Greco-Roman Magic - 23/april/2025

WHAT WE NEED

Page introducing greek magic

Page on Plato - 1

Page on Aristotle - 1

Page on Neoplatonism - 1

Greek folk magic  -1

Gnosticism

• About 6 pages

Hermeticism

• About 6 pages

PLATO

Western Esotericism begins with Plato. Don’t get scared. I am not about to spend the next several pages explaining all of classical philosophy to you. Our focus is more specific. The purpose of this text, dear reader, is to teach you how to approach a text like an esotericist. When faced with an unfamiliar writer, our first goal is to keep an eye out for three things: Style, Epistemology, and Physics. What kind of writer are we dealing with? Where does knowledge come from? What is the world made of? If you understand these three things, you’ve done 80% of the work. 

Stylistically, Plato is a trickster. His writing is structured in the form of dialogues. These are extended literary arguments between two characters. Usually, between one of Plato’s students, and Socrates.* He debates questions like What is bravery? What is truth? What is friendship? By the end of the dialogue, the answer is almost always a resounding Who the Hell Knows? 

Plato is not trying to inform the reader, per se. He is trying to induce aporea a philosophical state of puzzlement and confusion, usually marked by admitting “actually I don’t know what the hell friendship, truth, and bravery are.” According to Plato, knowledge is not actually transferable. A teacher cannot simply pour knowledge into someone’s head like pouring water into a bucket. All you can do is strip away wrong thoughts and misconceptions. You cannot just give someone information. They must arrive at it themselves. This requires some help. Wisdom, according to Plato, must be arrived at through a combination of reason and divine inspiration. 

To explain exactly what he means by divine inspiration, we have to discuss Plato’s physics. You see, dear reader, we are chained to the wall of a cave. All we see are the shadows cast upon the wall. We cannot see the forms casting the shadows. Ask Plato, what is a dog made of? Plato will say that the dogs we see are but shadows of the dog-form. There is an essence of dog-ness present within all dogs, or in which dogs participate. There is a Platonic Form of a dog, and all we see is the shadow. 

What is the dog-form made of? Well stop me if you’ve heard this one before; consider the Ship of Theseus. It is made of wood that Theseus himself touched. But replace every board and nail until there remains no part that Theseus touched, is it still the ship of Theseus? The point that Plato is actually making with this thought experiment, is that there is a difference between the hylos (literally koine for wood) of the ship, and the ahylos (literally, koine for non-wood) of the ship. The ship of theseus has both material, and immaterial components, but the most important qualities of an object are immaterial and hidden. The most important parts of the world are occult. 

The gods have placed a great veil over the world. You can learn about the wood of the ship of theseus with your eyes and hands. But to learn about that higher, formal ship of theseus. You gotta use your noggin. But not just anyone gets to see the world of platonic forms. According to plato, every time you learn something, it is because you thought about it hard enough the gods noticed, and gave you a peek behind the curtain. 

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle! Student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the great, he is considered “the normal one” compared to Plato’s effusive and theological philosophy. Where Plato saw a world of immaterial forms taking material shapes, Aristotle saw a world made of nothing but atoms and void. The Aristotelian universe is inanimate, made of atoms of earth, air, water, fire, and sometimes aether. Every change in the universe happens due to one of four causes; material, formal, efficient, and final. All of it was knocked into motion by an original “prime mover” but who knows what that could have been. 

Aristotle is a straightforward writer. He is concerned with empirical, observable, facts. He wrote dictionaries of the natural world, where he explores questions like “how many legs does an ant have” or “how many types of shellfish are there?” Aristotle rejects the idea that there is “specially unknowable” knowledge. If you can learn it, you can learn it. There is mundane knowledge you get from observing the world around you, and complex knowledge created when you contemplate what you have learned. 

Most of the surviving works from Aristotle are on Ethics and Politics. We don’t care about those. When it comes to esoteric history, we are far more concerned with pseudo-aristotle. 

When Alexander the Great died, legends about his life sprang up like weeds. Aristotle, being a major character in his life, was given a legendary role. He was no longer the sober, empirical, tutor to a great military mind. He was cast as Alexander’s court wizard, a font of occult insight who taught cosmic secrets to a legendary hero. Plus, if you wrote something, and you wanted it to have some real clout, you could just lie and say Aristotle wrote it. This trick would be pulled for several hundred years. Thus, pseudo-aristotle became equally as influential as the actual historical aristotle. 

Aristotle died in 322 BCE. By the time we hit Plutarch in 40 CE, people have fully accepted the Esoteric Pseudo-Aristotle as truth. Plutarch cites a (fake) letter between Aristotle and Alexander, in which Alexander chastises his teacher, essentially saying “why have you spoken the inner secrets of our esoteric order aloud, publicly, for all to hear?” To which Aristotle replies “They won’t even know that what I said is special.” This is one of the earliest examples of an essential concept for Western Esotericism, The Esoteric Secret. The wisdom is so esoteric that it hides itself from the general public. Only the initiated have the “key” to understanding it. 

Part of why this “esotericicizing” happened, is that Plato and Aristotle don’t agree on much. But they agree just often enough to be tantalizing. For the next several thousand years, philosophers would try their hand at unifying the two, to varying –and wonderfully esoteric– degrees of success. 

PLOTINUS

The Ceasers of rome maintained a version of Plato’s academy, with chairs for each of the major branches of philosophy. We don’t know who chaired the academy in the 3rd century, but we know he exchanged letters with Plotinus. The chair asked his opinions on philosophical matters, not the other way around. Successor to the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, major influence on every Abrahamic religion, major commentator on Plato. If you want to learn Platonic philosophy in the 3rd century, you had to go through Plotinus. 

His influence on pagan philosophy was so great, he has a whole era named after him. He marks the beginning of Late Platonism. Now, if you’re familiar with occult philosophy, you might hear Plotinus and his work referred to as “Neoplatonist” but I am choosing to distinguish the work of Plotinus, from the work of folks that would re-discover his work nearly 1,200 years later. So for our purposes, if you’re a 3rd century Roman, you’re Late Platonist. If you’re a Renaissance era Holy Roman, you’re a Neoplatonist. Plotinus is the bridge. This is why we are spending so much time on him. When occult philosophy gets jumpstarted in the 1500s, it is jumpstarted by Christian priests reading Jewish esoterica based on Islamicate esoterica, and everyone was reading Plotinus. All those folks called their philosophy Platonic. But they were doing some new stuff. So we call them Neoplatonist.

Plotinus wrote a lot, but his major work is called The Enneads, literally “the nine-nesses.” He wrote the material, but it was organized by his major student and biographer, Porphyry, who did quite a bit of chopping and screwing to make it all fit into chunks of nine. One Ennead is even cut-and-pasted in the middle of a sentence. It is impossible to give a crash course in Plotinus. Or, it is impossible according to Plotinus. His philosophy is performative, in the sense that you have to actually sit down, read the Enneads cover-to-cover, and puzzle it out for your damn self. That process of puzzling out is philosophically important to Plotinus. He refers to it as “noesis” literally “the process of knowing.” Therefore, there is no “quick guide” version of Plotinus that could accurately represent Plotinus’s actual philosophy. He would see such things as fundamentally incomplete. 

A QUICK GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOTINUS:

All things arise from an infinite, ineffable, utterly and completely, hyper-transcendent philosophical concept called The One. The only true thing you can say about The One, is that it is The One. It is beyond language. Contemplation of The One can only be done through apophasis, un-saying. The One is beyond all thought, and not beyond all thought. The One is both beyond language, and not beyond language. Etc. It is sort of a philosophical singularity, a thinking man’s black hole that collapses all knowledge into itself. Infinite, unchanging, beyond time and quality, existing in a form of existence that is not existence, as a paradoxical superposition of all potential statements. 

A tricky thing to talk about indeed! Plotinus spends many an Ennead emphatically saying that saying anything true about The One is impossible, but trying to get as close as possible. It is important to note. The One is not God. Or, not the sort of God that people today associate with God. The One is not a God that thinks, or does anything at all. The One actually can’t do anything at all. It exists beyond time and existence. The One is just The One. This begs the question though, how do we get from The One to a world where I can write this book and you can read it? The One is constantly on the verge of having properties. But if It has properties, it isn’t The One anymore. This creates a sort of philosophical event-horizon within The One, a roiling mass of almost-philosophy called the “prenoetic efflux” that gives rise to a hypostate, a sub-reality called…

Nous! This word is often translated as “mind” or “intellect” but honestly Roman people thought of the mind and intellect in such a different way its better to leave the word untranslated as Nous. This is the God that folks these days would associate with monotheism. This is a God that thinks. It contemplates itself, which gives rise to forms. At some point, this gives rise to the concept of existence, being itself, which gives us the world of…

Psyche! Or Soul. This is the hypostate of things that actually exist. Below this, is the world of physis, or matter. Matter isn’t just inert. It yearns for the forms found in the Nous like a ghost possessing a body. And there you go, there’s your universe. 

This entire process, The One giving rises to mind and soul and matter, is a process called Emmanation. This is a type of genesis mythology. In a creation myth, a supreme being makes something that is not itself, like a The Universe. The process here is an Emanation story, in which a supreme being filters itself down into reality through a series of sub-transformations. Except thats not entirely true. If you want to really impress another student of the occult, point out that The One, the Prenoetic Efllux, Nous, all exist in perfect, unchanging, trans-chronological states. Nothing is actually occurring or changing, because they don’t exist on strata of reality where change can take place. So actually, they’re not emmanating, and you are so very foolish to think so. The whole universe is simply The One existing. 

END ASIDE

The other thing Plotinus is famous for is a little treatise of his, you may know it as “against the Gnostics.” This can be a stumbling block for the occult-curious. “Why on earth would Plotinus have beef with the Gnostics?” I hear you say, “Their theology seems so incredibly similar!” Dear reader, nothing stokes rivalries among theologians like agreeing on 98% of points. For one, I think Plotinus was jealous. You must remember that monotheism and platonic philosophy were cultural rivals. The followers of Plato’s academy were often much closer to a religion than many imagine. For two, Plotinus had real trouble with the idea that souls needed to be saved. This was, in fact, one of Plotinus’s major disagreements with the rest of Philosophy. He believed in an “undescended self.” 

Basically every platonist and monotheist agreed on a “descended self.” The world of matter was corrupt in some way, full of suffering and falsehoods. You wanted to live somewhere above that, in the world of forms and truth. This could be done via divine grace, the cultivation of knowledge, or even Theurgy; the yanking of the gods down to your level for a bit for a boost. Plotinus thought this was ridiculous. We are all aspects of The One. What you think of as You is actually just the feet of great and towering figure, one that stretches from the world of matter, all the way up to The One. You exist at every hypostate. The soul is not descended, it has never descended, it cannot descend. Every last one of us is always in contact with The One. 

To which his critics would say. Well Plotinus, if I’m in contact with the highest form of reality at all times? Why am I stuck down here? I stretch all the way up to the God which determines the structure of the universe, why can’t I shape reality to give myself superpowers? 

To which Plotinus would say. Just because you know you have lungs, that doesn’t mean you can decide to breathe underwater. You know you have a stomach, but you can’t simply decide to digest stones. In fact, you don’t actually know what your stomach is doing at any given time. Most of what you consider You is actually hidden from your senses. And this, dear reader, is what it feels like to touch the higher hypostates. It is a universal synesthesia. Plotinus describes the feeling as if all sight and sound and sensation melts into one sense, a true sense, that allows him to see the world as Nous, if only for a moment. When he returns, the senses of touch and sight and taste feel dull, almost alien, but he recognizes them as tributaries to the true Noetic sense. 

How does one do this? How do you cultivate the ability to raise your senses to the Noetic realm? Easy. You familiarize yourself with the body of Platonic literature. You read Plato and Timeus and Aristotle, but most importantly, you read the Enneads. To touch Nous requires a cultivation of noesis, careful meditation on what you have learned, a philosophical and ritual shedding of falsehood. You can’t just pray like those idiot Gnostics. They say secret knowledge can allow you to speak to the godhead, but they don’t even know what knowledge is. 

But who is to say? Who gets to decide what knowledge is? You would have to be some sort of nigh-universally recognized expert on what exactly knowledge is, what it means, and how it is cultivated. You would have to be Plotinus. 

NOTES

Socrates

• Never submit, never have faith

• Concerned with Ontology, especially ethics

• He was ugly, which was important because beauty is truth

• Said to be impervious to both cold and heat

• War hero, saved Alcibiades

• Lots of dialogues that just end with lol IDK. What is justice? What is bravery? Idk

• You don’t just pour knowledge into people

• You don’t provide knowledge, you subtract wrong thought

• All knowledge comes from a combination of Reason + Divine Inspiration

• People can’t give you knowledge, you have to arrive there yourself. 

• He kept getting people to admit they didn’t know what stuff was. 

• Symposium Eros: You cant just do good, you have to WANT to do good

• We are not driven by necessity, but by desire. 

• Not entirely clear what his religious beliefs were

• Put on trial for corrupting the youth, of which he was definitely guilty

Plato:

• Influenced by Socrates, Pythagoras and other legendary sources. 

• All good philosophy is Plato rightly comprehended

• SHWEP makes the cool connection to the Erasmus translation of the new testament. 

• En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos, en pros ton theon. 

• This is often translated as “in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and god was the word” but a better translation of Logos is “discourse” or conversation.

• This describes plato. 

• He was a pythagorean, but what exacgtly that means who knows. The pythagoreans are poorly attested. Lots of influence from the orphic tradition as well. 

• Hated widely. He was tricky and contradictory. 

• Theory of forms.

• Obsessed with Aporea, or admitting you don’t actually understand the truth. Ending on a question mark rather than a period, says Crowley. 

• Plato uses Socrates as a character in his dialogues. Plato’s Socrates is enigmatic and mysterious. 

• Reading plato as a purely Exoteric text is actually pretty difficult. 

• Most known for the Theory of Forms, but he never actually lays this out in text. 

• There is an immortal essence of cat-ness, in which all cats participate, which is within cats and elsewhere. 

• First and Foremost a trickster. 

• Coins the term material and immaterial. Using the greek words Hylos and Ahylos. Literally meaning wood. Referring to the literal wood of the ship of theseus.

• Think is the ship of theseus the wood which thesus touched, or is it made of something immaterial, something non-wood.

• THE MOST IMPORTANT QUALITIES OF OBJECTS ARE IMMATERIAL AND OCCULT

• Timeus! As referenced by Jay Z no church in the wild

• “I'm wondering if a thug's prayers reach / Is Pius pious 'cause God loves pious? / Socrates asked whose bias do y'all seek? / All for Plato, screech”

• The Platonist school is pretty diverse. You can have platonists who believe the world is made of number-like things that are harmonic in nature. 

• Or platonists who deny the existence of knowledge itself. 

The Esoteric Plato

• Plato is often seen as being deliberately obscure. 

• The Moray Platonico is being deliberately vague.

• But, that doesn’t mean he was seen as being an esotericist in his time. 

• I mean, they probably did, but there just isn’t much evidence lol

• There are skeptics who didn’t believe in absolute truth at all

• So what does platonism even mean? 

• Well, sometimes its an intellectual lineage, sometimes its anyone who believes in an Immortal Soul like Plato, sometimes its anyone who approaches plato like hes writing dogma.

Aristotle

• Aristotle is generally considered the Normal One in comparison to Plato

• Empiricist, as opposed to Plato’s Idealism

• Student of Plato, teacher to Alexander the great. 

• LOTS of fake Aristotles, or people writing as Aristotles. 

• Like 30 authentic extant works, but few for magic

• Coined the term Esoteric

• Metaphysics + Dei Anima are ESOTERIC in that they are not for a general readership. 

• The idea of Specially Unknowable Knowledge would be verystrange to aristotle

• Basically, once Alexander died, Aristotle became a legendary figure. 

• Acroamatic: Meaning “Communicated Orally” the Esoteric teachings of Aristotle 

• Apoptic: ?

• Once the Late Platonists get their hands on Aristotle, he becopmes this legendary teacher

• According to them, he has his “open” teachings on ethics and politics etc

• But he also has secret teachings intended for True Initiates (irl these “secret teachings” are probably just lecture notes he gave to students as a teaching aid)

• According to Plutarch, knowing secret knowledge is a change of status

• Plutarch loves citing fake letters between Aristotle and Alexander

• This is where we get an important concept for western esotericism: the SELF HIDING SECRET

• Alexander says Master! Why are you publishing the inner secrets of your teaching? Weren’t we supposed to keep it a secret?

• To which Socrates replies: They won’t even know it is special.

• Like half of middle/late platonism is trying to reconcile Plato and Aristotle.

• Thats like half of Porphyry. 

• Plotinus treats aristotle as kinda “A Platonist who just doesn’t get it” (idk if I agree with this, imo Plotinus kinda treats them like they already agree. Wait no thats not right either. Plotinus treats Aristotle like he was a Platonist who didn’t even realize he “completes” Plato. Which makes sense when you think about it. Everything was a discourse to Plato, so the best thing you can do for a Platonist is argue with them and have points.)

• Aristotle was received as almost Orthodox by the dawn of Monotheism. 

• Whereas Plato was associated with dangerously heretical ideas. Sure he writes about having an immortal soul, but he also writes a lot about Gods plural.

• Liber de Pomo, or Book of the Apple. A text in which a dying Aristotle realizes the immortality of the soul, and accepts Platonic ideas, repeatedly revived by smelling an apple. So turns out he actually agreed with plato! What luck! (lie)

• “The Theology of Aristotle” was an extremely popular work. It was a work of aristotelian theology with a Transcendant, Ineffible, One. Hang on this is just the Enneads with an Aristotle logo slapped on the front. 

• This was crazy popular in islam, and was even passed around in influential jewish circles. 

PLOTINUS

• Most of our information on him comes from Porphyry

• 3rd century successor of the academy of Plato was asking Plotinus for his opinions on philosophy.

• Baically every contemporary was like this is the guy

• Crazy influential on early islam

• Noetic Quality as in relating to the mind

• Noesis the act of intellectual comprehension

• Da father of late platonism

• You have to actually read plotinus, his philosophy is performative

• A platonist, but full of aristotle

• Accused of plagarizing Numenius of Apamea

• Hypostases literally translating to reality

• The One > Nous > Soul > Matter

• To Hen > Nous > Psyche > Physis

• Basically, the world is so constantly on the verge of having properties, that it contains a pre-noetic efflux, a sort of philosophical event horizon. 

• This Prenoetic Efflux gives rise to Nous This is what we would equate with god. Nous contemplates itself, and gives rise to the world of forms. 

• Once Being is established in the Nous, you get psyche, or soul. 

• Then, at the bottom of the ladder, you have Physis, or matter, which is sort of a hungry ghost that eternally desires forms in the nous. A form + matter = bodies.

• Time does not exist in this, except in nature, it is a product of nous. 

• This isn’t emmanation per se, its just a theology where the world isn’t created. 

• Also, Plotinus believes in the Undescended Soul. Human beings exist at every level of this structure.  

• Plotinus was probably in dialogue with the gnostics. Third treatise is a direct response to gnosticism, specifically Valentinus

• He says all souls are saved, they were never not-saved. They are always in contact with the one. 

• The term homoousian comes from gnostic literature.

• Later thinkers, like Proclus, would say you need theurgy. Plotinus would not agree. You don’t need to bring the gods down to earth, they are already here, you need to look within. 

• Hes sort of a poetical metaphysician

• Narbonne says there IS a noetic matter, its sort of like the ghost of matter. Idk if I agree with that

• Why doesn’t he like the gnostics? One, he is jealous. Two, he thinks they are fake games. You can’t just contact the godhead by praying you need to cultivate Noesis.

• Plotinus demands knowledge, and a love of philosophy

• To read Esoterically is to assume the author hid deeper meanings in the text, and hid those meanings.

• The One is not a god that knows things. 

• Evil arises from Tolmao, or audacity, a sort of betrayal of the group. Excessive individuality is what causes hiccups in the one. 

OGDEN

• There was a trend of projecting the male sorcerer onto alien races

• Neopythagorean “greek shamans”

• Magoi: (mages) cure for illnesses, the manufacture of curse tablets, wellbeing in the afterlife

• Psuchagogoi: (Evocators) literally “soul-drawers” What do they do? According to Suda they find troublesome ghosts, perform sacrifices in order to speak to the ghosts, and hope to understand their anger and quiet them.

• Engastimulthoi: (ventriloquists) “men or women with prophetic demons in their stomachs that use their hosts as mouthpieces.” These guys often acted as prophets, mouthpieces for the spirits. Also called engastrimantis, literally BELLY PROPHET. Philochorus says the Ob of Endor is a BELLY PROPHET.

• The Greco Roman representation of witches, female sorcerers, is almost entirely fictional. But Medea and Circie are cool. There is a whole tradition of “witch-oid” type figures based on them in later mythology. Like Deianeira wife of Heracles. 

• Roman witch-oids are more bloodthirsty and conniving

• Goes (sorcerer), magos (mage), augurtes (augur), mantis (diviner)

• Theres daimones

• Aoroi: before their time

• Biaiaothanatoi: died by violence

• Agamoi: those, particularly girls, who died before marriage

• Ataphoi: those denied burial. The restless dead. These were the best for magical purposes. (how so? Get a quote)

• Theres also the jewish influence of expelling malicious spirits from people

• Necromancy for this purpose means “divination using the dead”. This is in the Oddessey.

• In the Roman period you get the reanimation of corpses. Ogden mentions something called Skull Necromancy which sounds badass. I wanna track that down

• Ghosts were important for binding spells. (katadesmoi or defixiones). Five subtypes:

  • Legal curses

  • Competition curses

  • Trade curses

  • Erotic curses

    • Separation

    • Attraction

  • “Prayers for justice”

• Paraphernalia involved: The mysterious Iunx, and the hippomanes, literally “horse madness plant”

• Kolossoi: (poppets or voodoo dolls) seem to predate curse tablets

Ch 2

• General themes:

• Katabatic trips to the underworld thank you Orpheus

• Egyptian tombs, Chaldeans: Foreign Mages

• Pythagoras could teleport by projecting his soul

• In the Laws, Plato says that curses are real and they can hurt you

• Plato also sees a connection between Sophists and Sorcerers.

• Concept of Pharmakeia

• “Iamblichus lays out categories of magic: the mage of locusts, the mage of lions and the mage of mice.”

Ch 3

• voces magicae, literally words of power. Prounounceable but non-linguisitc magical formulas that occur in antique spells. 

• Yeah foreign mages do all sorts of freaky shit like calling up the ghost of their dad and having sex with their moms totally definitely

• THey also do dream interpretation

“Even Numa himself, to whom no prophet was sent by god, nor any

holy angel, was compelled to perform hydromancy [water-divination] to see images

of gods in water, or rather the deceptions of demons, by whom he was told what

sacred rites and observances he should establish. Varro again says that this variety

of divination was brought over from the Persians, and he reports that it was em-

ployed both by Numa himself and subsequently by the philosopher Pythagoras. He

tells that when blood is used the dead too are summoned up, and says that this is

called necromancy [nekuomanteia] in Greek. Whether it is called hydromancy or

necromancy, it is the technique in which the dead appear to give prophecies” (ogden 39)

• Pliny was like yeah the mages are bullshit

• “The varieties of magic are several, according to Osthanes. He claims to divine from water, balls, air, stars, lamps, bowls, and axes and in many other ways,”

• The ghost of Ostanes is called up by Pseudo-Democritus and his own son, also Ostanes, to reveal the secrets of alchemy (From Physica et Mystica II)

• Pliny: “Of all animals the mages accord the deepest admiration to the hyena, inasmuch as they have attributed magical skills to it too and specifically the ability to deprive men of their minds and draw them to itself.”

• Suda on the distinctions of the varieties of magic: “Sorcery, Mageia and pharmakeia are different things”

• SNAKE BLASTING

• Iamblichus the novelist says that the chaldeans could revive the dead

• Also magic comes from Egypt

Ch4 Da Rivals of Jesus

• Appolonius of Tyanna does a bunch of exorcisms and evocation. He defeats a vampire. He raises a girl from the dead. 

• Celsus compares Jesus to a goes and Origen is like nooooooo

• Alexander of Abonouteichos does a bunch of shit

• Theres also Simon Magus but we don’t really have time for him rn

Ch5 Medea and Circie 

• Entirely fictional. But highly influential.

• Medea is an Exemplar of Pharmakeia, which means both medicine and poisoner.