language of the mysteries may have led us to assume that he rationalized the rites of Eleusis, yet in the view of the later Platonists, it was the other way around. Plato succeeded in transforming discursive thought into a form of mystagogy: thinking itself could be led down the path of initiation,[27] and Socrates was Plato’s mystagogue, a guide into the lesser and the greater mysteries. 

Consider the remarkable testimony of Aristides who described his experience in the presence of Socrates. 

By the Gods, Socrates, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s true! I’ve never learned (mathein) anything from you, as you know. But I made progress whenever I was with you, even if I was only in the same house and not in the same room—but more when I was in the same room. And it seemed, to me at least, that when I was in the same room and looked at you when you were speaking, I made much more progress than when I looked away. And I made by far the most and greatest progress when I sat right beside you, and physically held on to you or touched you (Theages 130d2- e2).[28]

Like the initiates at Eleusis, Aristides does not learn (mathein) anything when he enters the presence of Socrates but experiences a transformation that is intensified by gazing, and even more by touching Socrates, as if he were a god. In the West, this is not our usual experience while attending the lecture of a philosopher; it is, however, remarkably similar to the experience of devotees who receive darshan in the presence of an enlightened guru.[29] This portrayal of Socrates as a divine man is borne out by Alcibiades in the Symposium. After praising Socrates, Alcibiades says “the best you can do is not to compare him to anything human” (221d) and further, that his arguments are “truly worthy of a god” (222a). The power he has over his interlocutors is revealed when Alcibiades confesses: “…let anyone—man, woman, or child—listen to you or even to a poor account of what you say—and we are all transported, completely possessed (katechein)….I swear to you, the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face, even the frenzied Corybantes seem sane compared to me and, let me tell you I have seen many others experiencing the same things” (215e). Speaking to those similarly afflicted, he virtually begs for their understanding: “All you people here … have all shared in this madness (mania), this Bacchic frenzy of philosophy” (218b).[30]

Alcibiades neglects to say what it is that allows some of Socrates’ companions to benefit from his presence more than others. Aristides admits that when separated from Socrates, the progress he experienced “oozed away” (Theag. 130e). And although Alcibiades experienced rapture in the presence of Socrates,[31] he admits that “the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd” (216b). Not everyone is prepared to enter the mysteries, whether they are the theurgic ecstasies of Iamblichus, the traditional rites of Eleusis, or the philosophic mystagogy conducted by Socrates. If an initiate’s catharsis is incomplete, they will lack the capacity to contain the divine influx and will return from the mysteries untransformed, old habits intact. The necessary condition for transformation is a state of receptive emptiness, which Socrates describes as the “nothingness”— oudeneia[32]—of human wisdom.[33] The purpose of his elenchus, therefore, was not to discover rational principles—as our accepted history has it—but to lead others into the state of emptiness so that they too might become divine.

The initial dialogues of Iamblichus’ curriculum are therefore cathartic, with Socrates exercising his elenchus on others, stopping their thinking and moving them into the not-knowing state of aporia. Only after experiencing the emptiness of aporia and oudeneia is the soul cleansed and prepared to enter the cosmic mandala of the Timaeus. Virtually all the mysteries of Platonic mystagogia are revealed in it.

Unlike the previous cathartic dialogues, the Timaeus is evocative. It is Plato’s great mythos, a grand vision of the cosmos, the World Soul, and human souls. It is a monologue by the Pythagorean Timaeus and reflects the Pythagorean teachings that Plato learned from Archytas when he visited their community in 388 BCE. It is an invitation to enter an imaginal landscape, a living mandala.[34] The architecture of this imaginal vision is the framework for all subsequent Platonic metaphysics. 

1. There is a first divine principle, known as the One and the Good.
2. The overflow of this Origin is received and coordinated by a Divine Mind called the Demiurge, the Maker.
3. The Demiurge is a principle of Generosity, and from this principle the World Soul is created by a Pythagorean mixing of Being, Sameness, and Difference.[35]
4. The substance of this mixture is then divided into mathematical proportions/ratios, and these ratios become the basis for the unfolding of numbers into volume.
5. These ratios (logoi) are associated with the planets and their measured cycles and are seen in the cycles of nature.

Plato calls the cosmos a “divine animal” and a sacred statue (agalma) of the gods.[36] It is a Pythagorean mandala of harmony and perfection,[37] so how does Plato account for the imperfections of human souls? In short, what’s wrong with us, since we are permeated by this mandala and live in its presence and harmony? How do we fall out of alignment with the World Soul? The simple answer is that we are born. We should recall that there was a pessimistic tradition in the Greek world that is reflected in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus:  

Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, the best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. (1225)

Plato does not share this profound pessimism, but he does attribute birth as the cause for our misfortune. The creation of human souls by the Demiurge completes the cosmos, and we are sewn together with the same divine ratios as the World Soul, ratios mirrored in the planetary gods. Each human soul is a miniature World Soul, but we carry the substance of these ratios in a diminished degree, so when subjected to the intense sensations of birth, our ratios are scrambled, and we lose our alignment with the divine ratios of our original nature. We are born into a state of fundamental confusion, and the task of Platonic education is to recover our original nature and alignment with the World Soul. 

This recovery is the task of Plato’s mystagogy, and he adopts the language of the Eleusinian mysteries to describe it. We must undergo a catharsis to cleanse ourselves of the mistaken mental and emotional habits we have identified with since birth. This cleansing is dramatically portrayed by Socrates, who strips us of the habitual thinking that keeps us in ignorance. Once cleansed, the soul can recover its divine ratios, our original nature. Plato describes this as follows: 

The motions which are naturally akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe.  These each man should follow, and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe should correct the courses (circles) of the head which were corrupted at our birth, and should assimilate the thinking being (the human subject) to the object of thought (the visible cosmic order of the heavens), renewing his original nature, so that having assimilated them he may attain to that best life which the gods have set before mankind, both for the present and the future. (90 b-d)

The result of this mystagogy is that the particular soul, the microcosm, becomes aligned with the World Soul, the macrocosm. This pattern runs like an essential thread in western philosophy until the seventeenth century when we cut the thread by turning to a metaphysical materialism that denies the existence of the World Soul. The drawing below by the seventeenth-century physician and mystic Robert Fludd portrays the goal of Platonic education as the alignment of the microcosm with the macrocosm. Each human soul is the cosmos in miniature; it contains the twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven planets from Saturn to the Moon. The ratios that are in the heavens are in us, and when the soul aligns its internal cosmos with the external cosmos, it achieves perfection and deification. This becomes the basis for Iamblichus’s coordination of theurgic ritual with Platonic cosmology. The ritualization of this cosmology in theurgy was seen by later Platonists as elaborating and fulfilling the principles laid down by Plato himself. We become co-creators with the Demiurge.

Yet this vision of Platonic mystagogy—aligning the particular soul with the World Soul—makes no sense in a materialist metaphysics where there is no World Soul. Contemporary scholars who identify with the materialist worldview cannot sufficiently enter this vision of Platonic mystagogy, so they focus entirely on the logical arguments in Plato. They miss the visionary and erotic element in Platonism and thus reduce it to a curious adjunct to the progress of our rational mastery of material reality. Platonic mystagogy focused on the transformation and deification of the soul, for to align the particular soul with the World Soul was to deify it. How this was achieved by the later Platonists follows two trajectories.

The challenge for Platonists was how to align the microcosm with the macrocosm and achieve the goal of philosophy that Plato had described as a “likeness to God.”[38] Once purified, the soul must find a way to align its divine ratios with their correspondences in the heavens. Among later Platonists, there were two methods, identified as the path of philosophers and the path of theurgists. Damascius in the sixth century said:

There are those who prefer philosophy, like Porphyry and Plotinus and many others, and those who prefer theurgy, like Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus and the hieratic school generally. But Plato, realizing that strong arguments can be advanced from both sides, united them in a single truth by calling the philosopher a Bacchus.[39]

Damascius, who was both philosopher and theurgist, understood Platonism to combine both methods, but like Iamblichus, he recognized the limitations of a purely conceptual approach to the mysteries. He knew that those who practice philosophy merely as an intellectual exercise will never become divine. Damascius began his career as an intellectual; he knew the limits of discursive thinking, and his criticism is pointed: 

I have indeed chanced upon some who are outwardly splendid philosophers in their rich memory of a multitude of theories, their shrewd flexibility of syllogisms, and the constant power of their extraordinary perceptiveness. Yet within they are poor in matters of the soul and destitute of true knowledge.[40]

Intellectual acuity is not enough. Philosophers need to be led by something deeper than thinking. Damascius describes it as a divine and ineffable presence.

And as for us, how could we make suppositions of any kind whatever about it, if there were not within us some trace (ichnos) of it which is, as it were, striving towards it? Perhaps one should say then that this entity, ineffable as it is, communicates to all things an ineffable participation, by virtue of which there is something ineffable (aporreton) in each of us.[41]

The entire Neoplatonic tradition rests on the conviction that there is in us a trace of the first principle, the ineffable source of all things. To speculate on this principle without a personal experience of it is, at best, a preparatio, and at worst, it is a diversion from entering the mystery of our ineffability. For Damascius, intellectual speculation cannot take us there. Consistent with his critique of intellectuals, Damascius quotes his master, Isidore, who said he “did not care for the babble of books,”[42] yet even he recognized that those who ignore philosophic training are unable to receive the gods. The question Platonists faced was how to integrate their philosophic training with immersions into the ineffable.

The path outlined by Plotinus (c. 204-270 CE) was exemplary. No one in the history of Platonism evokes the experience of the One more profoundly than he. The Enneads remain a monument to the deepest aspirations of mystics. While Plotinus was a Platonist and used the framework of the dialogues to communicate his experiences, he maintained that without the experience of divinity, his words make little sense. As he put it, “[only] he who has seen, knows what I mean.”[43] Only an experience of the divine gives genuine understanding, and this was also how Aristotle described the Mysteries of Eleusis. But how is one to have such an experience? For all our current interest in the metaphysical hypostases of Plotinus: the One, Nous, World Soul, and Nature, these were more than conceptual abstractions. As A.C. Lloyd put it, “The hypostases (levels of reality) are experiences; they are types of consciousness …they have phenomenological properties.  It follows that the element of personal experience is needed to complement the non-empirical philosophical system.”[44]

Plotinus unquestionably had these experiences. He knew the hypostases from inside out. At a critical point in the history of Platonism, he re-established its deep mystagogy and divinization of the soul. Yet Plotinus’s Enneads focus almost entirely on our interior experience of higher states, and he virtually ignores religious rituals, sacrifices, divinatory rites, and oracular traditions by which most people of his time communed with the gods. The path of Plotinus was inward and upward; it was a departure from the material world and an ascent to the spiritual. “What then,” he asks, “is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet … you must close the eyes and call upon another vision which is to be roused within you.”[45] For Plotinus, our problem is that we have been soiled by our bodies and need to escape from this lower world. In fact, he asserts that our soul never truly descends into a body, and we must disengage—close the eyes—and recover our unfallen identity. Plotinus went so far as to assert this view despite its unorthodoxy.

 If one ought to dare to express one’s own view more clearly, contradicting the opinion of others, our soul does not altogether come down, but there is always something of it in the noetic realm.[46]

Escape and ascent define the path of Plotinus. Matter, he says, is “evil itself,”[47] and the soul is made ugly by its animation of a body. As evocative as Plotinus’s Enneads are in tracing a path to divinity, it is a path that rejects the body and—by implication—disregards the generosity of the Demiurge who creates the material world and brings our souls into it.

Trouillard maintained that Plotinus “goes to divinity by night,” by negating the body and all materiality.[48] This was not the way of Iamblichus and the theurgists. The Syrian Platonist knew of Plotinus’s severe asceticism, but Iamblichus believed that cleansing the soul was only part of what was required. He defines catharsis as follows: 

The most useful goals of catharsis are withdrawal from foreign elements; restoration of one’s own essence; perfection; fullness; independence; ascent to the creative cause; conjunction of parts to wholes; and contribution of power, life, and activity from the wholes to the parts.”[49]

Iamblichus contrasts this ancient teaching with the view of “many Platonists” (Porphyry and Plotinus?) who see catharsis simply as withdrawal from the body and separation from the material world. These are merely the “lesser goals” (smikra telē) of catharsis,[50] and although Iamblichus recognizes their value, they are preliminary, the “first stage” being the ascent to the creative cause, but this is to be followed by the soul’s descent, its theurgic sharing in demiurgy, sewing together the parts and wholes of the cosmos. Rather than “closing his eyes” and escaping from the world, Iamblichus keeps his eyes open and transforms the world by means of theurgic ritual. Iamblichus’s difference from Plotinus in practice reflects their metaphysical differences. 

Although Plotinus argues for the divinity of the world against the Gnostics and characterizes matter as an “intelligible Form” and ultimate procession of the One (Enn.V.8.7), he also maintains that matter—as the furthest departure from the Good—is evil, “primal and absolute evil” (Enn. I.8.3). Consequently, as he outlines in Ennead V.8.14, to be deified the soul must escape from the evil of matter and withdraw to its unfallen essence. The imagery and terms Plotinus employs to portray the soul’s fall into material reality betray the influence of gnostic descriptions of the fall of Sophia. Plotinus says the soul’s inclination to the body is not a true descent but only an illumination (ellampsis) of what is below while its essence remains above the material world (Enn. I.1.12). Similarly, he says the Gnostic Sophia does not descend into matter “but only illuminates (ellampsai) the darkness….” (Enn. II.9.10). Thus, it appears that Plotinus absorbed the dualist imagery he criticized in the Gnostics.[51] The divinization of soul as recovery of its unfallen condition, separated from the evil of the material cosmos, seems to conflict with Plotinus’ non-dualist vision. It may be one of the great ironies of the Platonic tradition that its greatest visionary and the architect of its most profound mystagogy remained, in some sense, outside of the structure that he explained more brilliantly than anyone. 

Plotinus also employed imagery from Greek religion to initiate souls into ineffable states of divinization: he spoke of becoming possessed by gods. In one of his “thought experiments” where the soul visualizes the sphere of the cosmos, Plotinus enjoins us to “invoke the God, the creator of the sphere you now hold, and pray him to enter (Enn.I.2.6).” This god, whom Platonists identified as Zeus, enters his sphere whereupon the visionary “must give himself up to what is within and become, instead of one who sees, an object of vision for another who contemplates him shining out with thoughts of the kind which come from that world” (V.8.11). In Plotinian mystagogy we do not see the god; the god sees through us. It is precisely this experience of entering the activity of a god that is developed by Plotinus’ successor, Iamblichus.

Iamblichus had been the student of Porphyry, and after returning from Rome to his native Syria he initiated students into ritual practices that were rooted in his Platonic vision. Iamblichus and Porphyry became the leading Platonists after the death of Plotinus, and this led to some friction between them. Iamblichus added to Plotinus’ vision a Neopythagorean solution to the problem of embodiment, and this, along with his ritual practices, put him at odds with his former teacher. Porphyry wrote his Life of Plotinus as an implicit critique of Iamblichus and explicitly criticized the practice of theurgy in his Letter to Anebo.[52] Yet Iamblichus was not opposed to Plotinus; he adopted his metaphysical vision and—with Neopythagorean adjustments—had made it his own. He was indebted most particularly to Plotinus’ understanding that the One “gives what it does not have,” for this transforms the world into a symbolic landscape in which the One is revealed everywhere, including in matter. Iamblichus developed a visionary discipline whereby the traces of Plotinus’s One could be entered in theurgic rites, but he objected to two teachings of Plotinus: (1) that sensible matter, as the outermost fringe of divine emanation, is evil; and (2) that the soul never fully descends into this world. Iamblichus criticized these doctrines for the same reason that Plotinus had criticized the Gnostics: they are metaphysically dualist and conflict—Iamblichus claimed—with the teachings of Plato and the ancients.[53] 

Plotinus’ doctrine of matter as evil remains a topic of significant scholarly debate, but it is clear that Iamblichus, Proclus, and the later Platonists disagreed with Plotinus. Their cosmology was more indebted to the Neopythagorean metaphysics promoted by Iamblichus, in which sensible matter is seen as the expression of a divine principle: the Indefinite Dyad. For Plotinus, the value of the cosmos is diminished in proportion to its degree of sensible expression. This is not the case for Iamblichus or for Proclus. As Iamblichus puts it, the influence of higher principles is “more penetrating” than intermediate principles and therefore the One is fully present—and perhaps especially present—in sensible matter.[54] This provides a rationale for the theurgic use of material objects. Proclus dedicated much of his treatise On the Existence of Evils to the refutation of Plotinus’ position on matter. As he argues, if matter is evil it becomes an “alternative principle of beings, dissident from the cause of good things, and there will be ‘two sources releasing their flow in opposite directions,’ one the source of good things, the other of evil things.”[55] (Opsomer and Steel, 84). For Proclus, matter is necessary for the universe; it is produced by the Good, and the Good cannot produce anything evil. “If then, matter offers itself to be used in the fabrication of the whole world, and has been produced for the sake of being ‘the receptacle of generation and, as it were, a wet-nurse’ and ‘mother’ (Timaeus 49a-50d), how can it be said to be evil, and even the primary evil?”[56]

Plotinus’s two doctrines are intrinsically related: if matter is evil, the soul should eschew contact with it and recover its unfallen essence as Plotinus taught. Iamblichus’ theory of the completely descended soul, by contrast, is complemented by his view that sensible matter is entirely good.[57] Iamblichus maintained that material objects can be experienced as the outflow of the One if we can learn to perceive them as such. Plotinus himself had coined the term for this kind of seeing: possessing the “eyes of Lynceus,” the Argonaut who saw treasures buried in the earth (Enn.V.8.4). It is, again, ironic that it was not Plotinus but his successor, Iamblichus, who used these eyes to develop his theurgic school. Iamblichus exorcised the dualist elements of Plotinus’s vision with a Pythagorean interpretation of matter as ultimately rooted in the One. The soul no longer must escape from the evil of matter to unite with the One because the One simply is the material cosmos and is present even in “stones, plants, animals, and human beings.”[58] The material objects that were obstacles for Plotinus become icons that help theurgists unite with divinity. 

Iamblichus outlined an itinerary of theurgic rituals for the common man as well as for the philosopher, and in this sense, theurgical Platonism was far more a religious practice than the Platonism of Plotinus. Iamblichus, like Pythagoras, made “a synthesis of divine philosophy and the worship of the gods,”[59] and this was evident to his students. According to Polymnia Athanassiadi:

Several generations of pupils who had come to Apamea emerged into the outside world with a new identity which singled them out as members of a specific religious community—more than that, as the shock troops of a new religion with a salvationary mission. As teachers and spiritual guides, as statesmen and administrators, the disciples…. of Iamblichus could be found everywhere, from the marketplace to the imperial court, disseminating the message through writing or by word of mouth, and occasionally by exercising their theurgical skills for the common good.[60]

Iamblichus saw theurgy in an almost evangelical sense. The social function of theurgists was to illuminate the world, a missionary trait not evident in the Platonism of Plotinus. It is perhaps no wonder that Iamblichean Platonism became the dominant school after the death of Plotinus, with Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, Proclus and Damascius adopting theurgical practices as well as the Pythagorean and Platonic curriculum that was established by Iamblichus.[61]

Let us go back to the distinction of Damascius:

There are those who prefer philosophy, like Porphyry and Plotinus and many others, and those who prefer theurgy, like Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus and the hieratic school generally.[62]

It might at first glance seem that these two Platonisms were vastly different, and there is no doubt that there were differences. But these differences are easy to overstate. The most significant difference was that Iamblichus encouraged the practice of rituals in accordance with one’s ancestral traditions and needs, and Plotinian Platonism did not embrace the ritual worship of the gods. This, of course, made it more amenable to being incorporated into Christianity than theurgy, with its explicitly polytheistic rituals. But even theurgical Platonism was adopted by the Church and became the framework for the sacraments of Dionysius the Areopagite. Iamblichean theurgy breathes through the Christian sacraments even to this day.[63]

One of the limitations of scholarship is that we tend to take our abstract descriptions as reality and assume that Iamblichus and his students were entirely different from Plotinus and his students.[64] But this would be a distortion. They were far more alike, and even if Plotinus did not engage in rituals to the gods, he lived in a communal house and tended to the very ordinary needs of his students and their children. Despite his rapturous imagery about ascending to the One, Plotinus was very much in this world. And so was Iamblichus, who is described by Eunapius as drinking wine and charming his students in relaxed conversations near his villas and on pilgrimages to holy sites.[65] They were both august Platonic philosophers and were far more alike than different. We end up exaggerating their differences based on their metaphysics. But they were both Platonic mystagogues, and they both shared their depth with philosophical friends and students. They both practiced catharsis and experienced divine union. If we can put on a talisman to protect us from thinking their metaphysical differences defined them, it is still worth examining what was going on with the different kinds of mystagogy they encouraged. Having recognized their existential similarities, it is worth reconsidering their differences again in light of Damascius’s comments, especially his reference to finding the middle ground and calling the philosopher a Bacchus.

But Plato, realizing that strong arguments can be advanced from both sides, united them in a single truth by calling the philosopher a Bacchus. For, if the man who has freed himself from generation were to stand in the middle, he would draw both to himself. And yet it is clear that he calls the philosopher a Bacchus in his desire to exalt him just as we call Nous a god or call physical light spiritual light.[66]

What does it mean to call the philosopher a Bacchus-Dionysus, the last god of the Orphic theogony so revered by the later Platonists? Dionysus was the embodied Demiurge, the human god, the god whose unique character as a divinity is that he is torn apart by the Titans. Paradoxically, fragmentation was his way to manifest divinity, a way that invites human souls to share in it, just as our Nous is seen to be a god and physical light is seen as a sunthēma of spiritual light.[67] Following the Orphic vision, it is to see our entire world as a manifestation of Dionysus. And so, Damascius says, the exalted ascent of Plotinus and the ritual descent of the theurgists are united in the philosopher who is both a Bacchus-Dionysus, an embodied god.

Let us now return to the Platonic mandala of the Timaeus, the imaginal map aligning the microcosm of the individual soul with the macrocosm of the World Soul. Assuming that the soul has been purified to enter this imaginal temple, what are the rituals required to unite with divinity? Here is where Plotinus seems to have less to offer and where Iamblichus has more. He explains that all souls, from the most materialistic to the most spiritual, have theurgic rites appropriate to them. All souls were invited to worship in this temple, but he is explicit that they should not perform sacrifices beyond their capacity.

Each should perform his offering to the divine according to what he is, not according to what he is not; after all, the sacrifice should not surpass the proper measure of the worshiper.[68]

Iamblichus coordinated a framework of theurgic rituals for material souls, whom he calls “the great herd,” purely noetic souls, and intermediate souls.[69] Like an electrical engineer who must match the capacity of the worshiper to the amplitude of the ritual performed, the Platonic theurgist built a psychic body capable of receiving greater and greater degrees of divine power, and there was no skipping the rudimentary steps of the material rites.[70] The key was to fit the ritual and God to the worshiper. There was nothing “better” about an immaterial sacrifice than an animal sacrifice; what made the rite effective theurgically was that it would match the psychic state of the worshipper. The gods were revealed in nature, and theurgists begin by worshiping the gods and their daimonic powers in their material forms. Iamblichus warns that those who aggressively “leap after the gods” fail to reach them, and their efforts only make them more perverse.[71] Iamblichus admits that he often performs rituals for his bodily needs to the gods and daimones that oversee his physical body.[72] In effect, the theurgist had to worship (and appropriate) all the gods and daimons in the cosmos. He enters their activity, the energeia of the divinity—which is what theourgia is—and his “body” gradually becomes the body of the entire cosmos. The theurgist eventually “takes the shape of the gods”[73] by becoming united with the World Soul. And this is achieved by finding the ratios (logoi) in the cosmos that correspond to the ratios in his soul. He becomes unified with each of the planetary gods, like the Demiurge of the sensible cosmos, Dionysus. He becomes, as Damascius said, a Bacchus. The microcosm aligned with the macrocosm.

This vision of Iamblichus enhanced the traditional worship of the ancestral gods by aligning it with the Platonic and theurgic trajectory of deification. Without taking anything away from the reflections of Plotinus, Iamblichus incarnates Plotinian visions into a practical mystagogy that invites people at every level of life. This is surely why the Emperor Julian was enraptured by the teachings of the theios Iamblichus and wanted to implement his vision throughout the empire. Julian’s engagement with theurgical Platonism makes a fitting conclusion to this study of Platonic mystagogy. He embodied the tensions concerning the direction of Platonism, including Bacchic and erotic madness. Even if “heaven-sent,” as Plato says in the Phaedrus, madness can be challenging.[74] Not surprisingly, divine eros was also part of the tradition of the Chaldean Oracles.

According to the Oracles, the Demiurge fills each soul with a “deep eros” (bathus erōs) to draw us back to the gods.[75] It is Eros that divides Unity into coordinated multiplicity, even into our embodied self-alienation, and yet it is also Eros that draws us back into Unity. From the perspective of theurgic Platonism, the embodiment and alienation of the human soul is simply the pivot through which the eros of the Demiurge returns to itself. In terms of the Orphic myth, the fiery thunderbolt of Zeus that immolates the Titans inevitably creates the Titanic and Dionysian mixing that ensouls the world. The trace of this fire is in human souls, and—like the deep Eros of the Oracles—it draws souls back to their divine and fiery origin. It is this Eros that transports philosophers into “the madness, the Bacchic frenzy of philosophy,” as Alcibiades says in the Symposium.[76]

Was there tension among Platonists between those who practiced theurgy and those who practiced philosophy? Undoubtedly, yes. Bacchic madness, the loss of rational control, understandably frightens us, and surely it frightened ancient thinkers as well. So, it is not surprising that this tradition faced resistance. Nor is it surprising that there was tension between the inspired theurgic and the rational philosophic schools of Platonism. This tension is reflected perhaps most dramatically in the emperor Julian, who, as a young man, was introduced to the teachings of Iamblichus by his successor, Aedesius.[77] Being advanced in years, Aedesius directed the overeager Julian to study with his senior students, Chrysanthius and Eusebius, who were inclined toward theurgy and philosophy respectively. Eusebius was critical of theurgic practices and once explained to Julian how dangerous and powerful such practices can be, describing in detail a séance that a fellow student, Maximus, had performed in which he invoked the goddess Hecate and animated her statue. Eusebius, who preferred dialectical studies, condemned Maximus’ supernatural powers as nothing more than deception and sorcery. Julian, however, was enthralled at hearing the tale and said to Eusebius: “Farewell and devote yourself to your books. You have shown me the man I was looking for.”[78] Julian sought out Maximus and became an ardent student of the theurgical rites of Neoplatonism.[79] Without doubt, the tensions between the bookish Eusebius and the flamboyant Maximus mark the extremes of the two paths described by Damascius, which he sought to address by implying that the tension is superficial; an opposition only among those who fail to become Bacchoi. In the sixth century, according to Damascius, true philosophers, the Bacchoi, were also theurgists, and theurgists were also philosophers.[80]

Emperor Julian had been initiated into Neoplatonic mystagogy and refers to the god Dionysus in the same way that Proclus and Damascius later refer to him (which suggests that this was an Iamblichean teaching). He is the god that, although fragmented and torn apart, remains the creative source and monad hidden within his own fragmented body. Julian explains this complexity:

He who will not by a process of divine frenzy turn the plurality of this life into the unified essence of Dionysus—an essence that remains indivisible while inhabiting the divisible—runs the risk of seeing his life flow into many channels, …be torn to shreds, and …  vanish away. And when I say “flow” or “torn to shreds,” no one should consider the bare meaning of the words and suppose that I mean a trickle of water or a thread of linen, but he must understand these words in another sense, that used by Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry and the divine Iamblichus.[81]

When and where did this mystagogy, this fusion of philosophy with theurgic ritual, begin? And why did the later Platonists transform their metaphysics into religious rites? Following Athanassiadi, I would argue that this fusion of religion and philosophy was the creation of Iamblichus. He integrated the intellectual disciplines of Platonic philosophy with religious ritual to produce a revolutionary synthesis. The gods became accessible both in nature and in culture; it was a polytheistic vision and way of life later repressed by the Imperial Church’s monotheistic hegemony. When Iamblichus was introduced to theurgy in the third century, it had been limited to a caste of Chaldean priests and their oracular rites in the temple of Bel Adad in Apamea, Syria.[82] In the early second century, one of these priests, Julian the Chaldean, groomed his son, Julian the Theurgist, to function as a medium for the gods and—it was reported—he channeled the deified soul of Plato himself. The oracles of Julian the Theurgist were recorded and edited by father and son and later took on a kind of scriptural authority for Platonists as the Chaldean Oracles.[83] Apamea was at the crossroads of East and West; in addition to its temple of Bel Adad and Babylonian gods, in the second century it was home to the Platonic and Pythagorean philosopher Numenius and, later, to Iamblichus, all of which led to a unique mingling of traditions. 

Iamblichus explained the revelations of the Chaldean Oracles in accordance with Platonic and Pythagorean principles. He Platonized Chaldean theurgy just as Proclus, Damascius, and Olympiodorus Platonized the Orphic Hymns. The later Platonists followed Iamblichus’s fusion of philosophy with religion and applied his hieratic vision to all pagan traditions. Iamblichean theurgy thus represents a seminal moment of theological creativity and ecumenism. By appropriating the Oracles to the heart of Platonic philosophy, Iamblichus transformed both Platonism and ancient religious practice. Platonic mystagogia came to define Platonism from the late third to the sixth centuries CE. After the Academy was closed by Justinian in 529 CE, these practices slowly vanished and were either appropriated by Christian theologians, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, or were later recovered by astrologers and magicians like Marsilio Ficino in fifteenth-century Florence as well as by occultists such as Cornelius Agrippa in the sixteenth century.

Iamblichean theurgy was not only a seminal moment of theological creativity in the fourth century CE; even now it continues to challenge our habit of misplaced concreteness, of mistaking conceptual explanations for reality. Theurgy invites us to enter activities that are prior to our categories of thought. Since many scholars find these activities difficult to enter and articulate, they have either been disparaged or ignored. Scholars of Platonism, therefore, have preferred Plotinus’s “rational mysticism” over the irrational superstitions of theurgy. It’s not that Plotinus shared this attitude, but his “more rational” Platonism represents what scholars today more easily identify with. It is true that after 529 CE theurgy went underground, yet it remained a stream of divine activity hidden in the rituals of the Abrahamic traditions and was more explicitly revealed in the practices of Western magicians. Today theurgy remains a rich reservoir waiting to be tapped by those dissatisfied with the lack of meaning in our conceptually curated world.

Lead quote: Marinus, Proclus or On Happiness XIII, 44–46, cited by Jean Trouillard, La mystagogie de Proclos, (Les Belles Lettres, 1982), 9.

[1] Proclus, Platonic Theology I, I.1: 5:16–6.3.

[2] Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic philosophy, edited with translation by L. G. Westerink (The Prometheus Trust, 2011), 1.20,2.

[3] Alfred North Whitehead famously observed, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978), 39.

[4] The curriculum of Iamblichus is described in the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, thought to be written by Olympiodorus in the sixth century CE;  translated by L. G. Westerink (Prometheus Trust, 2011) 26.1 45; 46–48. See also  Polymnia Athanassiadi, “Canonizing Platonism: The Fetters of Iamblichus,” in Mutations of Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015),136.

[5] These exceptions are discussed in  Crystal Addey’s review of Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern, edited by Kevin Corrigan and John D. Turner, in The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 2, no. 1 (2008): 88–92. She notes that Thomas Szlezak emphasizes that the full experience of Platonic dialectic “cannot be written down,” and that the goal of dialectic involves the soul becoming divine. Robert Berchman notes that while we moderns see the world as “dominated” by our descriptions, this was not the case for Platonists. And John Dillon, she notes, described the Forms not as static objects of perfection but as “laws” of creation, unfolding into our reality. These are more aligned with the later Platonism I am describing.

[6] As Plato says in the Phaedo, 69c–d: “For as they say in the mysteries, the ‘thyrsus-bearers are many, but the Bacchoi are few,’ and these Bacchoi are, I believe, those who have been true philosophers.” Plato equates philosophers to those initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis.

[7] Aristotle, quoted in Synesius, Dio 10.

[8] Proclus, In Rempublicam II.108.17–30; see Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987), 114. 

[9] Des Places, seeking to account for Iamblichus’ mathematical brilliance alongside his practice of theurgy, says that he had a “double personality.” Édouard des Places, "La religion de Jamblique," in De Jamblique à Proclus, Entretiens sur l'Antiquité classique 21 (Fondation Hardt, 1975), 77–78.

[10] Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1995). Kingsley critiques what he calls the scholarship of “optimistic evolutionism,” which distinguishes the “primitive crudity” of Empedocles' magical beliefs from the “intellectual depth” of his science (294–96).

[11] From the introduction to Purifications; see G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 399, discussing Empedocles, fragment 112.

[12] Peter Kingsley, “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2002): 350–56.

[13] Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (The Golden Sufi Center, 1999), 5–10.

[14] See Peter Kingsley's discussion of the terminology of the mysteries in relation to Theon of Smyrna and its comparison with the terminology and procedures employed by Empedocles in “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2002): 348–49, esp. n. 33. Kingsley further argues that the title Purifications is significant because only purified souls were able to enter the mysteries of the cosmos that Empedocles reveals to his student Pausanias in On Nature; see Peter Kingsley, Reality (Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003), 350–56.

[15] Taking the shape of the gods (DM.184.7–8); gods reveal themselves in human souls. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis 184.7–8; Calvenus Taurus, quoted by Iamblichus in Stobaeus, Anthologium 1.379.5–6.

[16] Jean Trouillard, La purification plotinienne (Presses Universitaires de France, 1955).

[17] According to Trouillard, catharsis leads not to an “idea” of totality but enables the soul to participate in the divine procession as a realizing law of manifestation; see Trouillard, La purification plotinienne, 81. Trouillard followed this seminal study of catharsis with La procession plotinienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955).

[18] Ibid., 5.

[19] Ibid., 81.

[20] Buddhism makes a very similar point about the defenses of the ego. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, addressing this point, says: “The fear of the absence of the self, of the egoless state, is a constant threat to us. ‘Suppose it is true, what then? I am afraid to look.’ We want to maintain some solidity…. we are bewildered by the discovery of selflessness and do not want to accept it; we want to hold on to something…. In other words, there is a fear of not being confirmed by our projections. One must constantly try to prove that one does exist by feeling one’s projections as a solid thing. Feeling the solidity of something seemingly outside you reassures you that you are a solid entity as well.” Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation (Shambhala Publications, 1976), 21. The practice of sitting meditation, prostrations, etc. might be considered cathartic practices that lead practitioners to the state of śūnyatā: seeing beyond conceptualization. This realization of emptiness is needed before one can engage in the esoteric practices of tantra (see Chögyam Trungpa, Journey without Goal: The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha (Prajñā Press, 1981), 25–29).

[21] Plato, Gorgias 497c.

[22] Plato’s Laws (12.957d) uses alexipharmakon in a similar way to indicate an antidote to mistaken views. Plato says those who would be lawgivers must possess the writings of the divine lawgiver and use these as a talisman (alexipharmakon) against all other speeches.

[23] For a masterful treatment of this topic, see John Bussanich, “Socrates as Mystic,” in Traditions of Platonism: Essays in Honor of John Dillon, ed. John J. Cleary (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 25–51. My remarks on Socrates follow Bussanich on virtually all points.

[24] Plato, Apology 23a–b.

[25] Ibid., 33c.

[26] See in particular Bussanich's discussion of scholars’ attempts to explain away the "irrational" elements of Socrates' statements: “I wish to argue that the sharp contrast in these accounts of Socratic philosophy between irrational faith or superstition on the one hand and reason on the other hand derives from Christianizing assumptions that have been reified by post-Reformation and Enlightenment thought.... That the insights of the classic philosophers have something to do with 'natural reason' as distinguished from 'revelation' is a conceit developed by the Christian Fathers....” Bussanich, “Socrates as Mystic,” 38.

[27] See Sara Rappe's discussion in Reading Neoplatonism: Non-Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge University Press, 2000), passim. As Rappe explains, the Neoplatonists’ radical critique of discursive thinking led them to regard Plato's writings as a mystagogy with a “supernatural source in the revelations of Apollo” (xii). See also Marinus, Life of Proclus 13, where Syrianus is said to have “led his student [Proclus] into the mystagogy (mystagōgia) of Plato”; Jean Trouillard, La mystagogie de Proclos (Les Belles Lettres, 1982), 9.

[28] Cited by Bussanich, “Socrates as Mystic,” 40.

[29] On the meaning of darshan as coming into the presence of a divine being, see The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion (Shambhala, 1994), 84. In light of Aristides' testimony, consider the encyclopedia's definition of avatar, an incarnation of a god: "[One who] is able to confer divine knowledge upon his fellow human beings by a touch, a glance, or even through his silence" (25).

[30] It may be significant that Plato has Alcibiades revealing the Socratic mysteries while drunk, for a drunken Alcibiades was notorious for having revealed the Eleusinian mysteries.

[31] He says that Socrates makes him utterly ashamed of his life (Plato, Symposium 216a).

[32] From the Greek ouden, meaning “nothing.”

[33] Socratic emptiness (oudeneia) has its functional equivalent in the Buddhist shunyata (emptiness).

[34] Imaginal is a term coined by Henry Corbin to distinguish it from the mere “imaginary.” The imaginal world (mundus imaginalis) is located between the pure noetic forms and the world of everyday life.

[35] Plato, Timaeus 30 for the generosity of the Creator. Timaeus 35 for the mixing of “the same, the different, and being.”

[36] Ibid.,30d;  37c.

[37] From the Sanskrit, mandala is a sacred circle in which ritual transformations take place.

[38] Plato, Theaetetus 176b.

[39] Damascius, Commentary on Plato's Phaedo I.128, text and trans. L. G. Westerink, vol. 1 (The Prometheus Trust, 2009; first published North-Holland Publishing Company, 1977), 172; translation modified from Polymnia Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History. Text with Translation and Notes (Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), 57.

[40] Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History, 91.

[41] Damascius, Traité des premiers principes, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Joseph Combès and L. G. Westerink (Les Belles Lettres, 1986–1991), 1:24.24–25.3; English translation adapted from John Dillon, “Damascius on the Ineffable,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 78 (1996): 128.

[42] Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History, 115. Elsewhere Damascius confesses his own failings as a rhetor: “How pernicious an activity was rhetoric, focusing all my attention on the mouth and the tongue and turning it away from the soul and from the blissful and divine lessons which purify it....” Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History, 307. Damascius also says that Isidore was suspicious of the pomposity and pretentiousness of rhetoric (141).

[43] Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.9.46–47.

[44] A. C. Lloyd, The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (Clarendon Press, 1990), 126 (emphasis added).

[45] Plotinus, Ennead I.6.8.

[46]Ibid.,  IV 8.8.1–4.

[47] Ibid.,  I.8.3.39.

[48] Proclus, Éléments de théologie, trans., intro., and notes by Jean Trouillard (Aubier, 1965), 23–25.

[49] Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, 70.1–5 (translation modified).

[50] Ibid., 70.5–10.

[51] Jean-Marc Narbonne argues that Plotinus's language concerning the soul's relation to the body—an illumination rather than a descent—was shaped directly by his engagement with the Gnostics, specifically the Gnostic treatise Zostrianos. According to Narbonne, the Gnostics appropriated Neopythagorean arithmology to portray creation as a fall caused by the Indefinite Dyad no longer contained by the Limit (horos) of the Monad. Plotinus counters this dualistic position in his very next treatise, “On Number,” where he argues that numbers are the guarantors of measure that encircle the unlimited impulse of matter and thus hold “infinite-matter-evil ... [as] an enemy bound within the totality of being, a rebellious counter-principle, admittedly, yes, but one that remains subordinate to being....” See Jean-Marc Narbonne, “The Neopythagorean Backdrop to the Fall (σφάλμα/νεῦσις) of the Soul in Gnosticism and Its Echo in the Plotinian Treatises 33 and 34,” in Gnosticism, Platonism and the Late Ancient World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner, ed. Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus (Brill, 2013), 411–24, quotation at 424. As Narbonne's language itself suggests, the portrayal of matter as an “enemy” and a “rebellious counter-principle” is precisely what later Platonists perceived as a residual dualism in Plotinus.

[52] Henri Dominique Saffrey and Alain-Philippe Segonds persuasively explore the tension between Iamblichus and Porphyry: “La Vie de Plotin, comme l'édition des Ennéades dans la mise en ordre porphyrienne, peuvent aussi être considérées comme l'affirmation d'une position opposée à celle de Jamblique....” Porphyre: Lettre à Anébon l'Égyptien. Text, translation, and commentary by Henri Dominique Saffrey and Alain-Philippe Segonds (Les Belles Lettres, 2012), xlv (emphasis added). Porphyry thus promoted Plotinian Platonism at the expense of Iamblichus.

[53] While Plotinus' doctrine of matter as evil remains a topic of significant scholarly debate, the fact is that Iamblichus, Proclus, and the later Platonists disagreed with Plotinus. Their cosmology was more indebted to the Neopythagorean metaphysics promoted by Iamblichus, in which sensible matter is understood as the expression of a divine principle: the Indefinite Dyad. For Plotinus the value of the cosmos is diminished in proportion to its degree of sensible expression. This is not the case for Iamblichus or Proclus. As Iamblichus puts it, the influence of higher principles is "more penetrating" than intermediate principles, and therefore the One is fully present—and perhaps especially present—in sensible matter (Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell [Society of Biblical Literature, 2003], 236). This provides a rationale for the theurgic use of material objects. Proclus devoted much of his treatise On the Existence of Evils to refuting Plotinus' position on matter. As he argues, if matter is evil it becomes an “alternative principle of beings, dissident from the cause of good things, and there will be ‘two sources releasing their flow in opposite directions,’ one the source of good things, the other of evil things” (Proclus, On the Existence of Evils, trans. Jan Opsomer and Carlos Steel [Cornell University Press, 2003], 84). For Proclus, matter is necessary for the universe; it is produced by the Good, and the Good cannot produce anything evil. “If, then, matter offers itself to be used in the fabrication of the whole world, and has been produced for the sake of being ‘the receptacle of generation and, as it were, a wet-nurse’ and ‘mother’” (Timaeus 49a–50d), “how can it be said to be evil, and even the primary evil?” (Opsomer and Steel, On the Existence of Evils, 81).

[54] John Dillon, ed. and trans., Iamblichi Chalcidensis in Platonis Dialogos Commentariorum Fragmenta (Brill, 1973), 236.

[55] Proclus: On the Existence of Evils, tr. Jan Opsomer & Carlos Steel (NY: Bloomsbury, 2014) 84.

[56] Ibid., 81.

[57] Given our dualist understanding of Plato and Platonism, this may seem difficult to understand. Yet Iamblichus (and the later Platonists) was quite clear that material reality is good: “It would be far from true to suggest that the material principle is evil.... Wouldn't it be senseless to say that the natural receptacle of such a thing [the beauty of numbers] is evil or ugly?” Material reality was entirely good despite the soul's tendencies to excess; matter was the receptacle of the arithmoi that shape and inform the world. For the sources of these quotations and further discussion, see Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 28–36, esp. 33. Damascius was the last and arguably the most brilliant head of the Platonic school before its closure by Emperor Justinian in 529 C.E. See Sara Ahbel-Rappe, “Damascius,” in A Companion to Late Ancient Philosophy, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 391 (translation modified).

[58] Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 233.9–13. All references follow the Parthey pagination, preceded by DM, for the Latin De Mysteriis.

[59] Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, trans. John Dillon and Jackson Hershbell (Scholars Press, 1991), 85.7–15.

[60] Polymnia Athanassiadi, “Julian the Theurgist: Man or Myth?,” in Die Chaldäischen Orakel: Kontext, Interpretation, Rezeption, ed. Helmut Seng and Michel Tardieu (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), 204.

[61] Athanassiadi, “Canonizing Platonism: The Fetters of Iamblichus,” chap. 6.

[62] Damascius, Commentary on Plato's Phaedo I.128, 172; translation modified from Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History, 57.

[63] Gregory Shaw, “Neoplatonic Theurgy and Dionysius the Areopagite,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 4 (1999): 573–99.

[64] Trouillard writes that “reason habitually seeks to enclose itself in a circle of definitive constructions ... it substitutes its abstractions and images for reality without realizing it.” Trouillard, La purification plotinienne, 57.

[65] Philostratus and Eunapius, The Lives of the Sophists, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, 1968), 365.

[66] Damascius, Commentary on Plato's Phaedo I.128, 172; translation modified from Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History, 57.

[67] In theurgy, a sunthēma is a symbol or signature of the divine in nature.

[68] DM 220.5 –7.

[69] DM 223.100 –224.6.

[70] Radcliffe G. Edmonds III gave me the idea of theurgy as a system of electrical circuitry. See Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World (Princeton University Press, 2021), 316.

[71] DM 176.13 –177.7.

[72] DM 221.1 –4.

[73] DM 184.8 –13.

[74] Plato, Phaedrus 244a.6–8.

[75] The Chaldean Oracles, frag. 43, trans. Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1989).

[76] Plato, Symposium 218b.

[77] See Athanassiadi's discussion of the rift among the post-Iamblichean Platonists and the position taken by Julian in Athanassiadi, “The Creation of Orthodoxy in Neoplatonism,” 278–80.

[78] Philostratus and Eunapius, The Lives of the Sophists, 433–35. Athanassiadi points out that Eunapius may have been deliberately echoing Plotinus' famous remark upon meeting his teacher, Ammonius Saccas; see Polymnia Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981; repr., Routledge, 1992), 33.

[79] For an analysis of Julian's conversion to theurgical Platonism, see Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography, 31–39.

[80] Damascius seems to have preferred the philosophic path to the theurgic; Proclus gave precedence to theurgy over philosophy. Yet both Platonists incorporated the disciplines of both philosophy and theurgy. Once Platonic philosophy aligned itself with theurgy, it was never the same. It became hieratic.

[81] Cited in Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography, 37–38. Here Julian seems to blend the dismemberment of Dionysus with the tearing apart of Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae.

[82] Athanassiadi explains that “Bel” is a title applied to various Babylonian gods, while Adad refers to the Babylonian storm god; see Polymnia Athanassiadi, “The Chaldean Oracles: Theology and Theurgy,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 153–55. In the Neoplatonic synthesis reflected in Proclus, “Ad” refers to the One, while its duplication, “Adad,” designates the Demiurge; see Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 594, cited in Athanassiadi, “The Chaldean Oracles: Theology and Theurgy,” 154.

[83] Or, more simply, Ta Logia (“the Oracles”).

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