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Greek Magic 21/may/2025
🕑 Added 2025-05-21 16:18:11 +0000 UTCWHAT WE NEED
Page introducing greek magic
Page on Plato - 1
Page on Aristotle - 1
Page on Neoplatonism - 1
Greek folk magic -1
Gnosticism
About 6 pages
Hermeticism
About 6 pages
MAGIC IN THE ANCIENT HELLENIC WORLD
From mentions in philosophy, mythology, literature, plays, to court records, our image of “magic” in the ancient mediterranean is a slapdash quilt stitched together from hundreds of different sources. To illustrate, let us discuss the Magi.
Ancient Persia, which was right next door to ancient Greece, was home to the Zoroastrians. This was a religion based on the teachings of their legendary founder, Zarathustra, or Zoroaster to the Greeks. The priests of this religion were called the Magi, Magos to the Greeks. So whenever you see ancient Greek literature referring to the Magi, we can safely assume they are referring to Zoroastrian priests, correct? Not so, dear reader. Over time, it is clear that in the Greek speaking world, “Magi” became a general term for “any foreigner who does magic.” Eventually this was diluted even further to “anyone who does magic” or even “a person who is wise.”
Dear reader, I am about to hit you with a long and complicated list of people who did “magic” in ancient Greece. I am about to detail many of the words used for these different types of practitioners. I want you to understand that these terms are just as slippery as the relationship between “magic” and “magi”.
There are four common terms for the types of people who practice Maegia. They are: Goes, Psuchagogoi, Manteis, Magoi, and Pharmakides.
Goes is usually translated as “Sorcerer.” These are folks who call up and manipulate the spirits of the dead. The term itself seems to come from a persian or median term that refers to wailing. This references a possible practice of wild and emotional incanting over the dead to evoke their spirits in some way. Sometimes the Goes acts as a mouthpiece and allows the dead to speak through them, sometimes they command the spirits to carry out the desires of the Goes. [Ogden 49]
Psuchagogoi is usually translated as “evocator.” The term literally translates to “soul-drawer.” Plato has some very negative thoughts about these folks. The Psuchagogoi are often associated with practices we might call exorcism. Many references to them involve the psuchagogoi slitting the throat of an animal as a sacrifice to some lost or unquiet spirit. [Ogden 27]
Manteis literally means seer, and is often translated as such, but is occasionally translated as “prophet” or “diviner.” These folks tell fortunes through diverse means. Sometimes, they simply stare into a fire or a bowl of water, and derive the future from what they see within. Sometimes, they are inhabited by a ghost or spirit which delivers prophecies with the Manteis as a mouthpiece. A personal favorite example is the engastrimuthos, literally “belly-prophet.” Who have prophecy-delivering spirits specifically in their stomachs. [Ogden 31]
Pharmakeía doesn’t have a direct translation. It means both healer and poisoner. It refers to someone who knows a lot about plants, and uses that knowledge to produce medicines, poisons, and other substances of various magical applications. This is easily one of the most commonly referenced practices in greco-roman literature. While they were still regarded with suspicion and distrust, the pharmakeía enjoy a bit more prestige. Many of the initiatory mysteries common to the greco-roman world involved the consumption of what were very likely psychoactive substances. Whoever was in charge of managing these substances would have been considered a pharmakeía. Additionally, this is the term commonly used for mythological figures like Medea and Circie. So, dear reader, if you ever hear someone refer to Medea and Circie as witches, you can give them a good “well actually” that term didn’t exist yet. Medea and Circie were not witches, they were pharmakeía.
PLATO
Western Esotericism begins with Plato. Don’t get scared. I am not about to spend the next several pages explaining all of classical philosophy to you. Our focus is more specific. The purpose of this text, dear reader, is to teach you how to approach a text like an esotericist. When faced with an unfamiliar writer, our first goal is to keep an eye out for three things: Style, Epistemology, and Physics. What kind of writer are we dealing with? Where does knowledge come from? What is the world made of? If you understand these three things, you’ve done 80% of the work.
Stylistically, Plato is a trickster. His writing is structured in the form of dialogues. These are extended literary arguments between two characters. Usually, between one of Plato’s students, and Socrates.* He debates questions like What is bravery? What is truth? What is friendship? By the end of the dialogue, the answer is almost always a resounding Who the Hell Knows?
Plato is not trying to inform the reader, per se. He is trying to induce aporea a philosophical state of puzzlement and confusion, usually marked by admitting “actually I don’t know what the hell friendship, truth, and bravery are.” According to Plato, knowledge is not actually transferable. A teacher cannot simply pour knowledge into someone’s head like pouring water into a bucket. All you can do is strip away wrong thoughts and misconceptions. You cannot just give someone information. They must arrive at it themselves. This requires some help. Wisdom, according to Plato, must be arrived at through a combination of reason and divine inspiration.
To explain exactly what he means by divine inspiration, we have to discuss Plato’s physics. You see, dear reader, we are chained to the wall of a cave. All we see are the shadows cast upon the wall. We cannot see the forms casting the shadows. Ask Plato, what is a dog made of? Plato will say that the dogs we see are but shadows of the dog-form. There is an essence of dog-ness present within all dogs, or in which dogs participate. There is a Platonic Form of a dog, and all we see is the shadow.
What is the dog-form made of? Well stop me if you’ve heard this one before; consider the Ship of Theseus. It is made of wood that Theseus himself touched. But replace every board and nail until there remains no part that Theseus touched, is it still the ship of Theseus? The point that Plato is actually making with this thought experiment, is that there is a difference between the hylos (literally koine for wood) of the ship, and the ahylos (literally, koine for non-wood) of the ship. The ship of theseus has both material, and immaterial components, but the most important qualities of an object are immaterial and hidden. The most important parts of the world are occult.
The gods have placed a great veil over the world. You can learn about the wood of the ship of theseus with your eyes and hands. But to learn about that higher, formal ship of theseus. You gotta use your noggin. But not just anyone gets to see the world of platonic forms. According to plato, every time you learn something, it is because you thought about it hard enough the gods noticed, and gave you a peek behind the curtain.
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle! Student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the great, he is considered “the normal one” compared to Plato’s effusive and theological philosophy. Where Plato saw a world of immaterial forms taking material shapes, Aristotle saw a world made of nothing but atoms and void. The Aristotelian universe is inanimate, made of atoms of earth, air, water, fire, and sometimes aether. Every change in the universe happens due to one of four causes; material, formal, efficient, and final. All of it was knocked into motion by an original “prime mover” but who knows what that could have been.
Aristotle is a straightforward writer. He is concerned with empirical, observable, facts. He wrote dictionaries of the natural world, where he explores questions like “how many legs does an ant have” or “how many types of shellfish are there?” Aristotle rejects the idea that there is “specially unknowable” knowledge. If you can learn it, you can learn it. There is mundane knowledge you get from observing the world around you, and complex knowledge created when you contemplate what you have learned.
Most of the surviving works from Aristotle are on Ethics and Politics. We don’t care about those. When it comes to esoteric history, we are far more concerned with pseudo-aristotle.
When Alexander the Great died, legends about his life sprang up like weeds. Aristotle, being a major character in his life, was given a legendary role. He was no longer the sober, empirical, tutor to a great military mind. He was cast as Alexander’s court wizard, a font of occult insight who taught cosmic secrets to a legendary hero. Plus, if you wrote something, and you wanted it to have some real clout, you could just lie and say Aristotle wrote it. This trick would be pulled for several hundred years. Thus, pseudo-aristotle became equally as influential as the actual historical aristotle.
Aristotle died in 322 BCE. By the time we hit Plutarch in 40 CE, people have fully accepted the Esoteric Pseudo-Aristotle as truth. Plutarch cites a (fake) letter between Aristotle and Alexander, in which Alexander chastises his teacher, essentially saying “why have you spoken the inner secrets of our esoteric order aloud, publicly, for all to hear?” To which Aristotle replies “They won’t even know that what I said is special.” This is one of the earliest examples of an essential concept for Western Esotericism, The Esoteric Secret. The wisdom is so esoteric that it hides itself from the general public. Only the initiated have the “key” to understanding it.
Part of why this “esotericicizing” happened, is that Plato and Aristotle don’t agree on much. But they agree just often enough to be tantalizing. For the next several thousand years, philosophers would try their hand at unifying the two, to varying –and wonderfully esoteric– degrees of success.
PLOTINUS
The Ceasers of rome maintained a version of Plato’s academy, with chairs for each of the major branches of philosophy. We don’t know who chaired the academy in the 3rd century, but we know he exchanged letters with Plotinus. The chair asked his opinions on philosophical matters, not the other way around. Successor to the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, major influence on every Abrahamic religion, major commentator on Plato. If you want to learn Platonic philosophy in the 3rd century, you had to go through Plotinus.
His influence on pagan philosophy was so great, he has a whole era named after him. He marks the beginning of Late Platonism. Now, if you’re familiar with occult philosophy, you might hear Plotinus and his work referred to as “Neoplatonist” but I am choosing to distinguish the work of Plotinus, from the work of folks that would re-discover his work nearly 1,200 years later. So for our purposes, if you’re a 3rd century Roman, you’re Late Platonist. If you’re a Renaissance era Holy Roman, you’re a Neoplatonist. Plotinus is the bridge. This is why we are spending so much time on him. When occult philosophy gets jumpstarted in the 1500s, it is jumpstarted by Christian priests reading Jewish esoterica based on Islamicate esoterica, and everyone was reading Plotinus. All those folks called their philosophy Platonic. But they were doing some new stuff. So we call them Neoplatonist.
Plotinus wrote a lot, but his major work is called The Enneads, literally “the nine-nesses.” He wrote the material, but it was organized by his major student and biographer, Porphyry, who did quite a bit of chopping and screwing to make it all fit into chunks of nine. One Ennead is even cut-and-pasted in the middle of a sentence. It is impossible to give a crash course in Plotinus. Or, it is impossible according to Plotinus. His philosophy is performative, in the sense that you have to actually sit down, read the Enneads cover-to-cover, and puzzle it out for your damn self. That process of puzzling out is philosophically important to Plotinus. He refers to it as “noesis” literally “the process of knowing.” Therefore, there is no “quick guide” version of Plotinus that could accurately represent Plotinus’s actual philosophy. He would see such things as fundamentally incomplete.
A QUICK GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS:
All things arise from an infinite, ineffable, utterly and completely, hyper-transcendent philosophical concept called The One. The only true thing you can say about The One, is that it is The One. It is beyond language. Contemplation of The One can only be done through apophasis, un-saying. The One is beyond all thought, and not beyond all thought. The One is both beyond language, and not beyond language. Etc. It is sort of a philosophical singularity, a thinking man’s black hole that collapses all knowledge into itself. Infinite, unchanging, beyond time and quality, existing in a form of existence that is not existence, as a paradoxical superposition of all potential statements.
A tricky thing to talk about indeed! Plotinus spends many an Ennead emphatically saying that saying anything true about The One is impossible, but trying to get as close as possible. It is important to note. The One is not God. Or, not the sort of God that people today associate with God. The One is not a God that thinks, or does anything at all. The One actually can’t do anything at all. It exists beyond time and existence. The One is just The One. This begs the question though, how do we get from The One to a world where I can write this book and you can read it? The One is constantly on the verge of having properties. But if It has properties, it isn’t The One anymore. This creates a sort of philosophical event-horizon within The One, a roiling mass of almost-philosophy called the “prenoetic efflux” that gives rise to a hypostate, a sub-reality called…
Nous! This word is often translated as “mind” or “intellect” but honestly Roman people thought of the mind and intellect in such a different way its better to leave the word untranslated as Nous. This is the God that folks these days would associate with monotheism. This is a God that thinks. It contemplates itself, which gives rise to forms. At some point, this gives rise to the concept of existence, being itself, which gives us the world of…
Psyche! Or Soul. This is the hypostate of things that actually exist. Below this, is the world of physis, or matter. Matter isn’t just inert. It yearns for the forms found in the Nous like a ghost possessing a body. And there you go, there’s your universe.
This entire process, The One giving rises to mind and soul and matter, is a process called Emmanation. This is a type of genesis mythology. In a creation myth, a supreme being makes something that is not itself, like a The Universe. The process here is an Emanation story, in which a supreme being filters itself down into reality through a series of sub-transformations. Except thats not entirely true. If you want to really impress another student of the occult, point out that The One, the Prenoetic Efllux, Nous, all exist in perfect, unchanging, trans-chronological states. Nothing is actually occurring or changing, because they don’t exist on strata of reality where change can take place. So actually, they’re not emmanating, and you are so very foolish to think so. The whole universe is simply The One existing.
END ASIDE
The other thing Plotinus is famous for is a little treatise of his, you may know it as “against the Gnostics.” This can be a stumbling block for the occult-curious. “Why on earth would Plotinus have beef with the Gnostics?” I hear you say, “Their theology seems so incredibly similar!” Dear reader, nothing stokes rivalries among theologians like agreeing on 98% of points. For one, I think Plotinus was jealous. You must remember that monotheism and platonic philosophy were cultural rivals. The followers of Plato’s academy were often much closer to a religion than many imagine. For two, Plotinus had real trouble with the idea that souls needed to be saved. This was, in fact, one of Plotinus’s major disagreements with the rest of Philosophy. He believed in an “undescended self.”
Basically every platonist and monotheist agreed on a “descended self.” The world of matter was corrupt in some way, full of suffering and falsehoods. You wanted to live somewhere above that, in the world of forms and truth. This could be done via divine grace, the cultivation of knowledge, or even Theurgy; the yanking of the gods down to your level for a bit for a boost. Plotinus thought this was ridiculous. We are all aspects of The One. What you think of as You is actually just the feet of great and towering figure, one that stretches from the world of matter, all the way up to The One. You exist at every hypostate. The soul is not descended, it has never descended, it cannot descend. Every last one of us is always in contact with The One.
To which his critics would say. Well Plotinus, if I’m in contact with the highest form of reality at all times? Why am I stuck down here? I stretch all the way up to the God which determines the structure of the universe, why can’t I shape reality to give myself superpowers?
To which Plotinus would say. Just because you know you have lungs, that doesn’t mean you can decide to breathe underwater. You know you have a stomach, but you can’t simply decide to digest stones. In fact, you don’t actually know what your stomach is doing at any given time. Most of what you consider You is actually hidden from your senses. And this, dear reader, is what it feels like to touch the higher hypostates. It is a universal synesthesia. Plotinus describes the feeling as if all sight and sound and sensation melts into one sense, a true sense, that allows him to see the world as Nous, if only for a moment. When he returns, the senses of touch and sight and taste feel dull, almost alien, but he recognizes them as tributaries to the true Noetic sense.
How does one do this? How do you cultivate the ability to raise your senses to the Noetic realm? Easy. You familiarize yourself with the body of Platonic literature. You read Plato and Timeus and Aristotle, but most importantly, you read the Enneads. To touch Nous requires a cultivation of noesis, careful meditation on what you have learned, a philosophical and ritual shedding of falsehood. You can’t just pray like those idiot Gnostics. They say secret knowledge can allow you to speak to the godhead, but they don’t even know what knowledge is.
But who is to say? Who gets to decide what knowledge is? You would have to be some sort of nigh-universally recognized expert on what exactly knowledge is, what it means, and how it is cultivated. You would have to be Plotinus.
GNOSTICISM
A MYTH:
I am sure you know the story. God spoke the world into being. He created the garden of eden, and inside of it he placed Adam, Eve, and the forbidden tree of knowledge. A serpent tells them to disobey. They eat the apple, becoming sinful. Their punishment is expulsion from the garden. Things are rough and dark and sinful, until Christ appears to redeem the earth through faith in his new church.
Except, what if a Great Invisible Spirit, infinite, unknowable, and unchanging, had a thought which knew it was a thought. This first thought in the mind of god was called Barbelo. From her and the Great Invisible Spirit arose Christ. The trio of them created a series of beings called Aeons, who existed in divine pairs. They had names like “perception” and “understanding.” This plurality of beings was called The Pleroma. The final Aeon in the Pleroma was named Sophia, Wisdom.
Sophia wished to create something, just like her father the Great Invisible Spirit. But she did so without the permission of her father, or her divine pair. The result was an ugly and malformed being which was called Yaldabaoth, or Saklas. It took the form of a great serpent with the head of a lion. Sophia was ashamed of her creation, so she hid it away from the rest of the Pleroma.
Yaldabaoth, believing itself to be the only god, created a world based on its dim memory of the Pleroma. It created a corrupt and material world, ruled over by seven demonic jailers called the Archons. (The Gnostics were Christian, and this figure is generally understood to be the God of the old testament.) Within the world he placed a man and a woman who he could torment. Sophia, realizing the gravity of her mistake, begged the Pleroma for help. They worked together to trick Yaldabaoth into breathing a spark of divinity into his creation, imbuing man with a dual nature: a corrupt material body, and an immortal soul. Sophia would appear to Adam and Eve as a serpent, and teach them of their true nature. This founded a tradition of secret teachings, which was passed down through Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve.
Later, Christ would also appear to humanity as a teacher of this sacred knowledge. Humanity can escape this prison world and rejoin the pleroma. Not through faith in a church, but through the cultivation of secret knowledge.
A HISTORY:
When Christ died, early Christians didn’t really know what to do with themselves. They figured the crucifixion was probably the most important thing to happen in the history of the world, an event of titanic cosmological significance. But what exactly did it mean for folks on the ground? Well that was up for debate. Quite a bit of debate.
What exactly was Christ? Was he just a guy? Was he a demigod like how the Greeks had? Was he literally God, or just an aspect of God? Did he even have a body? If he didn’t have a body what did it mean for him to suffer? Maybe he was some kind of energy ghost who didn’t have a real body? Was he a magician? Can we learn to do all that stuff? Can women be priests? The next 300 years of Christianity would hash out these questions in a no-holds-barred free-for-all theology deathmatch. The grand prize? The right to determine what exactly Christianity means.
Bishops everywhere would write letter after letter, arguing that their interpretation of Christ is the real, true, inarguable Christianity, and everyone who disagrees with them is a false teacher with dangerous and worthless opinions that are so obviously wrong they require an entire book to debunk how wrong they are.
The so-called Gnostics were one such group. So called, because in general, they leaned towards the idea that a sinful humanity could be redeemed through “Gnosis” the cultivation of secret spiritual knowledge. Their main detractors, the people who would eventually become the orthodox Latin church, believed that humanity could only be redeemed through “Pistis”, faith in the Church that Christ established.
There are books from early church fathers which describe something called Gnosticism. It was described as a rival religion to christianity which was stamped out by the church. A bishop named Iraneus wrote a book called Against Heresies, which meticulously details the teachings of the gnostics, and why they are untrue. Sadly, the words of the Gnostics themselves were lost to history. We knew what Iraneus thought about the texts, but we could not read them for ourselves.
That is, until recently. Within the last century and change, Archeologists have rediscovered many of these texts. Turns out what we’ve been calling Gnosticism is less a concrete rival religion, and more like a loose collection of ideas and mythologies. There were lots of texts that featured an evil demiurgic figure called Yaldabaoth, but the specifics varied wildly from text to text. The version of the mythology I summarized above is the version from the Apocryphon of John. We know this version was pretty popular, because archeologists have recovered multiple copies of this text. But don’t mistake it for a “real” version of the text. The other versions of the tale feature evocative details from a rebel archon to a twist on the apocalypse.
I cannot do justice to the breadth of Gnostic literature. All of this has been catnip for the esoteric and occult writers of western history. A secret and mysterious relation to early christianity that traded in secret knowledge? With a divine personification of wisdom? And many of their texts contain spells? It’s practically too enticing to pass up. As you progress through the rest of occult history, you will see characters and themes from Gnostic literature pop up. From the serpent in the garden as a figure of secret knowledge, to the mother of demons as a great and terrible teacher, to the recurring figure of Sophia.
(this is the bit where we recommend Pagels, the Meyer Nag Hammadi Library, and the Meyer Gnostic Bible)
HERMETICISM
It is difficult to say anything definitive about “Hermeticism” but that may be the point.
There is a group of texts collectively referred to as “The Hermetic Corpus” or “Hermetica” because they were attributed to an enigmatic character known as Hemes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great. They deal with a wide range of subjects, from astrology, to occult properties of herbs and stones, to the secret origins of the world, to the hidden nature of god. They deal with what we today would call magic. Historically speaking, they are not the first body of western magical literature. Plato and the Jews beat Hermes to the punch. But, Mythologically speaking, I am writing this book, and you are reading this book, because of the intellectual tradition founded by Hermes Trismegistus. Mythologically speaking, he was the first magician.
(So who was this Thrice-Great Hermes?) The origins of Hermes Trismegistus as a figure are murky and contradictory. Remember that ancient Hellenes were not allowed to worship foreign gods, to do so would be impious. However, they believed that Hellenic gods appeared to other cultures in different forms. Obviously, Hermes would appear to an Egyptian as an Egyptian Hermes. So yeah, they call him Thoth, but he’s the same god don’t worry.
Thoth is the god of scribes. Temples to Thoth were effectively scriptoriums run by the state. According to Egyptian mythology, he gave humanity writing, as well as the arts we would call magic. As such, the Egyptian version of hermes has a little extra spice to him. There had been Hellenic greeks in Egypt since around 700 BCE, and then in 322 BCE that rascal Alexander took over and things got extra syncretic. A special Thoth-Hermes figure developed. Around the same time, Artapanus of Alexandria, a Jewish historian, published a book wherein he mentioned that this Thoth-Hermes actually taught Moses, and things really kicked into high gear. What you’ve got now is a mythological figure who is the source of all Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish knowledge.
Depending on who you believe, Hermes Trismegistus is a god, a demigod, a mortal man taught by a demigod, a mortal philosopher, five guys only one of whom was Egyptian, the tutor of Moses, the student of moses, the plagiarist of moses, a pagan sage who prefigured the coming of Christ, and or a magician. Take your pick.
A QUICK GUIDE TO HERMETICA
The collection of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus is called Hermetica. It is not complete. In all likelihood, the Hermetic corpus is far, far larger than we know. Clement of Alexandria even mentions “42 Books of Hermes” that are, unfortunately, lost to the tides of history. What isn’t lost is strange, fragmentary, and often contradictory, but has some thematic similarities. For instance, most fragments are structured as a dialogue or a short play, depicting a conversation between a recurring cast of characters. There’s Hermes Trismegistus, along with his student Tat, The goddess Isis, Agathodiamon, and Ascelepius. The hermetic corpus can be roughly divided into two sub-categories. The philosophical hermetica, and the technical hermetica.
The technical hermetica refers to techniques for doing things. These fragments often feature long lists of stones and plants, followed by operations the reader can perform with them to produce certain effects. I am being careful with my words here. Today we would call this a spell book, but we don’t know if the intended readers of the text would see it that way.
The philosophical hermetica is significantly more complex. It features everything from discourses on the origin and nature of the universe, to outright hymns to Hermes. If you are interested in reading what secrets Hermes Trismegistus has to reveal, I would strongly recommend that you read up on Platonism, Jewish Magic, and Gnosticism beforehand. The best way I can describe the contents of Hermetica is this; it is in conversation with the rest of Egypto-judeo-greco-roman-tom-dick-harry-etcetera esoterica. Open the copenhaven translation of Hermetica, and the first fragment will be the Poimandres (note: the original fragments did not have titles.) You will notice some startling similarities to the creation myth in Plato’s Timeus, as well as the stories of creation common to Gnostic literature. You might call it a “Hermetic version” of the demiurge myth.
The demiurge we see in the Poimandres is much nicer than the mad idiot god of much Gnostic literature. In this version, Nous produces a primeval human, a divine anthropos, who descends into the world and falls in love with physis, the material world, who is female. This is not framed as a fall from grace or a malicious seduction, but the result of a god falling in love with his creation. In this version of the myth, humanity does not require redemption. We are not fallen or corrupt. We simply have a divine immortal soul from our father, and a mortal physical body from our mother. Whenever we get tired of reincarnating, we can cultivate gnosis and rejoin the godhead.
Before you get too comfortable thinking Hermeticism is “the nice version of gnosticism” you ought to know that Hermetica also has the evil version. The version where the universe was created by a vindictive idiot god to torture humanity. What gives? Could the Hermetics just not make up their minds?
We have no idea. Some scholars argue this is evidence of a broader curriculum. The idea being you start with the more common evil demiurge and archons version, and as you work your way up the ladder, your teacher upgrades you to the real secret knowledge, that god is actually nice and things are fine. Other scholars argue that hermeticism is less an intellectual tradition and more a collective pen name, or a genre of writing. In the same way that people would attribute their own work to Aristotle, people might attribute their work to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus.
ZOSIMOS OF PANOPOLIS
NOTES
Socrates
Never submit, never have faith
Concerned with Ontology, especially ethics
He was ugly, which was important because beauty is truth
Said to be impervious to both cold and heat
War hero, saved Alcibiades
Lots of dialogues that just end with lol IDK. What is justice? What is bravery? Idk
You don’t just pour knowledge into people
You don’t provide knowledge, you subtract wrong thought
All knowledge comes from a combination of Reason + Divine Inspiration
People can’t give you knowledge, you have to arrive there yourself.
He kept getting people to admit they didn’t know what stuff was.
Symposium Eros: You cant just do good, you have to WANT to do good
We are not driven by necessity, but by desire.
Not entirely clear what his religious beliefs were
Put on trial for corrupting the youth, of which he was definitely guilty
Plato:
Influenced by Socrates, Pythagoras and other legendary sources.
All good philosophy is Plato rightly comprehended
SHWEP makes the cool connection to the Erasmus translation of the new testament.
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos, en pros ton theon.
This is often translated as “in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and god was the word” but a better translation of Logos is “discourse” or conversation.
This describes plato.
He was a pythagorean, but what exacgtly that means who knows. The pythagoreans are poorly attested. Lots of influence from the orphic tradition as well.
Hated widely. He was tricky and contradictory.
Theory of forms.
Obsessed with Aporea, or admitting you don’t actually understand the truth. Ending on a question mark rather than a period, says Crowley.
Plato uses Socrates as a character in his dialogues. Plato’s Socrates is enigmatic and mysterious.
Reading plato as a purely Exoteric text is actually pretty difficult.
Most known for the Theory of Forms, but he never actually lays this out in text.
There is an immortal essence of cat-ness, in which all cats participate, which is within cats and elsewhere.
First and Foremost a trickster.
Coins the term material and immaterial. Using the greek words Hylos and Ahylos. Literally meaning wood. Referring to the literal wood of the ship of theseus.
Think is the ship of theseus the wood which thesus touched, or is it made of something immaterial, something non-wood.
THE MOST IMPORTANT QUALITIES OF OBJECTS ARE IMMATERIAL AND OCCULT
Timeus! As referenced by Jay Z no church in the wild
“I'm wondering if a thug's prayers reach / Is Pius pious 'cause God loves pious? / Socrates asked whose bias do y'all seek? / All for Plato, screech”
The Platonist school is pretty diverse. You can have platonists who believe the world is made of number-like things that are harmonic in nature.
Or platonists who deny the existence of knowledge itself.
The Esoteric Plato
Plato is often seen as being deliberately obscure.
The Moray Platonico is being deliberately vague.
But, that doesn’t mean he was seen as being an esotericist in his time.
I mean, they probably did, but there just isn’t much evidence lol
There are skeptics who didn’t believe in absolute truth at all
So what does platonism even mean?
Well, sometimes its an intellectual lineage, sometimes its anyone who believes in an Immortal Soul like Plato, sometimes its anyone who approaches plato like hes writing dogma.
Aristotle
Aristotle is generally considered the Normal One in comparison to Plato
Empiricist, as opposed to Plato’s Idealism
Student of Plato, teacher to Alexander the great.
LOTS of fake Aristotles, or people writing as Aristotles.
Like 30 authentic extant works, but few for magic
Coined the term Esoteric
Metaphysics + Dei Anima are ESOTERIC in that they are not for a general readership.
The idea of Specially Unknowable Knowledge would be verystrange to aristotle
Basically, once Alexander died, Aristotle became a legendary figure.
Acroamatic: Meaning “Communicated Orally” the Esoteric teachings of Aristotle
Apoptic: ?
Once the Late Platonists get their hands on Aristotle, he becopmes this legendary teacher
According to them, he has his “open” teachings on ethics and politics etc
But he also has secret teachings intended for True Initiates (irl these “secret teachings” are probably just lecture notes he gave to students as a teaching aid)
According to Plutarch, knowing secret knowledge is a change of status
Plutarch loves citing fake letters between Aristotle and Alexander
This is where we get an important concept for western esotericism: the SELF HIDING SECRET
Alexander says Master! Why are you publishing the inner secrets of your teaching? Weren’t we supposed to keep it a secret?
To which Socrates replies: They won’t even know it is special.
Like half of middle/late platonism is trying to reconcile Plato and Aristotle.
Thats like half of Porphyry.
Plotinus treats aristotle as kinda “A Platonist who just doesn’t get it” (idk if I agree with this, imo Plotinus kinda treats them like they already agree. Wait no thats not right either. Plotinus treats Aristotle like he was a Platonist who didn’t even realize he “completes” Plato. Which makes sense when you think about it. Everything was a discourse to Plato, so the best thing you can do for a Platonist is argue with them and have points.)
Aristotle was received as almost Orthodox by the dawn of Monotheism.
Whereas Plato was associated with dangerously heretical ideas. Sure he writes about having an immortal soul, but he also writes a lot about Gods plural.
Liber de Pomo, or Book of the Apple. A text in which a dying Aristotle realizes the immortality of the soul, and accepts Platonic ideas, repeatedly revived by smelling an apple. So turns out he actually agreed with plato! What luck! (lie)
“The Theology of Aristotle” was an extremely popular work. It was a work of aristotelian theology with a Transcendant, Ineffible, One. Hang on this is just the Enneads with an Aristotle logo slapped on the front.
This was crazy popular in islam, and was even passed around in influential jewish circles.
PLOTINUS
Most of our information on him comes from Porphyry
3rd century successor of the academy of Plato was asking Plotinus for his opinions on philosophy.
Baically every contemporary was like this is the guy
Crazy influential on early islam
Noetic Quality as in relating to the mind
Noesis the act of intellectual comprehension
Da father of late platonism
You have to actually read plotinus, his philosophy is performative
A platonist, but full of aristotle
Accused of plagarizing Numenius of Apamea
Hypostases literally translating to reality
The One > Nous > Soul > Matter
To Hen > Nous > Psyche > Physis
Basically, the world is so constantly on the verge of having properties, that it contains a pre-noetic efflux, a sort of philosophical event horizon.
This Prenoetic Efflux gives rise to Nous This is what we would equate with god. Nous contemplates itself, and gives rise to the world of forms.
Once Being is established in the Nous, you get psyche, or soul.
Then, at the bottom of the ladder, you have Physis, or matter, which is sort of a hungry ghost that eternally desires forms in the nous. A form + matter = bodies.
Time does not exist in this, except in nature, it is a product of nous.
This isn’t emmanation per se, its just a theology where the world isn’t created.
Also, Plotinus believes in the Undescended Soul. Human beings exist at every level of this structure.
Plotinus was probably in dialogue with the gnostics. Third treatise is a direct response to gnosticism, specifically Valentinus
He says all souls are saved, they were never not-saved. They are always in contact with the one.
The term homoousian comes from gnostic literature.
Later thinkers, like Proclus, would say you need theurgy. Plotinus would not agree. You don’t need to bring the gods down to earth, they are already here, you need to look within.
Hes sort of a poetical metaphysician
Narbonne says there IS a noetic matter, its sort of like the ghost of matter. Idk if I agree with that
Why doesn’t he like the gnostics? One, he is jealous. Two, he thinks they are fake games. You can’t just contact the godhead by praying you need to cultivate Noesis.
Plotinus demands knowledge, and a love of philosophy
To read Esoterically is to assume the author hid deeper meanings in the text, and hid those meanings.
The One is not a god that knows things.
Evil arises from Tolmao, or audacity, a sort of betrayal of the group. Excessive individuality is what causes hiccups in the one.
OGDEN
There was a trend of projecting the male sorcerer onto alien races
Neopythagorean “greek shamans”
Magoi: (mages) cure for illnesses, the manufacture of curse tablets, wellbeing in the afterlife
Psuchagogoi: (Evocators) literally “soul-drawers” What do they do? According to Suda they find troublesome ghosts, perform sacrifices in order to speak to the ghosts, and hope to understand their anger and quiet them.
Engastimulthoi: (ventriloquists) “men or women with prophetic demons in their stomachs that use their hosts as mouthpieces.” These guys often acted as prophets, mouthpieces for the spirits. Also called engastrimantis, literally BELLY PROPHET. Philochorus says the Ob of Endor is a BELLY PROPHET.
The Greco Roman representation of witches, female sorcerers, is almost entirely fictional. But Medea and Circie are cool. There is a whole tradition of “witch-oid” type figures based on them in later mythology. Like Deianeira wife of Heracles.
Roman witch-oids are more bloodthirsty and conniving
Goes (sorcerer), magos (mage), augurtes (augur), mantis (diviner)
Theres daimones
Aoroi: before their time
Biaiaothanatoi: died by violence
Agamoi: those, particularly girls, who died before marriage
Ataphoi: those denied burial. The restless dead. These were the best for magical purposes. (how so? Get a quote)
Theres also the jewish influence of expelling malicious spirits from people
Necromancy for this purpose means “divination using the dead”. This is in the Oddessey.
In the Roman period you get the reanimation of corpses. Ogden mentions something called Skull Necromancy which sounds badass. I wanna track that down
Ghosts were important for binding spells. (katadesmoi or defixiones). Five subtypes:
Legal curses
Competition curses
Trade curses
Erotic curses
Separation
Attraction
“Prayers for justice”
Paraphernalia involved: The mysterious Iunx, and the hippomanes, literally “horse madness plant”
Kolossoi: (poppets or voodoo dolls) seem to predate curse tablets
Ch 2
General themes:
Katabatic trips to the underworld thank you Orpheus
Egyptian tombs, Chaldeans: Foreign Mages
Pythagoras could teleport by projecting his soul
In the Laws, Plato says that curses are real and they can hurt you
Plato also sees a connection between Sophists and Sorcerers.
Concept of Pharmakeia
“Iamblichus lays out categories of magic: the mage of locusts, the mage of lions and the mage of mice.”
Ch 3
voces magicae, literally words of power. Prounounceable but non-linguisitc magical formulas that occur in antique spells.
Yeah foreign mages do all sorts of freaky shit like calling up the ghost of their dad and having sex with their moms totally definitely
THey also do dream interpretation
“Even Numa himself, to whom no prophet was sent by god, nor any
holy angel, was compelled to perform hydromancy [water-divination] to see images
of gods in water, or rather the deceptions of demons, by whom he was told what
sacred rites and observances he should establish. Varro again says that this variety
of divination was brought over from the Persians, and he reports that it was em-
ployed both by Numa himself and subsequently by the philosopher Pythagoras. He
tells that when blood is used the dead too are summoned up, and says that this is
called necromancy [nekuomanteia] in Greek. Whether it is called hydromancy or
necromancy, it is the technique in which the dead appear to give prophecies” (ogden 39)
Pliny was like yeah the mages are bullshit
“The varieties of magic are several, according to Osthanes. He claims to divine from water, balls, air, stars, lamps, bowls, and axes and in many other ways,”
The ghost of Ostanes is called up by Pseudo-Democritus and his own son, also Ostanes, to reveal the secrets of alchemy (From Physica et Mystica II)
Pliny: “Of all animals the mages accord the deepest admiration to the hyena, inasmuch as they have attributed magical skills to it too and specifically the ability to deprive men of their minds and draw them to itself.”
Suda on the distinctions of the varieties of magic: “Sorcery, Mageia and pharmakeia are different things”
SNAKE BLASTING
Iamblichus the novelist says that the chaldeans could revive the dead
Also magic comes from Egypt
Ch4 Da Rivals of Jesus
Appolonius of Tyanna does a bunch of exorcisms and evocation. He defeats a vampire. He raises a girl from the dead.
Celsus compares Jesus to a goes and Origen is like nooooooo
Alexander of Abonouteichos does a bunch of shit
Theres also Simon Magus but we don’t really have time for him rn
Ch5 Medea and Circie
Entirely fictional. But highly influential.
Medea is an Exemplar of Pharmakeia, which means both medicine and poisoner.
HERMETICISM
Thrice Great Hermes, legendary father of western esotericism
Legend starts with Thoth.
Greek people saw Thoth and went ahhh this must be your hermes.
Vast and complex reception history
Thoth the Ibis/Babboon, who gave humanity writing, and the magical arts
Greeks have been in Egypt since 700bce
And they’ve run egypt since alexander
A Hermes/Thoth figure develops
Artapanus eventually says he taught moses
There are many hermes. Hes a god, a triple god, a man, a demigod, several men, several gods, but some part of him is always egyptian.
People really did think he existed
Clement (which?) refers to “42 books of Hermes”
Hermes is the teacher of Moses, the Plagarist of moses, student of moses, magician, and gentile prophet
Cicero says there are actually 5 Hermeses, only one of which is Egyptian
Hermetica is the body of literature attributed to hermes.
There are roughly two types of texts within the Hermetica.
Devotional: Meaning literature involving things like hymns to hermes
Technical: Meaning it contains instructions for spells, potions, or techniques for doing things.
Hermetic literature features a cast of characters, like
Tat, ( student of Trismegistus, probably a corruption of Thoth)
Isis, the egyptian goddess
Agathodaimon, literally “good spirit”
And Ascelepius, who is equated with Imhotep
Now, while there are hermetic teachings, that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a Hermeticism, got me?
The body of hermetic literature is diverse, often directly contradictory. One can argue that it all fits into a comprehensive system, but you could easily argue it doesn’t.
The term Hermetic kinda has a life of its own.
Iamblichus cites Hermes as if he is a philosopher
While Abu-Bashr cites him as an astrologer.
I would say, Hermetic literature is always in conversation with the intellectual currents of the time. Hermes Trismegistus writes about everything from magic, to astrology, to alchemy.
Oh yeah Alchemy falls under Hermeticism
The Ascelepius, or the Perfect Discourse is part of why. It deals a lot with what is matter?
But a lot of the Stobias fragments are Theology
Copenhaven says the texts are often meant for non-experts. Like, the Kairanides (check spelling) has a long list of stones, followed by what you can do with those stones.
So what exactly is the Corpus Hermetica?
A notable thing about a lot of Hermetica, is that its in conversation with Gnosticism.
Although, there are bits of hermetica that are pro-cosmic, and some that are anti-cosmic
Fauden says this might be evidence of an initiatory tradition. Like, the teachings start off by saying the world is shitty and bad and made by an evil demiurge, but as you rank up and learn more, the teachings are like actually there is hope and the world is quite nice
So is hermeticism a religion?
Festugier says NO it has no congregation, but hes a christian and has very christian ideas about what defines a religion
Honestly who cares. Actually no I care. I just don’t think we know enough about Hermetica to say one way or the other.
A lot of the stories are in conversation with judeo-christian mythology
The Poimandres has Hermes speaking to Poimandres (we don’t know what this means) The Intellect of Power.
He says go out into the world, and cultivate gnosis, and cultivate noesis.
Kinda maybe evokes the Enoch/Sira literature?
Also we have no idea when this damn text is from
Noetize the light and learn about it
Basically Trismegistus asks Poimandres how the universe works and he says
Nous who is the androgyne light crafted a second Nous --a demiurge-- who then crafted Seven governors. The διοίκησις (dioikēsis), literally “housekeepers”. The choice of words here is important. Dioiketes were basically the greek colonial financial administrators who controlled the finances of egyptian provinces.
Rather than Gnostic arch-demons, the Archons. The Poimandres tells us about colonial bureaucratic accountants.
These are the seven governors, and their governance is called fate
Nous has two sons, the Demiurge, and the Anthropos, who are brothers.
The Anthropos wants to create, and Nous says thats fine go ahead yaaaay
So he descends past the governors into the world, who give him a share of their fate
Physis, materiality, who is female, sees the Anthropos and falls in love with him. They fall in love, embrace, and have children.
This is not framed as a fall. Physis is not a seducer or a satan figure. This act is framed as the first act of love.
They produce seven children, seven androgyne humans.
Nous loves them, so they are split into genders, and told to go: to love and multiply and explore creation.
This is why humanity has a dual nature, a material body and an immortal soul.
Trismegeistus asks “what great wrong hath humanity done to deserve death?”
Death comes from the primordial waters
The wicked are slaves to their appetites. All bad things are the result of too much of a good thing. Death is not a punishment, it is overdosing on love. Just like the anthropos taking on the governorship of fate to be with physis.
Poimandres is also kinda apocalyptic
Another tract says that the body is polluted with desire
Ascelepius
This is the bit in hermetica that has instructions for God-building.
Like, the process of building a statue and putting a soul in it so it can bring boons to those who serve it, and reign punishments upon enemies.
Augustine fucking HATED this bit. By his view, pagan temples are literally full of demons
So if there was a hermetic tradition, what da hell was it?
Well definitely not like a religion like how we would understand it
A lot of the texts point to the idea of a master/student relationship. As if these discourses are plays to be ritually performed. There was a concept in ancient greece called “closet plays” as in things written like plays never intended to be performed. Its possible that hermetica is these. We don’t know
Also endless reincarnation was NOT seen as a good thing. You wanted to rejoin the nous.
Sometimes knowledge is special, sometimes its not. Sometimes the esoteric “the eyes of the heart” are needed to learn special things
Its kinda epistomological esotericism
We can point to Fauden’s curriculum theory here
IM REVISITING OGDEN AGAIN
There are some basic questions I want to answer. Who was doing magic in the ancient greek world? What were they doing? What were the important parts of what they were doing?
So many spells involve mixing shit in a bowl
Crop charming is illegal
DRUGS: The concept of Pharmakon is so intensely related to greek magic. It can be healful or poisonful. Hecate in di0dorus drugged her father and took the throne, built a temple to artemis and sacrified strangers to the goddess. Circie understood drugs of all sorts. Medea and circie accomplish so much of their shit with intricate knowledge of pharmaka. The center of the eleusinian mysteries was the kykeon.
Magoi:
Supposedly fraudulent beggars
Cured illnesses
Manufactured curse tablets
Managed things related to the afterlife
Psuchagogoi: Literally “soul-drawers”
Maybe identical to the goes?
Goes: most often translated as Sorcerers
A sub-type of maegia
Plato doesn’t like them “hey undertake to persuade the gods, through the practice of sorceries [goêteuontes] with sacrifices and prayers and spells, and try to destroy root and branch individuals and entire houses for the sake of money.” (Plato, Laws)
Goes and Magoi are kinda seen as equivalent terms
Plato associates the Goes with the Sophists, which is negative. He seems to associate them with smooth-talking con-men.
“There are some evocators [psuchagôgoi], sorcerers [goêtes] in Thessaly being so termed, who summon up and drive out ghosts. In fact the Spartans sent for these, when the ghost of Pausanias was frightening away people who tried to approach the temple of Athene of the Bronze House, as Plutarch says in his Homeric Studies.”
Herodetus says that magoi and goes are different things but they’re closely aligned
Suda says that Goetia and Pharmakeia are different things
Goet- is associated with the dead
Origen rejects people comparing Jesus to a Goes. Its clear they were kinda related to trickery
”
Circles:
PGM 4 has instructions for creating a ghostly thrall using a skull. It involves inscribing words of power in a circle. (ogden 202)
Goes / Psuchagogoi / Magoi / Manteis
Voces Magicae: Literally means “words of power.” Takes many forms.
The persians would bable “exotic polysylables without immedeate meaning” while doing magic
The Chaldeans would invoke the names of sacred sages while snake blasting
A syrian mage incants “terrifying names” while spinning a magic wheel to create a spell
“The priest apparently uses voces magicae in calling up the god (see 174). For the desire for a direct one-to-one encounter, or sustasis, with a deity in magical context,”
Pamphile the witch in The Metamorphosis has tablets covered in indecipherable writing, presumably Voces Magicae
The PGM has a lot of Voces Magicae that are egyptianizations of Jewish names Ex PGM4
ZOSIMOS
Next bit is from A Survey of Greek Alchemy, Author(s): F. Sherwood Taylor, Source:The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 50, Part 1 (1930), pp. 109-139
Works on alchemy show up around the 1st century AD. It likely existed much longer.
The terms Alchemy and Alchemia appear AFTER most of these texts were composed
The texts themselves call it The Sacred Art or The Divine Art
There was no distinction between alchemy and chemistry
Alchemy is distinct from metallurgy because it is more specialized, and it exhalts its issues to a point of significance
I.e. a metallurgist works with metals and makes things out of them, but an alchemist produces them, and researches them
Call it a sub-department of metallurgy with a special ritual aspect
- alchemists were generally un-interested in the general properties of matter. They were concerned with a few precious metals and stones
Although, the distinctions between forms of matter weren’t nearly as strict back then
If you fuck with metal long enough, you WILL discover things.
“Now while sulphur is mentioned hundreds of times there is no allusion to any of its characteristic properties except its action on metals.” (Now THAT is interesting)
There is a religious atmosphere present in basically every text that distinguishes them from the vein of most other science
And that religious seasoning is EGYPTIAN
At no time does the greek alchemist employ any scientific procedure. His ground is searching for lost secrets
There is a lot of studying ancient and legendary authors, paying them due respect and fealty. It really wasn’t until the arab world that people started doing NEW stuff
The texts themselves
Lots of fragments, most preserved in arabic
1st-3rd ish centuries
There are lots of authors with various legendary titles. Like Celopatra, Dmocritus, Isis, Agathodiamon, etc
Then in the 3rd-4th centuries you get names like Zosimos, Synesius, Olymiodorous
Then you get the later commentators who showed up in the 6th-13th centuries like Papus and Theophrastus. Nobody cares about these guys. All they really do is comment on this stuff with some vague plato added.
There are basically two schools of ancient alachemsits:
Followers of Democritus, who mainly tried to color metals superficially or produce alloys
The School that Maria and Comarius were a part of: These are the guys who invented the soxhelet extractor and the Bain-Marie
There’s also the fragments we cant sort properly
The Followers of Democritus
Democritus’s followers regarded him as the father of alchemy
Short recipes
Big text here is Physica Et Mystica
The obscurity is probably due to our own ignorance rather than any deliberate esotericism
Part of this school is Iamblichus the Alchemist. (Different from the platonist) Mose (different from the bible guy) and Ostanes.
The School of Maria and Comarius
She was definitely Jewish
References to Maria show up all over the place in Zosimos
Invented GADGETS and GIZMOS which are described in great detail
Ok back to Zosimos
Shitton of works are attributed to him
Most of them address a student / colleague named Theosebia
What were they actually doing
Most of it was fucking around with the production of alloys
There are basically three Crysopeias.
“Manufacture of alloys analagous to brass”
“Preparation of debased gold”
“Superficial treatment of metals”
All of this is present in the manufacture of artificial jewlery
Oh huh, their main source of Zinc was cadmia, which is of variable zinc composition. So when you’re using cadmia to dye metal yellow, it won’t always work.
Debasing Gold
Basically, you can mix copper and silver into gold to “double its weight”
The alchemists did not see this as falsifying or diluting the gold, but rather as literally doubling its mass
The end product ends up around 60% Gold, 20% silver, 20% copper
Superficial Tinting
Theyd also like, encase metals in treated resins or thin layers of sulfides that superficially changed the color
Stuff they used:
Soxhelet Extractor
Kerotakis
Zosimos is the first guy to have crazy alchemical imagery, usually in the form of a guy being tortured.
Musaf As Suwar, book of pictures, is one of the first manuscripts where we find Zosimos. Its also basically the first book of alchemical emblems.
Rayat al hakim
