Opening the imagination - expressing the heart

This oracle of the now deified Apollonius calls to mind the thirteenth and twenty-second sections of Pletho's 'Chaldaean Oracles', indeed it may itself be regarded as both a genuine communication, and a guide for those hardy souls assaying the theurgic art of ascent to their spiritual original. The Neoplatonist Proclus believed that the gods had shown him the essential psychic signs (the Theurgic 'Character') of several Greek heroes, including that of Plato himself, as well as their "mystic names", a fact which enabled him to bring about their appearance at his evocations. From theurgic writings, those of Proclus especially, we can deduce that in these claims to having evoked such and such a person or deity the subjects experienced a type of self-recollection, a ritual 'anamnesis', whereby the lineage of their own soul was visibly displayed, often very publicly, for the edification and enlightenment of all mankind, "Inquire after the channel of the soul... combining the act with the sacred word" as the Chaldaean Oracles command. At the lowest these evocations constitute the supreme spiritual arrogance, a great thinker like Proclus could be excused his 'evoking' both Plato and the pythagorean Numenius of Apamea, whilst an even more profound philosopher like Plotinus could quite reasonably be supposed to have filled a Roman temple of Isis with the light diffused by his guardian spirit. Yet sure as Julian the Theurgist claimed also to have summoned and questioned Plato, so every unlearned impostor in the ancient world may have claimed spiritual descent for his or her soul from one of the Olympians.

Behind this art of evocation, this 'drawing into being' from the world of invisible potentials, lay a whole science of physical and psychical sympathies and antipathies. The short tract 'On the Priestly Art' by Proclus givesa deceptively simple series of solar correspondences throughout the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, whose theory relies for its justification upon his immense logical and theological treatises, his commentaries upon Plato, the 'Geometry' of Euclid, and the mysticism of the Chaldaean Oracles to which he was addicted. The magicians like Proclus and his predecessor Iamblichus of Chalcis, as well as early Christian writers regarded the composition of angelic, daemonic, and human bodies as participating in the energies of one another and of the Gods in differing degrees. To explain the confusion created by particular types of spiritual experience, these writers had recourse to the idea of a 'vehicle' of the soul, a type of starry envelope free from subjection to normal physical space and time. Apollonius of Tyana, like Pythagoras before him, was credited with the ability to appear in two places at once, sometimes seperated by immense distances. This ability, conferred upon him by his having been initiated into the life of this world and the next finds its traditional expression in the story of how Apollonius visited the cave of Trophonius, mythical builder of Apollo's temple at Delphi and presiding daemon of an oracular cave at Lebadea. According to the story in Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana descended into the cave not to receive a personal oracle, but "..in the interests of philosophy.." to which the officiating priests strongly objected. After seven days Apollonius emerged from the cave carrying a book of pythagorean philosophy, perhaps written in the same 'Cappadocian' dialect of greek in which Apollonius is supposed to have written his works on sacrifices, and on divination by the stars.

This descent into the underworld was viewed by theurgists as a natural progression from normal education, a threefold process of purgation, illumination and perfection. Hierocles, that indefatigable commentator on the 'Golden Verses of Pythagoras' perfectly sums up the aim of this curriculum:

"..Now to all these things that have been said in particular concerning the soul, in regard to its purification, and to its deliverance, we ought to join things of the like nature with these, and that analogically and proportionately answer to them, for the purgation of the luminous body. And hence it necessarily follows, that the purgations which are made by means of the mathematical sciences, should be accompanied by the mystical purgations of the initiations; and that the deliverance, performed by dialectics, should be attended by the introduction to what is most sublime and most excellent. For these are properly the things that purify, and that render perfect the spiritual chariot of the soul, that disengage it from the pollutions and from the disorder of matter, and that render it fit to converse with pure spirits.."

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Last modified: November 09, 2003