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

Preparing for Practice
The Living Tradition

The drumbeat runs through the lives of the teachers: settle the body, still the mind, contemplate the divine. How do we accomplish these tasks?

SETTLE THE BODY

The Platonic tradition does not value the body. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. The advantage is that anyone can be a Platonist. The tradition doesn’t care if you’re male, female, or gender queer; white, black, brown, mixed; straight, gay, adventurous or celibate; young, old, able or disabled. If you are willing to learn, you can learn.

Some religious and magical traditions place emphasis on gender; in these traditions we are always struggling against the gender hierarchy that values male over female and the solidly gendered against the gender fluid. Platonism provides a welcome alternative to those who are less valued in those traditions. For the theurgist, the essential polarity is not male/female, but human/divine.

While Platonism does not value one skin color over another, theurgists must guard against cultural appropriation, incorporating key insights from other peoples out of context and without acknowledgement. It is vitally important to recognize the sources of our tradition and to respect the peoples who created that tradition, whatever their color and culture. Iamblichus points the way for us here, as he credited the Kemetic contribution to his teachings.

The disadvantage of devaluing the physical is that it does not honor the contribution of the body to our theurgic practice. We can see this pitfall in the life of Plotinus. His biographer Porphyry notes that at the end of his life he refused medication and stopped bathing. His condition forced his pupils to avoid him, whereupon he withdrew to a country house to die. We can avoid this pitfall by drawing on the Kemetic and other traditions that require bathing before practice, and make it a point to bring a clean body to the gods.

Some Platonic and Pythagorean teachers advocate vegetarianism, a time-honored practice for those who wish to participate. However, Hellenic religion involved the sacrifice of animals, and some deities prefer meat offerings. Also there are people who must eat meat. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin notes that she would prefer that people had developed as plant eaters, but we are omnivores. She finds that she requires meat to function, and suspects that this is because her autistic system is built somewhat differently than other humans. Whether to eat meat or abstain is a practitioner’s personal choice, and as all humans are welcome to practice theurgy, meat eating should not be a bar to practice.

In terms of food, it is sensible for the theurgist to eat as many whole foods as possible and avoid processed foods. Recreating the offerings of our ancestors provides an interesting way to explore healthy eating. Remember that the temples of Kemet offered food to the gods that was then distributed to the temple staff. We can recreate this practice by offering our food to the deities before we eat. Now, Proklos did not offer TV dinners to the gods; a plate of fruit, cheese, and homemade bread is a welcome offering to the gods … and a pretty good meal for ourselves.

STILL THE MIND

We chatter. The active human neocortex continually processes the input of our senses. While some people think in pictures, most of us think verbally, in words. These words create generalizations, templates of the world used to sort and screen the overwhelming influx of data.

That chatter gets in the way of spiritual practice. Almost every religion and spiritual path contains some form of exercise to still the mind. All the Platonic teachers began their practical lessons with instructions to engage in meditation or contemplation. Meditation to clear thought is helpful to the theurgist. If our minds are full, how can we make space to accept the imprint of the divine?

While we don’t know exactly what priestesses like Neitokrity did in the temples of Kemet, we can learn from the many traditions surrounding us today. For example, yoga and tai chi meditations focus on breathing. Chapter seventeen, “Theurgic Ritual Workbook,” contains a simple breathing exercise, “Meditation to Clear Thought.”

Meditation can be part of ritual, but it does not have to be a ritualized activity. We don’t need special clothes or a temple or a particular time of day for these activities. Actually, it’s important to be able to meditate wherever we are: it is an important life tool for anyone on any spiritual path.

CONTEMPLATE THE DIVINE

To contemplate means to think deeply about a subject. As we study the teachings of our ancestors, we may find some ideas that are easy to understand, make good sense to us, and immediately enter into our worldview. Other ideas are new or contradict thoughts we already hold, challenging us to reexamine our worldview. We may find that the new idea reshapes the way we understand the world. We may also reject the idea—no one person has the ultimate truth, and not all notions are helpful to us on our own path.

Where theurgic contemplation differs from simple philosophical study is that it grounds in ritual. We not only think, we act, presenting ourselves before the gods in the way that our contemplation has revealed to us. We make ourselves available to the divine. When we speak to the gods and they answer, that illumination transforms us more than any amount of human reasoning can do. This opening of ourselves to the divine is the culmination of our work and the ultimate theurgic practice.

With these preparations in mind, we are ready to take on the study of the works of the teachers and the practice of theurgic rituals.