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" Correspondences and Invocations: "
Alt, Brian Patrick
Schott, Jeremy
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1114374
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2407333329
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| Main Entry
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Alt, Brian Patrick
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Schott, Jeremy
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| Title & Author
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Correspondences and Invocations:\ Alt, Brian PatrickSchott, Jeremy
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| College
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Indiana University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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363
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| Abstract
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This dissertation examines the theurgic Neoplatonism of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis alongside other Greco-Egyptian sources from the second through the fifth centuries CE, including parts of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri (PGM), and related philosophical texts in the Platonic tradition. By widening the comparative net, this study gives a fuller account of theurgic ritual related to its use of materials and invocations, especially as they correspond to the seven planetary spheres, which have special significance for the view of the soul and its subtle vehicles in theurgic Neoplatonism. Reading these sources together is justified not only by their shared Egyptian priestly milieu, but also by the structural and thematic parallels between Iamblichean theurgy and the other sources, creating a mutually illuminating interpretive framework that has gone mostly unrecognized in previous scholarship. Ritual purifications of the planetary faculties of the soul, which correspond to the “organs” of the cosmic body (and include the imaginative faculty as the correlate of the sun), lead to an increased fitness for participation in divine powers. The enhanced fitness of the imagination enables the individual soul to perceive the subtle light of the gods and experience visionary ascents “outside” the material body. Several physiological metaphors are employed by Platonic sources to express the relationship of the human self (microcosm) to the cosmic whole (macrocosm), and these metaphors ground an understanding of the ritual self in an extended somatic field that transcends the distinctions between inner and outer, and between contemplative and ritual-based “assimilation to god” as the goal of Platonic philosophy. Theurgic ascent is a lifelong cumulative practice in which a highly stratified divine hierarchy enables a gradual transformation of the self, which the theurgist identifies with progressively higher forms of divinity.
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Hermetica
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Iamblichus
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Magic
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Neoplatonism
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Proclus
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Theurgy
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