Sphere altar

Source: TW

The Sphere and the Altar of Sacrifice
Gregory Shaw
Stonehill College

To leave the body behind and pass into the ether,
to change our human nature into the purity of the gods…
permits us to be restored
to the same substance and cycle of the gods
we had before entering the human form.

– Iamblichus, Protrepticus (16.1-7)

When your prized possessions
start to weigh you down,
look in my direction,
*I’ll be round, I’ll be round. *

– John Lennon, And Your Bird Can Sing

What is it to become round, to become spherical, to recover the primordial state of perfection…
before the fall, before fragmentation, before consciousness is divided, isolated, dismembered?
Once, long ago, Aristophanes tells us in the Symposium,

“our nature was not what it is now…
the shape of each human being was completely round,
with back and hands in a circle,”¹

before our division and punishment,
before our rupture and isolation into parts.

It is as fragments that we begin to seek, longing for security and wholeness:
individual souls, as Plotinus put it,
“battered by the totality of things in every way,”²
we seek sanctuary in something unbroken and undivided,
a condition untouched by the singular awareness and suffering of mortal life.

The Pythagoreans identified our limited self-consciousness
geometrically with the line
and our lost wholeness with the sphere,
a shape without beginning or end.

“Whenever the soul is especially assimilated to the [Divine] Mind,”
Iamblichus says,
“our vehicle is made spherical and is moved in a circle.”
The sphere, he says,
“is both itself one and capable of containing multiplicity,
which indeed makes it truly divine….”³

Iamblichus speaks for a tradition
that imagines the soul’s salvation in the recovery of the sphere:
the line curved back upon itself,
mortality entering a consciousness without beginning or end.

• History of Platonism: Plato Redivivus, edited by John Finamore and Robert Berchman (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2005) 147-162.

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I wish to examine this longing and the itinerary that leads back to the sphere
through its expression in the work of Iamblichus.
I will suggest that in light of his paradoxical understanding of the soul as simultaneously mortal and immortal,
our return to the sphere must also express a fundamental paradox
and our habit of interpreting theurgic anagogê as an ascent to the gods
may, itself, need to be turned round,
making the way up identical with the way down.

Iamblichean theurgy does not represent an innovation or profound change—
certainly not a degeneration—of this tradition.
While the term “theurgy” may have been of recent coinage in the 3rd century C.E.,
for Iamblichus it was the ancient practice of contacting the gods,
received from sacred races,
and practiced by the wisest philosophers.

It was not new but old,
and if Iamblichus placed special emphasis on the importance of ritual over reason
it was because of the culture in which he lived,
a time when the rites of recovering our divinity, of re-entering the sphere,
were being lost due to what he perceived as the intellectual hubris of the Greeks.
For Iamblichus and other Neoplatonists,
the sacred art of returning to the gods was a tradition going back to Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato,
each of whom presented the tradition in a different way.⁴

Yet for scholars today who isolate the conceptual aspects of philosophy from experience,
the ritual emphasis in Iamblichus seems out of place and irrational.
Our contemporary separation of thinking from life experience, however,
was foreign to the later Platonists.
As Peter Kingsley writes,

“what have been dismissed as the irrational excesses and innovations of the Neoplatonists
were in fact not their creation at all
but, on the contrary,
mirror—and perpetuate—the traditions of pre-Platonic Pythagoreans.”⁵

And what these traditions aimed at was, in Plato’s language,
homoiosis theô, becoming god-like,
and what this required was a complete transformation of the soul,
an initiation, a death and rebirth of consciousness.+++(5)+++

According to Iamblichus,
this initiatory path had been misappropriated by intellectuals
who presumed that their ability to talk about the process
was equivalent to, or even better than, experiencing it.+++(5)+++
These “Greeks,” as Iamblichus calls them,
lived excessively in their heads,
and consequently, their thinking was quick, but shallow.

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Iamblichus compares them unfavorably with Egyptians and other sacred races
who preserve the power of their rituals,
but the Greeks, he says, are naturally the followers of the latest trends,
eager to be carried off in any direction since they possess no stability in themselves.+++(4)+++

Whatever they may have received from other traditions they do not preserve,
but even this they immediately reject and change
through their unstable habit of seeking the latest terms.⁶

Although an intellectual himself,
Iamblichus recognized that our discursive abilities are rooted in principles that transcend rational discourse.
In the De Mysteriis he warns Porphyry
that when the intellect is uprooted from this ineffable soil
we lose touch with our deepest values,
we lose touch with divinity.
It is not thinking
but a life shaped by traditional rhythms
that keeps us close to the gods;
theurgy, then, represents Iamblichus’ attempt to rein in the intellectuals of his age
and to preserve a sacred way of life.
In his De Anima doxography
he approvingly cites the opinion of the Platonist Taurus
who said that the embodiment of human souls allows the gods to appear on earth.
Iamblichus writes:

[He] thinks the purpose of the soul’s descent
is to reveal the divine life,
for this is the will of the Gods:
to be revealed through [human] souls.
For the Gods come forth into bodily appearance
and reveal themselves in the pure and faultless life of souls.⁷

The goal of theurgy
was to realize this purpose
and Iamblichus attempted to articulate the “old ways”
in a manner that could be practiced by anyone.
Drawing from Platonic, Aristotelian, and Pythagorean doctrines,
Iamblichus provided an outline for a sacred way of life
that allows the gods to appear in human form.

I. The cosmogonic cycle

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A critical element of Iamblichus’ teaching was that
cosmology reveals the way of initiation.
Drawing largely from the Pythagorean imagery of the Timaeus,
Iamblichus held that all divine beings share in the creation of the cosmos.
The souls of Higher Kinds,
as he calls the heavenly gods,
are complete in themselves (autoteleis),⁸
with vehicles that reveal their powers immediately in the heavenly round.
Human souls, however, with mortal vehicles,
are divided into the measured chronology of the physical body.

In geometric terms, the existence of Higher Kinds is circular:
their essence is inseparable from their activity,
their beginning identical with their end.
In the experience of human souls this circle is broken:
having entered generated life, the soul falls into a rectilinear existence
and becomes a creature whose beginning is separate from its end.

Iamblichus’ well-known doctrine of the complete descent of the soul
must be understood in this context.
In cosmogenesis, Iamblichus says,
the soul functions as a mathematical mean
to manifest divine proportions (logoi) in the generated world.

Without its descent into a body
the soul could not, as Iamblichus puts it,
“serve the work of creation,”⁹
or function as the “mean between the divisible and indivisible, corporeal and incorporeal races.”¹⁰
Iamblichus explores the existential paradox
this mediation presents to the soul. He writes:

The soul is a mean
not only between the undivided and the divided,
the remaining and the proceeding,
the noetic and the irrational,
but also between the ungenerated and the generated….
Wherefore, that which is immortal in the soul
is filled completely with mortality
and no longer remains only immortal.
[The ungenerated part of the soul somehow becomes generated
just as the undivided part of the soul becomes divided.¹¹]

In order to act with the gods in cosmogenesis
the soul must become mortal
and lose its place in the heavenly round:
once incarnated the soul “becomes a stranger to itself”¹² and is confined to a single physical form.¹³

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This loss is not an illusion but an experienced reality,
and although Plotinus and Porphyry characterized the soul’s recovery of divinity
by suggesting that, in some way, we never fully descend into a body,
it was critical to Iamblichus, for cosmological reasons,
to insist that the soul does descend.
To deny our descent
was equivalent to denying the soul’s role in cosmogenesis
and, consequently, the possibility of recovering our divine identity.

The doctrine of the soul’s descent has often been explained as Iamblichus’ rationale
for introducing theurgic rites into the Platonic tradition, but this is misleading.

It suggests that instead of being an integral part of an ancient tradition,
theurgic rites were an innovation requiring special defense,
as if the descent of the soul were an idea concocted by Iamblichus
to justify his attraction to irrational practices.
It was just the reverse.
If, as the lowest divinity,¹⁴ the soul brings the divine logoi into temporal generation
and becomes identified with mortal life,
then reciprocally, the soul must re-engage these logoi in the natural world
to recover its divinity.+++(5)+++
This art of recovery, Iamblichus believed, was preserved by Egyptians and other sacred races
who reproduced in cult and ritual the eternal measures (metra aidia)¹⁵ of cosmogenesis.
By performing these divine acts, these “theurgies,”
the embodied soul could begin to recover its divinity,
and it was from this “ancient” tradition, Iamblichus maintained,
that Pythagoras and Plato derived their philosophy.¹⁶
So it was not out of place for Iamblichus
to address students of Platonic philosophy in their own terms
especially concerning the identity of the soul.¹⁷

His insistence on its descent in cosmogenesis suggests that
the soul’s experience of self-alienation played a critical role,
not only in cosmogony,
but also in the recovery of its divinity.

Because the embodied soul is not only alienated from the gods
but from its own divinity,
contact with the divine must come from “outside” itself, in theurgic rites.¹⁸+++(5)+++

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The divine logoi projected outside the soul during embodiment
must first be recovered in the form of material objects
that correspond (analogoi) to its own divine proportions (logoi).

These sacred objects (sunthêmata)
possessed the power to awaken the soul
to its own logoi
provided the soul was prepared to receive them
and contain their power.
Through the use of material objects such as stones, herbs, animals, and aromatics,¹⁹
the alienating flood of sense experience was redirected in rituals
that effected the soul’s recovery:
the objects functioned as receptacles
to help theurgists contain the divine powers activated in the rite.
As they progressively recovered their divine status
theurgists employed ritual objects that were less densely material
until, very rarely, a soul performed an entirely immaterial form of worship.²⁰
The kind of ritual one performed was determined by the soul’s spiritual capacity.+++(5)+++
As Iamblichus put it:

Each attends to his sacrifice according to what he is,
not according to what he is not;
therefore the sacrifice should not surpass
the proper measure of the one who performs the worship.²¹

Whether the purely noetic and immaterial theurgy
included the visualization of geometric images, as I have argued,
or was simply the offering of the soul’s purest noetic experience to the gods
is not an issue I wish to take up in this paper.
What is clear, however one interprets material or immaterial theurgy,
is that Iamblichus characterizes our return to divinity as a return to the will ( ου ) of the gods
and to our spherical body.
The sunthêmata used in theurgic rites were effective,
not because of their material properties,
but because they communicated the single will ( boulisis? ) of the Demiurge.²²
As Emma Clarke has recently explained,
for Iamblichus only the gods possess ου ;
upon embodiment the human soul loses its ου and enters into choice (mian boulisis? ),
a deliberative state more akin to discursive thinking
than to the unitive awareness of noesis.²³
Iamblichus maintained that the ου of the gods
is responsible for both theurgic rites and the cosmogony they re-enact; for if the rites were invented by human beings, he argues, they would lack the power to elevate the soul.

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In the performance of these rites,
theurgists lived in two worlds.
On the one hand, Iamblichus says,
since the ritual is performed by human beings
it preserves our natural place in the universe,
but on the other hand, by means of the sunthêmata
theurgists are led round to the order of the gods
and “take on their shape.”²⁴
In effect, theurgists themselves become sunthêmata
through whom the boulisis? of the gods is revealed:
they assume a spherical body,
the shape of the gods.+++(5)+++
This recovered sphere is the soul’s original vehicle, or ochêma,
made by the Demiurge “from the entire aether which possesses a creative power.”²⁵
Like the etheric vehicles of the gods,
the soul’s original vehicle moves in the heavenly circuit with them
and manifests the generosity of the Demiurge in the creation of the cosmos.
As Iamblichus puts it:

“According to the Ancients,
souls freed from generation co-administer the cosmos with the gods…
[these] liberated souls create the cosmos with the angels….”²⁶

Theurgy allowed the soul to recover this divine activity
which Iamblichus describes as circular:
“the noêsis of the soul and the circular motion of [celestial] bodies,” he says,
“imitates the activity of the Nous.”²⁷

The soul’s circular contact with the gods
is discussed by Iamblichus in several contexts.
In acts of divination,
the presence of the god descends on the theurgist,
fills him, dominates him, and “circularly embraces him from everywhere at once.”²⁸
When the priestess at Delphi is possessed,
the god “circularly embraces her on all sides,”²⁹
and in god-sent dreams a divine “pneuma encircles those lying down”
making the sound of “rushing wind” (rhoizos) as it liberates the soul.³⁰
This rushing sound, rhoizos,
was the sound emitted by the stars in their celestial round,
so the vehicle of the soul not only takes on the shape but also the sound of the gods.³¹

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Immortalization through the act of recovering a spherical body
became an integral part of the soul’s spiritual itinerary,
and the shape of one’s ochêma became the index of the soul’s spiritual condition.
In Iamblichus’ view,
although embodiment causes the soul to lose the roundness of its etheric vehicle,
its sphere is recovered in theurgic ritual.

Damascius compares the transformation of this body to the changes of a sponge. He writes:

Like a sponge,
the soul [in embodiment] loses nothing of its being
but simply becomes rarified or densified.
Just so does the immortal body of the soul remain individually the same,
but sometimes it is made more spherical and sometimes less,
sometimes it is filled with divine light (pliroutai theiou futos?) and sometimes with the stains of generative acts….³²

Significantly, Damascius says
the etheric body becomes more spherical
when it is “filled with divine light,”
and Iamblichus explains that a principal technique of divination is phôtagôgia,
the drawing of divine light into the soul’s etheric body.+++(4)+++

All divination, Iamblichus says,
is caused by the lights that descend from the gods.
Although, strictly speaking,
the gods cannot be seen,
they are illuminated by intermediate divinities
so that they appear to us as light,
and it is this light that fills the soul’s ochêma.
Through prayer and other purifications,
theurgists developed the capacity to allow these lights to appear
in an imagination that becomes divine.
The soul that receives them experiences ecstasy,
for when the gods descend, Iamblichus says,

“they encircle everything in us and
entirely banish our usual way of thought and action.”³³

According to Iamblichus, in phôtagôgia
this [divine] power illuminates with light
the etherial and luminous vehicle (aitherodes kai aunoeides ochima?) that surrounds the soul,
from which divine visions possess our imaginative faculty,
since it is moved by the will of the gods.³⁴

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In some cases of divine possession
the discursive power of the soul remains quietly attentive—but uninspired—
for, as Iamblichus explains, the divine light does not touch it,
but the imaginative faculty is divinely inspired
because it is lifted into modes of imagination that come from the gods,
not from itself, and it is utterly removed from what is ordinarily human.³⁵

II. *“Immortal mortals, mortal immortals”

* ³⁶

The soul possessed by the gods in phôtagôgia
enters its original spherical body,
it is filled with divine light,
it takes on the shape of the gods.
And yet, the soul remains mortal, human, subject to death.
It might appear that the paradox of being mortal and immortal
is somehow resolved by Iamblichus’ insistence
that it is the phantasia and not the mind that becomes divine,
thus splitting the soul in two:
divine imagination — mortal mind.
Yet the soul also re-enters the sphere
in a less explicit way through sacrificial rites,
for since these rites recapitulate cosmogony,
the soul ritually shares in the activity of the gods.³⁷
It is by entering this divine activity, this theourgia,
that the soul re-enters the act of creation revealed in the cycles of time,
including those of its own mortal life.
In effect, theurgic ritual was a mnemonic spell
that awakened the soul to its role in cosmogenesis,
for although individual and mortal,
the theurgist enacted the divine light of the gods.

Iamblichus says that this light remains in itself
yet proceeds into the divisions of creation,
joining the last things to the first³⁸
and tracing a cosmogonic cycle seen in the circle of the heavens.³⁹
Whether the soul enters this circle through material sacrifice
or through the epiphanies of phôtagôgia,
it is ultimately the same circle,
which is why material theurgy ought not to be defined as worse than immaterial theurgy.+++(4)+++
To diminish the value of material rites
would deny the value of the divine activity
that materializes itself as the cosmos.
The theurgist had the unique experience of entering the fullness and immortality of the gods
while remaining individual and mortal,
and to deny his mortality would deny his access to immortality.
Even in deification the paradox remains.

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As Iamblichus says:

The benevolent and gracious gods shine their light generously on theurgists,
calling their souls up to themselves, giving them unification, and accustoming them,
while they are still in their bodies,
to be detached from their bodies and turned to their eternal and noetic principle.⁴⁰

Theurgists, then, inhabit two worlds:
they become gods in theurgic activity
yet remain mortal;
divine lights possess their imagination in phôtagôgia
yet their thinking remains uninspired;+++(4)+++
they become co-creators with the gods in theurgic sacrifice
yet they remain creatures;
they are lifted up into union with the gods
yet remain in their bodies.

This paradox is critical for Iamblichus,
not only because it reflects the soul’s mediating function,
but because it forms part of a central theurgic mystery,
one that, I believe, Iamblichus points to in his analysis of the number and shape of the body and soul.

In his Pythagorean treatise, On Physical Number,
Iamblichus maintains that numbers inform all aspects of material nature,
and he states that philosophers should be able to fit the appropriate numbers to their natural phenomena.⁴¹
With regard to embodied souls, he says:

Since animals are made up of soul and body,
the Pythagoreans say soul and body are not produced from the same number,
but soul from cubic number, body from the bômiskos.⁴²

The number of the body is called bômiskos,
a shape with three unequal dimensions,
having sides of 5x6x7 or 210.⁴³
I find it significant that bômiskos is the diminutive form of bômos,
the Greek term for the altar of blood sacrifice.
Thus, the number/shape of the body
is identified with the sacrificial altar.
The number of soul, on the other hand, is 216, a cubic number derived from 6x6x6.⁴⁴
For Pythagoreans, a cubic number such as 216
whose last digit, 6, is the same as the last digit of its side number
was considered spherical because it returned to itself: 6 to 6.⁴⁵

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Thus, the soul is a spherical number rooted in 6
which, Iamblichus maintains, is the first number to blend the divisible with the indivisible+++(=??)+++,
making it similar to soul in its mediating function;
this is why, he explains, “the solid embodiment of the soul falls under the hexad.”⁴⁶

As spherical numbers souls are divine,
but the nature of the hexadic sphere
is to mix the opposites:
the even with the odd,
the dyad with the triad,
the mortal with the immortal,
and so we return again to the paradoxes of the soul.+++(4)+++
Yet here Iamblichus presents the paradox with contrasting images:
the sacrificial altar, the bômiskos,
where mortal life is offered to the gods, and the sphere,
an image of divine life without beginning or end.
A literal reading of Iamblichus’ theurgic itinerary— from material to immaterial rites—
has led many scholars to assume that
theurgists eventually abandon the altar and its blood rituals for the noetic sphere.
I will argue, however, that to enter the sphere
the theurgist had to be initiated into the “bloodless secret” of the altar.⁴⁷

For Walter Burkert this secret is revealed in the similarity of triktus? ,
the triad of sacrificial animals, and
the tetraktus?, the Pythagorean symbol of cosmogony
which led initiates to the gods through number
rather than through the sacrifice of blood.
Burkert suggests that the triktus? was superseded by the tetraktus?,
a shift exemplified by Pythagoras teaching one of his students to perform divination
with numbers rather than with blood offerings.⁴⁸
It is all too easy for us to see this as a symmetric shift—
from material to immaterial, from blood to numbers—
as if these were distinct and comparable categories, but they are not,
and to think so distorts the asymmetry of the Pythagorean cosmos.
One cannot move from material to immaterial as if they were separate orders,
for the immaterial gods are never separate from matter
but are already present to it immaterially,
just as simpler numbers remain present in their complex derivatives.⁴⁹
This is why material sunthêmata have the power to communicate divine will
and awaken theurgists to the eternal logoi.+++(4)+++
For theurgists, the gods appear materially as stones, plants, animals and other generated life, including human beings.

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With respect to the gods appearing as human,
I would like to suggest a different reading of the altar’s bloodless secret.
We know that Iamblichus and other Neoplatonists considered the public cults of the city
to be a good example of theurgy.⁵⁰
Sacrificial offerings of blood formed the basis of one’s theurgic itinerary
and to neglect the material rites excluded one from further communion with the gods.⁵¹
We know that according to Iamblichus the sacred objects and animals used in these sacrifices
conveyed the will of the gods from which the soul had been alienated in embodiment.⁵²
The act of returning creatures to their creators in sacrifice
awakened in theurgists a reciprocal sense of returning to the gods.⁵³
We also know from the Chaldean Oracles
that the Demiurge implants a desire in every soul to return to the gods
and to its own divine nature.⁵⁴
The channel for this eros was the altar of blood sacrifice.
It was the first step in the soul’s return to divinity yet,
in a sense that reflects the soul’s paradox, I would suggest that it was also the last.
As theurgists were purified and developed a greater capacity to receive divine light,
they would enter a deeper dimension of sacrifice, one revealed in the altar itself.
They would realize that their sacrifice of mortal life to the gods had been, all along,
an inverse reflection of the gods’ prior sacrifice to the world of generation,
specifically the sacrifice of immortality to mortal life: taking the form of the human body, the bômiskos.
It is then that the theurgist would experience the depth of his paradox:
he is the mortal being that offers sacrifices to the gods while,
at the same time, he is the god that sacrifices its divinity on the altar of the human body.⁵⁵+++(5)+++
Through the altar the theurgist offers himself to himself:
as man to god and as god to man;
he discovers his divinity through his mortality
and enters a circulation whose pivotal point of return is the bômiskos, the sacrificial body-altar.
To be in the body, then, is a divine and cosmogonic activity,
one’s own sacrifice as a god to take on the human form,⁵⁶
an activity that recalls the words of the Platonist Taurus:

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“[T]he will of the gods is to be revealed through souls,
for the gods come forth into bodily appearance
and reveal themselves in the pure and faultless lives of souls.”⁵⁷

Theurgists realized that to recover the sphere
they must enter the circle of divine activity
that brings them into linear, mortal existence.
To re-enter the sphere they must leave it, ⁵⁸
but, in leaving, return through the portal of their departure:
the bômiskos—the mortal body, the altar of the gods.

The consequences of Iamblichus’ view are as follows:
(1) Just as the Pythagorean cosmos is asymmetric, so too are theurgical orders.
Immaterial (noetic) theurgy contains all forms of material theurgy;
the material rites establish the receptacles
that allow the soul to receive the gods and to recover their divine logoi.
Theurgists would not consider material rites to be “base”—as do modern scholars—
for they would have internalized them as expressions of divine eros for the gods.

(2) The deification of the theurgist is not a simple ascent or departure from the body,
for the divine activity with which the theurgist unites does not itself seek to obtain divinity
but to express it, to give it generously (afthonus?), like the Demiurge (Tim. 29E).
The soul’s embodiment and self-alienation should be understood
as an expression of this divine activity.

(3) The deified soul would live in accord with “the one of the soul.”
To do so would require it to contain the oppositions contained by the One
at the soul’s level of ontology.
Iamblichus maintained that the power of the One pervades all things undividedly
and thus establishes the continuity of all existence,
yet since the One stops to define each existence as “one”
it also establishes discontinuity.
As Iamblichus puts it, “its power encompasses both halting and proceeding at the same time” (In Categ. 135.8ff).
The theurgist would realize that the soul’s contraction into an isolated and individual mortal life
was as much an expression of the power of the One
as was its reintegration into the continuity of the whole.
To deny discontinuity in favor of continuity,
the material in favor of the immaterial, mortal for immortal,
would cut the soul out of the activity the One.
In sum, for human souls to become divine, they must remain mortal.+++(5)+++

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