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.
1
Plato, Symposium 189E.
2
Plotinus, Enneads IV. 8.4.18, tr. A. H. Armstrong , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
3
Iamblichus, In Tim. 49.13-15 in Iamblichi Chalcidensis: In Platonis Dialogos Commentariorum
Fragmenta, translated and edited by John Dillon (Leiden: Brill, 1973) 152-153.
 2

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.
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. These “Greeks,” as Iamblichus calls them, lived
excessively in their heads, and consequently, their thinking was quick, but shallow.

4
See, e.g., Proclus, Platonic Theology I 4.19-20.
5
Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 305.
 3

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.
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

6
Iamblichus, De Mysteriis 259.10-14. The standard edition is that of Des Places, Jamblique: les mystères
d’Egypt (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966), and I follow the enumeration of Parthey used by des Places. All
subsequent references to the De Mysteriis will be noted as DM.
7
Stobaeus I, 379,1-6. See, now, Iamblichus De Anima 54.23-26, text, translation, and commentary by John
Finamore and John Dillon (Leiden: Brill, 2002). I follow Finamore and Dillon in taking the phrase “Taurus
and his followers” to mean Taurus himself (155), and this is reflected in my translation.
 4

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

8
Stob. I, 373.11; see discussion by Finamore and Dillon, op. cit., 130.
9
Stob. I, 366.2-3.
10
Stob. I, 365.28 – 366.1.
11
Priscianus, De anima [DA] 89.35-37; 90.22-24 (Berlin: Reimer, 1882).
12
DA 223.31, heterousthai pros heautên. In keeping with the soul’s paradoxical condition, Pricianus adds
that according to Iamblichus, the soul “can never become entirely self-alienated or it would cease to be
soul” (241.10-11).
 5

is confined to a single physical form.13 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. 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 The
divine logoi projected outside the soul during embodiment must first be recovered in the

13
Stob. I, 373.7-8.
14
Iamblichus says the human soul is “last of the divine orders” (DM 68.11).
15
DM 65.6.
16
DM 5.15-6.2.
17
Iamblichus goes so far as to say that “Plato himself, Pythagoras, and Aristotle and all the ancients who
have gained great and honorable names for wisdom were absolutely convinced of these [i.e., his]
doctrines….” of the complete descent of the soul (Stob. I 366.5-9); see Finamore and Dillon 31.
18
DM 24.4; 30.16-19; 127.10; 167.2.
 6

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. 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 ( α ου ) 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 (π οα ), 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.
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

19
DM 233.9-12.
20
DM 226.9-13; 230.15-19.
21
DM 220.6-9.
22
DM 141.10-13.
 7

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 ου of the gods is revealed: they
assume a spherical body, the shape of the gods. 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
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

23
Emma Clarke, Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001) 49.
24
DM 184.8-13; 246.16 – 247.2
25
In Tim. Frag. 84.4-5; Dillon, op. cit., 196-197.
26
Stob. I 458.17-21.
27
In Tim. Frag. 49.15-16. Dillon, op. cit., 152-153.
28
DM 113.8-14.
29
DM 126.11-14.
30
DM 103,14 - 104.4.
31
Iamblichus refers to the motions of the stars as “rushing harmonious voices” (rhoizoumenas
enharmonious phônas). Peter Kingsley has discussed the “hissing sound” of the stars found in the Mithras
Liturgy and has explained its importance in the experience of initiates of Apollo, for whom the
hissing/piping sound is associated with the sun; see Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom
(Inverness, California: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999) 125-133.
 8

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 (π ου α ου φω ο ) 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.
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 (α ω α αυ ο οχ α) that surrounds the soul, from
which divine visions possess our imaginative faculty, since it is
moved by the will of the gods.34
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

32
Damascius, Dub. et Sol. II, 255, 7-11.
33
DM 117.4-6.
34
DM 132.11-15.
 9

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. 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. 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

35
DM 133.5-8.
36
Heraclitus,
37
DM 249.14 – 250.7; 259.1 – 260.1; 168.15-16.
38
DM 31.13-18.
39
DM 31. 18-19.
 10

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; 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 Thus, the soul is a spherical number
rooted in 6 which, Iamblichus maintains, is the first number to blend the divisible with

40
DM 41.4-11.
41
Dominic J. O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1989), Appendix I: On Physical Number, 11-12.
42
Ibid., 46-48
43
Ibid., 56-59.
44
Ibid., 54-56.
45
“Iamblichus,” The Theology of Arithmetic (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1988) 78, 120. The author of
this Pythagorean treatise is anonymous but the manuscript has been understandably attributed to
Iamblichus. Many of the same arguments that appear in the manuscripts recently discovered by O’Meara
also appear in this treatise. The positions throughout the treatise are Iamblichean.
 11

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. 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 υ , the triad of
sacrificial animals, and the α υ , the Pythagorean symbol of cosmogony which led
initiates to the gods through number rather than through the sacrifice of blood. Burkert
suggests that the υ was superseded by the α υ , 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. For theurgists, the gods appear materially as stones,
plants, animals and other generated life, including human beings.
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

46
Ibid., 79.
47
Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1972) 187.
48
Ibid., 187.
49
DM 218.10-13.
 12

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 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: “[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

50
DM V.15; Hierocles, In Carm. Aur. 26. 118.10ff.; see discussion by R.M. van den Berg, Proclus’
Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary (Leiden: 2000) 105-106.
51
DM 217.8-11.
52
DM 209.14-19.
53
DM 215.1-7.
54
Fragments 43, 44; Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary, Ruth Majercik (Leiden: Brill
1989).
55
This is consistent with the Neoplatonic understanding that the soul is “a god of the lowest rank”
(Plotinus, Enneads IV.8.5.26-27); DM 34.8.
56
This theme was discussed in Jean Trouillard’s aptly titled “Proclos et la joie de quitter le ciel,” Diotima,
1983, 182-193.
 13

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.59

57
Stob. I, 379.1-6.
58
In the same section in which Iamblichus cites Taurus, he also cites Heraclitus, who says the soul’s
descent is caused by “the rest which consists in change” which, with his other “dark” saying: “immortal
mortals, mortal immortals,” seems to point to the same paradox that Iamblichus highlights with his difficult
teachings on the soul and his contrasting images for the embodied soul: altar and sphere.
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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 (αφ ο ω ), 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
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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.