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

Plato
Stories from the Ancestors

A hundred years after Ankhesneferibre’s death, the Persians had conquered Kemet again. Once again they were pushed out by native pharaohs, this time with the aid of Greek mercenaries. Plato was born into a world at war. He lived 427—347 BCE, child of a wealthy Athenian family, but his family’s position could not entirely shield him from the chaos of the times.

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

The day everything changed the boy woke up, slipped into a brightly colored linen shift, threw on a cloak, stuck his feet into sandals, and scrambled down the ladder to the kitchen. His sister was waiting for him at the table. “Aristocles! You’re late,” she said, shoving a hunk of bread at him. He dipped it into water mixed with a little wine and ate as much as he could, wiped his hand on it, and threw it onto the floor. Potone pulled at his hand. “Come on,” she said, running out of the room with him, while behind them a slave quietly cleaned up the mess on the floor.

“He’s home,” Aristocles said to his sister in a low voice. He was Ariston, their father. To the public he was a great man, a politician, the son of kings. Aristocles and Potone knew a different Ariston. The night he tried to force his wife to have sex with him, Perictione shouted loud enough to wake up the whole house. Potone climbed into bed with Aristocles and the two of them shivered as they listened to the argument. Later their mother told them their father had changed; Apollo had come to him in a dream and told him to behave chastely.

Chastely to his wife, at least. “There’s going to be a symposium,” Aristocles said. He hated the drinking parties that kept the whole house awake all night. His father’s friends would cram into the men’s room of the house and shout “More wine!” while the male slaves poured them drinks, the women slaves worked in the kitchen all night turning out food, musicians played flutes and drums, and hired women came to dance and sing and roll about on the couches with the men.

“You know what he said to me?” Aristocles went on. “He said ’aren’t you in school yet, boy?’”

“Oh no!” Potone said. Their older brothers already went to school. When Aristocles finally joined them their father had said he would dismiss their tutor, and Potone’s education would be over. She’d join the women in the weaving room making cloth for the family and learning how to run a household. But she loved to learn. She listened raptly to the tutor’s stories about the Persian wars, especially the exploits of Artemesia, the warrior queen who fought with the Persians. She bent her head over the tablet, making marks on the wax with the stylus, determined to read and write.

“I told him I’m not old enough, but I don’t think he believed me,” Aristocles said. Their father was often gone, finding the house in the city claustrophobic, spending most of his time with the other politicians or touring the country estates that provided the family’s wealth.

Their tutor was not waiting for them in the craft room. Instead their mother sat on a bench, her eyes red with crying, supported by a slave woman. Aristocles and Potone traded an alarmed look, then crept up to her and sat at her feet. “Your father is dead,” Perictione said.

“Good!” Potone said. It was exactly what Aristocles was thinking.

Perictione shook her head. “Now we are alone in the world,” she said. “Your brothers are too young to represent the house.” Only men could serve on the political councils and speak in court. “I can’t manage the estates. This is a rich and noble family and there will be many who descend on us to try to take some of it for themselves.”

Aristocles felt helpless. He wished he was old enough to defend his mother and his sister. What would happen to them?

A few days later Perictione called all her children into the men’s room. Usually women didn’t use the room but it was the only place they could all gather. Glaukon and Adeimantis had already taken the couch, leaving Aristocles and Potone to sit on the floor. “You remember Pyrilampes,” their mother said. “My uncle. He’s ambassador to Persia, he’s just back from court.”

Stiff with age, Pyrilampes greeted Glaukon and Adeimantis gravely. When his eyes fell on Aristocles he grinned. “Bee lips!” he said. Aristocles grimaced. Of all the stories the man would remember! One morning when Glaukon had come in to wake him up he found bees on Aristocles’s lips. His mother said it meant he would be a great poet. Glaukon said it was because he had stolen a honey cake before going to bed.

Perictione said, “Pyrilampes is your new father.” Glaukon and Adeimantis traded a glance. Aristocles looked anxiously at his mother. What did that mean? “He has agreed to step in to protect our household. Now the estates will remain in the family. You’ll all be able to continue your education.” Seeing Potone bite her lips, Perictione said, “Yes, all. We can afford to keep your tutor, Potone. My daughter will be literate, like me.” Her eyes fell on her youngest son. “But Aristocles will have to go to school.”

Classical Greece

Athens, the birthplace of democracy! The shining city where geniuses built the foundations of civilization! For centuries Eurocentric scholars have glorified the accomplishments of the city’s privileged elite. In our modern time, however, scholars with other viewpoints have called into question this picture of Athens.

The classical Greek world was composed of an alliance of cities, each of which had a distinct character. Athenian “democracy” extended only to male citizens; women were either confined to their homes and estates or served as prostitutes to the men who engaged in public discourse, while the city itself was powered by the labor of slaves. European history remembers Athens’s rival and ally Sparta primarily for the bravery of its warriors, but in Sparta women received a literate and physical education and conducted the affairs of the town and their estates while the men were off at war. The cities around Athens periodically allied with each other and Athens’s other enemies to resist the aggression of the Athenian Empire.

The Greek cities in the Mediterranean bordered the Persian Empire, a vast alliance extending across Central Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe. The Persians built on the success of the Mesopotamian empires preceding them. For hundreds of years goods moved throughout the Persian world on peaceful trade routes. While the official religion of the Persian Empire was Zoroastrianism, Persian emperors permitted their subject peoples to keep their own religions and ancestral customs.

The Greek and Persian empires went to war in the fifth century BCE. While children of Eurocentric education are taught to cheer for the Greeks and applaud the bravery of the Spartans (especially the 300 who held the pass at Thermopylae), the Persian Empire at that time was significantly more cosmopolitan and tolerant than the Greek. In the end neither empire conquered the other, and after several decades of war a peace treaty firmed up the borders, one of the first divisions of East and West.

In the later fifth century BCE, Sparta and Athens went to war, an event that diminished the prosperity of the Peloponnesian peninsula. Sparta won and imposed strict controls on Athens. It was in that world where Plato grew to adulthood.

TRIAL OF A TEACHER

When Aristocles entered the gymnasium bathing room he found both his brothers waiting for him. A slave stepped forward to douse his glowing skin with oil and then scrape it off. Adeimantis looked up and down his brother’s naked girth and said, “Hello, Plato.”

Unlike “bee lips”, the nickname broad didn’t sting him. “The better to throw you with, dear brother,” he laughed.

Glaukon said, “How did the bout go?”

“I won,” Plato said. “I always win.”

Adeimantis grinned. “That’s my brother!” he said. “You’re the best wrestler in Athens. You should go to the Isthmian Games again.”

“I don’t have the heart after the war,” Plato said. Only a few years before, he’d fought in the Athenian army that lost to the Spartans in the latest battle of the Peloponnesian Wars.

Glaukon quelled Adeimantis with a glance. “That’s not what we’re here to talk about,” he said. “Are you heading out to Socrates’s house again?”

“Of course,” Plato said, turning so the slave could oil his back.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Glaukon said.

“Why not?” Plato said. “He’s a fine philosopher.”

“If that’s what you call it,” Adeimantis said. Glaukon glared at him again.

“Look, the rumors aren’t true,” Plato said. “He’s not an atheist. He doesn’t spend all day on the couch with his students either. Not that he’d be the first teacher to do that,” he added. Older men often picked youths for lovers, trading clothes and political favors for emotional and physical intimacy. Thanks to his mother’s uncle, Plato’s family continued to be among the wealthiest in Athens, and Plato believed he didn’t need favors from anyone.

“Socrates is a spiritual man,” he went on. “He’s an initiate of the priestess Diotima who serves the gods. He meditates—he can sit for hours. He hears messages in dreams and acts on them. His daimonion guides his actions.”

“His daimonion?” Adeimantis said. “You mean his daimon, the guardian spirit?”

Plato nodded. “He met his daimon as a child, and the daimon speaks to him in his mind. He always does what the daimon tells him to do. Or rather, doesn’t do what the daimon tells him not to do.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Adeimantis said doubtfully.

Glaukon took over. “The city has turned against him. They blame his students for helping Sparta install the tyrants.” Sparta had hand-picked thirty Athenians to rule the city. Their bloody rule had won them the title “the Thirty Tyrants.” “Ever since the tyrants were overthrown the city has been punishing the people who were associated with them.”

“I don’t follow them,” Plato said, putting on his chiton. “They were too violent. I can’t support that anymore.”

“You left, but Uncle Charmides didn’t and a lot of people remember that,” Glaukon said.

“We’ve always been a powerful family. We always will be,” Plato said. “I’m going into politics myself.”

“Just stay in the gymnasium today,” Glaukon said. “One of the Pythagorean teachers is lecturing.”

Plato laughed. “More tales of the mythical traveler? He’ll tell us to stop eating meat,” he said. “That’s not a wrestler’s diet. I’ll see you at home.” He shoved his feet into his sandals and turned to go.

Adeimantis grabbed at his arm. “You love Socrates,” he said accusingly.

Plato met his gaze calmly. “Of course I love him,” he said. “He’s the best man I’ve ever known.”

He didn’t become alarmed until he saw the soldiers standing in front of Socrates’ house. “Plato,” one of them said. “You should go home. No lectures today.”

He tried to push past them. “Where’s Socrates?” His voice rose. “What’s happened to him?”

The man looked sympathetic. “He’s been arrested,” he said.

“What?” Plato couldn’t hide his shock. “On what charge?”

“Corrupting the youth.”

“I’m his student. I’ll vouch for him,” Plato said.

The man said quietly, “You’re one of the youth he’s corrupting.”

Plato managed to make it to the court just before the formal charges were read. “This indictment and affidavit is sworn by Meletus, the son of Meletus of Pitthos, against Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state, and of introducing new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The penalty demanded is death.”

Plato pushed his way onto the bench among his friends who crowded over to make room for him. “New divinities,” one of them muttered. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Plato grew increasingly agitated as three accusers stood and passionately condemned Socrates. It seemed that his primary crime was teaching Critias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants, although there was plenty of stuff in there about his impious behavior too.

Finally Socrates rose to give his own defense. He seemed frailer than Plato had ever seen him, showing every one of his seventy years, but his voice rose strongly. Plato leaned forward, trying to commit to memory every word his teacher said. Socrates spoke for three hours about his love for Athens. He admitted it was true that he did not attend the religious festivals of the city, but he loved and honored the gods. It was just that he knew the gods through the works of his daimon.

Once he pointed up into the benches. “There are my students,” he said. “If I corrupt the youth, why don’t they accuse me?”

Plato’s friend elbowed him. “Look, they’re staring at us.”

Plato saw that many men in the assemblage were glaring at them. For the first time he felt the weight of disapproval. “I wish I was old enough to sit on the council,” he muttered. He realized that he did need political favors; once again he was too young, helpless to help his teacher.

His friend raised his eyebrows. “You are far from the most famous Plato in Athens.”

Finally the water in the water clock ran out and Socrates had to stop. The jurors threw their clay ballot disks into one of two pots, one for guilty and one for innocent. The count was close, but in the end, the verdict was guilty.

The jurors had to decide what his punishment would be. The accusers stood and demanded Socrates be put to death. Socrates stood to offer the usual counter-punishment. Everyone expected he would ask to be exiled, which would probably be accepted. Instead he said, “Punish me with free meals for life.”

The crowd roared. “What is he doing?” Plato shouted. “He’s provoking them!”

His friend said, “I think he’s saying he’s innocent.”

Another friend said, “I think he wants them to kill him.”

When the noise finally died down, one of his accusers said, “That’s not a punishment, it’s a reward. Propose a real punishment.”

“One silver coin,” Socrates said, throwing it down on the ground in front of him.

The crowd roared again. Plato leapt to his feet and ran to his teacher’s side. “One silver coin, and these,” he said, emptying his pouch. His friends pushed their way down to the floor and emptied their pouches too. In the end there were only thirty silver coins.

The jurors voted again, choosing between death and a punishment of thirty silver coins. This time the verdict was overwhelming: death by drinking poison hemlock.

The soldiers led Socrates away to a jail cell. His students followed, crowding around the couch while he lay his head down. The hand that reached for the cup of hemlock was steady. “Don’t be afraid of my death,” he told them. “I’m not.”

Plato said, “Why did you do it?”

Socrates said calmly, “My daimonion didn’t tell me not to.”

When Plato arrived home Potone threw herself on him. “I was so worried about you!”

Gently he pulled her arms from his neck. “I live,” he said. “My teacher does not.”

“I tried to spare you,” Glaukon said. “You should have listened to the Pythagorean.”

Pythagoras. The name gave Plato an idea. The old philosopher was said to have travelled the world. The city that had turned on Plato’s teacher seemed a prison to him now. “I’ll follow him,” Plato said. “I’m leaving the city.”

Pythagoras

More than a hundred years before Plato, Pythagoras was born on an island off the coast of Turkey. The port city of Samos engaged in seaborne trade around a quarter of the world. In “The Paths of the Ancient Sages” Peter Kingsley points out that the temple of Hera on Samos stored objects from around the known world, including Babylonia, Syria, Asia, India, and Egypt. It is not surprising that Pythagoras acquired a taste for travel at the beginning of his life.

We know Pythagoras’s life from the accounts of three biographers who lived many centuries after he died: Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. All of them documented his extensive journeys across the ancient world from Egypt to India. Iamblichus says he learned divine rites and worship of the gods from the Chaldeans. While it became a Eurocentric scholastic fashion to question whether Pythagoras ever traveled at all, Kingsley points out that reports of his travels date back to his own lifetime.

In middle age, Pythagoras settled in Corona, a city in Italy, and began to teach. In Pythagorean Women Sarah Pomeroy details his teaching methodology. First he addressed the men, then the women separately, then the children, including girls and boys, at a time when it was unusual for girls and women to receive formal education. Pomeroy points out that the reforms he instituted in daily life would have to be adopted by the whole family, including the women. These reforms included giving up ostentatious clothing and jewelry, wearing linen rather than wool, and strict monogamy. This last was an innovation in a culture where men routinely visited prostitutes and maintained concubines. Pythagoras also countered the idea that women were made unclean by sex by saying that women were pure enough to engage in ritual even after sex with their husbands, although not after sex with anyone else.

The followers of Pythagoras were divided into outer and inner circles. The outer circles lived at home and attended his lectures by day. The inner circle lived in a community of families that followed his way of life, including strict vegetarianism and holding property in common.

In his paper “The Death of Pythagoras,” Bruce Pennington notes there are as many as ten versions of Pythagoras’s death. In some, a spurned student rouses the populace against him. Others say he lived to be a hundred and taught his philosophy to Empedocles, the Greek philosopher who said that the world is composed of the elements, earth, water, air, and fire.

The school of Pythagoras continued in southern Italy, where his followers became fervent devotees of the Orphic Mysteries. Plato spent some time among them in his own travels and would later draw heavily on their ideas and the imagery of the mysteries for his own work.

A NEW BEGINNING

Plato peered anxiously at the slaves carrying his luggage sacks off the ship. “Careful with that!” he called out. One of those sacks held the accounts he had laboriously recorded of Socrates’s trial and as much of his teacher’s wisdom as he could dig out of his memory.

He’d started the journey with friends, other students of Socrates, but none of them had come with him this far. In Italy he’d spent time with Pythagorean teachers. They had taught him that this one life was but a waypoint on the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. They said Pythagoras had learned this teaching in India. Only virtuous living and spiritual initiation could win a soul free from the cycle. This was strange to Plato, who like every Greek knew that the soul entered the dark underworld after death where it could wander lost, or be saved by knowledge imparted by initiation and be brought to Persephone’s realm.

The Pythagoreans taught Plato that the mysteries of the universe could be understood through the knowledge of numbers, that philosophy imparts divine wisdom, and that the soul could rise to union with the divine. These things Pythagoras had learned not from India, but from Egypt, and these were the teachings he most valued.

The Pythagorean teachers had reminded Plato that his true calling was to learn. He was no longer running away from Athens. He was running toward knowledge.

“Greetings!” The voice spoke Greek, but the man was as far from Greek as Plato could imagine. His skin was so black it shone in the merciless desert sun. “Welcome to Thebes!” The city too was as far from Greece as he could imagine, with buildings made of clay stretching for miles along the banks of the river.

“’Thebes’ is what we call it. You call it ’Waset,’ don’t you?” Plato said, stepping off the boat. “City of a hundred gates.” He’d learned the land called “Egypt” in his own tongue was called “Kemet” by its own people, after the fertile black soil deposited by the yearly flooding of the Nile.

“The city has fewer gates since the Persians came,” his guide said, falling in with him along the path into the city. “Thebes is no longer the city it once was.”

“We’ve had some trouble with them ourselves,” Plato said dryly.

The man laughed. “And we thank you for your aid!” Egypt had only recently thrown off Persian rule with Greek assistance and had re-instated Kemetic pharaohs. “I presume you’re in the army yourself?”

“Not since my youth,” Plato said. “I’m a student, not a mercenary.”

The man blinked at him. “A man from Greece, and you are here to study?”

“I am told this is the finest school in the world.”

“Of course,” the man said, “but … are you ready?”

Plato drew himself up. “I was schooled in Athens by Socrates and in Italy by the Pythagoreans. I am sure I can learn what you have to teach in a year or two.”

His guide laughed and changed the subject. “You have sailed a long time.”

“Eleven days from Heliopolis,” Plato said. The travel guide written by Herodotus had said the trip would only take nine, and Plato rather held it against him. It had been a cramped boat.

“Then you are ready to rest,” his guide said. “I can show you a good place to stay. Run by a relative of my sister, very cheap—” He ran his eyes over Plato’s finely woven cloak and said, “Er, very comfortable.”

Later in the day as he walked toward the temple, Plato thought he had travelled enough that he should have become accustomed to the sight of women on the streets by now. In Athens there were only a few and they were not respectable. In Thebes respectable women were everywhere, beautiful brown and black women in linen dresses, with jewels around their necks and jeweled colors on their eyes and cheeks. They not only ran households, they ran businesses! They married who they wanted, travelled where they wanted, owned property, represented themselves in court, and seemed to live as freely as men.

The temple itself was impressive. The columns rose twice as high as the Parthenon, stone walls carved with figures and signs, all painted in bright colors. Six gigantic statues of men guarded the gate, all identical, except the two flanking the gate, who were seated.

As he stepped through the gate into the vast courtyard, an Egyptian woman greeted him in Greek. “Hail, traveler. What have you come to seek?”

He’d thought he was a man of the world, but a woman greeting him so openly in public surprised him. “I’ve come to speak to your teachers,” he said.

“I am a teacher,” she said. He expected her to next ask him what he wanted to learn, but instead she said, “What makes you worthy to be taught?”

“I am Aristocles, son of Ariston,” he said. “My family has been powerful in Athens for a hundred years.”

The woman smiled gently. “Do you see the guardians at the gate?” she said. “These are statues of Ramses the Great. He ruled for almost seventy years. He built many temples and cities, and he fathered many, many children. In a real sense we are all his children.” She paused. “He lived nearly a thousand years ago.”

Reeling, Plato reconsidered his answer. “I am willing to learn,” he said.

His guide smiled again. “Can you finish what you begin?” she said. “Our course of study requires quite a long time to complete.”

“How long?” Plato said, less sure of himself. He thought he might be able to stay for two, maybe three years.

“Forty years,” she said serenely.

Greek Cosmology

A Greek child was prepared to join the community through the paideia, a word meaning “education” but also including the meaning of understanding the natural order, including the stories of the gods. Everyone’s first exposure to the paideia was through stories told by professionals or parents, usually at community gatherings or at home at night.

The greatest stories were those told by the poets, Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus. The Homeric works include a collection of hymns, thirty-one song/prayers addressed to individual gods and goddesses telling stories of their origin and exploits. There are also two long stories: the Iliad, telling of the sack of Troy, and the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus’s journey home after the war. The hymns of Hesiod and Orpheus describe the origin of the gods, and Hesiod’s Works and Days gives agricultural instructions in a sacred context.

The poets Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus were held to be historic figures. Scholars point out that the story collections qualify as bardic traditions, as they were passed forward in time through generations of retelling with each singer adding their own perspective on the tales. Even so, it is remarkable how historically accurate some of the details remain. The Iliad contains a long passage, the Catalogue of Ships, listing the cities that sent soldiers to the war. European scholarship treated the catalogue as colorful and metaphorical until nineteenth-century archaeology unearthed the cities listed in it, proving the catalogue was not a fantasy but a historical record. It seems that at least portions of the Iliad date to the Mycenaean era, about 1100 BCE, five centuries before Plato lived.

Homer was the oldest of the poets, and his stories have endured through millennia. In Plato’s time, the Iliad and the Odyssey were still performed extensively. They were performed through the Byzantine era. They were performed in Renaissance Europe. They are performed today—a Google search on Homer gives a list of movies based on the Homeric works. The vivid depictions of war in the Iliad, and Odysseus’s meandering journey through fantastic lands to reach home in the Odyssey, still fascinate audiences of all ages. The people in the poems act with power, pride, compassion, arrogance, and faithfulness; they laugh, they grieve, they lose, and they win. Troy falls; Odysseus makes it home, where Penelope is waiting for him. They are great stories.

The bardic traditions were not only entertaining but also educational, letting the audience know what was expected at every station of life. Homer also described what happened to the soul in the afterlife. The Greek conception of the soul was simpler than the Kemetic system; for the Greeks, soul meant breath, and when the breath flew the body, the soul went with it. Homer describes the realm of the dead as a damp and dismal plain ruled by Hades and Persephone where misty shades flit endlessly.

It was possible to speak to the dead. In Books 10 and 11 of the Odyssey, the sorceress Circe describes to Odysseus how to reach the mouth of the underworld. Following her instructions, Odysseus sails to that shore, digs a pit, sacrifices animals, and speaks to the spirits of the dead.

Homer’s description of the underworld where wicked souls are tortured and even the happiest souls spend eternity as shades strikes us as grim today. It must have struck the ancients as grim as well. The Eleusinian Mysteries were the ritual response to this fate. The mysteries told the story of how Hades, god of the underworld, abducted Demeter’s young daughter Persephone and stole her away to the underworld. Demeter responded by hiding herself in a cave. Nothing grew and the people starved. Finally Zeus entreated Demeter to come out, but she refused unless her daughter was returned to her. Zeus agreed that Persephone could return, but only if she had not eaten in the underworld. When the gods came to rescue her they found Persephone had refused all food except a few pomegranate seeds. Zeus decreed that she had to spend the same number of months in the underworld every year as seeds she had eaten. Each year Persephone returns to the underworld and winter grips the earth; when she returns to her mother, warmth and life also return.

In the Eleusinian Mysteries the initiates were introduced to Persephone, goddess of the afterlife. While the mysteries remain a secret, many ancient sources attest that after the initiation they felt they had literally been saved and no longer feared death.

In addition to the cosmologies, the bardic traditions describe the Olympian deities. There are twelve, male and female, grouped into male/female pairs in antiquity:

· • Zeus, the father of the gods, and Hera, the mother

· • Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Ares, god of war

· • Artemis, the virgin huntress, and Apollo, god of prophecy and healing

· • Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Poseidon, god of the sea

· • Hephaestus, the smith, and Hestia, goddess of the hearth

· • Hermes, messenger of the gods, and Demeter, goddess of the earth

These were not the only Greek deities. Other prominent goddesses and gods had temples and stories. In later times the god of intoxication Dionysos displaced Hestia on Olympus (and ruined the gender pairing scheme). We have already met Hades and Persephone, rulers of the underworld, and the god of healing Asclepius whose temples served as centers of healing. Later theurgists honored them all, but it was the Olympians who framed the universe.

GOING HOME

“Careful with that,” Plato said to his slave. It had been thirteen years since he composed his youthful writings, but he still valued the precious words of his first teacher.

Since then he had learned so much more. He had studied physical sciences no one in Athens had ever seen. He had thought he’d learned mathematics in his childhood school, but the calculations he had mastered in Egypt surpassed them. He had learned the Egyptian tongue quickly and had been accepted among the priesthood, who taught him how to purify himself and approach the gods. Above all they shared with him the philosophy which revealed and explained the mysteries of the universe, the teachings of Ma’at.

He had learned why Thales, one of the philosophers who had also studied here, had preached the principle that water was the source of life. Watching the Nile flood year after year, seeing with his own eyes the mud rising as the waters receded, later hearing in the temple the stories of how the universe was created, he knew in mind and heart that water truly was both chaotic and the nourisher of life.

Now he was called home. He was a third son and had never been critical to his family’s fortunes, and his uncles and brothers had seen to the running of the estates, but his mother was ill and wanted to see him again before she died. Despite his worry, he smiled to think of her. Perictione’s philosophical book “On Harmonious Women” was popular; he was coming home as the son of a famous mother.

What was that wailing? A woman hung on the neck of his faithful slave. Over the years the man had become his dearest friend from home. Plato put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I am sorry,” he said. “You do not belong to me, but to my family, so I cannot free you. Do you wish your son to remain with you? I can buy him for you.”

“No,” the man said immediately. “He should stay with his mother in the way of Kemet. He will comfort her and care for her.”

Before he left Plato went back to the temple one last time. He searched through the halls and rooms before he finally found his first teacher. She sat on the edge of the temple pool watching the sun set in the desert west over the city of the dead.

He joined her and watched the sun for a while. “I feel as if I am dying,” he said softly. “I am going away from the source of life and knowledge.”

She turned to him. “You take your knowledge with you,” she said. “It nourishes life wherever it is planted.”

“I didn’t finish,” he said. “I feel as if I have only just begun.”

“Thales spent only a few years. Even Pythagoras only studied twenty-three years,” she laughed. “No Greek has done more.”

“I have learned from many wise teachers, but you were the first to accept me,” he said. “Thank you for taking in an ignorant man.”

She touched his hand. “You were willing to learn,” she said. She smiled at him as serenely as the first day he had met her. “Are you willing to teach?”

Greek Temples and Priesthood

Temples in classical Greece served a somewhat different function than the houses of deity in Kemet. They were not houses where living deities were tended by a full-time professional priesthood. The temple grew around objects holding the sacred power of deity and acted more as a storehouse or museum. The earliest temple of Athena on the Acropolis hill overlooking Athens housed a wooden object called a xoanon that fell from the sky in answer to a prayer to Athena. Later the much larger Parthenon with its magnificent pillars was built on the Acropolis and a huge statue of gold and ivory was installed there. However,the eyes and mouth of the statue were not opened as in Kemet and India.

Festivals honoring the deity took place on a periodic basis. These were often funded by wealthy citizens, sometimes including hetaera or prostitutes. The statues were not fed and clothed daily but were given food offerings during the festivals. In the yearly festival to Athena a young girl presented a robe that had been woven by the town’s women; that robe did not go to the ivory and gold statue of Athena in the main temple but to the temple of the humble xoanon. We may infer that the object itself held the power of deity the great statue lacked.

Priestesses and priests did not leave home to reside in the temple and did not study in the temples as in Kemet, serving only on special occasions. They also did not shave or bathe daily to maintain a state of purity, although they did engage in fasting or avoiding some foods in devotion to the deities. The offices involved more administrative than spiritual work, organizing the feasts, parades, and other offerings to the deity.

Priestly offices could move from person to person or be held in families. Several families in Eleusis seem to have made their primary living on the yearly Eleusinian Mysteries, serving in the offices of Hierophant, Hegemon, Hierus, Dadouchos, and Stolistes, among others. These titles are still in use among Golden Dawn magicians as well as in Neo-Pagan reconstructions of the mysteries.

THE GROVES OF ACADEME

Plato was restless. He wandered through the streets of Athens, hardly recognizing anyone. Many of the faces were so young they hadn’t even been born when he was fighting in the war. It was strange to see so many men on the street; when he did see a woman she was a slave or a prostitute, a hired dancer. Of course it was the prostitutes who were the most knowledgeable women and owned their own property too, but even these women were not as free as men and certainly not as free as the women of Kemet.

He found himself wandering outside the city walls and clambering over the nearer hills. Abruptly he stopped, recognizing the place. “The grove of Akademos,” he said to himself. The hero was rumored to be buried in the grove of trees sacred to Athena. “Neit,” he murmured. When he was in Egypt he had traveled to Sau (or Sais), sister city of Athens, and he had paid his respects to the goddess who had invented weaving and had saved her people from war. The priestesses and priests there told him Neit had travelled to Greece, where she had become Athena, still a protective goddess of weaving and knowledge, patron of the city that bore her name.

Plato sat beneath one of the trees, glad for the shade and the relative quiet of the forest after the bustle of the city. He was still in culture shock from the transition. Waset was a city of temples and schools, a city of learning and culture. After more than a decade in the temple there, the Parthenon seemed small; Athens seemed small, too … in size as well as outlook.

“Aristocles!” a young voice called. “Uncle Aristocles!”

“Here, Speusippus,” Plato said with a sigh.

His sister’s son came bounding up the path. “Mother said I should follow you and make sure you’re well.”

“I’m well,” he said. “You can go home and tell her so.”

The boy plopped himself against a tree. “It’s a long way and it’s hot. Want some food?” He handed over a hunk of bread and a wineskin. Plato was pleased to eat Greek bread again, not so tough as the hard, flat cakes the Egyptians ate, but he’d grown accustomed to Egyptian beer, and watered wine tasted sour to him.

“Potone says you went to Egypt to learn,” the boy said. Plato nodded. “What did you learn?”

Plato laughed. “I can tell you, if you want. How many years do you have?”

“As many as you can give me.”

Looking into his youthful, hopeful eyes, Plato sighed. He dug into his memory for the first words his teacher had spoken. “Settle the body, still the mind, contemplate the divine.” Looking forward a dozen years, he added, “so that you may encounter the divine.”

Plato’s Worldview

Plato’s works have survived in some number. Scholars note that it is difficult to decide which of Plato’s thoughts can truly be attributed to him. We can consider the corpus of his work to include the thoughts of his predecessors including his unnamed Kemetic teachers, as well as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Diotima. (Mary Ellen Waithe recovers Diotima’s thought in A History of Women Philosophers.) There are numerous translations of Plato; Benjamin Jowett’s readable translations from the early twentieth century are posted online by MIT.

Plato’s works call into question the conventional wisdom about the gods, particularly the stories told by the poets. In Book 10 of the Republic, Socrates says there is a “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry. Even though Homer has been the educator of the youth, in the Republic there will be no poetry except hymns to the gods, or pleasure and pain will rule the state rather than reason. Book 2 argues that the gods do not change shape or lie to humans, and therefore any entertainment depicting them doing so must be a lie.

Plato devotes one entire dialogue, Ion, to a dialogue between Socrates and a Homeric performer in which Socrates demonstrates to the performer that his work is not truthful. In the dialogue Phaedrus Plato says the Muses inspire poets with a kind of madness, and that if anyone tries to be a poet through knowledge rather than through inspiration, that person will fail.

If Plato’s cosmology did not derive from the poets, what did he teach? In the dialogue Timaeus, Critias recounts the story of Solon’s visit to Egypt. Solon, a politician and leader of the Athens, visited Sais, ruled by the goddess Neit, whom the Greeks equated with their Athena. Critias reproduces the dialogue between Solon and the priests of the temples. They told him that the Greeks were children because they had no beliefs passed down from ancestor to ancestor as in Egypt. The priests then delivered to him the history of his people as they had kept it.

The next speaker, Timaeus himself, acknowledges the gods and goddesses in order to tell the story of the creation of the world. Timaeus starts by making a distinction between the world of being that does not change, usually referred to by Platonists as the “Forms,” and the world of becoming which can be grasped by the senses. These two are often described as the “Intelligible” world and the “Sensible” world. The demiurge, the Craftsman, a being good and without jealousy, created the cosmos on the plan of the Forms. The Craftsman shaped fire, earth, air, and water into the body of the cosmos. This body was filled with the World Soul.

Plato had travelled the world to expose himself to new ideas, and he shaped those ideas in the dialogues. These core ideas have been passed forward in time through all the teachers who have studied his works.

THE MOST FAMOUS PLATO

“Stop crying,” he told Potone.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “You’re the only brother I have left.”

“Go ahead, give me a kiss.” She bent down and kissed his forehead. “There. You see I love you,” he said. “Now go get my students.”

Eventually they crowded around his bed. How had they gotten to be so many? There were even two women—Axiothea, who came dressed like a man, and Lasthenia, who didn’t. Some of the boys didn’t like it, but Plato had lived among the women of Kemet, and he remembered Potone’s love of learning when they were both young.

“No mourning,” he said, as he heard one of the younger ones sniffle. “Socrates wasn’t afraid to die, and I’m not either. Now, I’ve called you here so I can name a successor.”

Aristotle leaned forward. He was undoubtedly the most brilliant of Plato’s students. More, he had ambition. He was also one of the men who didn’t think much of the women students. “Aristotle,” he said, and the man leaned forward eagerly. “I know you desire the position. You will go far in the world. But I think your destiny is to find your own way. You don’t need to be confined to the way I do things.”

Aristotle reared back. “I respect you,” he said. “I have studied with you for twenty years.”

Had it been that long? “I know,” Plato said gently. “Now you must make your own studies. When you are ready, you will teach those.” He beckoned to Speusippus. “My sister’s nephew, and my closest heir,” he said. “Speusippus, I wish you to guide the Academy, to continue the work I have begun.”

Speusippus knelt beside the couch and kissed his hand.

No one seemed surprised that he was keeping the Academy in the family. Aristotle tried to hide his disappointment, but it was clear the decision was a blow to him. Plato was convinced he was right; Aristotle had his own path to follow, and trying to maintain Plato’s legacy would only hold him down. Speusippus was better suited to carry on Plato’s work. He would continue teaching the women too. Anyway, Aristotle’s family could afford to support him, but Speusippus needed the teaching fees.

Plato reflected on his legacy. Whatever people said of him, he felt he owed everything to Egypt and to Socrates. A thought struck him and he started laughing. Seeing that he was distressing his grief-filled students, he explained, “When I was young one of my friends told me I was far from the most famous Plato in Athens. Now I guess I am.”

Speusippus vowed passionately, “You will be the only Plato history remembers.”

Plato’s Afterlife

We have seen that for Homer the soul was simply breath. In her paper “Soma and Psyche in Hippocratic Medicine,” Beata Gundert explores Homer’s thought in a bit more detail. For Homer the human person was composed of both thoughts and works. The mind that thinks, nous, remains constant even when the body changes. The seat of thought is in the chest. The breath of life, called psyche, leaves the body at death and travels to the underworld as a shade.

The idea of reincarnation entered into Greek thought between Homer’s time and Plato’s. Pythagoras may have brought the doctrine of reincarnation to Greece when he returned from his travels to India, where the Upanishads teach that the death of the body is not the death of the soul, which goes on to be reborn in other physical bodies.

Plato’s understanding of the soul is somewhat more complicated than Homer’s and changes from dialogue to dialogue. In the dialogue Phaedo, Socrates says the soul that has spent its time pursuing earthly pleasures is contaminated by the physical and is drawn back to the world, flitting about monuments and tombs. Such souls are visible to the naked eye due to their ongoing physical nature. From there they can be reborn: the wicked into animals such as asses and hawks, the good non-philosophers as bees, ants, or people. The soul that has contemplated philosophy is pure, uncontaminated by the body, and flies up to that which is “like itself,” divine and immortal, to spend a happy eternity with the gods.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates compares the soul to a team of winged horses, one beautiful and good, one ignoble and difficult. The human charioteer has the difficult task of driving both as a team. The gods also have chariots and drive them through the heavens, Zeus at the head, followed by ten other Olympians, while Hestia remains behind on Olympus. Human charioteers strive to join that heavenly train. Those who succeed participate in a magnificent banquet with the gods; the horses enjoy ambrosia and nectar, while the charioteers enjoy beauties unknown by the human soul. This idea reminds us of the Egyptian concept of the ba of the deceased joining the gods in the stars upon their death.

Phaedrus contains a second conceptualization, wherein Socrates explains that souls have wings: when the soul loses its wings through contact with the ugly and foul, it wanders around until it settles into an earthly, mortal, body.

Critias tells us in the dialogue Timaeus that the Craftsman created the souls of humans. Each soul is immortal, and each is placed on a star as if being placed on a chariot. Each soul descends to earth to be incarnated in the human body in its first life. Souls that live well return to their stars on death, those that do not are born in their second lives as women (disappointingly), and if continuing to live badly, are reborn as a form of animal.

After creating the souls, the Craftsman delegated the creation of the body to the gods. The gods enclosed the three parts of the soul in the body: the rational and immortal part of the soul in the head; the higher mortal soul in the chest, seat of the passions; and the lower mortal soul in the trunk, seat of the appetite. In Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine Eric Iverson draws an explicit connection between some of the Kemetic parts of the soul and this three-part division in Plato. Iverson connects the mortal soul with the ba and the rational soul with the akh.

To Plato, the human soul partook of the divine. In Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, Sarah Broadie notes that the demiurge creates the soul from the materials left over from creating the cosmic world. She argues that this points to the essential identity of the cosmic world and the human soul. In Greek Religion Walter Burkert points out that the language Plato uses to describe the soul’s relationship to the cosmos is the language of the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. Through rational contemplation of the beauty of the good, the soul remembers its true identity, bringing the soul to the state of blessedness.

THE LESSONS OF PLATO

Neitokrity’s story introduced us to a world where the gods eat and wear clothes and live in houses and speak to the priestesses and priests who serve them. While we have the ritual that invited a deity into a statue, we don’t have a record of the techniques the priestesses and priests used to communicate with them.

Plato’s work constructs a vision of the universe, how it was created and how it works, and how each human was created, one entity in the cosmos, a part of the whole. He rejects a simplified construction of the gods as entities with human-like appetites and instead views them as fundamental to a universe that is just and good.

The vision Plato constructs shifts in his works. Iamblichus in Theurgia or the Mysteries of Egypt dictates the order in which Plato’s dialogues should be read by theurgists. In Theurgy and the Soul Gregory Shaw observes that read in this order, the grim descriptions of the afterlife in earlier works give way to the exaltation of the afterlife of the Timaeus. This order helps to make sense of Plato’s cosmology, allowing insights to deepen over time. Reading Plato’s works in this order becomes an initiation in itself.

Here is Iamblichus’s order: Alcibiades I, Gorgias, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Phaedrus, Symposium, Philebus, Timaeus, and Parmenides. Interestingly, this list does not include the Republic, which is most widely studied in universities today.

The first study assignment for the theurgist is to read these works and allow them to spark meditations on the universal questions: what is the body, what is the soul, what made the universe, what happens when we die, what is divine? Each of us comes to our own understanding. Theurgy does not dictate dogma; it encourages questioning and experience.

Notes on the Story

We happen to know quite a bit about Plato, including the names of his parents and siblings, the origin of his nicknames, and of course his relationship with Socrates. The childhood stories here (his father’s sexual assault on his mother, bees sitting on Plato’s lips, and the origin of his nickname “broad”) are in the historical record. Diogenes Laertius recorded the charges leveled against Socrates.

Our image of the classical philosophers portrays them as noble thinkers. When we start to think about how they lived their daily lives, some less admirable details emerge. As a member of a prominent family Plato would certainly have owned slaves. Only people who weren’t doing their own housework could afford to spend so many hours teaching, writing, and contemplating.

Here I am choosing to take Plato’s word that he studied in Egypt and explicitly reject the scholastic theories that call this into question. We don’t know why Plato cut his studies in Egypt/Kemet short after thirteen years to return home, but it is a human experience in middle age to be called home to care for ill parents and make our peace with them.