ANCIENT GREEK MAGIC - 15/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. 

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.