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NEOPLATONISM - DEC/27/2022
🕑 Added 2022-12-27 19:54:20 +0000 UTCA QUICK GUIDE TO NEOPLATONISM
The Neoplatonists were a school of Greek philosophers around 250 AD who drew upon Platonic and Neopythagorean philosophy to talk about God. While they were not magicians in and of themselves, their ideas about the nature of God and reality would be influential for everyone from the church fathers to jewish mystics to Islamic polymaths.
According to the Neoplatonists, we live in the sensible world. It is composed of all the things we can sense and understand. Things like rocks, trees, meat, dreams, ideas, and women, are all part of the sensible world. But where did it all come from? To answer this question, the Neoplatonists introduced three main ideas: The One, emmanation, and the many.
Think of yourself. You came from somewhere. You had parents who produced you, and they in turn had parents who produced them, and so on and so on all the way back to the biological Adam and Eve. But something had to cause them: be they sneezed into being by Atum, or evolved over time from some primordial froth, or shaped from clay by Ki. But something had to cause Autm, or Ki, or the primordial froth, and so on and so on until you reach the simplest, earliest, most original state of the world. This is The One. It is the simple, transcendent, and infinite cause of the universe that is furthest from comprehension.
But we live in the sensory world, the thing made of rocks, trees, dreams, ideas, and women, all things that are notably not transcendent. This is the many, the fragments of The One that make up the world. This raises a question: How does an Infinite, transcendent One become the finite, manifest world? The Neoplatonists answer: emmanation.
The One has to go through steps to break itself down into the world. These middle-states, called hypostates, are the bread and butter of why Neoplatonism has stuck around for the rest of magical history. Because no two Neoplatonists could really agree on exactly how many hypostates there were, what order they would happen in, or their relationship to each other. Discourse around how exactly the One became the many formed the basis for nigh on two thousand years of theological discussion.
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Early Christians interpreted Neoplatonic ideas as such, equating The One with the father, and the many with Christ, with the Holy Spirit serving as a hypostate between the two.
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Plotinus, as edited by Porphyry, posited some notably more complex hypostates.
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Sharp-eyed viewers may notice the similarities between these complex diagrams, and the kabbalistic tree of life, whose framers were undoubtedly influenced by neoplatonic ideas.
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WHO WERE THE GNOSTICS?
To explain Gnosticism, we have to talk about the formation of the Catholic Church. This will be the first of a repeating theme throughout history: Influential magical concepts being created from Catholic priests getting into fights.
The year is around 100 CE. Jesus is dead, and the “Jesus cult” is trying to figure out how to become the Catholic Church. Early Christians knew that the death of Jesus was pretty important, possibly the most important thing to ever happen. The death of Christ was an event of titanic, cosmic significance, but among the church founders, there was significant argument over what exactly it meant for the rest of us ordinary humans.
The crux of the matter was salvation. Did Christ’s death wipe the sin-slate clean? Were we all saved? Were only the believers saved? If you accepted Jesus as the son of god, were there extra steps we had to take? And what was the role of the church in all of this? Did you have to be part of the church to be saved? The answers to these questions would fundamentally shape the Catholic Church.
There were two big sides in this fight. The “orthodox” position, represented by church fathers like Ireneus, was that to be considered Christian you had to meet some requirements. One had to follow the teachings of the church, accept baptism, participate in worship, and obey the clergy. He said that for those outside of the church, “There is no salvation.” [1] Not everyone agreed with this. The other side of this argument, were people who taught that salvation could be acquired outside of the church, through the acquisition of secret knowledge. Irenaeus did not like these folks. The idea that salvation could be acquired outside of the church was a fundamental challenge to the validity of the burgeoning institution of Catholicism. Iraneus derisively referred to these heretics Gnostics, after “Gnosis”, the ancient Greek word for knowledge.
Gnosticism as a term did not originally refer to a religion, but what many Catholics understood to be a type of heresy. Because of this, there are many, many different texts, groups, and theologies that fall under the category of “Gnostic.” Texts are often described as ”Gnostic in character” or “a gnosticism” rather than “Gnostic”. Additionally, Gnostic texts are infamous for their complexity, and resistance to summarization. In the interest of time, we will discuss the sects and mythologies most commonly cited in modern magical thought.
[1] Pagels, xxiii
AN OVERVIEW OF GNOSTIC MYTHOLOGY, THE APOCRYPHON OF JOHN
Gnostic mythology can be difficult to penetrate. The stories themselves are often remixes or elaborations upon existing biblical mythology. Take a story that may be familiar to our Abrahamic readers; the Garden of Eden. There are many (conflicting!) Gnostic versions of this story, each with new characters, events, and cosmologies. If this weren’t enough, the original texts are often written in cryptic, poetic language that makes translation difficult. For the interested party, finding a good place can be a struggle.
The Apocyrphon of John is not a comprehensive overview of Gnostic mythology, but it is a good place to establish a base camp.
In the beginning, there was The Monad. It is infinite, supreme, absolute, transcendent in all ways. The Monad is inconceivable perfection. Eventually, The Monad has a thought. This first thought becomes a being known as The Barbelo, a divine androgynous being referred to as ”the mother/father”, “the holy spirit”, and “the first man”. She [1] is the first of a new class of being known as Aeons.
The Monad reflecting upon The Barbelo created Light, being called “Christ Autogenes” or “Christ the Self-created.” The gnostic trinity completed, Christ asked for a fellow worker, a being called Mind. The four work in concert to create further Aeons, each arranged into syzygies, or pairs. The sum of all these beings, the Aeons and The Monad, is referred to as The Pleroma, The Fullness. The Pleroma is perfect and good.
The last Aeon to be created was a being known as Sophia, or Wisdom. She attempts to create her own little micro-pleroma. This goes wrong. In some versions of the story, it is because she attempted to create something without the assistance of her divine partner. In others, it is because she wished to emulate The Monad, but could not due to her fundamentally lesser nature.
The result of Sophia’s mistake is imperfect, a malevolent being with the face of a lion and the body of a great serpent. She names it Yaldabaoth, a name likely based on the Imperial Aramaic yaldā bahôt, roughly translating to “Child of Chaos.” Seeing her creation is arrogant and malicious, Sophia attempts to hide Yaldabaoth from the rest of the Pleroma, and secrets him away inside a luminous cloud so he is ignorant of the higher gods.
Yaldabaoth is the first of a new class of being, the imperfect and malevolent dieties known as Archons. Yaldaboth is powerful enough to mimic the processes of the Aeons. He creates additional archons in his own image, and fashions his own little world out of darkness, animating it with a spark of light stolen from Sophia. The result is a world “neither light nor dark” (Apoc John 12) Yaldabaoth declares himself the sole and jealous god of this realm.
Sophia, realizing her error, finally fesses up to the rest of the Pleroma, who assist Sophia in redeeming her bastard creation. They devise a plan to reunite the sparks of the divine present in Yaldabaoth’s creation with the Pleroma. The Monad speaks to the Archons, the sheer magnitude of its voice shakes the foundation of the tiny universe, and leaves images on the “waters” that serve as its borders. The Monad says something along the lines of “Hey, you aren’t perfect sovereign here, there are sparks of the divine light inside of this thing, human spirits. You didn’t make those.”
The Archons, hoping to harness these divine sparks, create a “psychic vessel” a copy of the human spirit. But the vessels are only vessels, inanimate, motionless, and lightless. Seeing an opportunity, the Barbelo sent some angels to advise Yaldabaoth on why its creation was not moving. They instructed him to blow his mothers essence into the psychic bodies. Yaldabaoth does this, relinquishing the portion of his mothers spark, and animating Adam.
Realizing that they have been tricked, Yaldaboth and the Archons attempt to destroy their creation, but they cannot. Yaldabaoth attempts to draw the light from Adam’s body, but fails, accidentally creating the female form, and Eve. The Archons resort to trapping their creation in the Garden of Eden, a prison meant to keep Adam and Eve ignorant of the Pleroma.
Within this narrative, it was Christ who told Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, giving him knowledge of his greater role in creation, and the ultimate goal of returning to the Pleroma.
Not to be outdone, Yaldabaoth gives humanity the ability to procreate, in the hopes that this will dilute and confuse the knowledge of humanity's possible salvation, hiding the path to salvation among lies.
[1] footnote: Despite her divine androgyny, The Barbelo is referred to with feminine language.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn-long.html
VALENTENIANISM
SETHIANISM
BASILEDIANISM
NOTES ON GNOSTICISM
What we are gonna talk about
What even is gnosticism?
- Gnosticism isnt a religion, its a category of heresy
- Salvation from Knowledge rather than Faith
- A broad overview of the history
- Starts as early as 150 ad
Who are we gonna talk about?
- Simon Magus and the Simonians
- Basiladeans came after, inspired via menander
- The Great Declaration is their big work
- Valentinus
- 100 ad
- Was up for being bishop of rome, so he made his own church
- Followers were called Valentenians, and they didn’t like that.
- These were the big ones, the popular ones
- Eventually they split into eastern and western branches
- Sethianism
- 200 - 300 ad
- Viewed Seth as their hero, reincarnated as Jesus
- Generally closer to Platonism than the rest of christianity
- Three Steles of Seth
- Probably a liturgy
- This is where we get Apocryphon of John
- Apocalypse of Adam
- Apocryphone of John
- Trimorphic Protennoia
- Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians
- There were also the CATHARS later in the 12th and 14th centuries but we wont talk about them here
Maybe start with the Sacred Book of John / Apocryphon of John? Provides a good overall structure for Gnostic Christian Mytholoy
- Apocyphon was very popular. Iraneus attacks it vigorously. Four different manuscripts have been discovered, as far apart as egypt and france.
- Original god, thorugh knowledge of itself, produces a secondary entity called the Barbello, the meaning of which is mysterious
- The combination of the mother and the father produces the Autogenes, or the divine christ
- Further entities emanate or flow from them as Syzygies, or Pairs, usually attendant to barbello or christ
- All of this together forms The Fullnes, the Pleroma
- The last being Wisdom, Sophia
- Sophia seeks to emulate the father and creates something on her own, creating a disaster, Ialdabaoth
- This monstrosity is expelled from the pleroma, but it has a memory of being in the pleroma, it seeks to create its own micropleroma.
- That universe is a sort of inverted pleroma, populated with demons and malicious entities called archons, typically identified with the celestial bodies
- Here, the genesis myth from the Hebrew Bible is recast in gnostic fashion, with Yaldaboth being the progenitor god of our world.
- Yaldabaoth declares himself the other god, “I am a jealous god, there are none other before me.” Only to be corrected by the pleroma. Who point out that there are humans around.
- Yaldabaoth tries to create a sorta psychic copy of a human, but it doesn’t animate
- Here, Barbello tricks Yaldabaoth into breathing some of its divinity into its creation, thus animating it
- Yaldabaoth, realizing it has been tricked, casts the body into the furthest depths of matter, specifically into a garden. Eden, here is meant to be a trap
- The transcendent god takes pity on the humans, and places within them a divine being, Epinoia, which will allow them to reach salvation.
- This infuriates Yaldabaoth, who attempts to excise epinoia from Adam, accidentally creating a double of Epinoia, Life, or Eve.
- Eating from the tree of life, thereby disobeying Yaldabaoth, begins the process of liberation from the prison of the world
- After their expulsion from the garden, Yaldaboth assaults Life, creating beings roughly analogous to cain and abel, two demonic entities that rule over the physical body
- Adam and Life have sex, and produce a son, Seth, and this is the sort of spiritual ancestor to all those who seek knowledge
- Here, John interrupts Jesus, asking about the ultimate fate of humanity.
- Theres good news!
- The Good news is that basically everyone can be saved. Only those who achieve gnosis and abandon it will be left behind.
- Yaldaboth attempts to destroy humans by instituting fate, which can be resisted
- Gets demonic entities to fall to earth to mate with human women, possibly a reference to the Nephilim from Genesis 6 [like in the book of enoch]
- Then theres the hymn of the pronoia, but it might be an earlier document
Valentenian Gnosticism
- Basically every christian agreed that Jesus’s life and death was important on a cosmic scale, but how?
- We actually only knew about the Valentienians via references from their enemies until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library
- Valentenian was maybe born in alexandria around 100
- Lived taught and rose to prominence in rome
- Nearly elected bishop of rome, but when passed over he started his own church out of spite
- Valentenians didn’t see themselves as valentenians, they saw themselves as christians, and they didn’t like being referred to as Valentenians
- Early references are polemical
- Gospel of Truth / Tripartite Tractate / Treaties on the Resurrection / gospel of Phillip / Various fragments
- The final aeon is Sophia, who attempts to grasp the infinitude of the fatherly abyss, and this task tears her apart
- Western School: Perfect self = Ahamot (corruption of the hebrew hokhma) is cast out of the pleroma
- In the eastern school: gives birth to Logos (word) which flutters back into the pleroma, while sophia is cast beyond the horos (threhold)
- Outside of the world, Sophia raves in negative emotions, giving rise to matter
- She repents, producing psychical substance, something between pure spirit and evil matter
- The pleroma hears her cries and bands together to create a savior
- At the prospect of being saved she expresses pure joy along with numerous other entities that are copies of beings from the pleroma, though indirectly by a demiurge figure.
- Sophia and her children live in the Ogdoad, or eight. Between the pleroma and our world.
- The first humans were made with both psyche and matter by the demiurge, but sophia smuggled in a bit of spirit
- Humans, composed of all different elements, are ebset by demonic impulses
- To liberate the humans from these drives, a savior descends from our world in the form of Jesus
- Jesus conquers temptation and teaches the realization of the spiritual seed of joy
- Instead of beleif or faith or pistis being the causal mechanism of salvation, it is knowledge of the flawed nature of reality
- This accomplished, the savior returns to the pleroma, leaving behind a church
- This church is mirrored by the heavenly church
- So what was Jesus’s body like?
- Sometimes its spiritual and material, others its psychic and material
- Sometimes its psychic and spiritual
- Entering the Bridal Chamber = The re-unification of all
- How was this different from the church
- Fate, not knowledge, was salvific
- There was no doubt that jesus had a body
- Creation was fundamentally good and created by god, and not by an evil
- The primary tragedy was adam and eve, not the fundamental imperfection of reality
- Elaine Pagels is the Go-to here
Three Steles of Seth
Big Guys To Cover
- Simon Magus
- Valentenians
- Ophites
- Basilideans
- Mandeans?
NEOPLATONISM
- Start with Ammonius Saccas and his student Plotinus
- The Big Three: PORPHYRY, IAMBLICUS, AND PLOTINUS
- These ideas would go on to influence MAIMONADES and Thomas Aquinas and MEISTER EXCKHART
- Heavily influenced St. Augustine.
- -
- Later, you also have renaissance thinker like FICINO and MIRANDOLA who are influenced by the pereniallism
- Note possible indian influence on Ammonius Saccas?
- Whats new?
- Plotinus introduced: The One, Emmanation, and Henosis
- “Both Neoplatonism and Christianity were essentially spiritual philosophies that opposed what they understood to be the materialism of the Stoics.” (routlidge 511)
- Whats the same?
- Many basic precepts of Platonism and Neo-pythagoreanism
- “Slaveva-Griffin’s chapter on “Number in the metaphysical landscape” (Chapter 13) presents the aspect of Neoplatonism most heavily endorsed by all shades of Platonism and Pythagoreanism: the much acclaimed and debated relation between mathematics and metaphysics” (Routledge 164)
- “As Moran puts it below (p. 512), Neoplatonism “provided an intellectual architecture for articulating theological insights into the nature of the infinite God, the nature of the procession of the Word, the meaning of the Trinity, the nature of creation, and the relation between the soul and the divine”. (Routlidge 506)
- “Neoplatonism is visible particularly in the thinking of the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great (330–79 ce), Gregory of Nyssa (c.332–95 ce) and Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389 ce) (for the early Byzantine Neoplatonism, see also Ierodiakonou & Zografidis 2010)” (routlidge 506)
- “Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd” (rout 506)
Whats Important?
- “Porphyry (234–c.305 ce), on the other hand, had explicitly written works, for example, Against the Christians (adversus Christianos, which survives only in fragmentary form), criticizing Christians and their biblical interpretations (see Berchman 2005).” (rout 511)
- “The aim of all things and the explicit aim of Neoplatonic meditation or contemplation (theōria) is becoming one (henōsis). There is an “outgoing” (proodos, exitus) of all things from the One and a corresponding “return” (epistrophē, reditus) of all things to the One.”
Da Big Ideas
- Da One
- Emmanationism
- Demiurge or Nous
- World-Soul
- Phenomenal World
- Celestial Heirarchy: The One > The Hypercosmic > The Demiurge > The Cosmic
- Evil as a scalar, evil as simply the absence of good
- Return to the one
- two main types of Neoplatonic metaphysical discourses (constructive
- and deconstructive or apophatic)
- Whats the big juicy bit of Neoplatonism: What is the exact relationship between The Many and The One
Da Big Texts
- The Enneads of Plotinus
- Arbor Porphyria
- Porphyry, commentaries on Ptolemy’s Harmonics
Plotinus:
- Hes the big one
- Enneads
- Three Hypostases
- The One > Nous > The World Soul > The Sense World, each separated by a cycle of emmanation and transcendence
- Distinguishes himself from The Gnostics
- What was different? What changed?
- Introduced three big ideas:
- The One
- Emmanation
- Henosis
- What stayed the same?
Porphyry:
- Edited and pulbished the Enneads
- Student of Plotinus
Iamblicus
- Pupil of Plotinus
- De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum (On the Egyptian Mysteries).
- Sorley, William Ritchie (1911). "Iamblichus, the chief representative of Syrian Neoplatonism". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press
How do you get from an infinite god, to a finite one?
- Hypostases (States which are in-between)
- Kabbalists want to maintain both gods radical transcendence, and gods radical eminence.
- They solve this with three key concepts:
- Ein Sof - The Endless, the infinite, hidden god
- The Sefirot: Enumerations: The ten increasingly knowbale emantions of god’s reality
- The Shekinah: The Dwelling: The feminine, immanent reality of god in the world.
Early Kabbalah
- The Iyyun Circle (The Speculation Circle)
- The Provence Circle (Led by Issac the Blind)
PROCLUS - METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS
- Every Multitude partakes in The One - If something isn’t part of The One, then The One is not whole. Nothing is infinite except for the one. Nothing is composed of nothing.
- Hyparxis - Being, or Essence
- Basically, the one emanates forms and then those forms undergo hyparxis as instances
- Causes: The One causes > Being which causes > Life which causes > Intellect which causes > Soul which causes > Body
- Whats the difference between the Intellect and the Soul?
- You have to Be to Be alive, that makes sense.
- You have to be alive to have an intellect, which makes sense
- You have to have an intellect to have a soul? Hard time with that one. Maybe self-reflection?
- You gotta be aware to exist in a body?
- The further from The One a hypostate is, the more power it has over you. (Prop LVII)
PLOTNUS - ENNEADS (Written by Plotinus, compiled by Porphyry)
- What is a living being? And what is a human being?
- 1.1.1. - Pleasures and pains, feelings of fear and boldness, appetites and aversions and feelings of distress – to what do these belong?
- A living being is neither body nor soul, but a third thing that arises from both of these.
- We are the soul, we have a body.
- Against the Gnostics
- Gnostics are critical of the Sensible Universe
- Basically, the Gnostics think the SU is shit, and Neoplatonists see that attitude as a lack of understanding
- 2.9.4 “It is not due to some regrettable failing of Soul that it produced the sensible world.”
- 2.9.5 A critique of three Gnostic views: (i) that human souls are superior to celestial souls; (ii) that there is a soul composed of the elements; and (iii) that there is a ‘new earth’
- Sensible universe <> Intelligible Universe
- “If they should say that soul produced the sensible world as if it had ‘lost its wings’,23 the soul of the universe does not suffer this loss.”
- “Plotinus’ concept of the One is founded on the principle that everything that is conceivable, from the monolithic oneness of Being to the fragmented coherence of Many, has unity.” (Routlidge, 164)
- “ fact, it is clear that a strong pagan tradition informed by Neoplatonism ran parallel to and contended with Christianity for several centuries, and the pagan Neoplatonists were regarded as sages and ascetic holy men (see Edwards 2000).” (Routlidge 511)
