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

Proklos and Asklepigenia
Stories from the Ancestors

TOO DANGEROUS FOR PAGANS

Ulpian elbowed Proklos. “He’s mumbling.” Proklos hissed at his friend to be quiet. He leaned his elbow on his knee, listening raptly, while Ulpian crossed his arms on his chest and scowled.

When Olympiodoros finally wound to a stop and the students struggled to their feet, Ulpian complained, “Do you actually understand the man? He talks so fast I can’t make out a word he says.”

“He’s perfectly clear,” Proklos said mildly.

Ulpian punched his arm. “Don’t be impertinent,” he said. “You’re too young to understand what he’s saying anyway.”

Proklos absorbed the blow and said mildly, “I can repeat what he said.”

“Prove it.”

“You know that Thales held that water is the first principle,” Proklos said. As he spoke the words spooled themselves across his vision. After a while, all the students in the room sat down again, captured by his perfectly clear speech. “And so water is the source of life, offered to the gods and the dead for their continued life,” he finished.

Ulpian leapt to his feet and applauded. “By all the gods, you have never drunk from the forgetful waters of Lethe!”

Olympiodoros cleared his throat said mildly, “Not too fast to hear after all?”

All the students jumped. They’d completely forgotten he was still in the room. “Your pardon,” Ulpian said quickly, bowing and heading for the door, and the other students followed quickly behind. When Proklos made to join them, Olympiodoros touched his shoulder and said, “Walk with me.”

The teacher and his precocious student strolled out on one of Alexandria’s broad avenues, walking along the edge to keep out of the throng of people streaming in all directions. Proklos craned down the street to catch a glimpse of the harbor. “Just think,” he said. “This is the exact street where Hypatia rode her horses every evening.”

His teacher said, “You do have a good memory.” He added tartly, “Even if you are impertinent.”

Proklos laughed.

“But that’s not what I want to talk about,” Olympiodoros said. “You’re a grown man now, old enough to think about the rest of your life. Old enough to think about marriage.”

“Um,” Proklos said, turning red.

Oblivious, Olympiodoros soldiered on. “You know my daughter Aedesia. Sober, and a student of philosophy too. I challenge you to make a better match.”

“I don’t think I’m the kind to marry,” Proklos said tactfully.

Olympiodoros waved him off. “The kind of lover who attracts you has nothing to do with who keeps your house. I know you’ll take good care of her, and she’ll serve you well—”

A group of young men materialized out of the crowd. “Look what we’ve found!” one of them crowed. “Pagan philosophers, aren’t you?”

“We are philosophers,” Olympiodoros said mildly.

One of the youths shoved him. “That’s for Mark,” he said. “You filthy wretches killed him!”

“Not us,” Proklos protested, stepping between his teacher and the man. “We’re men of peace.”

“What difference does it make?” His face was red, contorted, his eyes angry. “A Pagan killed him, a Pagan should die for it!”

Another of the youths intervened. “Gaius, give way,” he said. “They said they are men of peace. So we are taught to be.”

Gaius snarled and turned on him. Proklos seized the chance to grab his teacher’s arm and pull him away. They both trotted rather quickly along the avenue until they reached the street where Olympiodoros lived. There the teacher paused, putting his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

Proklos said shakily, “I thought for a minute you were going to end up like Hypatia.”

Straightening, Olympiodoros shook his head. “The gangs are getting worse,” he said. “Since Hypatia’s death it’s almost become too dangerous for Pagans to live in Alexandria.”

“I’ve been thinking of leaving,” Proklos admitted. “You know Athena has always guided me. She told me to give up rhetoric and politics, to study philosophy and to love the gods. I have a great desire to see her city.”

“It’s safer there,” Olympiodoros said. “The Christians haven’t taken root there as they have here.” He eyed Proklos speculatively. “Are you sure you don’t want to take Aedesia with you?”

Alexandria

In the fifth century of the common era, Alexandria was one of the busiest cities in the world. The great urban center was crisscrossed with streets wide enough to allow horses and carriages to pass. Some of those streets led down to the bay, which was flooded with ships from all over the world, all guided safely into the harbor by the lighthouse on Pharos Island, one of the wonders of the ancient world.

The population of Alexandria in Proklos’s time may have been as much as a million people. A million people! In the streets Proklos rubbed elbows with immigrants from Greece, Libya, Syria, Persia, and Rome, and even from as far away as India. Only Greeks and later Romans held full citizenship; native Egyptians did not, despite providing the backbone of labor that kept the city functional.

Proklos was drawn to what we know now as the Library of Alexandria. In his time, it was a school renowned for its resources. There were two main areas. The first was the Museion or Museum, a temple to the muses. It was presided over by a priest who was appointed to direct the rituals there. The second main area was the Biblion, the library, filled with papyrus and parchment scrolls and codices. The library was burned by Julius Caesar, an event still mourned by scholars today, but even after that catastrophe it continued to function as a storehouse for learning.

For students like Proklos, the real attraction was not the temple or even the library but the community where the learned population gathered to learn and to teach—people such as Hypatia, the famous philosopher/mathematician. Proklos was born about the time that Hypatia died, but learned from teachers who had learned from her, making her a critical link in the Golden Chain of Neo-Platonic philosophers from Plotinus to Damascius.

In his vivid description of Alexandria, Henri Riad notes that it was a college town, filled with the energy that students bring to a city when they have left their provincial homes and taste the freedom of the broad world for the first time. The town was lively, boisterous, and irreverent. The streets that Proklos walked were exciting but also dangerous, roamed by gangs of Christians and Pagans who often clashed, killing each other in the streets.

Like all students at the Museion, Proklos had the opportunity to meet and talk with peoples of many religions. Alexander had granted Jews the right to Greek citizenship, and the Jewish section took up one quarter of the city. In this area Jews governed themselves. For the first two centuries of the city’s existence, Alexandrian Jews enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous life. They spread from the Jewish quarter to establish synagogues throughout the city. During the time of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in the first century C.E. the synagogues in Alexandria were closed and the Jewish quarter was attacked. Similar raids on the Jewish quarter would periodically recur throughout the life of the city, a template for all the attacks on Jewish neighborhoods throughout Western history.

Alexandrian students also had the opportunity to study Buddhism. The edicts of Ashoka from the second century BCE document the Indian king’s efforts to spread Buddhism throughout the Hellenistic world. The edicts list Greek monarchs who had been introduced to Buddhism, including Alexander, whose army had penetrated all the way to India. Several hundred years later, in the second century CE, Clement of Alexandria mentions Buddhist temples in the city. Buddhism formed an enduring presence in Alexander’s city.

Although Proklos was quite well aware of the religions around him, he remained a committed Pagan. But why was a philosopher interested in Pagan religion? Today we consider philosophy to be secular and separate from any faith. The situation was very different in the Alexandria of Proklos. In Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, Paulos Mar Gregorios notes that Alexandrian Hellenism was religious, with many philosophies flourishing side by side, while the priest of the Museion presided over the community’s ceremonies, rituals, and sacrifices.

In Alexandria philosophy was not just an intellectual pursuit, it was a religious one. For Proklos, magic and Pagan religion were part of the cultural matrix that preserved the peace of the gods.

A YOUNG PHILOSOPHER

“So this is the boy prodigy?” Propped up on a couch, Plutarch peered at the room.

Syrianus slapped Proklos on the shoulder. “Fresh off the boat from Alexandria. I brought him straight to the Athenian Academy of course!”

“Oh, well, nothing so grand as the Academy,” Plutarch said. “Just a school of Plato. Proklos, is it? What did you study in Alexandria?”

Proklos said calmly. “I studied Plato with Olympiodoros.”

“I’ve heard he speaks well,” Plutarch said. Proklos smothered a laugh.

“Did you also study Iamblichus?” one of the students said.

Turning toward the speaker, Plutarch said, “Let me present my daughter, Asklepigenia. She teaches along with me.”

It took Proklos a moment to recognize that the speaker was a woman, with her hair tied back, wrapped in a himation identical to the men’s. His face lit up. “Oh, like Hypatia!” he blurted.

“Nothing like Hypatia,” Asklepigenia snapped. Hierius snickered. She cut her brother a quelling glance.

Plutarch ignored them. “Did you study with Hypatia?”

“I didn’t have the honor. She died before I reached the city. I studied with some of her teachers.”

Squinting at him, Plutarch said, “How old are you?”

“Nearly twenty,” Proklos said. Deflecting his gaze, he said quietly, “May I hear you speak?”

“Don’t steal my student,” Syrianus warned.

Later, after all the students were gone, Asklepigenia settled herself on a little stool next to her aged father’s couch. “You were brilliant tonight.”

Plutarch stirred, turning onto his side to face her. “What do you think of Proklos?”

“He hasn’t studied Iamblichus,” she sniffed.

“He’s said to be devout. Syrianus said he didn’t hesitate to kneel and adore the moon.”

Asklepigenia sighed. “I know, I know. And his friends say when he set foot outside the city his first drink was from the well of Socrates. And when he reached the city gate the watchman said ’Really, if you had not arrived, I should have closed!’”

Plutarch’s lips twitched. “You don’t put stock in portents?”

“He has good friends,” she said wryly. “But it takes more than devotion and a year of study in Alexandria to make a philosopher. Much less a student of theurgy.”

Plutarch sighed. “Some are suitable. Some are not. Time tells.” He rolled over onto his back, settling in for the night. “Anyway, I like him. I’m going to teach him the Chaldean Oracles.”

Asklepigenia tucked the blankets around him. “You do that,” she said. Plutarch was already asleep. She said to herself, “I’ll decide whether to teach him the real secrets.”

Iamblichus Soter

Like Sosipatra, an aura of sainthood hung over Iamblichus. Neo-Platonists called him “divine” and “savior”. Iamblichus had lived more than a century before Proklos was born. By the time Proklos moved to Athens, Iamblichus was revered as Neo-Platonic demi-god, Iamblichus Soter.

Iamblichus was born to a Syrian ruling family and travelled to Italy for his higher education. He studied Plato, and like Plato he spent time in Kemet. When he returned to Syria, he gathered a circle of students, making him another link in the Golden Chain.

At some point he also became Porphyry’s student. Although he and Porphyry agreed on many points, they seem to have disagreed about the function of ritual in theurgy. Thomas Taylor’s translation of Porphyry’s “Letter to Anebo” is available online. In the letter Porphyry argues that the philosopher can commune with the divine through contemplation alone. In Theurgia or the Mysteries of Egypt, Iamblichus specifically addresses this idea and argues for the spiritual function of theurgic ritual.

In writing Theurgia, Iamblichus borrowed the ancient authority of Kemet by writing in the persona of an Egyptian priest, Abammon. He credited his studies in Egypt for his theurgic knowledge. The editors of the latest translation of Theurgia, Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, point to the Egyptian/Kemetic origin of many of his symbols, including the mud rising from the waters and the lotus. In Theurgy and the Soul, Gregory Shaw posits that Iamblichus based theurgic practices specifically on Kemetic rituals at Abydos.

The streams that nourished the river of Neo-Platonism were Egyptian/Kemetic cosmology, the Hellenic paideia, and Indian philosophy. We know that Iamblichus studied Pythagoras and wrote a biography, Life of Pythagoras. We can trace all these threads in Iamblichus’s writings.

Iamblichus taught that the divine can be understood as being three distinct persons, or hypostases: the One, To En; Intellect, Nous; and Soul, Psyche. Although it may seem that the idea of the One validates monotheism primarily because it is ubiquitously translated as “God,” the Neo-Platonic tradition also discusses the place of multiple gods, the Olympian deities in particular. The One does not cast out other gods—it encompasses them.

Writing as Abammon, Iamblichus describes the creation of the cosmos. Abammon’s first cause is self-generating and the true Good. This first cause immediately generates a second, the first principle of the intelligible realm. The self-creating Good maps onto Atum, Neit, or any of the gods or goddesses who emerged from the primal waters to the first mound as well as Plato’s first cause, the One.

What about the second cause, the intelligible principle? Eric Iverson compares Egyptian cosmology, notably the Shabaka stone text, with Hermetic texts in general and Theurgia in particular. Iverson draws attention to the dual nature of primal Egyptian deities such as Atum-Re and Ptah-Nun. These are similar to the pairing of the Neo-Platonic One and Demiurge. Iverson concludes that Egyptian sources predate the Hermetic and Neo-Platonic texts, and the Neo-Platonic texts substantially derive philosophical concepts from them, as Iamblichus clearly says.

Between the gods and humans are arrayed classes of beings who serve to connect humanity with the divine. These classes of beings include Platonic daimones and heroes.

The core of Iamblichus’s teachings brings the human being participating in soul to a mystical union with the One through the ritual practice of theurgy.

A SPINNING TOP

“Now you’re bragging,” Asklepigenia said. “You’ve never been sick?”

“I enjoy a sturdy constitution,” Proklos said serenely. “Although I did fall ill once, in my childhood.” He peered down the street. “I think we turn right here.”

“No, it’s one street over,” she said. “So, was it a mild illness?”

“Oh no. My mother refused to leave my side, and my father had given me up for dead.”

“I see you survived,” Asklepigenia said drily. “What happened?”

Proklos cast her a strangely shy glance. “Well, the way my mother tells it, a child appeared above my bed. She said he was immediately recognizable as Telesphoros.”

“Asclepius’s son?”

Proklos nodded. “With his little dwarf head tucked into his little cap. He spoke my name and touched my forehead. My condition turned from that moment and I recovered immediately. I’ve hardly been ill a day since.”

“Here we are,” Asklepigenia said. She watched closely as Proklos eased himself into the household, speaking gently with the young father, touching the sick girl’s fevered head.

“What did the physician recommend?” he said. “Oregano tea? Have you tried peppermint?” He looked over at Asklepigenia. “What would you recommend?

“That, and lemon balm also,” she said.

Proklos squeezed the father’s shoulder. “I go to make sacrifices on her behalf.”

Back on the street, he sighed. “I wish I could do more. Anyway, thank you for coming. I needed a second opinion. I want to make sure we’ve done everything we can.”

“You really care about your friends,” Asklepigenia said.

“I am so far from home, they are my family,” he said. “And I’m not the marrying kind. Anyway, what good is all my learning if I can’t help the people I love?” He stopped at the threshold of Plutarch’s house. “Here you are, safely home,” he said. “I’m going up to the shrine of Asklepios to sacrifice for her.”

“And call on Telesphoros?” she said gently.

He brightened. “It’s a good idea, thank you.”

Asklepigenia thoughtfully watched him head up the street. If not him, then who? She was willing to give him a chance.

Not many days later Proklos sat at her feet in her own house. Asklepigenia dropped a thread into his hands. “Have you seen one of these?”

Proklos untangled the thread to reveal a disc in the center. “It’s a toy,” he said.

She took it back from him. Spinning the threads, she moved the toy so that it made a whistling sound. “Now chant the vowels over it, like this.” She sang the seven vowels over the whistle.

Proklos carefully took the toy from her hands. He twisted the threads and lost control of the wheel. He looked up at Asklepigenia, but she didn’t laugh. “Try again,” she said. “Remember, settle the body, still the mind, contemplate the divine.”

Proklos breathed deeply, relaxed, and cleared his mind. The second time he mastered the trick of getting the spin going, and dutifully chanted the vowels while he did.

Asklepigenia took the toy back from him. “My father taught us both. Me and Hierius,” she said. “Hierius refused to do it. He said he wasn’t interested in singing the alphabet over a child’s toy.” She pulled out a small chest, opened the lid, and drew out a splendid globe studded with gems. “So he never got to see this one. Have you heard of it? It’s an iynx. We use it to call on the wheels, the ideas of the One.”

Eyes wide, Proklos didn’t reach out for it, but waited for her to gently place it in his hands. When she did, he held it reverently. Only then did he dare to voice his thought. “There are those who say that the fates write our lives. Our lot is to accept their decrees and learn to live with them.”

“I’ve heard the Christians say so. Is that what you think?” Asklepigenia said, smiling gently.

“It isn’t what my heart says, as a healer. I long to bring health back where it has been lost.”

She nodded approvingly. “That’s my belief too. It’s our job as healers to understand the source of the suffering and to work to change it. We don’t accept fate—we challenge it!” She gestured to the ball in his hand. “With this iynx,” she told him, “you can heal the most serious cases. With it you can call a soul back from the shores of the river Styx.”

Gods and Fate

For Asklepigenia and her student Proklos, knowledge of the gods was central to the experience of being human. The point of incarnation was to understand the gods. They saw substantial differences in Christian theology and their approach. We can see this most clearly in their understanding of Heimarmene, fate. As Mary Ellen Waithe reads Asklepigenia, her theurgy differed from Christianity in her approach to fate. Where the Christian accepted and was resigned to fate, Asklepigenia sought to influence fate through her knowledge of Plato and theurgic ritual.

In Theurgy and the Soul Gregory Shaw notes that for Plato the paideia educated the human soul in the knowledge of the cosmic order. It is the soul’s task to orient to that order. Plato had criticized the stories the poets told of the gods. How could humans look up to beings who were said to behave in such self-serving and destructive ways? Plato looked to the heavenly bodies—that is, the stars and planets—and saw the beauty of their mathematical movements as divine. The planets’ movements, the gods’ influences shaped the course of human life.

By the mid-second century BCE, astrology was firmly established as a divinatory art. Astrologers could draw up a chart placing the planets against the circle of the zodiac as they appeared at the moment of an individual’s birth. The zodiac was placed against a circle of twelve houses governing aspects of life. The horoscope was fixed by the ascendant, the zodiacal degree on the horizon at the moment of birth. Other aspects could be added, in particular the Lot of Fortune, calculated in various ways.

Astrology was among the arts suppressed by the Christian revolution. The Christian emperor Constantine counted mathematicians (that is, astrologers) as undesirable, while the Christian emperor Theodosius required astrologers to burn their books in the presence of bishops. Despite this overt opposition, the art of astrology has survived and flourished. Daily horoscopes still appear in news media and natal horoscopes are cast and interpreted not only for magicians but for the general public.

A PRUDENT DEPARTURE

It seemed like a lifetime since he had left the city. Proklos peered around anxiously for a friendly face.

“Proklos! Over here!” Archiadas waved.

Proklos lit up when he saw his friend. He raced down the plank to the dock with haste seldom seen among philosophers. Proklos drew him into a long hug and stepped back to look at him. “You haven’t aged a day.”

“It’s only been a year,” Archiadas said. His face darkened. “I resent every moment the Christian slanderers cost me with you. Vultures.”

“Politics come and go,” Proklos said. “They raise a man up and chase him from the city. Well, such are the habitual accidents of life!”

Laughing, Archiadas said, “You haven’t changed either. Did I mention I missed you?”

“Enough to put me up for the night? I seem to be between lodgings.”

Eyes sparkling, Archiadas said, “I’ve done better than that.” He led the way along the cramped city streets. “I’ve secured a house for you. You know the place. You told me once it is your favorite house in the city. It’s a philosopher’s house; Syrianus and Plutarch both lived there in their time. It’s handy to the temple of Asklepios and the temple of Dionysos. And it has a view of the Acropolis.”

“That’s good fortune indeed,” Proklos said. “I’m overwhelmed.”

“Well,” his friend said, pleased, “you’ll have to pay the rent.”

Proklos laughed. “How’s the Academy?”

“Asklepigenia is more reclusive every day. She resents time that takes her away from her meditations. She’s only teaching until you return.”

“And Hierius, her brother? Isn’t he teaching?”

Archiadas shook his head quickly. “Even if he enjoyed teaching, which he does not, the affairs of the family keep him busy.”

“The fate of the eldest son, to bear the burdens of the family,” Proklos said soberly. “I’m grateful I am a younger son.”

They broke out of the crowded street and came out on a little field dotted with herbs and shaded by small trees. “It’s good to be home,” Proklos sighed. “I can’t wait to offer to Athena again on her sacred ground.”

“Your letters said you learned a great deal in Lydia.”

“Oh yes, it was worth the journey. I believe Athena sent me there. I’m glad she called me back.”

“Well, that, and the shift of the political wind.”

Proklos laughed. “Look,” he said, “it’s midday. Will you pray with me?”

Hypatia and Synesius

Despite a deliberate campaign to destroy her work, we know a great deal about Hypatia, largely because of her student Synesius. Hypatia was born into an aristocratic family in Alexandria, the daughter of an internationally famous mathematician.

Throughout the Hellenistic period, philosophy was a religious/spiritual pursuit open only to the upper classes. The vast majority of people living in the city and in the countryside were engaged in growing and cooking food, weaving clothing, and creating pots and jewelry for everyday use. They had little time to spend in contemplation. As we study the lives of the philosophers, we must remember that they were among the elites of their times; for every philosopher is an entire estate founded on the labor of dozens of less valued family members, servants, and slaves, providing the fortune that allowed for one of them to spend decades in study.

An upper-class student heading to Alexandria to complete his or her education would already have had primary education in reading and writing; secondary education in rhetoric, geometry, and mathematics, and sciences; and physical development in the gymnasium. Formal education was open primarily to men, with women being taught informally at home and absorbed into the support system of the family. However, women did sometimes study, and women in families of famous male philosophers were often recognized as philosophers themselves.

This is what happened with Hypatia. Biographer Maria Dzielska believes she was born in 355 and was about sixty-five when she died. She lived, taught, and died in Alexandria, a true daughter of the city. Her father, Theon, was a poet, mathematician, and a member of the Alexandrian Museion. Hypatia’s education began at home but must have included a wide array of teachers. By 380 Hypatia had students of her own, and by 404 she was the head of the Neo-Platonic Academy in Alexandria, celebrated in her home city and around the empire as a brilliant mathematician and teacher.

A few generations before Proklos travelled to Alexandria to study, another young man from the provinces stumbled wide-eyed through the great city. Synesius arrived in 393, the year Emperor Theodosius forbade public performance of Pagan rituals. Synesius had been drawn by Hypatia’s reputation and was accepted into her circle.

Synesius always counted the years he spent learning from Hypatia as the finest of his life. She must have been attractive but was unimpressed with her own beauty; her sole focus was on calculating the mysteries of the cosmos. Hypatia avoided marriage and devoted her life to spiritual pursuits. As an unmarried woman surrounded by men, the subject of physical as well as spiritual love came up. Damascius reports the story of how she fended off the overtures of an amorous student by handing him a menstrual rag and saying, “this is what you love.” Synesius himself appears to have been deeply attached to her, and from his descriptions of the other students in the circle this attachment seems to have been common among them.

It was Synesius’s sad fortune to be drawn back home to Libya to manage his family’s economic and political interests, marry, and have children, confined to the life of a householder in the country. To console himself he wrote letters to Hypatia and the other students in her circle. His sad fortune is our good fortune, as his letters form a clear picture of Hypatia and how her circle of students functioned in late Hellenistic Alexandria.

Wherever you find a philosopher, you find a circle of students who were tightly connected. We can see this at work in the students of Hypatia. Synesius tells us that he continued to meditate on his meetings with his teacher, as was part of the agreement between her and her students. He returned to Alexandria repeatedly to spend a year or two in their company. When he was away from Alexandria, he kept in close contact with his teacher and the circle of students around her, counting them among his closest friends. Clearly the group was tightly bonded.

In Hypatia of Alexandria, Dzielska delves into the details of her daily life. Synesius describes Hypatia’s inner circle as a family. The inner circle visited Hypatia every day. She delivered lectures according to a private schedule, with some knowledge passed on to the public, and some reserved only for her initiates. They kept this inner knowledge of the mysteries of philosophy as deep secrets. At times Synesius met with three other students in a group of four to study and preserve the knowledge they had received from her.

Hypatia’s students included Pagans and Christians. This was natural, as the city itself was mixed, and she was one of its most influential people. Many attended her public lectures as a way to enter into her sphere of influence. Synesius himself became Christian and eventually a bishop; however, he continued to have more in common with his fellow Hellenistic aristocrats, both Pagan and Christian, than with Christian monks, who appeared to him unlettered and lower-class. Although Christian, he was nourished by the paideia.

Hypatia taught what Synesius called the “mysteries of philosophy.” Biographer Mary Ellen Waithe notes that Hypatia discussed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and others. She taught mathematics, geometry, and astrology; she taught the use of the astrolabe, an instrument used to measure the sun, moon, planets, and stars; and she taught the use of the hydroscope, used to look at objects underwater, as well as in divination.

The word “mysteries” points us to understand the kind of philosophy Hypatia taught. She was less interested in rhetoric or ethical questions and more interested in the nature of the cosmos. Mathematics was for her a spiritual pursuit. Her father composed poems on the spiritual nature of the planets. Scholars today struggle with this essential unity of scientific and spiritual knowledge in her work, as today science and spirit has been separated. Studying Hypatia’s work allows us a glimpse of a world in which knowledge of the stars included love of the heavenly spheres.

While Hypatia was not trained or initiated into theurgy, her students studied the Chaldean Oracles. Synesius studied the works of theurgists, including Iamblichus, and speaks respectfully of the Hermes of the Hermetic texts. While the rituals her group performed were not theurgic, they were closely related to theurgy. Dzielska speculates that her students read and sang hymns both Pagan and Christian to prepare themselves for the silent experience of the blissful silence of the heavenly spheres.

Synesius describes his teacher as a blessed lady, a saint, and holy. He says her students always felt the presence of her spirit, and even her body was considered sacred; she bore the charisma from Plato that allowed her to teach. These terms were all used to describe Plato and Iamblichus, also teachers surrounded by students who delighted in listening to their heavenly voices.

Hypatia’s work was targeted for destruction, and the prejudice against women philosophers has downplayed her contributions; retrieving her work requires discovery and detection. Mary Ellen Waithe uncovered her voice in the work of her father and students in A History of Women Philosophers. Bruce MacLennan cast his entire work on the philosophies of Alexandria as a set of lectures by Hypatia, The Wisdom of Hypatia.

ATHENA LIVES

When Proklos arrived at Asklepigenia’s house panting from his run through the city, he found all the students of the Academy crowding into her biggest room, filling the floor, while she sat rigid on her stool with a face white as death. “What is it?” he said, alarmed. “What has happened?”

Archiadas said hotly, “It was the Christians. They swarmed the Acropolis last night. They moved that which should not be moved!”

“They brought down Athena,” Ammonius choked out. Choked sobs echoed through the room.

“No,” Proklos said, clutching his stomach as if he had been stabbed.

Archiadas said sadly, “It is true. There are those in the room who saw it with their own eyes.”

Proklos breathed through the pain, managing finally to stand upright again. “A statue fell,” he said strongly. “But they did not bring down Athena. A god’s spirit is no more trapped in a statue than our spirit is trapped in our bodies. I know that well myself as a traveler, she has found me wherever I am, just as we can find her wherever we are.”

The room took a collective breath, their tears shuddering to a halt. Asklepigenia said, “Yes, this is true.”

Proklos said, “Last night in a dream I saw a divine woman. She told me to prepare my house because the Athenian lady was coming to live with me. We all have images of Athena in our homes, don’t we? She lives with all of us.”

Asklepigenia reached up to a shelf, pulled down a box, and brought out a ball made of lacquered blue metal studded with precious stones. Many students had never seen the iynx and held their breaths, afraid to make the slightest sound. She began to whirl it, and it began to whistle; she hummed over the whistle, making a harmony with it. “Call her, Proklos,” she whispered.

“Grey-eyed lady,” Proklos said. “Daughter of Zeus, lady of the shield, lady of weaving, Athenian lady, whom the Egyptians call Neit, lady of wisdom … ”

His voice cut off as his vision flooded with light. Asklepigenia said, “She is here. Close your eyes and you will see her.” Her voice lifted strongly over the whistling top. “She lives in our hearts.”

Christianization and Triumphalism

At the turn of the millennium, Jewish peoples in Jerusalem and Alexandria revolted against Roman rule. When the great temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the governor of Alexandria also closed the largest Alexandrian Jewish temple. Finally, in the second century a revolt against the Emperor Trajan was forcibly stopped by Roman soldiers who entered the Jewish quarter and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. Pogroms against Jewish Alexandrians would continue from that point forward.

Christianity rose up among the Jews as a response to persecution. In Zealot, the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan argues that the new religion was another instance of revolt against Roman rule. Like many other revolutionaries, Jesus preached rebellion against the Romans, and was executed for that reason. When the Jewish revolt he had led failed, the new religion moved to Alexandria and reinvented itself. The followers of Christ no longer addressed Jewish people in Hebrew; instead, they spoke to Hellenes in Greek. They recast their revolution as metaphorical, a spiritual rather than literal return of the kingdom of heaven.

At first the empire responded to the new sect by attempting to suppress Christianity as they would any other revolt. This time, however, Christian leaders made converts among the Roman noble families and eventually included the emperors themselves. Eventually, the religion of revolution overtook the empire from within.

When the Pagan emperor Julian died, his Christian successor Theodosius started a campaign of forbidding Pagan worship and closing Pagan temples. Unfortunately for religious Hellenes, from Theodosius onward Christianity became the official religion of the empire. Peoples subject to Roman rule were required to convert to Christianity and to cease their familiar religious practices and customs.

In Hellenic Religion and Christianization Frank Trombley traces the process by which Christian religion gradually overwrote the religion of the land. First, children were taken from their parents and inculcated in Christian religion while at the same time teachers of the paideia were forbidden to teach the ancient rites. Next, urban temples were closed and the statues destroyed. The countryside caves, springs, trees, and mountaintops that had been sacred to Pagan deities were rededicated to Christian use. The deities themselves were demoted to the status of daimones, with the status of holy deity reserved strictly for the God of the Christians. This process proceeded gradually throughout Greece, Egypt, and Syria from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Trombley notes that even though Pagan religious practice was officially banned, it was still widespread throughout this period. The very fact that emperor after emperor had to reissue the bans forbidding Pagan practices attest to their persistence.

In Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance, David Frankfurter surveys the survival of native religious tradition in Roman Egypt. The religion of the countryside was conducted beyond the reach of the imperial mechanisms. Egyptian deities took on a distinctly Roman look, wearing armor and riding horseback, but their essential character remained unchanged. The large temples had so long been the centers of religious practice that the priesthoods serving them persisted for many centuries. The temples continued to give oracles as they had always done, drawing pilgrims from far and wide. This pattern of journey to the temple provided a template for later Christian pilgrimages to sacred sites. Frankfurter argues that the rhetoric of Christianization and the decline of Egyptian civilization require reassessment. He says, “Most of all, one must get beyond the notion that religions actually die, taking seriously the anthropology of small communities and dynamic relationship with ever-changing Greek traditions.”

For Pagans seeking connection with the rituals of our ancestors, it is painful to read about the history of Christianization. When we hear that Proklos dreamed of Athena the night her temple was destroyed, he seems brave, defiant, and a little sad. It’s even more difficult when the historians who write about these events celebrate them. Christian scholars in the early twentieth century framed this forced conversion as the “triumph of Christianity” and presented the process as the inevitable victory of a superior religion. From this point on, Pagan religion was “dead” and only Christianity lived in ritual or custom.

As we read these comments, it is tempting to strike out in anger, to proclaim that we are rebuilding our religion, that we are bringing back the worship of the gods, and that Christians are not welcome among us. We must remember that wars based on religious differences such as the Crusades have torn apart the world for millennia.

The Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993 included a Global Ethic signed by attendees pledging to cease to war with each other over these differences. Deborah Ann Light signed the compact as a member representative of three participating Pagan groups, Circle, EarthSpirit, and Covenant of the Goddess. The ethic outlines a course of meditation and action that continues to be vitally necessary today.

The Pagan groups present at the Parliament signed the ethic alongside Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and many other groups. We have taken our place among religions on the world stage; it does not contribute to the peace of the gods to resurrect this ancient war. Hypatia taught Christians and Pagans together, and there is no reason we cannot continue to study together in peace.

However, we can and should continue to politely but firmly contest the triumphalist narrative. Until recently the study of Mediterranean history championed the grand narrative of Western progress in which human culture marched inevitably forward on a straight upward trajectory from primitive to sophisticated, from undeveloped to developed, from Pagan to Christian. Scholars seriously debated the relative definitions of magic, religion, and science, with science in its Western incarnation valorized as the pinnacle of human achievement, and religion in its Christian form as the manifestation of the most sublime human spirituality. In contrast with

science, magic was described as superstition; in contrast with religion, magic was primitive. The mechanical science that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution has been framed as the crowning achievement of civilization. In the last few decades, scholars in many fields have challenged this narrative, pointing to the racist and imperialist underpinnings of the idea of “progress.” It is a form of exceptionalism, the doctrine that holds that certain people—in this case white European people—deservedly dominate the world through their extraordinary accomplishments. In addition to calling European exceptionalism into question, scholars challenge the Industrial Revolution as a form of imperialism that claims the world’s resources for the benefit of the privileged few.

One of the forms European exceptionalism takes is the idea that the Mediterranean region was a self-enclosed realm in which writing, cities, monumental religion, and civilization itself arose and were perfected. Scholars have gone to great lengths to prove that the Babylonians invented astrology before the Egyptians, that “foreign” artifacts discovered in the Mediterranean world signal the trading of goods but not ideas, and that there was a sort of cultural wall protecting the Mediterranean region from incursions of outside customs and beliefs. In “The Paths of the Ancient Sages,” Peter Kingsley describes the scholastic idea of the “Oriental Mirage” in which scholars discount the ancients’ own descriptions of their travels and the influence of other cultures on Mediterranean thought as a form of wishful thinking! Fortunately these attitudes are changing. Scholars such as Kingsley, Garth Fowden, Algis Uždavinys, Molefi Kete Asante, Maulana Karenga, Sarah Iles Johnston, and others call for researchers to take seriously what the ancients themselves wrote.

The world was as singularly small and interconnected in Proklos’s time as it is now. Alexandria mixed Kemetic, Greek, Roman, Syrian, Persian, and Indian thought; Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Paganism all affected the philosophies that issued from the Alexandrian schools.

A THEURGIC LIFE

It was dawn. Xanthus hung back in the door until Proklos finished his prayer to the sun and turned to go inside, falling into step with him. “Master, will you eat today, or fast? Do say you will eat, you’ve fasted too much this moon.”

“You speak of care for the body,” Proklos said, amused. “I care for my soul.”

“Which depends on the body,” the steward said stoutly. “Food today?”

“Very well. I will eat, but lightly. It’s a holy day.”

Xanthus knew the Athenian calendar, and this was not a holiday. “Which holy day? A Roman, or one of the Egyptians?”

“Lydian, if you must know.”

“You must not travel again. You bring gods back from every land,” Xanthus muttered. He answered the door and called out, “Archiadas!”

Archiadas joined Proklos in the study. “I see you’re up before me again. If you slept at all.”

“A bit, between prayers,” Proklos said, laying the texts out on his desk.

“How many teaching periods do you have today?”

“Four. No, five,” Proklos said. “Four today, and there’s one more tonight.” He smiled. “An old friend has arrived. Aedesia, the daughter of my first teacher Syrianus. She’s come to study with me, and she’s brought her sons Heliodorus and Ammonius to learn as well. I’m spending extra time with them.”

“Ammonius?” Archiadas said, diverted. “Like the teacher of Plotinus?”

“A good name for a philosophical family,” Proklos said.

Archiadas frowned. “A night lesson? Are you sure the widow doesn’t have her eye on you?” Proklos laughed. Archiadas went on fussily, “Anyway you don’t have time to teach at night if you’re going to write.”

“But I will write. Seven hundred lines, every day,” Proklos said.

“You’ve been at it, what? Four years?” Archiadas laid a hand on his arm. “I worry about you. You drive yourself too hard.”

“I’ve only a year until I finish the work. I think,” Proklos argued. “At any rate it’s important. No one else has compiled a history of the Chaldean Oracles. They taught me theurgic principles and they will teach others, too.” He smiled. “Not everyone has had Asklepigenia for a teacher.”

Archiadas studied his face. “There’s more than that,” he said shrewdly. “Something else drives you.”

Proklos smiled. “I can’t hide anything from you, can I? I had a dream. Plutarch came to me and predicted I’d live as many years as the pages I write about the Oracles. I mean to make seventy pages.”

Whistling, Archiadas said, “That’s a good, long life.”

“With you beside me every year,” Proklos said quietly. “but that isn’t all—in the dream I saw that I am one of the links of the Hermetic chain. It’s my duty to finish the work.”

“Can’t you cut back on your teaching periods then? Or some of the prayers?” Archiadas sighed. “I see by the set of your shoulders you won’t hear of it. At least tell me how I can help.”

“You can set out the stools for the students.”

Studying at the Academy

In his own lifetime, learning from Proklos was a significant commitment. The course of education at the Athenian school took many years to complete. Grammar and rhetoric students formed the bread and butter of every school. Those who remained after learning those basic subjects worked their way through a curriculum that laid a foundation of logic and philosophy and gradually led into metaphysics. The curriculum covered Homer and Hesiod, then followed Iamblichus’s designated order of reading Plato’s dialogues. This layered education was intended to elevate the intellect from the material toward the divine.

In Proclus, Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science, Lucas Siorvanes outlines the curriculum. First, the student cultivated natural physical health, then civic virtue, fulfilling individual political responsibilities. Then came purifications that prepared the student for a contemplative, philosophical, life. The student contemplated physical and theological realities. Finally the student was prepared to tackle theurgy, ritual operations bringing the philosopher into union with the divine.

Higher education was available to a very small percentage of the population, almost exclusively upper-class men. However, under Proklos as with Plato, female students were welcomed at the Academy. Unlike other schools in the late Roman world, the Neo-Platonic Academy under Proclus’s leadership allowed women to pursue the same education as their male counterparts.

In her work The Academy under Proclus, Nina Ellis Frischmann lists the justifications Proklos offered for his decision. Women have souls just as men do and share the same virtues and pursuits. Education makes women better citizens and counterbalances their natural passions. Women in other societies took leadership positions, proving this was possible. Proklos also noted the gods possessed women as well as men. Didn’t that prove women and men must share the same type of soul?

The example of the goddess Athena herself argued for women’s education. Although she never married, she did not reject the traditional duties of women and fulfilled her domestic duties, while leaping to the defense of Athens in times of war. She was the epitome of the educated woman.

DEAREST FRIEND

“I can’t.” Frustrated, Proklos pushed away from the table. “I can’t make the tops any more. My hands don’t work right.”

Archiadas steadied him as he stood. “You’ve already lived five years longer than the seventy years your dream predicted. It’s no wonder your hands aren’t as steady as they were.”

Proklos coughed. “My health has been so bad these five years I don’t think they count. Here, help me into bed.”

A flash of lightning briefly lit the walls, followed by a low roll of thunder. Archiadas tucked a blanket under his chin. “Do you remember when you saved Attica from drought? You called the rains down with one of your famous tops.”

“Not just the top,” Proklos objected. “It’s the rite that activates it, and the prayer to the gods.”

Aedesius drew a stool next to the bed. “We all owe you so much. I owe you my daughter’s life.”

“How is she?”

“As healthy and fit as if she was never poised on the shore of the Styx. Her mother and her husband are grateful every day.”

“I know. They send soup,” Proklos said. “It’s all I can eat these days.”

“Not just my family,” Archiadas said. “So many of us think of you as our own family.”

“It’s because I never married,” Proklos said comfortably. “Did you bring it? The will?”

“I have it here,” Archiadas said.

Proklos unrolled the document on his chest and peered myopically at it. “All my possessions to Archiadas, that’s right. After Archiadas, to Xanthus for his care, very good. Then to Athens.” He pushed the document off his chest. “Will you have it entered?”

“Tomorrow,” Archiadas assured him, retrieving it and rolling it up again.

“And you’ve made the arrangements?”

“You have the tomb next to Syrianus, as you wanted.”

“Good,” he said, satisfied. “May our souls find the same abode.”

Archiadas squeezed his hand. “I’m selfish. I want your soul to share this one a little longer.”

Proklos fell back on the bed, his eyes distant. “I have seen immortal splendor,” he said. “I have seen the supercelestial force springing from a consecrated spring, streaming with fiery light. I have been possessed by a spirit of fire lifting me to the heavens with music echoing in the starry vault.”

“The starry vault,” Archiadas said. “It is where our souls belong. Sleep now and dream of it.” As the old teacher’s breath evened into sleep, he said softly, “Go when you are ready, on the wings of my love.”

Successors of Proklos

The primary source for the life of Proklos is Marinus’s work On Happiness, Life of Proclus. Guthrie’s translation is available online. Proklos was about seventy-five when he died. In his youth he walked in a city that still publicly honored the ancient gods; he worshipped his patron goddess Athena in the Parthenon, the thousand-year-old temple of Athena.

Proklos wrote prolifically; five of his commentaries on Platonic dialogues and six of his books survive, including his major works Elements of Theology translated by Dodds, and Platonic Theology translated by Thomas Taylor. Proklos also wrote many hymns; five which survive were translated by Thomas Taylor as Proklos, Five Hymns.

Several of Proklos’s students succeeded him as head of the Academy: his biographer Marinus, Isidore who named his son Proklos, and Hegias, who inherited the knowledge of the Chaldean Oracles and the rituals of theurgy.

The last head of the Academy was born in Damascus, another philosopher steeped in Syrian religion as well as Platonism. Like Proklos, Damascius was forced to flee Athens for a time, taking refuge in Persia, but he eventually returned to Athens. In the tradition of the school, he wrote a biography of his teacher Isidore. He also wrote commentaries on Plato and the surviving work Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, elaborating on the ideas of Asklepigenia and Proklos. Damascius contemplated the first cause, that which made everything, and noted he didn’t even like to use the term “To En, the One,” because the human mind could not comprehend it enough even to name it.

THE LESSONS OF PROKLOS

AND ASKLEPIGENIA

In his lifetime, Proklos witnessed the gradual suppression of public Pagan worship. Though not the last Pagan philosopher or the last head of the Academy, Proklos was the last of them to visit the temple of Athena while it was still a functioning Pagan place of worship. In his lifetime Pagan religion transitioned from the publically performed religion of empire to a private, home-based religion.

He seemed to feel a personal responsibility to preserve Pagan religion. He gathered information about deities wherever he travelled. He kept numerous feast days. He took on priestly offices. He wrote hymns. His patron goddess Athena spoke to him all his life and he accepted her guidance.

He learned practical magic from Asklepigenia and passed on his knowledge to his successor Hegias. Both Proklos and Asklepigenia conducted theurgic ritual as well as teaching and practicing philosophy. While they would teach philosophy to many, they only passed on knowledge of the practical rituals to a chosen few, Asklepigenia to Proklos and Proklos to Hegias. Proklos was credited with numerous successes in healing and protecting Athens.

Proklos did not hesitate to learn from any source he encountered, including the teachers of Kemet. Proklos and Asklepigenia worked together and fought to keep the Academy open to women as well as men. They stand as exemplars for Pagan conduct, preserving Pagan religion, teaching philosophy in the service of the gods, turning magic to the service of their community.

Notes on the Story

The main source for Proklos’s life story is the biography written by his student Marinus, “On Happiness.” Guthrie’s translation is available online through the Platonic Library. Marinus specifically quotes Proklos as saying “Such are the habitual accidents of life!”

Although his teachers tried to pick out wives for him, Proklos managed to duck marriage, leaving his estate to his constant companion, Archiadas, arguing for a strong friendship if not an outright bonded relationship. Proklos was also a friend to women, forming quite a strong friendship with Asklepigenia and defending the right of women to enter his circle.

Asklepigenia was known to have a beautiful sphere to conduct theurgic ritual. The children’s toy described in the story is available today and is a good tool to add a buzzing or whirring sound to vowel chanting.