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

Studying Theurgic Religious Philosophy
The Living Tradition

A theurgic education is always self-directed. We can learn from ancient texts, from living teachers, and from our own experiences in ritual, where the entities we contact provide us with additional guidance. Even where a living teacher provides knowledge and guidance, the path is so individual that each of us charts our own way.

One place to start our studies is with the materials in Appendix B, “Theurgic Study Course.” This course includes Kemetic wisdom texts and rituals, Platonic dialogues, the works of the Neo-Platonists, and Hellenistic ritual texts. Reading through these works takes some time but provides a solid foundation for our ritual work.

As a brief overview, there are two primary sources of theurgic religious philosophy. The first is the Chaldean Oracles, in which the gods, especially Hekate, describe the nature of existence. The second is the writings of Iamblichus and Proklos, understanding that the writings of Proklos also include the thought of Asklepigenia. Iamblichus, Asklepigenia, and Proklos based their religious philosophy on the theology of the oracles as well as Platonic theology. All three teachers also practiced theurgic ritual, and our ritual practice today benefits from their insights.

This chapter provides a summary view of theurgic theology based on the Chaldean Oracles and the Iamblichus/Asklepigenia/Proklos school. We begin with a discussion of the definition of philosophy and how theurgic philosophy differs from the philosophy we learn in school today. We also discuss how theurgic philosophy shapes Pagan theology. Then we dive into the discussion of the nature of the divine and the divine hierarchy.

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Although today we think of religion and philosophy as different subjects, theurgy reunites these two disciplines. In fact “philosophy” means something very different to us than it did to the ancients, so it’s worth taking a moment to explore what happened to that word. Philosophy today seems to be a series of intellectual contests between elite players, mostly rich white men. People of color, women of all races and nationalities, the non-college-educated, and other outliers rarely get a chance to speak. Philosophers argue endlessly about the nature of the universe and the human experience but seldom seem to touch on what people are really doing in our daily lives. Confronted with arid mental games, most of us tune them out.

This matters because philosophy is our most sophisticated mode of thought. It is the operating system of our culture, underlying all of our assumptions about how the world actually works. Unfortunately, contemporary Western philosophy privileges reason. Philosophy today speaks to the insatiable human need to know, to understand, to press the limits of comprehension, but it does not speak to the heart—leaving that to psychology, and it does not speak to the spirit—leaving that to religion.

There was a time when philosophy, psychology, religion, and magic were not separate endeavors but part of a whole. The works of theurgists describe insights, emotions, and experiences that our mind-only philosophy does not replicate. When we call what they did “philosophy,” we should remember it was a spiritual quest led by the heart as much as by the mind.

In today’s definition, philosophy is separate from theology. Philosophy, which is secular, deals with the study of existence and of the human place in the cosmos. Theology, which is religious, studies deity, belief, and faith.

In the Platonic school, philosophy and theology are the same. Inquiring into the nature of existence means studying the nature of the divine. The universe was separated from deity in Western European thought in Renaissance times, when mechanical philosophy explained the manifest universe as a series of nonliving mechanisms. Platonic thought re-unites the universe with divinity and places human existence in the context of a sacred flow of life.

We can discuss theurgy as a philosophy and as a theology—both terms are appropriate. The study of theurgic theology strengthens contemporary Pagan theology, reconnecting us to the wellspring of Western religious philosophical thought.

PAGAN THEOLOGY

One of the tropes of religious studies is that Pagan theology is undeveloped. Folk religion has little need of developed theology, and sophisticated Greco-Roman Pagan religion ceased to develop with the triumph of Christianity. A few recent attempts have been made to shape a universalist Pagan theology by examining cross-cultural conceptions of polytheism and indigenous world religions (Jordan Paper and Michael York), or by cataloguing the theology of a broad spectrum of contemporary Pagans (Christine Hoff Kraemer). These are interesting and helpful efforts.

However, as we have seen, Graeco-Roman Pagan religion did not cease to develop but remained lively through the transmission of Neo-Platonic philosophy. Study of that philosophy leads to a renaissance of Pagan religious expression, specifically reverence for deity, the keeping of festival days, and a return to attunement with the natural world.

Religious and secular scholars approach theurgic theology from the point of view of the philosophers. What did Iamblichus think? What did Proklos teach? As we engage Neo-Platonic theology, it is important to understand what the teachers themselves thought. It is also important to recognize that these teachings were not static but dynamic, building on what came before and sometimes contradicting prior ideas, adapting to the times.

Our contributions to Platonic philosophy will change it. Platonists have historically grappled with inherited ideas, sometimes adding to what we have been given and sometimes overturning the past to develop a workable system in the present. This is especially necessary for contemporary Pagan theurgists and theologians. To be useful to us in the present, our theology should reflect the values of inclusion of diversity, respect for persons and cultures, and sustainability in the natural world.

THE NATURE OF THE DIVINE

The core concepts of theurgic religious philosophy are:

· • the One, or First God;

· • the Intellect, or Second God, issuing from the One to manifest existence;

· • the World Soul, or Third Goddess, bringing souls into the material realm;

· • the Empyrean, Intelligible, and Material Worlds, which the divine triad create;

· • a celestial hierarchy including gods, spirits, heroes (such as teachers);

· • the individual human soul.

In this theology, the sun is understood as the sustaining power of the Material World and the road through which the soul returns to the spiritual world.

The First God

As Ruth Majercik and Sarah Iles Johnston explain, the oracles describe a primal triad, with three forces combining to generate the manifest universe. The first principle is called:

· • the One

· • Hyparxis

· • Monad

· • Source

· • the Highest Good

· • Father

What can we know about the One?

The One is.

The One is everything, and beyond everything. The One is male and female and all genders on the spectrum. The One is the consciousness of everything. The One has always been and will always be.

The limited human mind cannot hold the immensity of the One. We can think of the One as the universe, as all universes at all times, and to totality of creation and existence. These are all just shadows of understanding. Our yearning to understand is our yearning to participate in the One.

The One is sometimes translated as God. The idea of the One is not identical with God. God as we know the concept today is irrevocably conflated with Yahweh, the God of the Jews, and with the Christian God the Father, the old man in the clouds. In contrast, the One is beyond knowing. The One is the source of the visible and invisible universe. The One is the ultimate source of our souls, and returning to union with the One is the ultimate goal of theurgy.

The One has aspects of the Qabbalistic “veils of negative existence.” It is not possible to comprehend the One with human minds. This makes sense from a One-as-Universe perspective too.

Most importantly, the One is good. Fundamentally, the One encompasses all living things as a nourishing matrix.

The Second God

The oracles go on to describe a second god. Ruth Majercik notes that the second god is sometimes equated in the oracles with the One, and sometimes is described as the first emanation of the One.

This god is called:

· • The Demiurge

· • The Intellect

· • Nous

· • Craftsman

· • Abyss

· • Father

As Intellect, the Demiurge thinks the thoughts of the One. As Craftsman, the Demiurge shapes the thoughts of the One. As Abyss, the Demiurge seems remote, but as Father the Demiurge seems close, even nurturing.

The Third Goddess

The oracles describe the third member of this triad as a goddess. She is called:

· • Dynamis

· • Power

· • Hekate

· • World Soul

Hekate is the goddess who speaks the oracles. She is the gate through which souls pass to incarnate in the Material World.

The Triple Deity

Triads are familiar to students of religion, to Witches, Pagans, Ceremonial magicians and esotericists. We can immediately call to mind the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the Kemetic triads including Isis, Osiris, and Horus, Mother-Father-Son, and Khnum, Satet, and Anuket, Father-Mother-Daughter. Qabbalists will think of the Supernals: Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. Witches may think of Dryghton/Providence, Goddess, and God/Consort.

From the oracles, Ruth Majercik traces many similar phrases describing this triple deity.

This is a little different than other trinities. For example, in the Isis-Osiris-Horus triad, Isis and Osiris mate, and Isis gives birth to Horus, their son. In the case of the Witchcraft triad, the Dryghton is the unitary spirit who gives rise to the Goddess/God pair. In the Christian trinity the Father emanates the Son and the Holy Spirit in a kind of hierarchy. The First God, Second God, and Third Goddess are not in a family relationship, but are three interlocking parts of a whole.

The vision of relationship among these three entities is not that of a linear hierarchy, but as a horizontal linking. In the horizontal image, the Third Goddess, also known as Life or Power or Hekate, is seen as mediating between the First God and the Second God.

First God Third Goddess Second God

The Third Goddess is always a liminal entity. Specifically, the One thinks Ideas; the Intellect projects the Ideas of the One into the World Soul’s primal matter, or womb, making her the Mother to his Father. Majercik notes that this “reflects an obvious truth: that a feminine element is necessary if there is to be a process of generation at all, whether at the highest or lowest levels … ”

The Three Worlds

The triad of First God, Second God, and Third Goddess together create three worlds. These are:

· • The Empyrean World

· • The Intelligible World

· • The Material World

These worlds are arranged in a cosmic hierarchy. The Empyrean World includes the Platonic Ideas, which provide the form for the worlds below; the Ethereal World includes the sun, the fixed stars, and other planets; and the Material World includes the moon and earth.

These correspond to the Platonic worlds: the World of Forms, the Intelligible World, and the Sensible World. Qabbalists will immediately think of the four-world system of Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah, and Assiah. Neo-Platonism predates the Qabbalistic system and formed one of the inputs to Qabbalah. However, the Platonic system sees the universe not as four, but through the lens of triplicity—everything is in threes.

How does this world creation occur? The One is filled with unbounded power that spills out like water to create the manifold cosmos. In Proclus, Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science, Lucas Siorvanes describes the activity of that power as expressing itself in a threefold process: “proceeding,” flowing out; “reversion,” returning; and “remaining,” still staying essentially itself despite going forth and returning. The universe is not static but filled with this constant movement.

The Journey

The cycle of the soul through incarnation is another example of this process of flow. The soul proceeds from the One and is impelled to make the journey of return to the One.

Everything that is exists in the One. The manifest universe is an outpouring from the One. All that pours out from the One must return to the One. Human souls partake of the One, we came forth from the One, and our entire purpose is to understand how to make the journey of return. Put another way, the theurgist seeks to move up the hierarchy from earth, to moon, to the sun, to the stars, and to the realm of the Ideas themselves.

Theurgy does not insist that theurgy itself is the only way to make the journey of return. Because the One is unknowable, so is truth. Humans often insist on a particular religion, science, or point of view as being irrefutable truth. However, we can see that human comprehension of what is true shifts over time with new understanding. In human relationships, “true” can be understood as a synonym for “right.” Insistence on one truth over another leads to evil action, the source of many cruelties. It may be that Truth exists, but no human knows it.

To approach the One, to make the journey of return, we learn to be good. Among humans, this means learning to be good to one another. This is a core religious teaching as well as a core humanist value.

It is also important to note in our journey that the One and the manifest universe are good. Theurgy purports that evil derives from human imperfection; most of what we understand as evil is the action of humans. Evil exists as an error, a falling away from the understanding of the One and the processes of the universe. Coping with evil is an opportunity to learn what we need to know to return to the One.

THE DIVINE HIERARCHY

As we have seen so far, the triad deities—First God/One, Second God/Intellect, Third Goddess/World Soul—bring forth the universe in three worlds: the Empyrean World of Ideas; the Ethereal World, including the stars, planets, and sun; and the Material World, including the moon and the earth. The human soul incarnates by falling from the One, through the World Soul, through the stars, planets, sun, and moon, to a physical body on earth.

A celestial ladder links the Material World to the world of Ideas; the links include gods, spirits, heroes, and individual souls.

The Gods

For Proklos, “the God is one, the Gods are many.” The myriad gods are all part of the One.

That is not to say that the individual gods do not have their own identity. The Monad, the unitary being, contains multiple other unities called henads. This is an idea akin to (but not identical) the Qabbalistic idea of the sephiroth “sphere.” These henads are not gods, but they are linked to gods and are divine. Each henad is described by one deity, specifically one of the Greek Olympians, but may also contain multiple deities. In “On the Gods and the World,” translated by Gilbert Murray, Sallustius gives several examples of how a henad can include several deities: the henad of Zeus includes Dionysos, the henad of Apollo includes Asklepios, and the henad of Aphrodite includes the Charites.

It may seem strange to equate a universal force with the Olympian deities. We’re accustomed to hearing stories about the gods behaving badly—Zeus raping women, Hera punishing his victims, Hermes stealing cattle, and so on. The gods of the stories behave in ways condemned among humans. How can they be held up as examples of the highest good?

In Platonic philosophy the Olympian deities are not seen through the lens of Homer’s stories about them. In fact, Plato devotes one whole dialogue, Ion, to a criticism of poetic license. Sallustius acknowledges that the doctrine that the gods are unchanging and good directly conflicts with the myths portraying their adultery and theft. He concludes, “Is not that perhaps a thing worthy of admiration, done so that by means of the visible absurdity the soul may immediately feel that the words are veils and believe the truth to be a mystery?” In other words, he says, it’s a mystery, and the myths do not accurately describe the totality of the gods.

The task of the gods is to generate the universe. It is also the task of the gods to exercise Providence, that is, protective care. Humans participate in Providence through prayer and ritual action. We may remember that the Mithras Liturgy begins with the invocation, “Be gracious to me, O Providence … ”

In addition to the Chaldean Oracles, the works of Iamblichus, Proklos/Asklepigenia, and Sallustius, there is another source of information about individual gods or deities. The Kemetic and Greek ritual texts known as the Greek Magical Papyri include numerous rituals invoking individual deities.

Eleni Pachoumi extensively analyses the deities in the papyri. These are not nearly so neatly organized as Sallustius’s categories of the Olympians. They are Kemetic, Greek, and a Kemetic/Greek synthesis, with some survivals of Babylonian deities and additions of Jewish and Christian names and spirits. They include:

· • Hermes and Hekate

· • Dionysos and Aphrodite

· • Apollo/Helios and Selene

· • Artemis and Eros

· • Tyche

· • Isis and Osiris

· • Horus and Typhon

· • Thoth

· • Nepthys

· • Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Christos

· • Aion

· • Ereshkigal

New Gods

Is it possible to approach other deities than those listed here through theurgic techniques? The ancient theurgists did. Proklos added deities to his devotional list whenever he travelled. The list of deities from the papyri seems eclectic. Since this is an urban system, and a living one, there should be in theory nothing to block a theurgist from using theurgic techniques to approach deities from other pantheons than the Kemetic and Greek. For example, many Pagans who work with Hellenistic deities also work with Norse and Celtic deities.

Hinduism, Buddhism, and Santeria are living religions that honor deities with techniques similar to theurgy. Statues in Hindu temples are brought to life by the priesthood. Small Buddhist statues are sold for home use that have been consecrated with a similar technique to theurgic animation. Santeria practitioners invoke the orishas to possession.

Since these are living traditions, these deities should be approached with the devotionals from their traditions. Their devotees may use techniques similar to the work we are doing, but the deities have their own rituals, and we should honor them by learning them on their own terms, rather than incorporating what interests us out of context. The same is true for Native religious rituals from around the world.

We can begin to make reparations for European colonialist actions by forbearing to continue them in the present. Colonialism imposed a Greek and Western European overlay on many other religions. If people with ancestral heritage object to what we are doing with deities in their line, it’s time to back off, listen respectfully, and meditate on correct action. Hearts committed to spiritual practice can meet through dialogue and caring.

Spirits

The oracles, the works of the philosophers, and the papyri describe numerous spirits involved in the hierarchy of being.

DAIMONES

In English today “demon” means evil or inferior spirit; “angel” means good or superior spirit. The Greek word daimon referred to a spirit intermediary between the gods and humans. We have also encountered the idea that an individual could have a personal daimon, as Socrates had his daimonion, an idea similar to the Christian idea of a personal guardian angel.

Each of the Olympian henads commands daimones, spirits to whom they impart their particular power. These daimones can be addressed by the names of the deities, as in, “oh daimones of Apollo.” Lucas Siorvanes points out that these daimones seed the substances of the gods in the terrestrial realm, creating the symbola—plants, animals, stones, sounds—that carry the power of the gods.

In the oracles, daimones are neutral spirits who can perform both good and evil acts. Destructive daimones are sometimes called “dogs” and can be of earth, air, or water. Various oracles list either Hekate or Hades, god of the underworld, as the rulers of the negative daimones.

IYNGES AND SYNOCHES

The oracles discuss several entities unique to the theurgic system. The first of these are the Iynges or wheels. The thoughts of the One are Iynges, messages between the divine and human, magical names sent forth by the One to communicate with the theurgist.

The word iynx is also used to describe a ritual tool. Hellenistic magicians used magic wheels in their operations, and theurgists appropriated that magic wheel for use in their rites. They spun the wheel, iynx, to attract the divine names, Iynges. When theurgists spoke the divine names, they acquired magical powers.

Another divine force is the Synoches who harmonize and protect the universe. They establish the bonds of the universe and watch over it as guardians. An example of a Synoche is the rays of the sun.

TELETARCHES

The oracles also identify Teletarches, beings who assist the Synoches and Iynges. Majercik thinks that the Teletarches as spirits may be truly Chaldean; that is, Babylonian rather than Kemetic or Hellenic in origin. Majercik calls them the “masters of initiation” and notes that they are the rulers of the three worlds. The Teletarches are associated with three virtues: Pistis, or Trust; Aleitheia, or Truth; and Eros, or Love.

The Greek word pistis is often translated as “faith,” but faith means something different today than pistis meant to a Pagan in Hellenistic times. To a modern English speaker “faith” has a strong religious overtone, associated with the fidelity of Christian and other religious practitioners to their religions even in the face of the mechanistic or secular denial of that faith. Faith is belief despite the absence of scientific proof of something physically measurable.

Pistis is also mentioned in a few ancient sources as the personified goddess of trust. To the ancient theurgist “pistis” meant a particular kind of knowledge or gnosis. In The Egyptian Hermes, Garth Fowden quotes the Hermetic phrase “to have understood is to have believed and not to have understood is not to have believed.” He goes on, “one could hardly wish for a more concise statement of the ancients’ conviction that human and divine knowledge, reason and intuition, are interdependent.” Trust, pistis, is the goal of the contemplation of the divine. Contemplation leads to intellectual knowledge but the touch of the divine itself leads to certainty.

Although the Teletarches as guiding forces may be Chaldean, Greek religious philosophy discussed Aleitheia as a concept well before Plato. Parmenides wrote the poem “On Nature” in two parts, the first named Aleitheia, translated “truth” (the second was Doxa, “opinion”). Hayim and Rivca Gordon review Heidegger’s analysis of Parmenides’s poem and note that the philosopher approached Aleitheia as a goddess in her own right, and as a force of “unconcealing.” Understanding Aleitheia’s truth as a form of unconcealing or revelation points to the importance in theurgy of learning from direct contact with divinity.

We know Eros as a Greek deity in two forms: an older form who was the cosmic force of generation, and a younger form appearing as the son of Aphrodite. Parmenides’s poem described the rising of the poet to the realm of Aphrodite in a strikingly theurgic image (see John Burnett’s translation). As a Teletarch, Eros inspires in us the love of philosophy and the love of the gods that drives us to seek contact and communion with them.

The Neo-Platonic Soul

The soul is the final entity in the divine hierarchy. The oracles gave specific instructions allowing the soul to approach the gods. Before we can learn these, we need to understand something about the Neo-Platonic understanding of the soul.

In the oracles, the soul descends into matter via the ether, sun, moon, and air. Each contributes to the vehicle of the soul. This descent is an intoxication from which the soul should wake up. After death, unpurified souls spend a period of time in Hades undergoing purification until they can return to earth.

The soul is purified through theurgy, the use of ritual. In his explanation of theurgy, Iamblichus was at some pains to distinguish between theurgy as god-work, and goetia or magic. Goetic magicians sought to compel the gods, while theurgists understand that the gods choose to descend and interact with humans.

Symbola and synthemata, divine objects, bear the signatures of the gods in the physical world. They are divine presence in matter. The synthemata are physical objects like herbs, plants, stones, and incense, and they can also include chants, songs, and visions of the gods. Using those sacred symbola, the soul could awaken the same signatures in the soul itself; the gods would infuse the theurgists with their power and make the theurgists themselves holy.

In Theurgy and the Soul, Shaw argues that theurgy’s place in Platonism is to move the experience of embodiment from being imprisoned in matter to full participation in the World Soul. The soul transforms its experience of chaos into cosmic order. Iamblichus returns to the imagery of the Heliopolitan cosmology to articulate this thought, using the symbols of mud and lotus. Mud nourishes the lotus until it is ready to rise above the mound; in the same way the soul of the theurgist rises above matter, which allows its full development.

Majercik’s translation of Fragment 110 of the Chaldean Oracles describes this theurgic process: “Seek out the channel of the soul, from where it descended in a certain order to serve the body, and seek how you will raise it up again to its order by combining ritual action with a sacred word … ” We will discuss sacred words and passwords in the section “Rising through the Worlds” in chapter 16.

Christian Theurgy

As we encounter ideas like “One” and “Father,” and “all gods are part of the One,” we may be tempted to draw parallels between Platonic religious philosophy and Christian monotheism. There is, however, a difference between recognizing the unity of all things, and insisting that one conception of one God is the only correct perception of the universe.

Throughout this work, I have been making the case that the study of Platonic philosophy leads to Pagan ritual. We should note that there is such a thing as Christian theurgy. Hypatia taught Christians; her devoted student Synesius was a bishop; and the Alexandrian Academy admitted Christians until its closure. The tension between Christians and Pagans in the Alexandrian Academy is vividly portrayed in the work of Zacharias of Gaza, who would later become Bishop of the Greek city of Mytilene. In Ammonius or On the Creation of the World, Zacharias describes heated discussions between “the Christian” and Ammonius in which Ammonius is ultimately driven to silence. In late antiquity, committed Pagans were pressured to convert to Christianity, and Platonic philosophy was pressed to collapse the myriad forms of divinity into a single monad, God.

Christian theurgists practice today. In Living Theurgy, Jeffrey Kupperman analyses the theology of Dionysius alongside the theology of Iamblichus, equating Pagan entities with an angelic hierarchy. Kupperman also includes Christian practice, giving directions for animating a statue of the Christos. I am personally aware of several contemporary theurgists who primarily identify as Christian.

There are, however, fundamental differences between Christian and Pagan theurgists. We have already noted that Asklepigenia and Proklos rejected the Christian submission to fate and actively sought through magic to change the course of their lives. Pagan religion celebrates the diverse forms of deity and offers to each their particular preferred sacrifice.

These differences were emphasized by the early Christian church and continue to be emphasized by Christians today. Christian leaders issue injunctions to their followers to worship only the Christian God and not Pagan deities, and they specifically prohibit working with statues as well, requiring Christians to submit to the will of God. Christian theurgy on the other hand leads Christians into practices more congenial to Pagans. I harbor a private suspicion that non-theurgic Christians would identify the practices of Christian theurgy as Pagan in character.

I welcome Christian theurgists to the work, as Platonists have always done, but I warn that this project is not intended to alter Platonism to make it acceptable to Christianity; our emphasis here is on restoring the rich complexity of Pagan theology and practice. Readers may remain Christian if it is their will, but respect for the Pagan path is absolutely required. We congenially invite everyone to follow in the footsteps of Boethius and Plethon and fully convert to Pagan Platonism.

Updating the System

Contemporary theurgists have the responsibility to preserve Platonic philosophy and Pagan religious practice. In addition to teaching what the ancients taught, we have the responsibility to improve the system.

Platonic conceptions rely heavily on gendered imagery. While the One encompasses everything and is beyond understanding, the One is also called the Father. In “Animal Par Excellence: Soul, Body, and Gender in Plato’s Timaeus,” Adam Weitzenfield analyzes the ways in which Plato’s dialogue Timaeus valorizes the male. The soul is created by the demiurge and placed in bodies by the gods. Those who succeed in contemplating the rational in their first lives are free to return to their home star, but those who do not are reincarnated as women. Here we see a denigration of the female gender as being less rational and secondary to men.

For Plato, there is a world more real than the physical, and rational contemplation puts us in touch with that world while sense experience traps the soul in a physical prison. The immortal divinely created soul is meant to contemplate the perfect world of the forms from whence it came, and to steer away from experience of the Material World. There is a devaluation of matter in this conceptualization. The world is a trap, is evil, and is the prison from which the soul is attempting to escape.

This is where the challenge to the concept of perennial philosophy becomes important. Because we know we are not looking at an eternal truth but instead ideas created within a historic context, we are free to explore the ways in which context have shaped those ideas and alter the metaphysic to fit our own needs and understanding.

Pagans are far from alone in the effort to reform aspects of this tradition. Feminist theologians challenge the gender of God as male. Contemporary feminists struggle with the historical conceptions of God as reflecting a particular people in a particular place. They seek to diversify God by acknowledging all aspects of the human in God.

It is the task of the contemporary Pagan theurgic philosopher-theologian to find terms and images that reflect an understanding of the One as not bounded by human form in ways privileging specific humans over others. We can acknowledge the historical understanding of the One as the Father while creating new language and new visions that understand the One as embodying every human form.

First, we can refer to the One as “the One” rather than “God” or “Father.” The conception of the One as overflowing, giving, nurturing, creating are all beautiful images, well suited to female imagery as it is to male, arguably borrowed from language describing Goddesses.

We can engage Kemetic theology to provide us with examples of trinities that include the female. As many scholars have pointed out, Kemetic theologians routinely created new stories to reflect their own needs and changing understanding of the universe. While we create new stories we may also explore the fluidity of gender; a new trinity can include male, female, and neither/both.

In contemporary religion, there is no reason not to validate people of all genders. Some feminist philosophers point to Plato’s non-gendered soul as the seed of this understanding. If a soul can be born into male or female bodies, or any kind of body, then the soul itself has no gender. Removing the value system that ranks some people as more valuable than others frees us to understand every kind of body as equally sacred. To accomplish this, we must continually challenge the default person as male, white, heterosexual, and able-bodied.

In Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, Brian Easlea outlines the politics that resulted in the desacralization of the Western idea of the universe. When Platonic and Hermetic works were re-introduced into Renaissance Europe, a battle was sparked between exploratory thinkers who called themselves natural philosophers and Church clerics enforcing Christian dogma. A détente between them conceptualized the universe as a mechanism God created and then left to run itself. From there it was a simple step to ignore God altogether, bringing us to the conflict today between “religious” (Christian) and “secular” (mechanical) viewpoints. In this conceptualization, life is an artifact of a hostile universe; the only relief from the sterility of this view is belief in a distant but caring Father. The mechanical universe permitted the exploitation and destruction of the earth and its living creatures as soulless mechanisms.

New physics points to the idea that the universe is conversely an artifact of life. Similarly, deep ecology calls on conceptualizations of the earth as a single organism and all of the earth as an artifact of life. This is perhaps the most important reason to re-engage the Platonic metaphysic that conceives the universe as a living and interconnected whole. Resacralizing the world and the universe contributes to a shift in emphasis from use of dead matter to the preservation of life.

A cosmos that is sacred, in which matter is sacred, in which all genders are valued equally as both participating in embodiment and participating in spirituality is a philosophy derived from the Timaeus but differs from it substantially. Can it be considered to be Platonic?

Why would it not be? We honor Plato as one of the contributors to the worldview we inhabit. However, we do not worship Plato and his successors as an infallible intellect. We can test the work of our ancestors, shaping it for use in the modern era and making it our own.