Theurgy, Theory and Practice: The Mysteries of the Ascent to the Divine, Homeric Epics, the Chaldean Oracles, and Neoplatonic Ritual
P.D. Newman
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2023. xiv + 210 pp., hardcover, $40.
Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus
Gregory Shaw
Brooklyn, N.Y.: Angelico, 2024. xvii + 259 pp., paper, $22.95.
Theurgy comes from the Greek theourgia, meaning divine working. A term used by the Neoplatonic philosophers Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus in late classical antiquity, it was defined thus by Iamblichus: “Theurgy works through the divine love and providence of the gods who bestow their presence upon human beings through divine illumination.”
A present-day scholarly source defines theurgy as “religious ritual demonstrating supernatural power” which “both symbolised and encapsulated the extraordinary miracle of the soul’s conversion back to its divine cause.”
The practical aspects of theurgy are mysterious. Some have contended that the Neoplatonists did not employ any ritual but merely thought of theurgy as a contemplation of the divine. P.D. Newman disagrees, citing Iamblichus, who writes, it “is not pure thought that unites the theurgists to the gods . . . it is the accomplishment of acts not to be divulged and beyond all conception, and the power of unutterable symbols, understood solely by the gods, which establishes theurgic union.”
Newman’s book traces theurgy back to the beginnings of Greek philosophy. Following the classical scholar Peter Kingsley, he contends that the earliest philosophers, the Presocratics of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, practiced a kind of shamanic descent called a katabasis. “By the time we get to Plato and his successors,” Newman adds, “ritual descents to the underworld will be largely abandoned in favor of dialectical anabasis, theia mania or divine madness, and, eventually, theourgia or theurgy.”
In short, the Platonic and Neoplationic traditions replaced descent to the underworld with ascent to the realm of the gods, which would culminate in a divinization of the adept. “Theurgy is a veritable reversal of the soul’s emergence or ontology,” writes Newman.
The ancient mysteries envisioned incarnation into human form as a descent from the heavenly realm through the seven spheres of the planets as then known (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon), absorbing the characteristics of each sphere in turn. Theurgy, as Newman indicates, is the opposite: an ascent through those seven spheres in reverse and shedding oneself from these characteristics—usually seen as vices—before returning to the pure realm of the gods. A similar process is described in the Hermetic text known as the Poimandres.
To illustrate what this process might have been like, Newman points to a text from the Nag Hammadi Library called the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth as a “technical instruction on the ritualized ascent of the soul into the Ogdoad [the pure heavenly realm] and beyond.” He also discusses a description in Contra Celsum (“Against Celsus”) by the Christian church father Origen, who describes a similar practice by a Gnostic sect known as the Ophites.
Even these short comments indicate that the thought and practice of the Neoplatonists, Hermeticists, and Gnostics, despite very real differences, shared remarkable similarities and may not be as easily distinguished as academics might like.
Newman’s fascinating book delves into other topics, including uses of the Homeric epics as allegorical guides to the soul’s ascent and even the practice of calling down divine powers into statues. All in all, this work is a useful glimpse into the mysteries of theurgy and what it may have meant to its practitioners.
Gregory Shaw’s book is another matter. It does not immediately inspire confidence to see a book about the Neoplatonists titled Hellenic Tantra: Tantra, the diverse and obscure mystical tradition of India, would appear to have little to do with the Platonic philosophy of late antiquity. In this case, the lack of confidence is justified.
Shaw has written scholarly works on Neoplatonism, notably Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (1995). In this new work, he attempts to characterize the theurgy of Iamblichus as an ancient Greek version of Tantra.
Shaw contends that Iamblichus differs from his predecessors, Plotinus and Porphyry, in one key respect: for the latter, in Shaw’s view, “the soul does not descend into a body; it only seems to be in a body. Its confusion can therefore be eliminated by cleansing the soul of the illusion that it is embodied.”
For Iamblichus, by contrast, “the soul descends fully into the body, and this alienates it from divinity. The immortal soul, as embodied, identifies with a mortal self, our ego. For Iamblichus, no cleansing of the ego would allow it to recover its divinity, for its very structure prevents this. One’s identification as an individual effects one’s self-alienation. The solution to this existential problem is that the soul somehow be released from its self-fixation in order to receive and recover its divinity. An experience of ekstasis, ‘standing outside’ one’s habitual state, is required for the soul to become divine” (Emphasis here and in other quotes is Shaw’s). Theurgy generates such experience.
For Plotinus and Porphyry, the divinization of the soul involves an ascent from the defiled material world of the body. For Iamblichus (according to Shaw), theurgy entails a descent: the full embodiment of the soul in the body so that the individual becomes a god in the flesh, complete with divine powers: “the soul needs matter in order to unite with the divine,” he tells us.
Shaw argues that Iamblichus’s theurgy is identical to Tantra. He cites one Western scholar’s definition of the latter, saying that it applies equally well to theurgy: “that body of belief and practices which, working from the principle that the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and maintains the universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways.”
But the theurgy of Iamblichus does not seem to resemble Tantra at all. The latter embraces a radical nondualism: there is no ultimate difference between Shiva, the divine consciousness, and his manifold manifestations; hence there is no ultimately real distinction between “pure” and “impure” substances and acts. One Tantra practice to demonstrate this truth is panchamakara, involving use of the five M’s, the initial of each of which stands for a forbidden and defiling substance: madya (wine), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (grain), and maithuna (sexual intercourse).
Shaw does not, and cannot, show that the theurgy of the Neoplatonists involved any such practices. Here is Iamblichus’s own characterization of theurgy: “The Gods . . . shed their light upon theurgists, calling their souls back to themselves and orchestrating their union with them, accustoming them, even while still in the body, to detach themselves from their bodies and turn themselves towards their eternal and intelligible first principle” (emphasis Shaw’s). This is far not only from the five M’s but from the nondualism of Tantra (although Shaw, like many authors today, tosses around the word nonduality rather promiscuously).
Note two points here: (1) theurgy, even as described by Shaw, bears little resemblance to Tantra in any recognizable form, and (2) Iamblichus’s views do not differ from those of Plotinus and Porphyry to nearly the extent that Shaw claims.
All this apart from the question of whether Shaw, or even the Western scholarly sources that he relies on, understand Tantra at all. It does not help that he at times speaks of yoga and Tantra as more or less interchangeable, although they are radically different and in many ways contradictory.
I would not trust Shaw’s book to give anything like an accurate picture of Tantra. Even its treatment of Neoplatonism, despite his expertise in the area, seems unreliable in some respects. Readers wanting some knowledge of Neoplatonic theurgy would do better to go back to his earlier work Theurgy and the Soul—or to Newman’s.
Richard Smoley