For the Love of the Gods: The History and Modern Practice of Theurgy - Brandy Williams 2016

Stories from the Ancestors

We call on those who have come before us,

Grant us the support that ancestors can give.

To contemporary Pagans, the word “ancestors” often means the people connected to our bodies—that is, our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers as far back as we can reach. We advise one another to research our family lines, to discover our people, to find the divinity that calls to us through our blood. This discovery may be easy for some, difficult for others, impossible for those whose ancestors were stolen from their homelands and brought to Europe and America as slaves.

There is another way to look at our ancestors, the ancestors of our souls, a chosen family of the spirit. Any ancestor who speaks to us can form part of that lineage. This does not depend on our physical bloodline and no one can exclude us from that relationship.

Pagan theology has a category of people who stand out above the rest, who contribute so much and live such exemplary lives that they occupy a space between humans and spirits. The term for these people is “heroes,” and especially, “teachers.”

To ancient Pagans, teachers were not simply people who imparted knowledge. They were also spiritual guides. They themselves glowed with the energy of the gods they invoked, serving as intermediaries between students and the gods. They were called by titles such as “Divine” and “Savior.” They inspired respect but also reverence and even love. Individually they can guide us; collectively they form the golden chain connecting us to our human past and the knowledge of the ultimate source of our souls.

We can and must study the works the teachers left behind, but if we limit ourselves to reading the texts, we’re simply walking back down the road of understanding with the mind only. We also need to understand the context of those works. Where did they live? What gods did they worship and how? What was happening in the world that affected their work?

We tend to treat the texts of the ancients as if they exist outside of space and time, floating in a mind-only world. But the people who wrote those works had a physical life. They were children once, they had great triumphs and terrible losses, and they had flaws. We need to understand who they were, how they lived, what their friends thought of them, where they succeeded and where they failed. We need to hear their stories.

Telling the stories of the teachers of theurgy from a Pagan perspective strengthens the golden chain that connects them to us. It is an act of reclaiming, bringing back to life the lives that have come before us, framing a Pagan context for our own relationships with the gods. We learn from the teachers and they show us the way.

The Neo-Platonic teachers all insisted that their knowledge was rooted in Egypt. We begin our study of the lives of the teachers in Kemet, with the practices in the temples where priestesses and priests approached the living presence of the gods.