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Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

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The Eyes of Lynceus

Gregory Shaw

To cite this article: Gregory Shaw (2013) The Eyes of Lynceus, Jung Journal: Cult ure & Psyche, 7:4,
21-30

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 The Eyes of Lynceus
Seeing Through the Mirror of the World
GREGORY SHAW

Descending with a lamp, he thus saw things under the ground.

—Palaephatus
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What stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery . . .

—James Hillman

Richard Frankel has addressed the problem of human suffering and alienation in terms of
narcissism and melancholy as they relate to our current immersion in virtual reality.1 His thesis,
following Freud, is that our avoidance of loss and suffering cuts us off from reality and the
vulnerability of relationships and encloses us in a narcissistic, hallucinatory, and melancholic
world. Despite the fact that the World Wide Web seems to “connect” everyone, its psychological
effect significantly disconnects us from one another, exacerbating the avoidance and encapsulation
that Frankel describes. The Internet provides each of us with a private world in which we
are virtual gods, where our will is law, and through which all our desires can be met with the
click of a finger.
The Neoplatonists of Antiquity believed that all souls are connected but that our connection
comes through participation in a World Soul. They believed that our identities are deepened as we
become more and more intimate with the divine Being that ensouls the world. Through an
enriched experience of this intelligent presence, the individual—despite his or her existential
isolation and suffering—becomes woven into the totality of the world, breathing in and through
all things. Thus, despite the wounds and traumas of embodied life Neoplatonists trusted that souls
could be connected and healed through participation in the World Soul. These later Platonists
would probably breathe a sigh of relief at not having to combat such a powerful seduction as the
Internet, one which offers the appearance of easily obtained connection and universal power yet
leaves the soul lost and fractured in a world of virtual images. As Frankel articulates, Freud’s “grief
work” is focused on images, specifically the remembered images of what one has lost and the
psychic effort to integrate the pain involved with that loss. According to Freud, the interruption of
this process causes us to fragment, become split off, and to fall into a self-alienated and increasingly

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 7, Number 4, pp. 21–30, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047.
q 2013 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2013.840486.
 22 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013

isolated state of melancholia. This is where the immersion in virtual images through the Internet
can foreclose the psychic work and acceptance of loss. The Neoplatonists were also acutely aware of
the power of images. They believed that our engagement with images—both material and
conceptual—determines whether the soul is fragmented or becomes whole. Two Neoplatonists,
Plotinus and Iamblichus, who lived in the third and fourth centuries CE, had quite different
strategies for how the soul should engage images. They provide a context in which the alienation of
the psyche as discussed by contemporary psychologists can be re-imagined.

Plotinus: The Way of Narcissus

In his essay On Beauty (Ennead I.6),2 Plotinus characterizes human alienation and suffering
through the image of Narcissus who represents the state of the soul enthralled and blinded by its
own image and in need of purification. Plotinus lived in an era in which the dualist cosmologies of
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Gnostics, Christians, and Hermetists gripped the collective imagination. In the Hermetic treatise
Poimandres, the material world is viewed as the error of a divine Archetypal Man, a cosmic
Narcissus, who becomes so entranced with his own image reflected in the waters of Nature that he
tries to embrace it but falls, thus creating the world and human beings (Copenhaver 1992, 3).
In this cosmology, as in many Gnostic cosmologies, the world itself is the result of a primal mistake,
so escaping from it is the goal. Plotinus opposes these dualist cosmologies. He sees the world as a
reflection, but of an archetypal realm. For Plotinus, the mirroring that is our world is the way
divine Forms are revealed (Armstrong 1986, 147– 181). The cosmos is theophany, not a mistake.
So it is instructive to see how Plotinus explores the theme of narcissistic reflection in human souls.
He asks how we discover divine beauty and says
When [we] see beauty in bodies [we] must not run after them; [we] must know that they are images,
traces, shadows, and hurry away to that which they reveal. For if a man runs after the image and wants
to seize it as if it were reality, like a beautiful reflection playing on the water . . . is it not like the myth
telling us mysteriously about such a dupe who sank down into the stream and disappeared? (Ennead
I.6.8, modified)
Plotinus’s allusion to Narcissus is telling, for the beautiful image to which he is attracted is his own.
Thus, although Plotinus believes the cosmos itself is not a mistake, our identification with the body is.
Beauty and reality are to be found in the invisible Forms, not in their material reflection, so Narcissus’s
fixation on his “image” represents how human souls become enthralled in their bodies, the “image” of
their divine souls. In effect, Plotinus shifts the primal error of Gnostic dualism from the cosmos to the
psyche. The material cosmos is good, but our identification with the body and our failure to recognize it
as a reflection of the invisible Forms is a mistake. Alluding again to the error of Narcissus, Plotinus says
. . . because we are not accustomed to seeing beautiful things within and do not know them, we
pursue external beauty and do not know that it is that within us which moves us: as if someone looking
at his reflected image and not knowing where it came from should pursue it. (Ennead V.8.2.34 –35)
For Plotinus, the body both reveals and inevitably entraps the immaterial soul in the mirror of
matter. Our engagement with the world confirms the sense that “I” am a body, for this is what
the mirror tells me; this is the error of Narcissus. There remains in Plotinus a gnostic aversion to
 Gregory Shaw, The Eyes of Lynceus 23

matter and the material world. He goes so far as to describe matter as an “absolute evil,” a dark
mirror that imprisons the soul (Ennead I.8.3.38 –40). That the soul’s confusion is caused by
the mirror of matter is also evident in a passage where Plotinus describes the fall of the soul
by referring to the myth of Dionysus who is torn apart and devoured by the Titans after he is
distracted by a mirror. “The souls of men [Plotinus says] see their images as if in the mirror of
Dionysus and come to exist [here] in a leap downward from above . . . .” (Ennead IV.3.12.1 –3).
For later Platonists, Dionysus’s dismemberment is both a myth of human origins and a description
of our self-alienation. We project our souls into matter, enter into sympathy with our reflected
images—our physical bodies—and through identification with them are dismembered by the
Titans, that is, by our own titanic passions (Hadot 1976).3
To these images of the fallen soul Plotinus answers with the figure of Odysseus. Whereas
Narcissus becomes lost in the mirror of matter, Odysseus sails through the waters of materiality
and returns to his homeland, which symbolizes the soul’s reunion with the divine Forms and the
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totality of all things. Praising his model, Odysseus, Plotinus says

Odysseus is surely a symbol to us when he flies from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso—not content to
linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and the delights of sensation . . . . What then is our course,
what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet . . . you must close the eyes and call
upon another vision which is to be roused within you . . . . (Ennead I.6.8)
Plotinus exhorts his readers to “close the eyes,” to withdraw into themselves, to cut away all that
has been added to the soul in embodiment. He exhorts us to return to an interior and immaterial
world.
Julia Kristeva argues that Plotinus replaces the “narcissistic shadow” with “autoerotic
reflection,” a move that causes later Platonists to lose engagement with the world and “topple over
into subjectivity” (quoted in Hadot 1993, 11). Although I believe this critique is a caricature, the
dualist elements in Plotinus invite it. In his only explicit autobiographical passage, Plotinus admits
to being “puzzled how the soul could come to be in a body”4; he then denies that it descends into a
body at all: it only appears to be in a body (Ennead IV.8.8.1 –4). And Porphyry’s biography begins
with the unforgettable statement: “Plotinus, the philosopher, seemed ashamed to be in a body”
(Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 1 in Armstrong 1966 –1968; aischunomenô hoti en sômati eiê).
Kristeva’s critique of Plotinus as drawing Platonists away from the world is understandable.
Nevertheless, Plotinus’s subjectivity is not egoistic self-love, as she implies, but a radical
transformation of consciousness. The singular self becomes a totality: the individual soul is united
with the World Soul. Attempting to explain the union of these oppositions of part and whole,
Plotinus says
Here, in our ordinary state, one part could not come from another, and each is only a part, but There
(in our elevated state) each part comes from the Whole and is part and whole at once: it has the
appearance of a part, but a penetrating look sees the Whole in it. The myth of Lynceus who saw into
the depths of the earth, enigmatically describes the eyes of this divine state. (Ennead V.8.4, modified)
Lynceus, the Argonaut, could see treasures beneath the surface of the earth and is said to have invented
mining by descending underground with a lamp. With the eyes of Lynceus, we would no longer see our
own images like Narcissus; we would see through the water to the treasures lying within their material
 24 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013

images. Lynceus represents a way of engaging the world not as mirror but as window. Thus, through the
image of Lynceus, Plotinus provides a model for inhabiting a body. He also says the divine is revealed in
sensate objects and maintains that the Egyptians had learned to “reveal the spiritual wisdom of the
divine world” directly through the images inscribed in their temples (Ennead V.8.6, modified). Yet
despite these positive views of material and embodied reality, Plotinus seems to prefer the disembodied
state. He goes so far as to argue—against the authority of the Platonic tradition—that the soul never
descends into a body (Ennead IV.8.8). In sum, there is a contradiction in Plotinus between his
affirmation of the cosmos as divine and his belief that matter, the body of the cosmos, is evil. It was
Iamblichus, the Syrian Platonist of fourth-century Syria, who develops the world-affirming trajectory
of Plotinus’s thinking and explores its consequences. Iamblichus used the “eyes of Lynceus” to design a
renewed school of Platonism in Syria, and he provides a different approach to the problem of
narcissism and self-alienation.5
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Iamblichus: Theurgy and the Way of Lynceus

Iamblichus’s solution to the problem of alienation and suffering is quite different from that of
Plotinus. As a Platonist, Iamblichus works with the same metaphysical assumptions: all things are
rooted in an inexhaustible source that continually overflows, divides, and eventually reveals itself in
the phenomenal world, with each creation mysteriously reflecting and revealing the hidden source.
We exist in this continual emanation and bear its traces, but Plotinus and Iamblichus disagree on
the status of the human soul. For Plotinus, the soul never fully descends into a body. As he puts it,
“there is always something of the soul that remains in the spiritual world” (Ennead IV.8.8).6 The
soul merely illuminates its body (Ennead I.1.12.25 – 29).7 Although our narcissistic vision may tell
us that we are bodies, Plotinus says “our heads remain firmly set above, in heaven” (Ennead
IV.3.12). Iamblichus disagrees. For him, the soul is completely descended, embodied, and subject to
death; the consequences of this difference are reflected in their ways of addressing our suffering.
Because Plotinus believes the soul’s embodiment is an illusion, we need only stop looking into the
mirror of matter to be released from its spell. We must, he says, “close the eyes” and escape. Our
immersion in virtual reality today might be seen as a perverse inflection of this Plotinian escape.
For Iamblichus, the way of addressing embodied suffering is profoundly different. The depth and
divinity of soul is accessible only through a full acceptance of and engagement with our mortal
condition. For him, there is no escape nor should there be. If the world is theophany, which he
believes it is, there is no point in escaping from it. Yet, with Plotinus, Iamblichus believes that
because we are mortal, individual, and embodied, the soul becomes Narcissus; we become “fixated”
on our body-image as self. As Iamblichus puts it, the condition of being human is to be “self-
alienated”8; even more, our self-separation and isolation is the necessary pivot through which the
One and the Many, the universal and particular, are distinguished and woven together. Our
embodiment, including our self-alienation, is a necessary part of what allows us to share in the
creation of the world.9
Iamblichus believes as much as Plotinus that our souls are divine, but, for him, the
realization of divinity comes through our physical bodies. Rather than disavowing the
alienation and wounds of embodiment that Plotinus encourages (“close the eyes”), for Iamblichus
 Gregory Shaw, The Eyes of Lynceus 25

these very conditions become the means through which we recover our divinity. Iamblichus
understood that our bodies are built by contractive energies he called daimons. These divine
beings serve the process of creation by building the physical world and our singular sense
of identity. We become congealed through our engagement with these daimons.10 We are, to
use psychoanalytic language, mirrored into existence: daimons personifying the instincts
that sustain our embodied existence. Again, in agreement with Plotinus, Iamblichus believes
that the narcissistic soul contributes to its self-alienation without being aware of it. The
difference between the two Platonists is that Plotinus sees this contribution as a correctible error,
whereas Iamblichus sees it as the inevitable consequence of divine unfolding. For him,
embodiment and our wounds are a kind of felix culpa without which the soul could not become
complete.11
A brief description of Iamblichus’s soul-work is in order because most scholars have
associated Neoplatonism with Plotinus and we are unfamiliar with Iamblichus’s therapy. He
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called it theurgy, working with the gods.12 He believes that souls share in the creation of the
world and this includes our own self-alienation. The work of healing begins, for Iamblichus,
by recognizing the presence of the gods in the very impulses and contractions that wound us.
Unlike heavenly gods or the World Soul, human souls possess mortal bodies; we become
alienated from our divinity and lose touch with the totality we bring to the world. Theurgy is
the art of recovering the divine impulses we carry by paying attention to our suffering and
learning how to receive the gods in our pathologies—each condition providing a place where
the soul can recover the divine impulse revealed in its suffering. These places do not require
that we “close the eyes” to access them. They are physical places and are unique to the
suffering of each soul.
A personal anecdote may help to exemplify how this works. When I initially received Richard
Frankel’s paper, “Digital Melancholy,” I began reading but couldn’t get through the first paragraph.
It was too depressing—Freud, grief, melancholy—unbearable. I had to wait until I went to the
most depressing place I know, one that I visit every week—the Laundromat. There, sitting among
the tired, economically deprived, and recently divorced, I had a place that could contain the
heaviness and melancholy of Frankel’s paper. I found it illuminating. The Laundromat provided a
ritual receptacle for what I could not contain on my own and it allowed me to enter the depth of
Frankel’s essay. This is what Iamblichus means by learning how to receive the gods. Place matters.
In Frankel’s terms, without this receptive capacity we cannot engage in grief work, bridging
melancholia and mourning. In theurgic terms, without a place we cannot integrate the divine
currents in our life.
For theurgists of Iamblichus’s school, our traumas become the indices of where the soul
needs work and what gods need our attention.13 According to Iamblichus, the gods who
sustain the world are present in all our experiences. The soul becomes subject, he says, to the
divisions, collisions, impacts, reactions, growths, and breakdowns over which these gods rule.14
These are the unavoidable consequences of embodied life, all part of the theophany of
existence. It is only through honoring these traumas and their gods that we can shift our
perspective: the soul learns how to receive the gods, recover its divinity, and share fully in the
totality praised by Plotinus.
 26 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013

But the difference with Plotinus is significant. The Iamblichean soul recognizes in the mirror
of Narcissus, in its illusory sense of self, and in the traumas that follow, a divine impulse that must
be recognized, honored, and ritually received . . . sometimes even in the Laundromat! Platonic
theurgists weave themselves into the cosmos; they gradually transform the self-reflecting mirror of
the world into a window. They exchange the vision of Narcissus for that of Lynceus, and the fusion
of individual soul with World Soul, which is described so evocatively by Plotinus, is realized by
theurgists in the body and through the material world. Our very mortality and vulnerability, our
wounds, become the portals to this experience.

Conclusion
I see a correspondence between Iamblichus’s ritual recognition of the gods in our traumas and the
grief work described by Frankel. The contexts are vastly different, but in both, the soul, in the face
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of existential grief, can either retract from suffering—and thus become more split off and shadowy
—or it can honor the grief and face it, as it is best able to do. Iamblichean theurgy was tied to a
traditional belief in a World Soul with gods revealing themselves in nature and culture. This
provided support for the difficult work of recovering the parts of the soul that had been
dismembered or, in contemporary discourse, dissociated or split-off. Through performing
traditional rites to the gods revealed in one’s suffering, the soul is given a container to help endure
and transform its grief. In our contemporary world, we lack such assistance. Even a will of iron
seems insufficient to endure such weight.
To be more specific, our contemporary way of imagining the world seems to virtually
guarantee that we remain narcissists. Our sense of self is based on what Plotinus described as a
mistake: taking image for reality. In Iamblichus’s terms, we are self-alienated. Despite every effort
to engage in grief work, from a Neoplatonic perspective, our situation seems hopeless. We take our
concepts of reality—including our “self” concept—as if they were real and thus buffer ourselves
from contact with a living world. Our culture has long since given itself over to this habit, and the
virtual world of the Internet is simply one more iteration of this impulse. The digital world, in
many ways, is an amplification of the habit of thinking that Iamblichus said prevents us from
theurgic contact with the gods. We are familiar with it because it forms the basis of our culture.
It is the assumption that our concepts define reality and give meaning to the world, and it has
become so natural to us that we confuse the image with what it reflects and find it difficult to
imagine anything could be otherwise. The Internet is an extension of this trajectory of thought.
Although Plotinus certainly exercised rationality, he warned that discursive thinking has a
power to bewitch us. When we take our concepts as real—the “self” concept most of all—we
become bewitched and enthralled (Ennead IV.4.43.16; Rappe 2000, 104). As David Abram
puts it, we become lost in the “mirrored labyrinth” of thought (2010, 178).15 Iamblichus
characterized this habit as a poison from which we need a protective talisman.16 They knew.
The Internet seems perfectly suited for a culture that has become locked in self-absorption. For
what is the error of Narcissus but to see only himself while gazing at the stream? The stream,
the world, is not real but is a reflection of our thinking. We alone are real. How far we are
from possessing the eyes of Lynceus!
 Gregory Shaw, The Eyes of Lynceus 27

Perhaps the most significant difference between our worldview and that of the
Neoplatonists is that for us the world has no subjectivity; it lives only through meanings we give
to it. For Neoplatonists, the world is alive and intelligent; it is the anima mundi, a living soul
with faces and voices; it is living and breathing presence. Their world is not simply a mirror to
our subjectivity but is its own subject and each object its own face and voice, not to be read for
our subjective meanings.17 But we are not Lynceus. We are Narcissus. The world has no
significance except for how it reflects our subjectivity. “Not only does this view kill things by
viewing them as dead; it imprisons us in [a] . . . tight little cell of ego” (Hillman 1997, 103).
James Hillman argues that we have forgotten the anima mundi and her beauty. We have
become insensate and dull, trapped in subjectivity. Yet even this could come alive if we could
gain the eyes of Lynceus and re-enter a living world.18 The heaviness of grief work, then, could
be transformed; it could begin to move, play, and even dance . . . perhaps it must dance.19
Speaking specifically to the problem of the Internet, Hillman reiterates the concerns of
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Plotinus and Iamblichus about the bewitching power of discursive thought: “Technology
becomes psycho-pathological when, like any other phenomenon, it is deprived of soul, as it has
been by the very theoretical assumptions that gave birth to it in the first place. It was
monstrously conceived” (Hillman 1997, 123).
Yet, just as the subjective self-as-Narcissus can be woven back into the World Soul, so can
technology. It is not so much that technology is soulless and alienating; it is, rather, a mirror of
our own alienation. In theurgic terms, the hallucinatory virtual world sustained by the Internet
could be read as a symptom to remind us of what gods we have neglected. After all, if the
world is theophany, then the Internet must have divine roots and we can learn to engage its
divinities. Perhaps we need to understand the complex relations of Hermes and Aphrodite and
find the altars on which they can be propitiated.20 We need to discover a place where we can
receive the gods present in the Internet. Yet before we make such moves, we must recognize
where we are and how alone Narcissus is. We must feel the grief. For, despite the efforts of
contemporary therapists, it is hard to imagine how grief work, sustaining openness and
vulnerability to the world, can take place if we don’t really think the world—apart from us—is
real. I conclude by quoting from Hillman again, reflecting on the difficulties of doing therapy
in our contemporary world:
If particulars—whether images, things, or the events of the day—are to afford significance, the burden
has been on the subject to maintain libidinal cathexes, “to relate,” so that depersonalization and
derealization do not occur. It has been up to us to keep the world aglow. Yet these syndromes . . . are
latent in the theory of the external world as soulless. Of course I am lonely, unrelated, and my existence
throwaway. Of course therapy must focus on relations rather than on contents . . . things that
matter, because connection becomes the main work of therapy when the world is dead: ego psychology
is inevitable, for the patient must find ways to connect the psyche of dream and feeling to the dead
world so as to reanimate it. What stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery; what terrible need for
will-power . . . . Of course I am in desperate narcissistic need, not because I have been neglected or still
neglect my inmost subjectivity, but because the world without soul can never offer intimacy, never
return my glance, never look at me with appeal, with gratitude, nor relieve the essential isolation of my
subjectivity. (Hillman 1997, 121–122)
That, I suggest, is a good starting point for grief work and the transformation of Narcissus.
 28 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013

ENDNOTES

1. See his essay “Digital Melancholy” in this issue (9 –20).

2. All translations of Plotinus, unless otherwise noted, are from Armstrong’s translation (1966–1988).
3. Later Platonists reflected on this myth in various ways. Some Platonists (after Iamblichus) imagined our
dismemberment as an expression of the will of the Demiurge in the procession from the One
(Armstrong 1986, 174 –177).
4. This characterization of Plotinus must be nuanced by taking into account whether Plotinus is speaking
from the perspective of the soul moving up to the One or from the One moving down to the soul. As
Margaret Miles puts it:
When his goal was to describe the unity and integrity of the universe he spoke of body as a necessary
and beautiful reflection of the One . . . . [but w]hen he aimed at generating motivation for
contemplative ascent to the One, he spoke of the body as a hindrance against which we must struggle.
(1999, 163)
5. Pierre Hadot coins the phrase “the Lynceus method” to characterize how one may “pierce the material
envelope of things” to see spiritual realities within (1993, 36).
6. Plotinus acknowledges that his view contradicts the Platonic tradition, and later Platonists who rejected
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his psychology of the undescended soul recognized it as unorthodox.

7. Plotinus’s view of the embodied soul is similar to the Christian heresy of Docetism, the belief that Christ
did not fully descend into human flesh but only “appeared” (dokein) to be in a body.
8. The term Iamblichus uses is allotriôthen, or “to be made other” (Simplicius 1882, 223.26); Iamblichus
also says that in embodiment the soul is “made other to itself” (heteroiousthai pros heautên) (223.31).
9. I explore this central Neoplatonic mystery in “Eros and the One of the Soul” (Shaw 1995, 118–126).
10. These spiritual powers are the engines of manifestation and are described by Iamblichus in On the
Mysteries (Iamblichus 2003, 67.15–68.1). I will refer to the Parthey pagination when citing this text
and will use the abbreviation for its Latin title, De Mysteriis (DM), given by Marsilio Ficino in the
fifteenth century.
11. The “happy fault” here has no dependence on Christian theology, but the underlying idea that what
appears to be a fall and misfortune allows for a greater fulfillment is certainly the case for the
Neoplatonic descent of the soul. It is only through the descent of the soul into a body and its loss of
immortality that the soul can achieve its perfection as soul, including an immortality that is expressed
through a mortal body. This is the paradoxical psychology of Iamblichus that is quite distinct from that
of Plotinus.
12. Theurgy is from Greek theios, which is equal to divine, and ergon, which is equal to action. Thus, theurgy
literally means “divine action.”
13. C. G. Jung memorably said “the gods have become our diseases” (Hillman 1983, 37). For Iamblichus,
this has always been the case.
14. These are experiences of all embodied life and under the rule of the material gods (DM 217.10–13).
15. Abram expresses precisely the theurgical understanding of Iamblichus:
Our intelligence struggles to think its way out of the mirrored labyrinth, but the actual exit is to be
found only by turning aside, now and then, from the churning of thought, dropping beneath the spell
of inner speech to listen into the wordless silence. Only by frequenting that depth, again and again,
can our ears begin to remember the many voices that inhabit that silence . . . . Only thus do we
remember ourselves to the deeper field of intelligence, to the windblown thinking that is not ours,
upon which all our thought depends. (2010, 178)
16. For Iamblichus, it is not merely that our theological assumptions are mistaken (and could be corrected);
our very way of thinking is mistaken and keeps us alienated from divinity (2003, 100.8–101.2). The
hubris of thinking that we can fathom divine mysteries conceptually is precisely what Iamblichus argues
against. To Porphyry’s questions about theurgic ritual, he says: “ . . . it is not enough simply to learn
about these things, nor would anyone who simply knows these things become accomplished in the divine
science” (114.1–2). Cf. “ . . . we don’t perform these acts intellectually, for then their actualization would
be part of a conceptual exercise and depend on us, which is not at all true” (97.1–4).
 Gregory Shaw, The Eyes of Lynceus 29

17. As James Hillman put it: “All things show faces, the world not only a coded signature to be read
for meaning, but a physiognomy to be faced. As expressive forms, things speak; they show the
shape they are in. They announce themselves, bear witness to their presence: ‘Look here we are’”
(Hillman 1997, 102).
18. This is precisely the point of Iamblichus’s coordinating of our self-alienated soul into divine activity.
19. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton prescribes “dancing” as one of the most effective cures for
excessive melancholia (Burton 1927, 479). To dance is to enter spontaneous, immediate experience;
it is to recover the Dionysian power of the flow. It is, in Neoplatonic terms, to re-member the
dismembered body of the god torn apart by the Titans. Dionysus is the Neoplatonic image of an
embodied god, their icon of Incarnation. But this is no docetic and desexualized Incarnation, merely
appearing in a body with its “head in heaven” (one can see how appealing Plotinus’s imagery is for
Christianity). Dionysus is mortal and he is abundantly sexual. He is animal, mortal, and he is immortal.
20. Hermes, god of communication, revelation, and lies must certainly be present in the virtual world of the
Internet. Aphrodite, too, as she is the goddess identified with the Soul of the World and its Beauty:
spiritual, sensual, and pornographic. For the Neoplatonists, Aphrodite is the anima mundi to which we
have become insensate, yet she appears in our archetypal lusting for images on the computer. Our erotic
engagement with the Heavenly and/or Common Aphrodite of Plato’s Symposium (180d –181d) is
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revealed in our computer habits.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abram, David. 2010. Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.
Armstrong, A. H. trans 1966–1988. Plotinus. Enneads I–VI. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. 1986. Platonic mirrors. ERANOS 55: 147 –181.
Burton, Robert. 1927. The anatomy of melancholy. New York: Tudor Publications.
Copenhaver, Brian. 1992. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English
translation, with notes and introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hadot, Pierre. 1976. Le mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin. In Narcisses: Nouvelle Revue de
Psychanalyse. XIII (Printemps): 102.
———. 1993. Plotinus or the simplicity of vision. Trans. Michael Chase. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hillman, James. 1983. Archetypal psychology. Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc.
———. 1997. The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Dallas: Spring Publications.
Iamblichus: On the mysteries. 2003. Trans. Emma Clarke, John Dillon, and Jackson Hershbell. Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature.
Miles, Margaret. 1999. Plotinus on body and beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rappe, Sara. 2000. Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive thinking in the texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and
Damascius. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Shaw, Gregory. 1995. Theurgy and the soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. University Park: Penn State
Press.
Simplicius. 1882. De anima. Ed. M. Hayduck. Berlin: B. Reimeri.

GREGORY SHAW, PhD, is Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, Massachusetts. He is the author of
Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Penn State Press, 1995) and a number of articles on
the later Neoplatonists and Iamblichus, including a comparison of theurgy to the contemporary practice of
Jungian active imagination. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the embodied aspects of
later Platonic philosophy and its similarity to the tantric traditions of South Asia. Theurgical Platonism
presents a radically non-dual vision of reality at odds with our usual way of understanding Platonism.
Correspondence: Gshaw@stonehill.edu.

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, the world has experienced a profound cultural change effected by the digital revolution.
The influence of the Internet on virtually all aspects of our lives has outpaced our ability to reflect on its
 30 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 4 / FALL 2013

consequences. Along with the papers written by Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs, this essay explores the
challenge of the Internet as a new iteration of an ancient problem. The Neoplatonists of Late Antiquity
recognized that when we become lost in images we fall into self-alienation and narcissism. Using the
strategies of Plotinus and Iamblichus, this article explores their solutions to a problem that is still with us and
seems to have intensified to an even greater degree due to the titanic power of the Internet.

KEY WORDS
alienation, dualism, gods, grief work, Iamblichus, Internet, Lynceus, melancholia, mourning, Narcissus,
Plotinus, theurgy, World Soul
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