chapter 1

A Divine Technology

Imagine, we are told by Plato, that there are a group of people living in a cave.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

This group of people—Plato never gives them a name, but let’s call them Chthonians—are born into strange circumstances. At birth, they are taken and bound to face a wall. They can eat and drink, but never turn their heads. They must always watch the wall.

Meanwhile, their wardens walk behind them, carrying an assortment of objects in front of a fire, so that the shadows of those objects display on the wall. So one of the wardens—again, Plato does not name them, but let’s call them Aions—is carrying a vase, which casts a vase-shaped shadow on the wall. One of the Chthonians says, “Look, a vase.” Another Aion carries by a sword, which casts a shadow that the Chthonians call “sword.” And so on.

In fact, since the objects the Aions carry before the fire are cast on the wall only as two-dimensional shadows, very complex objects might end up having many different names, depending on from which vantage point the shadow is cast, which angle the light falls on the object. So perhaps an Aion might carry a book in front of the fire. If carried flat, it projects a wide rectangle; if carried lengthwise, a slender rectangle; and if open, a V shape, all of which the Chthonians call by different names and do not recognize that each of those shapes is the same object—although perhaps they notice, if they are really astute, that one such object might turn into another, under mysterious circumstances.

Now imagine a Chthonian gets free. She struggles past the stunned Aions, blinded by a glimpse of the great fire, and with the green afterimage of the flame over her vision she scrabbles on hands and knees over the hard, steep ascent of the cave. Finally she bursts into the light, which dazzles her to absolute blindness. She cowers in terror at first but finally her vision begins to clear and she sees things for which she has no name. For the first time, she sees three dimensions, color, texture, and she watches objects change their shapes as she walks around them. She understands finally that all she saw before were shadows of these real, vibrant, beautiful objects. And when she looks up at the sun, she knows it for what it is: a god.

So now she makes a life outside the cave, but she has friends back there, and finally she screws up her courage to its sticking place and goes back, armed this time with the truth. The Aions let her pass, and she sits again among her old friends. “Listen,” she says. “I’ve discovered something amazing. This light, these shadows, are just pale reflections of the real reality.”

“What do you mean?”

“Objects have multiple dimensions. See that book there? That’s the shadow of an object—”

“That’s not a book,” another friends says. “It’s a Slender Rectangle.”

“Yes, Slender Rectangles are really Books. See, when you—”

“Slender Rectangles can turn into Books sometimes. Is that what you mean?”

“No, they don’t turn into anything. They already are Books,” she says, getting a little frustrated.

Her friends whistle and laugh. “She’s gone a bit batty,” they say.

“No, listen—”

But they won’t.

In frustration, she tries to turn a few heads physically, but that causes terror and panic, and they impose their strongest punishment on her, and threaten to put her to death. She flees the cave, back into the world above.

But a few quiet people had heard what she said and wondered if she really was so crazy. One of them begins to reason: If there are objects being moved before the fire, then perhaps something moves them. He starts, when no one else notices, talking aloud to the Aions, not sure if anyone can hear him.

But the Aions have heard too, and some of them are sympathetic. One in particular comes closer and closer to the young acolyte. He listens, silently, until one day he leans close enough to whisper.

“I’m here.”

The boy, taken aback by having his prayers answered, nevertheless rallies quickly. “What is your name?”

“I am called Poimander,” the Aion says.

“Is what she said true? Is there a world different from these shadows?”

“Yes,” Poimander tells him.

“I’ll give you anything to free me.”

“All you have are shadows. What could you give me?”

The boy thinks for a long time, and finally says, “I have reason and words. I will give you speech offerings. I will sing you songs, make you poems.”

That is very little, but Poimander really just wants an excuse anyway. Compassion is already in him. So he unlocks the boy and quietly leads him out of the cave into the light of day.

I have embellished this story quite a lot from Plato’s version. In his version, we have no specific account of how people escape, and no names for those who move the objects before the fire. But at its root, the moral is the same.

We are the Chthonians—or Earthlings—locked in a cave of perception, and our everyday experiences are shadows on a wall. The fire is the light that gives us vision but outside is a greater light and greater forms than we can perceive with our senses. When we do achieve perception of them even for a moment, we are blinded by their splendor and cannot think of words to describe them because we only have words for shadows.

You live in a cave. But you don’t have to. There are ways out, and theurgy is one of them.

When the boy began to whisper to Poimander, he was engaging in theurgy. He had a technology to make contact and gain divine help for his release.

Theurgy comes from two Greek words: theos, meaning “god”; and ergon, meaning “work.” It’s a way of appealing to the divine using our reason, intuition, and aesthetic powers, in order to gain a greater perspective on reality and ultimately achieve the highest perspective, that of henosis: oneness with the ground of existence itself. This henosis is a complex topic I’ll explore more later, but it shares some resemblances—and some significant differences—with nirvana in Buddhism or moksha in Hinduism. It is a kind of universal liberation, an experience of perfect understanding.

What does theurgy look like in practice? On the surface it might be indistinguishable from an ordinary act of worship, and you’d be hard-pressed to identify a theurgist from actions alone. Yet theurgy isn’t worship in the traditional sense of the word. Your German shepherd might worship you: jump up and smile a doggy smile when you come home, run in circles when it’s time to play, bark playfully and do a little shuffling dance during walks. But if you train your dog to do some service, to act to a purpose, all those acts of worship take second fiddle to doing its duty. Just look at a service dog some time and watch it work. They kind of remind me of soldiers or police officers with their single-minded attention, no-nonsense attitudes, and direct focus. Theurgy is similar. For a theurgist, an offering and a prayer is a kind of work, an act with a purpose.

Don’t misunderstand: theurgy isn’t some mercenary bribery of divine forces. There’s plenty of ridiculous prosperity gospel books about that blasphemous attitude; I’m not going to add to the stack. It’s also not abasement or grim grit-teethed willpower. It’s not work on a god, or even work for a god—it’s work with a god. In theurgy, you are not serving god, nor are you bribing god to serve you. Instead, you are collaborating together to achieve a joint goal: henosis.

I’ve used that word several times already, and only barely defined it. Henosis is union of perspective with the highest reality in the universe, the one thing from which everything else proceeds. It’s hard for us to understand what that oneness might mean. Attempts to describe it fall short, because language is inherently dualistic. For example, people might ask, “Does the personality dissolve in henosis? Do I remain who I once was, or do I cease to exist?” As unsatisfying as it might seem, there’s no good answer to that. If I say, “your personality ceases to exist,” then that’s not henosis: that’s not oneness, but noneness: that’s just deleting yourself out of the equation of you and the one. If I say, “your personality remains; you remain who you are,” that’s not henosis: that’s duality. There’s still you and the one. I suppose I could try to say something like “the personality you are, who you are, becomes the exact same thing as the one,” but that’s almost ridiculous. Could you imagine if I were the one from which the entire universe proceeds? I’m a weird little man with strange hobbies and a fondness for fine food. I couldn’t imagine what universe would proceed from that: one with lots of artisanal cheeses and a lot of dead languages with plenty of good study materials, I suppose.

So I can’t construct a good definition of henosis. But let me put it this way. Henosis will, perhaps only temporarily at first but later with more and more reliability, solve your problems. Sometimes those solutions will be miraculous, and sometimes you’ll just see your problems from a perspective that makes them irrelevant. It won’t necessarily cure your obesity—but it might help dissolve the boundaries that prevent you from exercising. It might not balance your checkbook—but it might help you see money differently. And it might not find you one true love—but it can help you learn how to love and be loved. Henosis isn’t a magic bullet, but it is magic. Henosis—even just chasing henosis—will make you a better person, more competent at life, and probably happier.

Is This a Religion?

It’s surprisingly difficult to find a definition of “religion” that satisfies everyone’s intuition. We could take the simple dictionary definition, and say that religion is a system of beliefs and rituals that center on the belief in a supernatural being or beings, especially a God or gods. But it’s not hard to find examples that don’t fit under that umbrella. Not all forms of Buddhism require the belief in supernatural beings at all, for example, and there are aboriginal religions that center on ancestors or the power inherent in certain places and objects. To try to roll all the world’s religions up in this same blanket makes for an odd bundle indeed.

In fact, this definition may just be the result of a Judeo-Christian history. If you ask a person from a typical Judeo-Christian culture how many religions they have, they will probably either say “none” or “one.” It is impossible (for such a person) to have multiple religions, because the models for this definition of religion are inherently exclusionary. One cannot take communion as a Christian while simultaneously being a Jew, and one cannot be Jewish and Muslim at the same time. But in areas not dominated by a Judeo-Christian history, another model of religion dominates. A typical Chinese person might hold Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian beliefs all at the same time, and if asked “how many religions do you have” say “none.” While there are certainly exclusionary religions in the East (and inclusionary religions in the West, like Baha’i), the general pattern holds: in those cultures where exclusionary—monotheistic, orthodox, and often proselytizing—religions are dominant, it’s hard to imagine having multiple religions.

But it’s not so easy to draw this line and say “these religions are splendid for being inclusionary, while these others are icky for being exclusionary” because each of those exclusionary religions has a branch that is much more inclusionary. In its public rituals, dogmata, and doctrines, a religion may be exclusionary and clear-cut. I call this popular and public face of a religion its exoteric face. But every Western monotheistic religion has another face: a private face with flexible rituals, a greater emphasis on pragma (practical activities) than dogma, and contemplation rather than doctrine. This is its esoteric face.

We need only look at the three dominant monotheistic religions of the West to see this play out. The esoteric face of Islam, of course, is Sufi. An esoteric face of Judaism is Kabbalah, while an esoteric face of Christianity is contemplative Christianity. Each of these offers something the exoteric face does not.

Where the exoteric face offers dogma—a line of belief that adherents must internalize—the esoteric face offers pragma—a set of practices that the adherent may use for specific purposes. For example, while exoteric Islam requires adherence to a particular set of beliefs (often summarized as the five pillars), the esoteric branch of Sufi gives a set of spiritual exercises aiming at union with Allah. Similarly, the required beliefs of Christianity are supplemented by the practices of contemplative Christianity.

Where the exoteric face offers ritual and ceremony, the esoteric face often has its own rituals, again for specific aims. Some kinds of Sufi are famous for spinning, for example, while others elevate the dhikr, a simple prayer asserting the unity of God, to a central place in their ritual. Often these rituals are inward-turning, such as the practice of contemplative prayer or the meditations on the letters of Hebrew Kabbalah. There is also more room, often, to create or borrow new rituals and interweave them into private practice, because the esoteric practice of a religion is often done alone rather than communally.

Finally, the teachings of a religion can be divided into their exoteric teachings and their esoteric teachings. Western Christianity teaches that human sins were forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus. But some kinds of esoteric Christianity go further, suggesting that this forgiving of sins wasn’t simply a negative act but a positive one, not just wiping the slate clean but elevating man, potentially, to the position of Christ. Similarly, where the dhikr—“There is no god but God, and Muhammed is his prophet”—is central to Islam, to the Sufi it takes on additional meaning. “There is no god but God” can be interpreted “there is no reality but God.” In other words, everything is divine.

Obviously, the esoteric faces of religions with their innovative rituals and controversial doctrines sometimes skirt heresy. And sometimes, when their teachings, practices, or beliefs run too far away from the dominant stream, the orthodox cracks down on the esoteric branches of the faith. Historical examples of this tendency are not difficult to find.

Neoplatonic and Hermetic Esotericism

In the third century ce, the indigenous pagan religions of Rome—which included a complex network of traditional practices, foreign religions, and religious innovations—were faltering before the popular mystery religion of Christianity. As the exoteric practices of these ancient religions began to wane, as sacrifices went unperformed and temples began to empty out, the esoteric practices began to rise to the fore. These practices began with the allegory of the cave above, and from it and the other writings of Plato, philosophers created a system of philosophy and practice that promised a technology for salvation rather than a mystery religion.

Sadly, we do not have all the practices anymore, as they are at best hinted at in the writings of the primary proponents of what came to be called Neoplatonism. Yet we do have their philosophies. The philosophers of this new movement often disagreed with each other, even about fundamental issues, but this is a result of the movement’s origin in philosophy, where disagreement and dialogue are signs of robust reasoning, not failure. Perhaps this complexity of opinions is one reason Neoplatonism faded away in favor of Christianity, whose doctrines were much more simple. Of course as any theologian can tell you, the doctrines of Christianity are anything but simple, but much of that complexity is a result of wrestling with the same complex questions as Neoplatonism (and sometimes, importing answers wholesale).

The central problem Neoplatonism addresses in all its various forms and with all its various complex cosmologies is a simple one: What exists?

That might seem like a simple question. Since there’s such a venerable tradition of dialogues in Platonic philosophy, let’s imagine how it might play out in a conversation between two people, a philosopher named Philanike and her student Euthymios.

Philanike: So, what exists?

Euthymios: Matter exists. This table, for example, is real.

Ph: What is matter?

Eu: Well, this coffee mug is matter, isn’t it?

Ph: So is matter solid or liquid?

Eu: I suppose it can be either.

Ph: The mug is brown; is matter brown?

Eu: It can be.

Ph: Can it be red?

Eu: Yes, that too.

Ph: Is matter heavy or light?

Eu: It can be either, I suppose. This mug is heavier than a feather, and gases are material too, and very light.

Ph: So it seems matter can be anything I describe it to be. If I
say “what is an animal?” you could answer that by listing every kind of animal, although that would not be the most efficient way to do so. But with matter, you cannot even define it by listing everything it can be, because it seems it can be everything.

Eu: My thoughts are not material.

Ph: Oh, good! Then it can’t be everything.
What differentiates your thoughts from matter?

Eu: They are not extended in space.

Ph: So matter is that which occupies space.

Eu: It would seem so.

Ph: Then what is space?

Eu: Einstein tells us that space and time are the same thing.

Ph: I thought we were ancient Greeks. How do we know about
relativity, if we’re ancient Greeks?

Eu: No, I think we just have really unusual names.

Ph: That’s a relief. I’m such a fan of air conditioning and
antibiotics. But we’re off topic. What is space-time?

Eu: If I said “the thing which material objects occupy,” would
that cut it?

Ph: You know it wouldn’t. If we cannot define a thing by listing it, we can define it by cutting it free from other things, by saying what it is not. So—what is not space-time? What is outside it?

Eu: My thoughts. Ideas about things.

Ph: Such as?

Eu: E = mc2. It’s an equation that describes the equivalence of
mass and energy, that defines matter, but doesn’t exist in space-time. I can write it in matter, but that’s not the equation: the equation is the nonmaterial reality these letters describe, whether marks of chalk or graphite or ink or sketched in sand.

Ph: And if Einstein hadn’t figured it out, would it still be true?

Eu: Yes, I suppose so. It’d be true even if no one ever figured
it out. So it exists outside of time, as well as outside of space.

Ph: Go back to the mug. You said it was brown, which
means it reflects light in certain wavelengths we can
describe in the same sorts of immaterial ideas.
So: is “brown” an idea outside of time and space?

Eu: I guess so. If we exist in a universe with the sort of light that we have, then those wavelengths exist whether or not we call them brown or dun or whatever, and even if no one existed to perceive them, those wavelengths would exist and behave according to the laws that give rise, in us, to the perception we label “brown.”

Ph: So reality exists in the form of ideas, which we can think of crudely as equations describing eternal or timeless laws, although that may lead us astray a bit later and we’ll find it more complicated than that. But for now, let’s say that: what, then, is matter?

Eu: It seems matter is that which can instantiate these ideas in the realm of space-time. Matter brings down immaterial and eternal ideas and plants them in space-time.

Ph: So is matter real?

Eu: Well, not as real as the ideas it instantiates.

The process by which matter does this—receive the impressions of these eternal ideas—is an issue of very fine wrangling among the Neoplatonists; those with an interest in the philosophers of Late Antiquity can dig up writings and dive into it. They’re wonderful examples of pure reason applied to complex problems, argued and negotiated across hundreds of years. We do not live in Late Antiquity, however. Rather than learning all these complex and ancient cosmologies, we’re going to reason out a position of our own, understanding as only we postmoderns can, that we are building a model that must not be confused with the thing it models, a map that is not the territory. There may be gaps, areas where we could spill gallons of ink on forests of paper to tease out an answer, and that may be a worthwhile exercise for someone at some time. But this is a book about practical theurgy, so what do we need to know right now to get started on the road to henosis?

Try to imagine matter without any qualities: an object with no adjectives to describe it, no nouns to classify it. What you end up with is a concept the philosophers sometimes called hyle, a Greek word meaning “forest” or “timber.” We might say “clay.” Consider this clay of no qualities. If I impose a quality on it, it becomes a thing: if I color it and shape it, it becomes a mug, a knife, a stapler. If I attenuate it and give it certain chemical properties, it becomes water vapor, nitrogen, xenon. Ultimately, with my scientific understanding, I can break it down and say I am making it into collections of electrons, protons, and so forth. Or go further and say I’m making my clay into bosons and quarks. Even then I’m merely imposing qualities, ideas, on the matter itself.

Now, for this creation of matter to work, I need to move from ideas which have no form or temporal or spatial existence into matter situated in space-time. How do I do this? First, I have to give it a start point: anything that exists materially must exist in time. Second, I have to give it a location: it must exist somewhere. Therefore, I must postulate two things that come between the world of Ideas and the world of matter: space and time, which we postmoderns understand to be related to each other as space-time. Let’s start drawing a diagram:

Fig. 1: Ideas, Matter, and Space-Time

We can logically work out a chain of what exists prior to what so matter may arise, but before we do so it’s important to define “prior.” If time is one of those things that exists before matter does, then some of these things will exist before time does, so “prior” cannot mean “prior in time.” Instead, think of it as a structure: the whole building stands at once, but the girders are prior to the walls, the walls prior to the roof. If we take off the roof, the wall doesn’t fall; if we take off the walls, the roof collapses. We could, rather than speaking of one thing being prior to another, speak of one emanation depending on another, hanging on it like the links of a chain.

Once we have time and space, we can begin talking about things having qualities: they can be red, shiny, big, or sweet. We can also begin talking about them having quantity: three, four, five, six, and so on. We never see number or quality separate from matter: we never see “red,” without something being red, even if it’s just a ray of light. And we never see three without three of something. But we can abstract away the idea of red and the idea of three from stuff, which means that it must exist prior to that stuff: redness or threeness doesn’t spread through the world like a virus. These ideas exist, and the world reflects them.

So time and space and quality and quantity—the ideas about things—must exist prior to matter; matter depends on them. Remove time, space, quality, or quantity, and matter cannot exist as we experience it. Time, space, quality, and quantity are ideas, and ideas—in our experience—exist only in a consciousness. But our experience of consciousness is material: it is something we experience in time, so there must be a kind of consciousness outside of time and prior to it, where ideas outside of time can exist. This other consciousness is called Nous by Neoplatonists, and the part of it where the ideas of time, space, and quality dwell—sometimes called the lower Nous—is called the Psyche. Let’s amend our diagram with some labels:

Fig. 2: Nous, Psyche, and Hyle

Now, various Neoplatonists provide competing cosmologies, and I could go into all the details of Iamblichus’s cosmology compared to that of Plotinus and so on, but those differences have been treated well enough elsewhere. I could also go into all the philosophical debates against this particular model of reality, but that would make this a very different book. Instead, let’s stick with this simplified scheme for now, recognizing that centuries of reasoned debate have refined it but that we can get by for our practical purposes with the simplification. In fact, since we are postmoderns seeing this not as a perfect map of reality but as a model of how we may conceive reality in order for us to accomplish certain things, many of those later arguments are irrelevant to us anyway. How convenient.

What relationship do I—or you—have to this model? We say there is an idea in the Nous—E = mc2, let’s say—and that idea exists whether a human mind holds it or not. But human minds do hold it. We do not merely receive perceptions of the universe and act on them as automata. We think, and we think timeless thoughts. We can recognize the timeless truth of these thoughts, without ourselves being fully timeless. How to explain that?

Hermeticism, a later esoteric movement, explained it with often contradictory and obscure arguments, but ultimately what it comes down to is that we are the universe. As above, so below; so below, as above. Our mind, our consciousness, reflects the reality of the universe. We can modify our diagram one more time:

Fig. 3: As Above, So Below

Our Psyche is the Soul, receiving the perceptions of the body in two ways: through sensory perception and through phantasms, some of which arise from the memory and some through the Nous. Phantasms are images that arise in our mind, sensory impressions without senses. If I ask you to visualize a cat, the cat you “see” is a phantasm. Of course, sight is not our only sense, so if I ask you to imagine the smell of lilacs or the sound of seagulls, those sensory imaginings are also phantasms. Some of our phantasms come from memories of other things, others are cut from whole cloth, and some come from the Nous. In fact, we are constructing a phantasm whenever we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel something. We never really taste matter or see matter: we experience only the phantasm we build in our mind around that sensory experience. This is why memories can emotionally move us: they are as real as the phantasms created from our direct sensory experiences.

Phantasms can also come from the Nous. Our Nous is the Mind, not the little to-do-list scribbling mind of our morning errands, but the mind that can think eternal thoughts. Let me show you how. Visualize a point. Move that point any distance in one direction, tracing out a line. Now move that line 90 degrees to itself, perpendicular, so it traces out a plane. You now have a square. Now move that square perpendicular to the direction of the plane, so it forms a cube. Now take that cube, and move it perpendicular to itself, 90 degrees away from itself: this object is a hypercube, an object that does not exist in our world. Yet with enough practice, we can visualize it. It may not be easy at first, but I assure you that it’s possible with enough practice to visualize a hypercube. This image does not exist in physical matter, but it exists in the Nous as an idea, and we have access to it through our minds, and then can build phantasms of it.

So how does this model and similar models help us understand the nature of the divine or rise up to henosis? For that matter, why rise up to henosis at all? Is there something wrong with the lives we live, something wrong with matter? Again, opinions of the Neoplatonists are diverse and opinions of the Hermetic philosophers even more diverse. Plotinus regards matter as evil, at least at some points in his Enneads. And the Hermetica argue both that matter is evil and insist that it’s not. I find no reason to condemn matter, since the ancients couldn’t agree on the issue anyway.

I like to think of it this way: We are physical beings, true, but that’s not all we are. We’re capable of being, of doing more. And if we are capable, isn’t it worth striving for those goals? Any physical goals we have, as valuable as they are, need to be valuable for something. A pile of money is worthless on a deserted island. So what good are career success, love, family—granted, all very nice things—unless they help us reach up to something greater?

Exercise 1.1: Contemplation of Matter

This exercise will, at its most basic level, give you a familiarity with the concept of hyle and an experience of it. If continued, you will also begin to understand the means by which spiritual forces affect matter. I doubt that it’ll give you telekinetic powers, but you may gain an experiential understanding of the oneness of matter which will aid you in later exercises such as enlivening a statue and working with symbols.

Step 1: Begin by finding a small object. It literally does not matter what it is, and you don’t need to strive for the mystical and poetic. An empty soda can will work as well as a seashell. As you repeat this exercise, you can choose different objects and objects of greater size and complexity, but for now aim for something you can hold in your hand.

Step 2: Analyze out from that object all of its qualities. These are descriptors, usually either adjectives or nouns, that you might use to describe the object to someone else. List them out, a word or a phrase at a time, on a piece of paper. The first few times you do this exercise, it’s important to do this in writing so you can keep track. As you get better at it, you can forego the writing and hold these qualities in your mind. You can categorize those qualities by the kinds of phantasms they invoke: for example, visual, tactile, and so on.

Example: Let’s imagine my object is an ink pen. I list qualities: “oblong, black, clicks, plastic, clear, solid, liquid ink, smooth, black rubber grip.” Of these, the shape, state of matter, and texture are tactile. The colors are visible. The click is audible.

Step 3: Put down the object. While looking over your list, call up a phantasm of the object in your mind. Now, begin removing qualities from the object. It’s often easier to begin with smell, taste, and color before going on to form.

Example: Holding the pen in my mind, I remove some of its incidental qualities. I take away its click mechanism, the rubber grip, the ink.

Step 4: When you remove the incidental qualities, begin removing the essential qualities. Now it’s very important not to cheat. When you remove color from the object, do not simply imagine it clear or white: imagine that it has no color, that color as a quality does not impinge on it at all. It’s not clear, it’s literally colorless. So don’t replace one quality with another: taking away the quality “smooth” doesn’t mean making the thing rough in your mind: it means abolishing texture as a category entirely.

Example: Taking away the concept of color and texture, material phase (solid or liquid), and finally shape itself, I’m left with …

Step 5: It’s easy to say at this point that you’re left with nothing, but do not succumb to that notion. Try to hold the pen in your mind without having any concept of its qualities for as long as you can. Perhaps you’ll feel a curious mental blankness or fog. You will almost certainly experience the pen trying to take shape again, but whenever it does gently deny it qualities so it returns back to the formless chaos to which you have reduced it. You will not be able to articulate your experience of what remains, because to do so will be to apply qualities to it, but what remains is pure hyle, without any impression from the Nous at all: it’s matter, receptive and malleable. It’s substance, sub-stance, that which stands underneath.

If you do this exercise you may well have a sense that something remains—something tenuous, barely existent, but there. Notice that all the things we regard as existing are phantasms we create in regard to the object. Kicking a stone doesn’t prove that the stone is hard: it creates a phantasm of the stone’s hardness. The stone, we might say, is liable to create phantasms of hardness, but the stone itself is not hard outside of conceptions of its hardness.

Exercise 1.2: Experiencing the One

This exercise is the complement of the previous exercise. Where in the previous exercise we explored the nature of matter through our imagination and found that apart from our senses it is at best a tenuous fog of possibility, in this exercise we will strive for an experience of the One. This isn’t an exercise you will succeed at immediately or find easy, and in many ways it is a constant practice you can and should undertake regularly, both to give yourself perspective and to continually strive for henosis. It is possible for us to experience the One as well as matter because we exist in every level of existence: we are bodies, minds, souls, and as such partake of the One itself. As Pauliina Remes puts it, “The fact that the human soul extends to as many, or almost as many, levels as the metaphysical hierarchy ensures that it has the cognitive and other powers suitable for the penetration of all these levels.” 2 The more work with theurgy you do, the easier a taste of the One will become.

I take this exercise from the Hermetica, where it is described like this:

Enlarge yourself to an unmeasurable size, leaping out
from the whole body, and, having transcended time,
become Eternity, and you will know the divine.
Think that nothing is impossible to you; consider
yourself to be immortal and able to understand
everything: all arts, all sciences, all the ways of life;
become the highest of the heights, and the lowest of
the depths. Gather together all the sense perceptions
of objects in yourself, of fire and water, dry and wet,
and in the same way, be everywhere—in earth, in
sea, and in the heavens. Be not yet existing. Be in
the womb, newborn, old, dead, and that which
is after death. And understanding all such things
the same—time, place, events, qualities, quantities—
then you will be able to know the divine.3

Step 1: When first beginning this exercise, it helps to get as comfortable as you can. As you become familiar with it, you can do it while doing other things (although I wouldn’t recommend doing it while driving!).

Step 2: Focus on your breath. Aim for a four-fold breath, where you inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, and hold for a count of four. If you’re sitting still, with some practice you should be able to do this, but if you’re moving about you may find it easier to aim for a count of two rather than four or otherwise modify the time.

Step 3: Imagine yourself from outside yourself, as if you have a floating-eye perspective of the scene. It is as if you are watching yourself sitting or lying there, like in a movie. You may close your eyes if you want.

Step 4: Build up this image of yourself as accurately as you can. Then slowly begin to lift your perspective upward, taking in the room, then the building (assuming, of course, that you’re inside), then the city. With each breath, take in a bit more, and don’t be afraid to go slow. If you begin to lose focus, rest on that level of perspective for a while.

Step 5: Eventually, you will take in the whole world, then the solar system, then the galaxy, then the whole universe as a whole. If you don’t manage this the first few times, don’t worry. You are gaining benefit just by seeing the big picture as high as you can.

Step 6: When you can hold the universe in your imagination, contemplate the totality of it without focusing in or catching on any one thing for a few breaths.

Step 7: Now, holding it all in your mind at once, let the boundaries between all its parts dissolve: the galaxy is the same as the people, and all perspectives collapse. If you can do this, you may glimpse a moment of unity.

Step 8: If you can achieve step 7, which may take some time, try now to abolish even the boundary around the universe. The experience of this is hard to describe, but you will probably find your discursive, binary mind stopping in a sudden awareness of unity. This is a glimpse of henosis.

Step 9: Whether you got to step 7 or not, after holding the image of the entire universe, or the oneness behind it, for a while start to move back inwards to the galaxy, solar system, planet, continent, and location. This helps ground the experience; in theurgy the return is as important as the journey.

Structure of the Soul

The ancients were masters of introspection, and they could look within their own souls with a clarity and precision we can’t match with scientific instruments. As can be expected with something so subjective, though, the lines and borders of the parts of the soul differ from formulation to formulation. That’s not a sign of a flaw in the system or the unreality of the soul. On the contrary, it’s a sign that we are looking at the complexity of people’s experience of themselves as ensouled beings. And by studying the differences in these systems as well as the similarities, we can begin to see some of the richness of the soul itself and perhaps begin to identify our own personal psychology.

That the soul is a single thing, indivisible, comes from Aristotle, and this notion was a new one. Aristotle defined the soul as that first cause of thing, its purpose of being. The soul of a clock is to tell time. The soul of a dog is to be a dog. But the soul, for Aristotle, was merely the cause of the body; without the body, there was no soul, or need for one. Aristotle was responding to Platonism, which argues that not only is there a soul, it is the intermediary between the human consciousness and the world of Ideas, or Nous. The soul, in Neoplatonic doctrine, is a marvelous thing: “Unlike the rest of the universe, the human soul is not a prisoner of any one form or way of looking at the world.”4 Our souls are the things that can lead us out of the cave.

Plato describes the soul as having three parts. In the Phaedrus, he says that the soul is like a chariot with two horses. I’m going to steal and modify his allegory a bit. Imagine you’re driving a chariot. You know where you’re going; you have the route planned out, and you also are sitting up on the chariot and can see where you’re going. You can see the road is clear here, bumpy there, obstructed over there. You’ve got the traffic report from LOGO FM, the radio station of rationality. But your chariot is bound to two horses. The first horse, whom you’ve named Thymos, is a spirited and clever mare. She sometimes is spooked by shadows on the road, and sometimes she’s intrigued by a strange smell or sight and wants to run after it and find out what it is. Sometimes she’s just gloomy and stubborn and doesn’t want to move. Her partner, however, is a powerful stallion you’ve named Eros. He knows what he wants and he gets it, which is usually anything in heat. But he’s also got a huge appetite, and will veer off the road at the sight of anything green, good for him or not. He’s strong, so he often pulls Thymos along with him. But sometimes Thymos balks, pulls back, or goes along or a while and then seems to change her mind and fights against him. Overall, you’ve got your hands full controlling these two horses so you can get that chariot up Henosis Hill!

The logos or driver is the part of our soul that is rational. It is the reflection of the capital-n Nous in our own being: it’s where reason and logic and understanding live. In some formulations, it’s the highest part of the soul. In a well-regulated soul, it directs the other two parts, thymos and eros. The thymos of our soul is our spiritedness, our emotional drive. This can be all the higher emotions of compassion and aspiration, or it can be the emotions of anger, jealousy, and fear. It’s interesting that this word, which meant among other things “aspiration” in ancient Greek, now means just “anger” in modern Greek. It’s easy for thymos to run away. The eros—which shouldn’t be confused with the god of the same name—is the part of our soul that wants stuff. It’s the appetite, be it for sex or food or pleasure. Well regulated, we can let it go and enjoy a nice big plate of crab and some lentil stew, perhaps even a glass of wine, or a recreational romp in the sheets. Poorly regulated, we are haunting nightclub bathrooms looking for a fix, eating ourselves to death with greasy burgers at a fast food joint we don’t even really like, or drinking our liver into stone.

Most of us do all right most of the time in controlling these two wild horses. Why not just cut them loose, though, for all the trouble they cause us? We could surrender our emotions, like the character Spock in the old Star Trek shows. In fact, that’s what a lot of people think the point of the Stoic philosophy was, although that’s not at all the truth. The Stoics were a philosophical school that argued that we are happiest when we are not trying to control things outside of our control. Since the only things within the scope of our control are our emotions and reactions to events, Stoics taught that the way to happiness was to achieve control of those things, but that doesn’t mean to abolish emotion. In fact, the Stoics tell us that emotion serves a powerful and valuable purpose. Without it, life isn’t worth living—but we also need to know that we don’t have to be miserable. In fact, the Stoic says, you can be happy right now, regardless of your circumstances. You’re under no obligation to be miserable. That’s a hefty expectation, and not even the Stoics all lived up to it all the time (some of Marcus Aurelius’s meditations read like they were written on the edge of despair). But it’s a thought: well regulated, our emotions can lead us upward through joy and compassion, without which we are no longer sentient—the word sentient literally means “feeling”—beings.

But surely we can cut off appetite? Many great mystics have tried, but a chariot with one horse doesn’t get too far. That’s why I have borrowed this image. It’s a wonderful argument against excessive asceticism such as that of Plotinus, whom his biographer describes as “embarrassed to be in a body.”5 As big as a fan I am of Plotinus, and as big a fan as I am of Neoplatonism, the ascetic turn of Late Antiquity never sat terribly well with me as a means of learning self-control.

I’ve always preferred the Stoic approach: Instead of the logos getting off the chariot and kicking eros until it stops moving, which seems to be the ascetic method, in Stoicism logos learns to steer the chariot. You control a horse by putting up fences. And when you train a horse, you can train it to learn its limits so that instead of tying it, all you need to do is loop the bridle over a branch. The horse will not even try to pull away, because it knows its limits and no longer needs to be tied. Such is the Stoic approach to eros or desire.

You give desire its reins when it is safe to do so, but the logos is in control. The logos sets the limits of the fences. The eros demands a night of chocolate cake and pornography? The logos offers a slice of cake after a nutritious meal and a French film. The eros demands extravagant expenditures, and the logos consults the budget and decides yea or nay. All impulsive desires are watched and controlled, and periodically you practice poverty, by going without for a set time, just to find the limits.

One way to do this is to recognize the desire consciously and sit with it rather than pushing it away. Those who diet know the sensation of overwhelming desire for some specific treat; a donut can expand into a universe of cream cheese frosting. The initial desire for a donut turns into a desire for cake, and the logos, the reins slipping, gives in again and again, cake after cake, until it would have been better just to eat the initial donut. Of course, the problem with eating the donut is wanting another afterwards, so the logos sits mindfully with the experience of that donut, makes it a production, and savors every bite.

The eros never really wants an object in the physical world. The eros is driven toward or away from phantasms of things, coming either from our senses or our memories. If we have a memory of a tasty treat and we desire it, we don’t desire the treat—we desire the phantasm. Those who eat—or fulfill any other erotic drive—unconsciously are enjoying the phantasm of memory rather than the phantasm of the senses that might satisfy the eros. And the eros can be trained to be satisfied with the phantasm itself, at least some of the time.

The drives of the eros play a large role in magic. When we want something and choose to do magic for it, we often want other things as well. The horse is spooked on all sides by phantasms of desire and aversion and so magic becomes impossible because the chariot cannot move forward. We need to train the eros by addressing each phantasm one by one and fulfilling those desires in some way consistent with the magical goal. The logos can do this: integration and synthesis are its talents.

If eros represents the desires that drive us, the thymos represents emotional needs. Whereas the eros accesses a phantasm from the senses or from memory and moves toward that phantasm with desire, the thymos responds not to phantasms but to thoughts about those phantasms. We are not made happy or sad by the things that happen to us, but by what we think about those things. This might seem counterintuitive. After all, if I win a prize, I am happy. If I lose something, I am sad. But it’s obvious that I am not happy or sad about those things until I realize it. If I win a prize and don’t hear about it for a couple months, I am not happy unaccountably and only later realize why. I am happy when I learn of having won the prize, because that’s when I can begin thinking about it and responding to those thoughts.

Many of the thoughts that make us unhappy or angry or afraid are irrational thoughts, which the logos would never approve if it could see them. But they can speed by so quickly that the logos doesn’t have time to stamp them with its approval or rejection. The trick to controlling this horse is to learn to see the thoughts that drive it rather than the horse itself. In other words, we don’t look at the emotion but at the thoughts that provoke it, just as we don’t look at the steering wheel but the road.

One way to do that is to write them down as they occur, but that’s sometimes impractical. A more practical method is to write down the thoughts that spark particular emotions later from memory. For example, if I find myself annoyed at the store, I might sit down later and remember that feeling of annoyance and ask, why was I annoyed? Because the woman in front of me was slow and rude. But that’s the phantasm: what thoughts about that phantasm led to annoyance? That she should be faster, that she should be politer, and that she should get out of my way. Once we do this, we can start to see the patterns of irrationality. For example, the word “should” is absurd in those thoughts: why should she be faster? By natural law? No, surely not, or she would have been. By moral law? What kind of ridiculous moral law would state that a person shouldn’t take their time at the checkout? And even if it did, how can I expect every single person to follow every single moral rule or rule of politeness that exists? They wouldn’t be rules if people just naturally followed them. A more rational thought to replace it with would be “I’d prefer that she speed up.” That is true, rational, and not tremendously emotional.

Psychologists, particularly cognitive behavioral psychologists, have written extensively about this approach to controlling the thymos. The methods they derive are closely related to Stoic methods invented in Late Antiquity, as some psychologists are now recognizing.6 Psychology, after all, is just a branch of philosophy, at least from the perspectives of the great philosophers of Greece and the late Roman empire.

What the therapists and even Stoics fail to mention is that it’s also worthwhile to keep track of our happy thoughts. For example, perhaps we have a good day at work and we write “I was happy today.” Why? “Because I was very well-prepared and my plan was quite successful.” That’s just the phantasm, though, and didn’t cause the emotion of happiness. So what did I think about that phantasm that created happiness? “I helped people understand something complex today, and am a competent and skilled person.” Now, we can begin to apply the searchlight of the logos on this thought: is it rational to be happy when you help someone? Yes, because we are social creatures and it is divine for us to aid each other. Is it rational to be happy when one is skilled? Perhaps, but it’s important to recognize that a skilled person might act unskilled on some days. If we’re only happy when we apply certain labels to ourselves, we must expend a lot of useless energy upholding those labels. Instead of selecting my happiness from that thought, I chose to focus on the first, more rational reason to be happy. While you may very well be skilled and competent at your work, someday you may goof up, and you don’t want to be crushed when that happens.

If we start to dig into Egyptian, Hermetic, Neoplatonic, Qabalistic, and other psychologies we’ll discover slightly different lists of parts of the soul arranged slightly differently. But they all have in common the Platonic realization that we are not a single, undifferentiated force of consciousness. We know this through mere observation, so why the concept of a unitary soul persists in our culture is beyond my comprehension. We all know we are thinking beings, whatever else we might be, as Descartes so succinctly puts it: cogito ergo sum, he writes, “I think, therefore I am,” or less literally, “I know that I am thinking these thoughts, and therefore I know that I must exist to think them.” But we also know that sometimes we think one thing and do another. Sometimes we want what we know will hurt us or feel emotions we don’t want to feel. If you’ve ever had a crush on an unsuitable or unavailable person, you know quite well that our emotions and desires do not always match our thoughts.

What Plato recognized is that we are not a thing but a system. The logos reasons, the eros wants, and the thymos feels. And each communicates with the other. But he also recognized that we’re not a democracy in our heads. Like a ship at sea, we’re ruled by the captain, our logos—at least, unless there’s a mutiny. Plato understood that many of us are just that: ships in mutiny, colliding into each other because the navigator is powerless, no matter how loudly he shouts, to bring the sailors back under control. Of course, he used the metaphor of a chariot because in a chariot race a horse going astray can lead to a spectacular wreck—which was probably half the reason people went to chariot races in the first place, just as we go to hockey games hoping to see a fight. It’s less fun to watch when it’s us, of course, and even the most skilled charioteer could have a bad race, just as even the most skilled theurgist can have a bad day, week, or month.

Exercise 1.3: Contemplating the Parts of the Soul

This is a useful contemplation whenever you are feeling overwhelmed or conflicted about a course of action. I like to do it before I do any magic or undertake a big project to make sure that all the parts of my soul are pulling in the same direction and rein them in if they’re not.

Step 1: Begin by relaxing as you do when you are going to do a contemplation.

Step 2: Imagine yourself in a room or temple. You are alone and looking out of your own eyes at a relatively empty and featureless room. Let this phantasm of yourself in such a place become as strong and vivid as you can.

Step 3: Feel whatever desires you are currently experiencing. These may be small—a desire to shift to a more comfortable position or eat something—or they may be much larger. Perhaps your eros is calm and satisfied right now or a raging storm of lust. Either way, feel it where it is in your body without responding to it.

Step 4: When you have a strong sense of that desire, let it take form in front of you. Perhaps it will look like a child, an animal, a double of yourself—it doesn’t matter. Just let it take form and hold the visualization of it in this mental space.

Step 5: Now, determine which emotions you are feeling. What are your physiological responses to events, and how are you interpreting them? Are you feeling sad, happy, content, nervous—or some combination? Don’t worry about listing the emotions by name: just feel them.

Step 6: Once you have a strong sense of those emotions, again, let them take form outside of you in that mental space.

Step 7: You’ve now got your eros and your thymos separated from you, and what remains is the logos. Now you can communicate with them directly, asking them questions and listening to their responses, as well as the reactions of your body. For example, if you wish to overeat, you could ask your thymos why your appetite exists from its perspective, what emotional needs it fulfills. Then you could turn to your eros and ask why it desires this, and would it settle for some other desire instead?

Eventually, you can begin to negotiate. Ask if your eros will be satisfied with something smaller than a whole tub of ice cream? You can even make bargains—“I tell you what. You can have one bowl of ice cream, but if you start demanding another bowl, I’m going to just dump the rest of the tub down the sink.” You’ll be surprised how far fair and rational bargaining will get you with your eros and thymos.

Wisdom and Virtue

In the occult community, we speak quite a lot about wisdom, but rarely do I see much practice of it. The question is, how would we know it when we see it? Some people seem to think wisdom is a particular bearing of the body; a mild smile and a soft, platitudinous way of speaking. Some think it’s a haughty superiority, as if condescending to children. And some think it’s portentous pronouncements. I suspect all these attempts to “look wise” might say more about how people’s parents acted or what kind of novels they like to read than about true wisdom.

Fortunately, the ancients have a very good definition of wisdom that is hard to miss and a clear program for how to develop it. Wisdom, they said, was the perception of the good. If you know what is good and now how to achieve it, you have wisdom. This definition is quite practical: we can judge, moment to moment, whether we act wisely or unwisely by whether or not we have chosen the good. Food is good: if I forgo it and starve myself deliberately, I am being unwise. Even alcohol is good if taken in moderation, although I may be wise to forgo that entirely if know myself inclined to a weakness toward it. If I eat a whole pizza in one sitting and drink a whole bottle of wine, I have exceeded the good: I have acted unwisely. In every instance, then, wisdom consists of finding the balance between extremes, the golden mean. Four particular golden means are enumerated by the ancients as virtues, or strengths, that a wise person would develop: temperance, prudence, courage, and justice.

The Neoplatonists seemed to think that developing virtue was a necessary first step for the practice of theurgy. A lot of life’s problems are simply the result of a lack of wisdom and can be solved merely by rearranging one’s thinking. Once solved, those problems no longer interfere with the quest for henosis. Moreover, if we are to call the gods to us, it stands to reason that we should be pleasing to them. What is pleasing to humans? Beauty and the goodness it reflects. So it stands to reason that the gods, too, will admire beauty. But whereas humans, dwelling in the world of matter, might be attracted to physical beauty, the gods will be attracted to beauty of the soul: virtue.

Temperance, or sōphrosynē, can be summed up in four words: “Know what is enough.” We Americans live in a culture that does not encourage much temperance, sad to say. Americans have always had a weird relationship with the idea, from the Temperance movement of the early twentieth century (which reinterpreted temperance to mean absolute abstinence) to our current culture of 2,000-calorie sandwiches and coffee drinks with several days’ worth of fat. This virtue, therefore, is one of the harder ones to develop for those who live in such a culture.

One way to develop temperance is to deliberately do without for a set time. How long can you go without eating fast food? At first you may think, not long. But eventually you’ll realize you could go your whole life and never eat another bite of fast food. Knowing it’s possible helps you see what is enough. Of course, temperance isn’t absolute abstinence of all joy: on the contrary, it’s knowing how much you can take in and enjoy and how much you can’t. Another way to develop temperance is to take something you enjoy—video games, cookies, or anything else—and give yourself only a quarter of what you normally would of that thing. If you typically play video games for two hours, set a timer and play only for thirty minutes. If you normally eat a whole cookie, break it into quarters and eat only one—give the rest away if you can’t resist it at first. You might still, from time to time, eat a whole cookie or spend a whole weekend playing games, but you’ll do so consciously, knowing that you have exceeded what is enough by choice, rather than compulsion.

Another way to explore temperance as a virtue is, paradoxically, to develop new pleasures. Try sushi, go out dancing, go bowling, try learning a musical instrument or a new language. You might find you take joy in these activities that you didn’t think you would. This also teaches you what is enough. Going out dancing every weekend might be a lot of fun, but you may learn that staying at home and reading a novel is also enough for you to enjoy your weekend.

Temperance also is that part of wisdom that sees what we have. Make a list of all the things that bring you gratitude and awe, and add to it frequently. Spend some time each morning giving thanks, perhaps just in general, perhaps to a deity, for what you have, even if it’s meager. Even if you are scraping by, ill, unhappy, or unfortunate: you have something that you can be grateful for. I’m not saying that your suffering isn’t real and serious, but that even in the darkest moments, we can find something precious, even if it’s only the fact that we exist and can suffer.

The second virtue, phronēsis, usually translated “prudence,” isn’t like what we mean by that word now: saving our money and being cautious. It can be that, of course, because forethought is an important part of prudence, but a person with this virtue might not be cautious at all if caution is not called for. A better translation might be “practical wisdom” or “situational understanding.” It starts in the awareness that an action that is right in one place and time may be uncalled for in another. For a trivial example, you wouldn’t eat with the same manners at a fancy restaurant as you do in a backyard cookout. As a less trivial example, if someone needs your help, do you offer it? In some situations, perhaps even most, the right thing to do is to offer help; but in others, help may be counterproductive. I’ve often watched students work through a problem, and I’ve had to bite my tongue not to offer premature help before they had a chance to figure out where they went wrong themselves. It’s easy to see how this gets translated as “prudence,” but the meaning of that English word doesn’t cover nearly as wide a range of care and awareness as phronēsis. Perhaps a better way to describe it is discernment, which is identifying and separating good from bad, true from false, and right from wrong.

Another way to think of it is that this is a virtue of perception: can you see things as they really are, or are you blinded by your preconceptions and language? This virtue is useful in analyzing our own right and wrong. If we look to our own souls, we might find things we don’t like: a tendency to lie, let’s say. Are we therefore liars? If you say, “yes, I am a liar,” you have abandoned the possibility of change and self-forgiveness. If you say, “I have lied. I will be careful not to do that again,” then you’ve opened yourself up for change and self-improvement. Similarly, when we look at ourselves, we’re sometimes blind to our strengths and the good within us. We cannot succeed in theurgy if we cannot recognize the good when we see it. It is prudent, therefore, to listen to the compliments of friends as well as their criticisms to learn who we are.

The third virtue, andreia, or courage, is also a difficult one to understand, as we often call courage those things which are not actually virtuous or good. Ultimately, courage is the virtue of acting with contempt for the inconsequential. Our prudence will teach us that our physical body is not as important as our soul and that we are free to choose our actions even if that freedom is constrained. It is courage that makes a stand, even if it means losing a job or one’s life, because courage recognizes that our values are more precious than our jobs or even lives. But courage isn’t always a life-or-death matter. Courage is also how you deal with the daily difficulties and pains of life: do you suffer under them or do you face them with equanimity?

Courage is a good example of the golden mean. We should not be foolhardy, certainly, rushing into every dangerous situation without regard for our welfare. By the same token, we shouldn’t be cowards, huddling in our homes with the doors locked. But how do we find a balance? We can’t just be fools half the time and cowards the other half, because that’d be insane. No, we must look at each situation, judge it with prudence, and decide whether it is wiser to be safer or to take a risk. Finding this golden mean requires practice and an awareness of what you value and why.

The final virtue, dikaiosynē, is the virtue of “justice,” which we might more accurately translate “fairness” or even “charity.” Justice is the mean between unthinking retribution and absolute clemency, but it is closer to the pole of clemency than it is to revenge. But justice is also the scale on which we weigh our values. Is it better to save a hundred dollars or buy a new piece of jewelry? We tell ourselves, sometimes, that justice is involved: we deserve the treat. But what do we truly value? Moreover, what if the choice is saving a hundred dollars versus telling a lie?

Imagine after shopping and arriving at home, you discover that a distracted checker gave you a twenty-dollar bill instead of a one-dollar bill in change. Do you drive back to the store? We might rationalize that we should not, that it is out of the way, that it is not our problem. But what does real justice demand when we step back and look at the situation with prudence? I have not earned this money, the checker will have to pay for it or get fired, and so—what is just? As someone who has more than once returned to the store to pay for a single item that didn’t ring up properly, it’s obvious where my opinion falls. But you must let your own reason guide you.

The golden mean, mentioned earlier, is the teaching that each virtue is a mean between two extremes. That is, it’s a golden mean because it shifts and changes due to circumstances: this is not a list of commandments but ethics built on reaction to the world as it is. So for each of the virtues there are two vices, which might seem an unduly harsh way to run a universe, but so it goes.

For prudence, we have foolishness on one extreme, and haughtiness on the other. The fool is the person who does not know nor cares to know. This is the person who covers his or her ears and eyes and yells “LA LA LA” when confronted with unpleasant truths. The haughty person is the know-it-all who offers an opinion on every occasion, always pointing out that others in the conversation are wrong. Where the fool might also do this, the haughty person has the advantage of usually being right. But it doesn’t improve the experience for those involved that he or she is; if anything, it makes the listeners less likely to take that person’s advice.

Temperance has two opposite poles, both denials of temperance. One is overindulgence. This might be drunkenness or eating too much, but it could even be reading too much, playing too many video games, and so on. Of course, “too much” is subjective, which is why temperance is a mean between the two extremes. If I want to spend Saturday reading a fun novel, that’s not necessarily overindulgence; but if I neglect other work or my loved ones for the exciting book, that’s another matter. The opposite, self-denial, is strangely just as common. People in America, at least, seem to swing back and forth wildly. One day, we might be eating huge hamburgers with thousands of calories; the next, we’re on a cabbage soup diet. Of course, again, this is a matter of finding the mean. An alcoholic may indeed wisely decide never, ever to indulge in alcohol again without failing at achieving temperance. We don’t need to have just a little bit of heroin in order to show that we have found a golden mean! But people have not really achieved temperance if they hurt themselves by starving, by refusing themselves time to relax and rest, or by living in unnecessary austerity they secretly hate.

Justice’s two poles may seem familiar to many occultists: severity and excessive mercy. If you are severe, you are a person who has standards so high that no one can live up to them—probably not even yourself. In my experience, few people are as unjust to others as they are to themselves. If you beat yourself up because you are not perfect, you are being unjust. No one is perfect. And if you are disappointed with the effects of a ritual and think, “I suck at magic,” you might want to withhold judgment. For one thing, one never knows until all forces have played out. But for another, no one is perfect all the time at any skill, even adepts at those skills. The polar extreme of severity is excessive mercy, which I must admit I see less often. When we do see this in our society, it’s in the form of a person who never says no, even though he or she really wants to. But you also see it in the overindulgent parent or the boss or teacher who accepts excuse after excuse, rather than face the confrontation that is needful.

Of course, that might be a failure of courage as well, specifically cowardice. Cowardice isn’t feeling fear; feeling fear is normal. Cowardice is giving in to that fear. We all have probably exhibited a bit of cowardice from time to time. Choosing not to go to the party because you don’t want to meet people you might not like could be cowardice (or it might be prudence if you’re doing it because you know you need to do other things at home—this can become sticky to tease out, as you see). Phobias and anxieties are medical conditions, of course, and not an indication that you lack virtue—although prudence would entail getting treatment, since they both usually respond well and quickly to it. The opposite of courage is foolhardiness, a word I’ve always loved, because it reminds me of Hardy of Laurel and Hardy, who is also a good icon of it. It’s doing stupid things without thinking about the consequences, and even intelligent people can fall for it. It might mean having unprotected sex, gossiping about a colleague for a cheap laugh, or even drinking a milkshake even though you know you’re lactose intolerant. Obviously, it can also mean rushing into danger, getting in fights, and so on. Now, if you’re a stuntman or a professional racecar driver, you’re not necessarily foolhardy. The way you can tell is that you take safety precautions: you behave prudently in the face of the danger.

In fact, all these virtues can be reduced to prudence, which itself is a kind of wisdom. Ultimately, that’s what virtue tries to inculcate in us: wisdom. And wisdom is a divine force in the universe, so by becoming virtuous we begin to build a mind that looks more and more like the mind of the divine.

Exercise 1.4: Inventory of Virtues

You can do this exercise on three different levels. Start with the first level, the general assessment, then begin to practice the retrospective contemplation and the prospective contemplation. This exercise has the goal of giving you a firmer sense of who you are: your values and strengths as a person. It may not seem flashy or impressive for those who want to cut to the circumambulations and chanting, but it’s extremely valuable to lay foundations for that kind of more overtly magical work later. It’s not meant to be an excuse to beat your breast for your weaknesses, and if you begin to do that, stop the exercise for a while and work on developing self-compassion.

Step 1: The general assessment. Get a small book or open a computer file in which you make four lists, headed: Temperance, Prudence, Courage, and Justice. Under each list, write down the qualities, experiences, and ideas you have about them. Some questions to get you started:

Temperance

• Where are you inclined to do too much? This can be food, drink, work, anger, or anything else that is best in moderation.
• What do you keep a close rein on that could run away from you? Perhaps it is a whim or desire you control, a fondness for a particular thing, or anything else.
• What do you deprive yourself of that you don’t have to? Perhaps you tell yourself every year you’ll go on vacation next year but never really do. Or perhaps you want a new computer and really need one but keep putting it off.

Prudence

• What are you blind to? Perhaps you have prejudices about a particular group of people (not necessarily a race or ethnicity; you might be prejudiced about Lexus drivers), or maybe you discount information on a particular topic you don’t like.
• What are you particularly wise about? What do you know how to do well, and what kind of problems can you solve without much difficulty?
• What sorts of things do you overthink to the point of anxiety or paralysis?

Courage

• What are you afraid of to the point of not wanting to act? Perhaps you’ve put off a dental appointment for two years, or you don’t want to fly because of fear.
• What are you brave about? You might still feel fear, of course, but where do you act in spite of that fear?
• When are you foolhardy, rushing in even though you know it’s unduly dangerous? Perhaps you engage in risky behavior in one or more areas of your life.

Justice

• What do you have negative biases against? These might seem to be trivial things, like particular brands of computers or political parties, but it’s worth putting down everything you can think of.
• Where in your life do you exhibit fairness and honesty?
• Where are you excessively lenient? Do particular types of people get away with more just because of who they are? Do you treat some people differently than others for no logical reason other than their power over you or their attractiveness, physical or otherwise?

You can add to this list over time. Be kind (exhibit justice, in other words) with yourself, but also be honest. You are not as bad as you might imagine, and you are not as great as you might hope. You’re human and as we’ll learn, the gospel of theurgy is that being human, flawed as we might be, is a wonderful thing to be.

Step 2: The daily assessment: retroactive contemplation. For this step, you will do a similar activity but rather than write it down you’ll run through it in your head. I like to do it before bed, but some people prefer to do it a bit before to give them time to unwind. Begin by imagining waking up the morning previous. Remember what you did at each step of the day, and for each significant decision, identify it as arising from a virtue, vice, or neutral trait. For example, I got up and went to work, where I met with clients. That action required prudence, because I had to identify their needs and react to them. It also required justice, because I had to react appropriately. Then, driving home, I got mad at someone in traffic. That was a failure of prudence, because it put me in danger and surrendered my equanimity to another, and it was also an absence of temperance, because I indulged unnecessarily in anger. Run through the whole day, taking mental note of what you did well and what you did badly. If you do this every day, you’ll find yourself doing it during the day, thinking “how will this stand up to my assessment later?” Of course, what you don’t want to do is worry or dwell. Once you identify something as a vice, simply let it go, knowing that identifying it is all you need to do for this step.

Step 3: Prospective contemplation. In the morning, before beginning your day (perhaps in the shower) take a few moments to think about what you might face. For example, if you have a project that needs to be done, ask yourself “what will be a prudent action to take? What would be the courageous, temperate, just course of action?” Do this for each of your day’s planned activities, and you will find quickly that you have developed a habit of virtue that kicks in even when unexpected events surprise you.

How Is Theurgy Practical?

You might have gotten the impression from the last section that theurgy is just a tarted-up excuse for moral posturing and preaching. If so, I’d like you to understand me differently. The goal of achieving virtues is not to be “good,” although you will be. The purpose of achieving virtue is to be strong enough to deal with the gods themselves. Virtue means, literally, “strength.”

The entire path of theurgy is a path of practicality, rather than airy-fairy imaginings, despite historical impressions to the contrary. Some proponents of practical magic (although certainly not all) might say “if magic doesn’t achieve an observable effect in the world, you can’t know if it worked or not.” This is an interesting statement because it seems reasonable and rational but encodes some assumptions about the world that are strangely contrary to most magical systems. For one thing, it assumes that the world is material, and the material world and our experiences of it are what is real. That’s hardly accepted in most magical systems (except perhaps chaos magic). Also, the statement assumes that changing oneself isn’t a change in the real world, but of course whatever the real world is, we exist in it, whether as bodies or as minds.

Theurgy achieves three fundamental and practical effects that are real and measurable and even affect the physical world. Theurgy makes the practitioner a good person, which isn’t some vague moralistic smiling church-social happy-clappy space-cadet concept of “good” but a practical, real kind of good that can be observed objectively. Theurgy also makes the practitioner a better magician; in fact, I’ve come to believe that theurgy is the foundation of all other practical magic. If you want magic to be a tool to get you rich, laid, and powerful, that’s fine. Theurgy can actually help with that, although perhaps not the way you might imagine. Finally, theurgy offers a goal and an aim for life and magic, something sorely missing in much postmodern magic—and for that matter, much religion.

From a theurgic perspective, being a good person isn’t the same as being a “nice” person. A good knife is good for cutting; a good antibiotic is good for curing infections. A good person from this perspective is good for something. It isn’t enough to be nice (in fact, niceness is often a way to avoid the requirements of justice and courage), and it isn’t enough to be charitable alone. And yet even being good for something isn’t enough: a knife can also be good for stabbing, an antibiotic can be too good at its job and weaken the immune system, and a person might be quite good at cheating and stealing. A good person must be good for something good.

But what is good?

Good is love.

But what is love?

I remember when my partner first said, “I love you.” I answered back, “I love you too, but now we need to define ‘love’ to each other”—the perils of loving a philosopher. But the answer is pretty simple: love is when your growth and health and happiness and welfare are as valuable to me as my own. Notice that’s not “more valuable”; justice demands that we be equal partners, and while self-sacrifice might be a noble thing in the right situation, it cannot be a way of life. Logic forbids it: if your growth is as important as mine and I sacrifice myself needlessly for your own growth, I have cut down one healthy tree in favor of another healthy tree. Of course, some situations may demand such a choice, but they are contrived and unlikely. By all means, care for the sick … but do not make yourself sick in the process.

Yet there is love and there is love. Loving someone else is one thing, loving the world is another. Can you live such that the growth and welfare of the world is as important to you as your own? Eventually you can or at least move toward that goal. I’m not talking about being a saint walking on water and curing lepers although if that’s your aim in life, good for you. I’m talking about living in the world in such a way that the world is better off for your having lived in it. You don’t need to be a plaster saint for that. In fact, it helps if you’re not, if actually you’re a person with a normal life who has an extraordinary effect on the world.

It’s easy to get tangled up in specific actions. Is this action good or bad? That’s why I advocate, as did the writers of Late Antiquity, a virtue ethic that sweeps aside questions of specific action in favor of particular dispositions that will serve us in any activity. If you develop courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, you will grow in wisdom. If you grow in wisdom, you will act out of love.

And, as you do this and as you work with the divine forces described in this book, you will begin to experience a sound and rational reason for love. You will learn that you are the world in which you live. There is no difference. I don’t mean in the solipsistic sense that the world doesn’t exist, but in the sense that if you didn’t exist, we’d have a different world. You depend on the world and it depends on you, because you’re part of the same thing. Of course that’s easy to write and it sounds a bit like a 1970s folk song, but the experience cannot be explained.

Most of my readers want to be good, as well, at magic. If you’re already a practitioner of a magical path, you may have achieved some considerable skill in that field. Theurgy will help you achieve more. In fact, limits to your magic begin to melt away when you plug into the forces underneath reality. If you pick up some of the traditional magical texts from the Renaissance, you’ll see this theme returned to again and again. In Abramelin, you must achieve knowledge and conversation of an angel before you begin. The majority of the Arbatel consists of moral aphorisms designed to make the magician pleasing to God. Even the Key of Solomon exhorts the reader to engage in constant prayer and piety: “Solomon, the Son of David, King of Israel, hath said that the beginning of our Key is to fear God, to adore Him, to honour Him with contrition of heart, to invoke Him in all matters which we wish to undertake, and to operate with very great devotion, for thus God will lead us in the right way.”7

Perhaps these suggestions are merely pious dodging to throw off the scent of unfriendly critics, but I don’t think so: I think these magicians knew that you had to reach up in order to reach down, like the magician in the Rider Waite Smith tarot. The social element of magic has been long overlooked in contemporary Western magical practices. Instead of considering whom we can cultivate as allies and friends in the invisible world, we concern ourselves with “magical energy” and other such models. But throughout most of human history, magic has been a social act, a way of interacting, positively or negatively, with people. Some of those people were material, some immaterial, but the relationship was paramount. Building this relationship is what theurgy is about, because as you work with the gods you begin to work with their daimones, their deputies, and in time you gain a familiar friendship with the underlying forces of the universe itself.

Of course, your goals going into theurgy might very well change as you practice. I sometimes think the practice of magic is a benign trap. Yes, you can be powerful, wealthy, sexually alluring, and so on—but by the time you’ve got all that, you won’t want it anymore. You’ll have better goals. But if what it takes to get you started is the promise of money and sex, then by all means, start with that. And who knows? Perhaps for you that is the purpose of your life, and when you reach up to the gods they’ll say, “Hey, glad to get in touch with you. Here’s a new sports car and a swimsuit model of your preferred gender/sex combination.”

It might seem grand to say it, but this is a book about contacting gods, so why not be grand: I know the purpose of human life. It’s the same for everyone. Sure, it looks different for different people: For some, it might just look like having lots of adventurous sex in exotic locales while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. For others, it might look like founding a charitable foundation. For others, it’s writing books, making art, cooking delicious food, sweeping streets, dancing beautifully, singing, gymnastics, football, astronomy, or gathering the world’s largest ball of twine. From the perspective of a theurgist, ultimately the purpose of human life boils down to this (yes, I will now tell you the meaning of life—you’ve got your money’s worth for this book; never say you didn’t): The purpose of human life is to join the gods in the great work of creation.

Your skills, talents, dispositions, and even your vices all determine how you’ll go about that. For me, it’s teaching and writing. For others, it’s making a room beautiful and functional by rearranging the furniture. For others, it might be playing tennis. But you’ll know you’ve found this purpose because the gods will stand behind you as you work, and you will look up—even if you’ve felt like a slacker or a failure—and realize that you’ve accomplished a lot without ever being aware of it.

Theurgy can help you find the way you achieve this purpose, what Aleister Crowley called your “true will.”

Nothing is more practical than that.

[contents]

2 Pauliina Remes. Neoplatonism. (Berkeley, CA: Unversity of California Press, 2008), 166. For more elaborate and historically detailed accounts of the various Neoplatonic cosmologies, I highly recommend this book.

3 Corpus Hermeticum XI:20. My translation. My source for the Greek Hermetica is A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, trans. Corpus Hermeticum. (Collection des Universités de France. Paris, 1945). A very readable English translation also exists: Brian Copenhaver, trans. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation with Notes and Introduction. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

4 Pauliina Remes. Neoplatonism. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 120.

5 Mark Edwards, trans. Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by their Students. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 1.

6 Donald Robertson. The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy. (London: Karnac, 2010).

7 S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers, trans. The Key of Solomon the King. (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1974), 10.