chapter 2

What Is a God?

As I explained in the last chapter, monotheistic and exclusionary religions often have an orthodoxy, a set of beliefs to which every worshiper must adhere. Sometimes, these appear in a statement called a credo or a catechism. Pagans, as you might imagine, never had such a credo, and so they were often a bit more accepting of new ideas. Of course, they were not always the earth-loving and diversity-accepting people we wish to imagine them to be—after all, one of the (clearly false) accusations that got Socrates killed was that he introduced new gods. But at most times throughout antiquity in the West, different theories and idea of the gods coexist more or less peacefully. The ancients called these ideas “schools,” although we now think of them as philosophies.

We can divide these schools into a couple groups, not just for the sake of classification but because we’re likely to see ourselves in them. It’s handy to have a label to attach to our introspective activities, although it’s also worthwhile to keep in mind that any given individual, while identifying with one or another label, might study under several schools.

Ultimately, the theology of the schools hinged on two simple questions:

• What is the ground of being? What is really real?
• Is the divine immanent, transcendent, or both? In other words, are the gods in the world, out of the world, or both in and out of the world?

On the ground-of-being question were usually two different answers: matter and spirit. Among the materialists were such influential schools as the Stoics and the Epicureans, who also offered useful moral teachings and practical wisdom (in fact, even though not a materialist, I regard my philosophy as heavily influenced by the Stoics and have even called myself a Stoic). On the side of spirit were other, more esoteric philosophies sometimes called “mysteries.” Among these were the religious mysteries, in Late Antiquity, of the Great Mother, Dionysos, and Isis. We will explore these mysteries more fully later. Often, modern philosophers discount the mystery schools as not really being philosophies, but Algis Uždavinys has argued that far from not being philosophies, they are actually foundational practical philosophies from which our modern ideas of philosophy derive.8

On the question of the nature of the divine, opinions ranged from the view that the gods exist but are so separate from the world that they have no effect on it at all, to purely pantheistic views that the gods are in fact not just in the world but are the world.

These questions gave rise in the fourth century to a system of philosophy—actually, a cluster of different systems of philosophy—that tried to reason its way out of manifold conundrums and objections. We now call this system Neoplatonism, but of course they just called themselves Platonist. The practice of theurgy in Late Antiquity was in part a response to the arguments of the Neoplatonists, so it’s worth understanding those arguments even if our views of the divine differ.

In brief, the Neoplatonists answered the question of the ground of being by saying that what was really real were not things but the Ideas those things reflect. The Neoplatonists were not solipsists; they did not believe that objects only existed in your head. The Ideas they were talking about did not exist in any head, but in the Nous itself. The universe, in other words, was a consciousness, and matter merely the reflection of its thoughts. This idea is actually consistent with some contemporary philosophies and speculations about cosmology, among them panpsychism.

For the Neoplatonic philosophers, matter wasn’t evil or degraded, only vaguely existent. The exercise you did in the last chapter gave you a sense of why they thought that; separated out from every concept, matter only remains a something that takes on impressions. Matter is only evil insofar as it distracts us from the really real, at least for most Neoplatonists.

They answered the question about the nature of the divine with a bit more complexity. Recognizing that humans had a mortal part and an eternal part, they also recognized that the gods did as well. The gods were in the world as they impressed themselves as Ideas on matter. They were also transcendent of space and time because they did not change or die. So how was it possible that the gods were both in the world and out of it? This is a question I wish to explore, because I think it’s one of the central theological questions of contemporary Paganism and has important practical implications for the work of theurgy, whether or not you approach theurgy from the position of a Neoplatonist.

Transcendent and Immanent Deity:
Gods and Daimones

Let’s eavesdrop again on the philosopher Philanike and Euthymios, once again in Philanike’s kitchen, where she is sharing freshly baked cookies with her disciple.

Philanike: So, are the cookies good?

Euthymios: They certainly are. I love it when the chocolate is all gooey.

Ph: Are those things that you love good?

Eu: Some of them. But that really belongs in the previous chapter, don’t you think, with all that virtue talk?

Ph: You’re right. This chapter’s about the gods. So—what’s a god?

Eu: You tell me.

Ph: Cheater. Am I a god?

Eu: Keep the cookies coming, and I’ll deify you all right … Fine, fine, no need to give me that look. No, you are not a god.

Ph: How do you know?

Eu: You’re mortal, and we call the gods “athanatoi,” the undying ones, because they are not subject to death.

Ph: So now we’re Greek again? How inconsistent. Fine: they’re undying. What in the world of matter is undying?

Eu: Nothing. Everything changes and is subject to death.

Ph: So the gods are not material? What are they, then?

Eu: They must be mental—ideas, in other words, in the cosmic sense, not in the day-to-day sense of “ooh, I’ve got an idea! These cookies would be even better with some milk!”

Ph: Fine, I’ll get you a glass. But while I do that, tell me this: if
the gods are not mortal because they are outside of matter, outside therefore of time and space, then can the gods change?

Eu: I suppose not, since change implies time. And if the gods, as you say, are ideas in the cosmic sense, they are prior to time and space. Hence, they are not extended in space nor are they existent in time. So no change.

Ph: Then why bother praying? Here’s your milk.

Eu: I suppose there’s no purpose. Should I become an atheist, then?

Ph: If you like. There’s something to be said for atheism. But consider the sun.

Eu: If I’m quiet, it’s because I’m considering the sun, not because my mouth is filled with gooey cookies and milk.

Ph: So much for temperance. Does the sun get brighter or darker?

Eu: Yes, but not so quickly that we’d ever notice it.

Ph: So when we say “the sun rose today,” what we mean is—?

Eu: The earth turned to face the sun.

Ph: And when we say “the sun is bright today,” what we mean is—?

Eu: There are no clouds or mist between us and the sun.

Ph: So when we say “The god Helios favors me” what we mean is—?

Eu: I’ve turned toward Helios. I’ve put my mind, in the personal sense, in harmony with the cosmic idea of Helios.

Ph: So Helios never needs to change: we change, and in that change, become aware of the god.

Eu: Neat. But what about miracles?

Ph: Such as?

Eu: Prophesy. Or just garden variety religious experiences.

Ph: The gods must work in the world of matter then, after all, yes?

Eu: How can that be, since they do not die and thus are not extended in matter?

Ph: How can it be that you are mortal, yet can think immortal thoughts?

Eu: Some part of me must extend beyond space and time.

Ph: So some part of the gods must extend into space-time, or at least be able to influence it, even if not material.

Eu: So the gods, like me, have bodies?

Ph: What’s the sun, if not the body of Helios? But of course, Helios has lots of bodies. He’s in the sun, in gold, in lions, in all sorts of things.

Eu: That sounds like a topic for another chapter, maybe chapter 3.

The late Neoplatonic philosopher Sallustius was an interesting figure. He was one of the leading Pagan thinkers under the reign of the last Pagan emperor of Rome, Julian the Philosopher (sometimes called Julian the Apostate by those with a different set of tools to grind). Sallustius struggled with this notion, that the gods were perfect and unchanging yet affected the world and were affected by our prayers and offerings. If you accept perfect, unchanging deities, there’s no point to prayer or theurgy at all. (Of course, you could reject perfect, unchanging deities, but Sallustius didn’t want to do that, because he felt it would compromise logic: after all, a thing can only change to become better, in which case it was not perfect before, or to become worse, in which case it stops being perfect. But he refuses to establish why the gods are perfect, insisting that it’s an axiom that they must be.) He writes in his “On the Gods and the World”:

It is impious to suppose that the Divine is affected for good
or ill by human things. The Gods are always good and always
do good and never harm, being always in the same state and
like themselves. The truth simply is that, when we are good,
we are joined to the Gods by our likeness to them; when
bad, we are separated from them by our unlikeness. And
when we live according to virtue we cling to the gods, and
when we become evil we make the gods our enemies—
not because they are angered against us, but because our
sins prevent the light of the gods from shining upon us,
and put us in communion with spirits of punishment.
And if by prayers and sacrifices we find forgiveness of
sins, we do not appease or change the gods, but by what we do and by our turning towards the Divine we heal our own badness and so enjoy again the goodness of the gods. To say that God turns away from the evil is like saying that the sun hides himself from the blind.9

So it is the act of worship that draws the worshiper to the gods, not the gods to the worshiper. Theurgy, therefore, isn’t like thaumaturgy, in which I ask a spirit to act upon the world. It’s changing oneself to be the sort of person who achieves the relevant desires. For example, if I do a love spell, I might make someone love me. But if I perform relevant theurgy, I become a person who is loved. The difference is subtle but transformative.

Yet we live in a world of time and space, so how can the gods act at all in such a world even just to help us change ourselves if they are always outside of it? The same question puzzled thinkers like Sallustius, but the answer is clear when we consider ourselves: we, too, exist in the world of time and space, and also at the same time we exist outside of it. We have an eternal part and a temporal part and so do the gods. The gods have—or rather, are—daimones which act upon the world.

The Greek word daimon is the word from which we get our “demon,” but it has a long history of referring not to evil demons but to spirits, some good, some bad, that interact with reality. The gods themselves are called daimones by ancient writers, and the line between daimones and deities is a fuzzy one. Plutarch went so far as to imagine that Apollo, for example, was an office, and mortal spirits filled that office in turn.

Of course, this isn’t the only ancient view of deity. We modern Pagans might be more comfortable with the Roman view, which held that the gods were numina (sing. numen). A numen was the underlying reality, the force beneath any phenomenon. Here, rather than having to wrangle with the sticky issue of time and space (a fun thing to wrangle with, but with only some practical effects on our practice) we can conceive of the gods as animistic forces existent in our world of daily experience. But this view, too, smacks of Platonism. After all, how do these forces interact with matter? We can’t measure, taste, hear, or smell the gods. Yet as Seneca the Younger writes, we feel the awe of the gods in the presence of nature:

If you have ever come upon a grove that is thick with ancient
trees which rise far above their usual height and block the
view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches,
then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the
spot and your wonder at the unbroken shade in the mist
of open space will create in you a feeling of the divine.10

How is this possible? The gods can be said to animate matter, and the word “animate” comes from from anima, “soul.” The gods are the souls of matter.

In the Neoplatonic system, each god can be seen as threefold. First is the god as an idea in the Nous, pure and changeless as an equation, and beyond time and space. Let’s take a deity like Apollo. In the world of Ideas, what does Apollo look like? In computer science, we now have intelligent algorithms not quite conscious but capable of doing complex decision making that looks a lot like intelligence. They are not even computer programs so much as mathematical expressions. Imagine Apollo as an algorithm—hardly the inspiring religious figure we might pray to! But consider how complex such an algorithm must be in the world of Ideas. It must contain all the laws of harmony, the behavior of light, beauty, standards of truth—all those things under the domain of Apollo.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that the Apollo of the world of Ideas is an equation or an algorithm in the literal sense. I wish only to create an example of how a changeless thing—an algorithm in this case—can be said to exhibit the ability to “think.” It’s not thinking as we imagine it with our minds locked in time. But it isn’t a contradiction to say that the gods exist in the world of Ideas outside of time yet still remain conscious beings rather than mere laws of the universe.

When these deities interact with matter, we have the part of the gods that are in relation to the world of psyche. Here we have the deities that ensoul matter, the daimones of the gods. From Apollo come daimones that govern music: Harmonia, for example, who is both a goddess and a part of Apollo. These are the personal gods, with names and images, and the worship of these gods is quite a bit easier than those abstract deity-concepts in the world of Ideas. And, in fact, there are daimones who simply take the name of Apollo, because they are clear reflections of that deity in the world of the psyche.

Finally, in the world of matter, in hyle, the gods manifest by imposing shape upon things. A piece of beautifully played music, here, can embody Apollo, as can a shaft of light. We will explore these manifestations of deity in a later chapter in greater depth, as such manifestations are useful tools for contacting the divine.

These levels of reality are not dimensions, but we can imagine an analogy in geometry. Take a cube and imagine that you slice across it in a plane. If you could live within that plane, you would see one of the two-dimensional shapes created by slicing a cube: a square, a tetrahedron, a number of other possibilities. Much like the shadows in the cave, the cube itself remains the same but we can turn our plane through it to give the impression of change and multiplicity. The daimones are like slices across the multidimensional forms of the gods.

While there are transcendent gods who exist outside the world of time and space, there are also gods—the “same” gods—that reach into our world of matter. Just like us, they have an eternal part and a physical part. To say that the daimones are mortal is to say that they, like the universe, change: when the universe suffers heat-death, they will fade away, but the eternal gods will remain because in their perspective, the universe has suffered, will suffer, is suffering its end, and its beginning.

I would contend that what slices across the unchanging forms of the gods to give the daimones form is the human mind. It is we who give the gods forms. The syncretic reflex of ancient people, who went to the north of Europe, for example, and met the god Odhinn and called him “the Germanic Mercury,” is actually a valid one. As modern scholars, we sometimes sneer at it. After all, we say, the cultural forces that shaped Odhinn are very different from those that shaped Mercury, and if we look at the mythology and functions of those different gods, we find myriad differences, and so on. But perhaps that urge to syncretism wasn’t so much an imperial leveling-out of religion but a recognition of a central truth: that Odhinn is a slice across the same vast divine Idea that Mercurius is.

Let me address a very popular theological idea in Pagan circles: the idea that we create the gods. Partially, I think this idea resonates with Pagans because it conforms to “enlightened” ideas about science and cultural studies. I also partially suspect it is appealing for the power it gives the worshiper, and partially, because perhaps it has some small part of truth. I think we do give the daimones their forms and names, just as we give our friends names by which we call them. But just like our friends, the daimones and the gods behind them exist before we do. Logic demands it. Something that creates something else is prior than that thing: a child comes after her parents, a computer program comes after the programmer, and so on. Yet the gods are prior to us: they have power and spiritual force well in excess of ours and existed before us. So how could we create them? Moreover, the gods are the divine ideas behind objects in the world. Helios (or Sunna or Sol) is the divine force behind the sun. Did we create the sun? Certainly not. So we did not create the gods, nor do they live on our prayers (this idea is easy to trace back to certain fantasy novels, hardly great sources of theology).

In conclusion, then, what we work with in theurgy are these culturally defined deities: entities to which we give names and forms. But we do not create them. They arise from divine figures external to space-time, Ideas in the world of Ideas. What we imagine as gods, as beings who move, think, and act in space-time are daimones of the unchanging gods in the world of Ideas. Through these temporal daimones, we can begin to approach the abstract and changeless gods. In practice, this can look quite a lot like Pagan worship as it has always been done: personal prayers to personal deities. But behind it is a deeper significance.

Pantheons

Every culture takes a census of their gods, which is one way they give them shape and form. These censuses are called pantheons, from Greek roots meaning “all the gods.” In practice, rarely does a pantheon list all the gods except in rigidly controlled cultures, examples of which I cannot easily call to mind. Gods are always coming into a culture or going out, depending on the needs of the people and the ways in which they perceive the reflections of the gods in their souls. In fact, for cultures that spanned a long period of time such as Greek culture, it’s hard to pin down one particular pantheon (and in fact it’s kind of ridiculous to write “Greek culture,” since that refers to cultures as different as Athens and Sparta, or Hellenic Alexandria and Bronze Age Achaeans). So any attempt to discuss the pantheons of particular religious groups will result in a more or less clumsy leveling. I want to make it clear how clumsy this leveling is because otherwise we might forget that we’re leaving gods out of our lists. And because this isn’t an exhaustive encyclopedia of ancient religious practices, I am limiting myself to some subpantheons in each larger pantheon.

I want to talk about two different pantheons, which for the sake of convenience I’ll call the Egyptian pantheon and the Greco-Roman pantheon. These terms alone are a good example of the clumsiness of such a project. And let me hedge one final time: I am approaching these pantheons from a theurgic perspective. The practices I describe in this book are not an attempt to reconstruct the ancient religion of Egypt or the late Roman Empire. I am not even trying to reconstruct the theurgic practices of Late Antiquity, since I have no problem including modern ideas about theology and spirituality.

The reason I address these two pantheons is that they were the central pantheons of the theurgy of Late Antiquity. Yet we have certain advantages over our ancient friends. For example, we understand some of the cultural and historical reality of Egypt better than Egyptians of the fifth century did because unlike them, we can read hieroglyphic writing. The secret of hieroglyphic writing was lost in about the fourth century, when most Egyptian was written in a derived but very different script called Demotic. The ability to read the monuments of ancient Egypt was only restored in the late nineteenth century. So we may have an understanding of ancient Egyptian religion that perhaps the Egyptians of Late Antiquity no longer did.

The Ennead of Heliopolis

Heliopolis, a city on the Nile delta, thrived throughout the Old and Middle Kingdom periods of ancient Egypt, from about 2700 bce to about 1700 bce. Heliopolis is its Greek name; the Egyptians called it something like Iwnw. The religious beliefs of Egypt were not uniform across the country, and every city had its own cosmology, patron gods, and so forth. The religious practices of Heliopolis were highly developed and carefully thought out, so the gods of this city ended up having an important place throughout Egypt as well as a large influence on the larger Greco-Roman world. The nine gods worshiped at Heliopolis were called the Ennead, a Greek word meaning “collection of nine.” They were far from the only pantheon, however, as different places had different arrangements, replacing Atum with Ptah for example, or adding Re to the mix. Don’t get the impression that this is a monolithic, formulaic pantheon, or self-contained in any way. It’s a snapshot of the religious beliefs of a very old and longstanding culture at one particular time.11

The chief of these gods is Atum, who is often depicted in art as a human wearing a red and white crown. Atum rose from the chaos of Nun to bring light to the world. Later, he became associated with Re, a solar god, hence giving Heliopolis its Greek name: “City of the Sun.” Atum is self-created. This is the god of creation and order, symbolized by light. According to mythology, Atum masturbated and from his semen created two new gods, Tefnut and Shu.12

Tefnut is the goddess of moisture. She is associated with another goddess, Maat, the goddess of rightness and balance. The king’s role in Egyptian politics and religions was to uphold Maat, or justice, and everyone whose heart is weighed at death is weighed in the scale of Maat, against a feather. Tefnut is also associated with Atum’s eye, or the eye of Re. Since the hieroglyph for “to do” is also the symbol of the eye, this links her to Atum’s action and efficacy in the world. With her brother Shu, she is also associated with time and eternity.13

Shu is a god of air and wind. Shu is also a kind of creator god, in that he makes existence possible by separating Nut and Geb, as explained below. Shu is often depicted with a feather on his head, just as Maat is, which links him and his sister Tefnut to the concept of primal rightness that Maat represents.

Shu and Tefnut together gave birth to two additional gods: Geb and Nut. Geb is the god of the earth, and Nut is the goddess of the sky. Geb is usually depicted as a reclining man with an erection pointed at the sky. Nut is usually depicted as a woman arched over the sky, the stars and sun and moon on her body, with her fingers and toes touching the earth at the farthest reaches of the cardinal points. According to the mythology of Heliopolis, when she and Geb were born, they copulated so fiercely and continuously that Shu separated them, pulling her up into the sky. Nut and Geb then gave birth to four gods: Seth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys.14

Seth is sometimes regarded as an evil god, but there are instances of his worship and even a few kings who took his name. Seth’s domain is destruction such as the destructive forces of weather in the desert, and he serves good by defending the sun from demonic attack. He’s the god of the desert itself, and in that role can be invoked for protection from its dangers.15 Seth is sometimes depicted as a creature that looks a bit like a greyhound with triangular ears, wider at the top than the bottom. Of course no such creature exists in Egypt, but it’s possible that his image represents an extinct animal or cryptid.16 The was scepter, a symbol of power, has Seth’s head on it.

Nephthys, of these four, is the least well understood. Her name in Egyptian is Nebt-Het, which is sometimes written on her headdress in hieroglyphs. Her name means “Lady of the House” or “Lady of the Temple,” and she is at least nominally Seth’s wife, although she does not support his violence toward Osiris. She joined her sister Isis in mourning Osiris’s death after Seth murdered him.17

Osiris began, apparently, as a deity of vegetation. Later, he became associated with embalming and rebirth. He is usually depicted as a mummy wearing a crown and holding the crook and flail.18 His skin is often black—a color of fertility and growth in Egypt, which in the original language of the country was called Kemt or Kemet, “the black land.” Sometimes, his skin is the green of new vegetation. Overall, Osiris is a god of life and the cycles of life. His cult is one of the most important in ancient Egyptian religion, although outside of Egypt two other gods, his wife and his son, take on greater importance.

I have saved his sister-wife Isis for last in my list because of her great importance in later Roman mystery cults. To the Egyptians she was a mother goddess and a goddess of magic and resurrection. She resurrected Osiris from the dead using the name of power she tricked from Atum-Ra, so she has the power of heka, or magical speech. She is also the mother of Horus, a sun-deity who in later mythologies avenges his father Osiris upon Seth.19 But her main popularity came in the Roman Empire when her cult became a Roman mystery religion, well after the heyday of Heliopolis.

This popular mystery religion offered salvation through initiation. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, a comedic novel written in the second century, is partially a tract for the Isis cult. In it, a young man named Lucius desires to experience magic. He gets his hands on a magical ointment and upon using it accidentally turns himself into an ass. He can transform back, he learns, if he simply eats a rose; but a series of unlikely coincidences continuously prevents him from ingesting the magical remedy. Ultimately he is saved through the divine intervention of Isis, and he joins her mystery religion.20 While this book is obviously a comedy, the religious and didactic elements are hard to deny, and Apuleius implies that we can be transformed from our bestial state by the intervention of the goddess.

Horus, too, gains a certain popularity outside of Egypt as a solar deity. Within Egypt, he is worshiped as a god of the sky, of the sun, and of kingship. He seems to be a possible amalgam of several falcon-deities.21 Outside of Egypt, he is most often depicted as the child of Isis, and becomes almost a symbol of her motherhood and nurturance. He also appears in a number of other forms, such Horus the Child (Harpocrates), who is depicted as a naked child representing the renewal of the universe. He is called upon in a number of spells to cure the bite of poisonous animals.22 Horus is not considered part of the Ennead, but as child of Isis and Osiris and enemy of his uncle Seth, he is often depicted along with images of the Ennead.

But let’s return to the Ennead, looking at it as a whole. What does this particular company of gods tell us about the nature of the divine, not just from the Egyptian perspective but from our own, later understanding? First, we see that the gods are arranged in a geometrical order:

Fig. 4: The Ennead

Each of the lines indicates a god who produces another god. Atum is in the center, unproduced by anything. He produces, of himself, two gods: Tefnut and Shu. Now, each of the gods produced after Tefnut and Shu have two lines leading to them: one from the mother, one from the father. Gods are placed opposite their mates. This diagram illustrates the admirable symmetry of the arrangement of the Ennead.

It is clear that this Ennead was selected to slice up the experience of a typical Egyptian at this time. Earth (Geb) and sky (Nut) are the pair between which everything else happens. These arise out of two primal elements: moisture (Tefnut) and air (Shu). We have a god of cultivation (Osiris) and one of the desert (Seth). Finally, we have two aspects of motherhood: one that gives life (Isis) and one that guards, protects, and nurtures us into old age and death (Nephthys).

We could abstract these gods further, and stretching back all the way to Late Antiquity mystics have certainly done so. Atum is the primal light, who gave birth to two movements: drawing together (in Tefnut) and separating apart (in Shu). We have above and below in Nut and Geb. Two types of earth, the wild earth of the desert (Seth) and the cultivated earth of the Nile (Osiris) are set forth below, while above we have two goddesses: one governing life and magic and one governing death and protection. Ultimately, the entire arrangement is a miniature precis of the experience of ancient Egyptian life. Every experience has a place in this divine scheme.

Greco-Roman Pantheons—Dodecatheon

The geometrical symmetry and symbolic completeness of these nine deities—which I have only sketched—shows a sophistication in ancient Egyptian religion that impressed Greco-Roman theurgists who sought such a sophistication for their native gods as well. Yet the imposed order of the Egyptian deities is a result of a trained priesthood living in a longstanding theocratic totalitarian society. The Greeks and later Romans who devised the Greco-Roman gods, while having a “state religion,” sometimes lacked the “state” on which to hang it. Until the Hellenistic period, the Greeks did not have a unified country but a collection of loosely affiliated and culturally connected city-states. Only when Alexander conquered the known world did the Greeks come under anything like a central authority. And Alexander, while occasionally worshiped as a god, had no interest in establishing a universal religion. Similarly, the Romans, while having kings in the beginning, moved toward a republic in 508 bce. While there were state positions of religious authority such as the pontifex maximus and various other priesthoods, there was little hegemony in place to establish or control doctrine.

Despite this anarchic theology, the notion of a company of twelve main gods arose early in Athens, around the sixth century bce or so, although it may well have had older roots. This scheme wasn’t meant to be all-inclusive (important deities like Hades are absent from some conceptions of it), but it was seen as an auspicious number of gods to sit on Olympus. These twelve gods consist, most often, of the list that follows. Quite a bit of controversy arises as to whether or not Hades is in the list, whether Hestia is, or whether she has been replaced by Dionysos. I will address that question later, but you’ll notice that my list of twelve gods has fourteen entries, and this controversy—not a failure of my mathematical ability—is the reason. I’ve added their Roman names after their Greek names to simplify later reference to Roman deities, but the character of the Roman gods is not always the same as the character of the Greek gods, as will be explained as we explore each deity.

Zeus (Iuppiter or Iove) is the king of the gods, usually depicted as a bearded patriarch. He is often holding a thunderbolt, his weapon. The eagle is sacred to Zeus. In mythology he is sometimes a bit of a philanderer, to put it mildly. In religious practice, however, he was the god of justice and good order, and the special protector of strangers and guests.

Hera (Iuno) is the queen of the gods, Zeus’s sister-wife, often shown with a peacock. She is the goddess of marriage and social order. In mythology, she’s cast as a jealous wife punishing those whom Zeus pursues, but in religious practice her cult seems to have regarded her as less bitter—but then, they also regard Zeus as less philandering. The moral is this: the myths are not accurate guides to the characters of the gods as religious figures.

Apollo (Apollo) is often conflated, in later mythology with Helios (Sol), the god of the sun. But Apollo’s domain is larger than that: as a god of light, music, and beauty, he is often painted with a lyre and a crown of laurel, a plant particularly sacred to him. He was also the god of plague and the healing thereof, as well as an important figure of prophesy. His temple at Delphi acted as the closest thing the ancient world had to a central religious authority able to make declarations of doctrine.

Artemis (Diana), like her brother Apollo, is often conflated with Selene (Luna), the goddess of the moon. But in earlier times, she was the goddess of the hunt and of magic. Her sacred city, Ephesos, has a famous statue of her with many breasts (or maybe they’re eggs). Her myths describe her staunch virginity and her loyalty to her brother.

Ares (Mars) is one of those gods whose character differs dramatically depending on whether we ascribe to the Greek or Roman view. In the Greek view, he is an animalistic and bloodthirsty god of war, whose worship was rarely undertaken as a practical cultus. Mars, on the other hand, was central to Rome: as patron of agriculture and empire, he was the protective force that established Rome’s expanse. Where Ares is a force of destruction (in Homer, he changes sides in a battle because it looks like the other side is winning), Mars is an agricultural deity and thus a god of civilization and order.

Athene (Minerva) is another virginal goddess, born from Zeus’s head alone. She too is a goddess of war, but also a goddess of civilization and wisdom and the patron of Athens. In both the Greek and Roman myths, she is known for her wisdom and modesty, although from time to time—as all the gods—her myths describe her as potentially a dangerous force. When Arachne brags excessively about her skill as a weaver, for example, it is Athene who turns her into a spider.

Aphrodite (Venus) is a goddess of love and beauty over all. In the myths she is somewhat fickle, chasing after Ares while married to Hephaistos, but her nature is always to bring together the disparate. Her symbol is the zona or girdle, which binds together the entire universe; as Aphrodite Ourania, she is a goddess of the sky, and the zona is either the Milky Way or the ecliptic of the fixed stars. In the Symposium, Plato has some of the guests at the philosophic drinking party point out that she has a dual nature: a heavenly love and a common love. She rules, then, pure philosophical love as well as the love of sexual attraction.

Hephaistos (Vulcan) is unusual among Greek gods for having a physical defect: he is lame. Some myths suggest that he was thrown from Olympus by an enraged Hera, while others suggest that he was born from Hera’s head just as Athene was born from Zeus’s head. He is the god of skill and art as well as fire. The Roman Vulcan was said to live inside of volcanoes, whose eruptions were the stoking of his furnace. He is married to Aphrodite, but she was not always faithful to him in the myths.

Demeter (Ceres) is the goddess of agriculture and nature. She is an earth goddess, whose central myth (and later, a mystery cult) was the kidnapping of her daughter Persephone (Proserpina) by Hades. The earth’s cycles are attributed to her pining for or rejoicing in the presence of her daughter, who is bound to dwell for half the year in the realm of the dead with Hades. During this time, the earth is fallow and nothing grows, but when her daughter returns, the earth gives forth life again. She is often seen holding a sheaf of grain.

Poseidon (Neptunus) is the god of the sea and the shaker of the earth. Obviously, he was an important deity to the seagoing Greeks and Romans. He is also the god of horses and, by extension, charioteers. His ire against Odysseus is the driving conflict of Homer’s Odyssey. His weapon is a trident, and the horse is sacred to him.

Hermes (Mercurius) is the messenger of the gods, and among the Roman gods he is also a deity of commerce. Small statues of him in the form of pillars adorned with his face and an erect phallus were often placed at the crossroads. Called Herms, these pillars were meant to bless and protect the roads and those who travel on them. Hence, he is also a god of travel and transportation. Later he was identified with logos, the ratio that lay under existence, and in that capacity becomes a cosmic deity of order and magic. His emblem is a wand with wings at the top, called a caduceus.

Hestia (Vesta) is a controversial deity. While included in most early lists of the twelve, she is omitted in favor of Dionysos or Hades in later mythology. She is the goddess of the hearth and home, while the Roman Vesta is the protector goddess of the sacred city hearth, whose temple is the origin of the hearthfires of every home in Rome. The hearth itself is her altar. In Rome, her priestesses, the Vestal Virgins, were sworn to virginity and charged with the important task of protecting her sacred fire.

Sometimes, Hestia (Vesta) is replaced by Dionysos, a god who is half mortal and half divine. An important mystery religion of Dionysos was established late in antiquity, but even his earliest worship was a relatively late innovation to Greek religion. He is a god of wine, but of course wine is a metaphor for divine inspiration, and Plato allocates one of the three kinds of divine “madness” to him. He is often depicted holding the thyrsis, a wand with a tip shaped like a pinecone. I am not the first author to point out the similarity of this sacred object to a part of the male anatomy.

Other times, Hestia (Vesta) is replaced by Hades. Plato at least apparently wished to worship Hades among the twelve, as he assigned him a month in his calendar. Hades is the god of the dead, of course, but he is not death (that is Thanatos, one of his daimones). He is also called Pluton, which means “wealth” because as a chthonic deity it is assumed he has control over the treasures of the earth.

One theurgic way of analyzing the roles of the deities is to assign them cosmological and spiritual functions. Sallustius argues as follows:

These are four actions, each of which has a beginning,
middle, and end, consequently there must be twelve
Gods governing the world.

Those who make the world are Zeus, Poseidon, and
Hephaistos; those who animate it are Demeter,
Hera, and Artemis; those who harmonize it are
Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hermes; those who
watch over it are Hestia, Athena, and Ares.23

This passage is a productive one for meditation. For example, when we imagine the creation of anything, we can see that there are three stages: beginning the project, making the project, finishing the project. In the beginning, we lay down the laws of creation according to Zeus. In the making of the object, we draw up impressions and materials from the depths of Poseidon. At the end of the project, we polish it and file off the rough edges as Hephaistos. Similarly, the process of ensoulment or animation follows the three stages of Demeter, Hera, and Artemis, and so on. I’ll stop there. To fully elucidate these patterns would rob the theurgist of productive meditations.

The Hermetic Planetary Gods

Astrologers and most magicians are familiar with one final pantheon, that of the seven planetary gods. This pantheon is ancient and survived even the rise of Christianity, because Neoplatonic Christian astrologers and magicians made use of and even personified them as divine forces under the control of the one God of Christianity. Much of Western ceremonial magic is built on this arrangement, and these gods—unlike the twelve or the Ennead—lack mythology. They are purely philosophical, and therefore well-suited to higher forms of theurgy.

Most of my readers are already familiar with the seven, which are Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These deities are essentially a solar pantheon, with the sun as a central figure or “light” in the midst of them, and the moon or Luna as a consort to Sol. These gods have the same name as some of the twelve, but it’s important to recognize their origin to see that they are not, in all ways, the same gods.

The seven planetary gods are one of the oldest pantheons, stretching back to the first written records to Sumer. The Akkadians were a Semitic people who supplanted Sumerian culture around 2270 bce. They regarded Sumerian culture with a great deal of respect, adopting their writing system and many of their cultural beliefs and practices, including astrology. The Greeks identified the planets with their own gods and gave them names reflective of that identification by the fourth century bce. The Romans, in an early instance of the syncretism that characterizes Roman approaches to comparative theology, renamed the planets with the names of their cognate deities, and these are the names that we have inherited in English.

Early astrologers observed that only seven visible heavenly bodies moved against the backdrop of the fixed stars in a regular pattern. Of course, other bodies such as comets and meteors also move against the backdrop of fixed stars, but their movement is irregular and unpredictable. The Babylonians took great care in observing not just the paths of the planets but also the events that occurred on earth in concert with those motions. In many ways, this foundation of astrology was eminently empirical, several millennia before the invention of the empirical method. Through this careful observation of heavenly patterns and earthly correlations, the Babylonians assigned personalities and deities to the moving stars or planets.

This observation served as the foundation of our seven-day week. Each of the days of the week is named after one of the gods. If you speak a Romance language, you may notice a clearer correspondence—for example, the Spanish miércoles for Wednesday is clearly derived from Mercury. In English, our day names derive from the Germanic gods associated with the Roman planetary gods, in another example of Roman imperial syncretism. Hence, Monday is the moon. Tuesday is Tiw, associated with Mars. Wednesday is Woden, associated with Mercury. Thursday is Thor, associated with Jupiter. Friday is Freya, associated with Venus. Saturday is borrowed directly from the Latin Saturn, and Sunday is, obviously, associated with Sol, through the Norse solar goddess Sunne.

The order and arrangement of these seven planetary powers is reflective of a long-lasting and influential cosmology, or symbolic structure of the universe. In this structure, the earth is in the center of nested crystal spheres. The sphere closest to the Earth is that of Luna. Beyond that is Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars. These planets roll about in their crystal orbits according to a fixed scheme of cycles and—identified later—epicycles. Of course, modern understandings of our solar system do not paint such a pretty picture of the universe, but as a metaphor for the operation of these planetary forces, this cosmology still has much use in modern magic.

I suppose it’s worth digressing for a moment to point out that while I and pretty much everyone I know fully accepts our contemporary understanding of the astronomy of our solar system, many of us also subscribe to this system as a kind of truth. The planetary cosmology is a psychological and spiritual model of the organization of seven forces or kinds of thoughts in the Nous. They are real but not physical: in fact, they are real because they are not physical. Of course, I don’t believe that the Curiosity rover on its way to the lump of rock called Mars punched through crystal spheres. If I wish, however, to arrive at the psychological truth represented by the planetary god Mars which manifests among other things as a lump of rock in our solar system visible from the Earth, then I expect to rise through crystal spheres indeed.

This organization of the seven planets describes a particular progression of ideas in the Nous, the mind of the universe. How this works out requires understanding the nature of these seven gods and how they differ from the descriptions of the gods of the same name given earlier. I see these deities as more abstract and therefore more useful in a wide variety of magic. These seven planets can be arranged in three pairs with one left over.

Let’s start with the leftover one first. Mercury as the messenger of the gods is also the mediator of the planets. Sallustius lists Hermes among his harmonizing deities, and here it harmonizes each of the planets with each of the other planets. The planet Mercury is that which communicates, both in the sense of transferring information and in the sense of achieving communion. Since Mercury governs communication, it can be seen as the planet of the mind and the special patron of magic, since all magic is an act of communication.

Sol and Luna are the two lights, both approximately the same size (which by the way is a rather remarkable coincidence; there’s no good reason why our satellite should appear the same size as the sun). Where the sun is constant (one of the solar deities of Late Antiquity is called Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun), the moon waxes and wanes. In the middle ages, the moon was the symbol of inconstancy and change. As the Carmina Burana, a series of profane songs written in Latin by a group of monks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, put it: “Oh, Fortune, you are variable like the moon, always waxing and waning. Detestable life! Now it’s oppressing, now it’s comforting, as the play of its mind takes it. Poverty. Power. It melts them like ice.”24 This is the equivalent of medieval emo music, but it illustrates the changeability of the moon in distinction to the constance of the sun. The sun as the source of life and light is associated with the sense of self, the soul (animus), in astrology. The moon, as the reflection of the sun, is the external personality and the feminine soul (anima). Of course, these are modern interpretations; Sumerians didn’t have Jung. In older texts, the sun is a symbol of power and authority, while the moon represents changeability and reflection.

The sun has a particular place in theurgy, as Plato uses it as a metaphor for the Good, or the One, that underlies all other reality. He describes our apprehension of the good as a person who sees an object—let’s say an apple—from the light of the sun. The sun casts light on the apple, the eye takes in that light (well, we know this now—Plato didn’t), and creates an image in the mind, which is knowledge of the apple. Similarly, the Good casts a certain light, the Nous, which our mind takes in and creates images out of, those images being the philosophical concepts that give rise to our knowledge of the Good.

Venus and Mars are opposites in that where Venus brings things together, Mars pulls them apart. One can see these two planets as ideas about relationships: Venus is harmonious, Mars contentious. But it would be too simple to say that Mars is malefic and Venus is benefic. In fact, too much harmony can be a symptom of weakness, and Mars can serve to strengthen and energize a situation.

Jupiter and Saturn, similarly, expand and contract respectively. Jupiter’s expansive idea is represented in our human dealings with generosity and liberality, while Saturn establishes boundaries and borders. We can roughly think of these two planets as representing public policy where Venus and Mars represent individual relationships. Of course, again, Jupiter’s expansiveness can lead to overgrowth and profligacy, while Saturn’s borders can define and give structure to the otherwise structureless.

Other than astrology, what can we do with these seven powers? One use of the planets is as sources of meditation in the order of their crystal spheres, a process called “rising on the spheres.” One begins with Luna, imagining images of changeability and reflection. Then one moves up to Mercury, and so on, eventually identifying oneself with the fixed stars of the zodiac. Another use, aside from this contemplative practice, is the practical magical use of the planets in creating talismans and amulets, a use that will be addressed in greater detail later in this book.

The Liminal Gods

Additional gods exist outside of these pantheons but are important because they are intermediaries between realms. The goal of theurgy itself is to unite realms, so these liminal deities can act as bridges and helpers. I will examine two particularly important liminal gods, referenced in many works of theurgy.

Hekate

Originally a goddess of the moon and perhaps an epithet of Artemis, the goddess Hekate became associated with crossroads, gateways, and protection from evil spirits in Late Antiquity. She is often depicted as a woman bearing a torch, or as a triple goddess facing in three different directions at once. She is associated with the Roman goddess Trivia, goddess of crossroads, but she has a much greater importance in theurgy than Trivia. Her role is as an intermediary, or key-holder, between realms, and in later depictions she sometimes appears with keys, much as does Janus, whom we will discuss in a moment.25

The Chaldean oracles describe her as an intermediary between the sensible world—the world of matter that we perceive with our senses—and the intelligible world—the world of Ideas we perceive through pure reason. As such, she is the soul of the world, because the soul itself serves to link these two realms. The later Christian Neoplatonic idea of the Anima Mundi can be seen as a reworking of Hekate to fit into Christian theology.

Hekate also serves as a psychopomp, having led—by some accounts—Kore into the underworld to become Persephone, the queen of Hades. Hades is sometimes described as the world of matter, so this myth is an allegorical account of the process of animation of matter. Hekate brings soul, as Kore, down into matter, and also reconciled soul and matter so that in their marriage the soul is elevated as Persephone.

As befits a liminal goddess, traditional rituals define Hekate’s role in two ways. Hekate figures in theurgic rites as a doorway into the intelligible world, as well as in thaumaturgical rites as an ally and queen of witches. As I will argue later, the thaumaturgical and theurgic are not so sharply defined as one might think. As a thaumaturgical deity, she acts as a deliverer of messages to the world of Ideas. She works in both directions, then: not merely leading the ideas down into manifestation, but leading the theurgist and his or her will back upward into the world of Ideas. This two-way flow of information would have struck traditional Platonists and even some Neoplatonists as impious or illogical. How, after all, could an idea from the many have an impact on the Ideas of the One? The answer, of course, is in the transformation of the theurgist: the ideas of the theurgist become the Ideas of the One, alleviating any paradox of imperfect notions affecting perfect Ideas. In other words, it is not that we affect the gods with our spells but that we change ourselves and our reality in harmony with those gods.

Janus

Janus is the Roman god of doorways and beginnings, usually depicted with two faces that look in opposite directions. As a god of doorways, he is literally a liminal god, as the word “liminal” comes from a root meaning “threshold.” Roman rituals usually begin with an invocation to Ianus Pater (Father Janus) or Ianus Bifrons (Two-Faced Janus). In this way, Janus opens the doorway to the gods during the ritual. Like most liminal gods, there are few myths about Janus himself, but his worship is widespread. Perhaps this lack of myth is a function of his not being borrowed from the Greeks, like most Roman mythology. Janus is clearly a native Roman, perhaps derived from an Etruscan god.

Proclus offers a hymn to Hekate that makes an interesting and unexpected connection between her and Janus. He begins and ends the hymn with this refrain:

Hail, mother of the gods, many-named and giving
forth beautiful children: Hail, Hekate, standing by
the door, mighty one: but also, likewise Hail Janus
the forefather, eternal Zeus. Hail, highest Zeus!26

He clearly associates Hekate with Janus, and at the same time assigns to both the role of demiurge or world-maker. This association is unusual, but it does lend support to the idea that Janus himself may have been invoked in theurgic rites in the same way that Hekate was: as an intermediary between the sensible and intelligible worlds. Proclus also identifies Janus with Zeus, which is certainly not the usual association (which would be, of course, that Iuppiter is the Roman Zeus). This identification illustrates how important Proclus believed Janus to be to his system of theurgy.

The purpose of these liminal gods is to act as bridges to the divine powers invoked in other theurgic rituals. Therefore, I suggest that any theurgist interested in a particular pantheon begin by developing a relationship with the liminal gods of that pantheon. How to develop such a relationship is the bulk of this book, but a good place to begin is to find or make an image of the liminal deity in question. Small rituals of observance (discussed later) can also be used on a regular basis to establish and maintain a connection. I find the liminal gods quite easy to connect to, so they are a good place to begin when first exploring theurgy. Then, of course, they can help connecting to more abstract gods.

The psychological effects of liminal spaces and times should not be discounted in the practice of theurgy. Areas and moments between our categories of time and space can be particularly powerful in breaking down those categories and seeing the reality between them. We can do this intellectually by always seeking a third option when offered a dichotomy. We can do it physically, taking advantage of liminal spaces in nature where two kinds of places interact—sea shores, forest clearings—to create rituals and establish sacred space. And we can do it psychologically, through deliberate invocation and recognition of liminality in our lives.

Exercise 2.1: Creating a Phantasm

A phantasm is an image in the mind, but it’s not merely a visual image. It’s sensory in all dimensions—smell, taste, sound, and touch, as well as vision. These phantasms are imaginary images that you will use in your theurgic practice. The ability to construct a detailed and convincing phantasm is the sine qua non of practical magic of all types, but especially of practical theurgy.

Step 1: Study the image of the deity you wish to work with. A lot of occultists like to work with Egyptian deities simply because they are easy to visualize and distinguish from one another. But keep in mind that Greek deities also have distinctive emblems and features. A bearded man with an eagle is Zeus, for example, and a similarly bearded man with a trident is probably Poseidon. You can learn about such identifying characteristics in any good book on mythology or even the Internet if you employ a small amount of care to distinguish the good historical information from fantasy.

Step 2: Study, as well, any traditional scents or other sensory factors that might be considered. If you cannot find historical perfumes or odors assigned to the deity in question, you can assign scents based on reason. For example, the smell of ozone after a storm is clearly associated with Zeus, while the earth-smell of fresh rainfall is very much a scent associated with Tefnut.

Step 3: Finally, seek out sounds associated with the deity or the deity’s domain. Soft rain for Tefnut, thunder for Zeus, and so on.

Step 4: Every morning, for a few minutes, cast the image of the deity before your mind’s eye along with the scent and sound in your imagination. Try to make the image as detailed as possible, and see it from all possible angles. Mentally repeat the name of the god as you do this; this is very important, because it serves as an anchor and a protective device.

Step 5: When you can do this easily, do it throughout the day, especially in situations associated with that deity’s domain.

Step 6: You will succeed in building a powerful phantasm when it begins to move and react on its own. When the phantasm no longer seems like a thing you are doing, but a thing you are watching, you have succeeded in making a strong phantasm.

This exercise is a central one to most of the work that follows. Practice it diligently until you can construct a phantasm easily. It would be a good idea to select a pantheon either from those listed above or from your own research and begin to work through it, devoting a week or so to building a phantasm to each of the gods in turn. Be careful with this exercise, though: it’s not just pretending. If done well, you will create a connection to the gods that will affect your life, so be aware that by beginning this practice you will begin to transform yourself. Also, it’s not wise to create this kind of phantasm out of spiritual beings that are not gods unless you know what you are doing. It would be downright idiotic to start doing this with Goetic demons, for example.

Myth

We moderns have a strange idea of myth.

Part of the problem is that we need to learn about myth to understand a lot of the literature we value as a culture. But in learning about myth, we are told that “of course” no one believes in these gods anymore. Moreover, we’re told that myths were a clumsy attempt to explain the origins of natural phenomenon, before the invention of science. But all of this is nonsense. If myth were just a clumsy groping after knowledge before the invention of science, we wouldn’t still have myth—and we do. And good thing, too, because myth serves much more interesting purposes than a stand-in for science. Myth defines meaning.

The first thing to understand about myth is that there are different kinds of myth: there are myths that reveal truth, and myths that tell interesting or amusing stories. Even the ancients were disturbed by myths describing the gods as philanderers and liars, cheaters and rapists; but the myths treat the gods with a double-consciousness. If you read The Iliad, you’ll see that Homer describes the gods as somewhat ridiculous when interacting with humans, but as majestic when dwelling in Olympus. The literary figures of the gods who drove the human plot are petty and destructive, but the gods on Olympus, the forces that governed the world, are worthy of worship. Homer understood that the stories we tell about the gods depend upon our perspective. From the human perspective, a hurricane might destroy a city and kill many people; from a divine perspective, this hurricane may mean something we cannot comprehend. As Sallustius explains:

Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the
goodness of the Gods—subject always to the distinction
of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and
the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is
hidden: since, just as the Gods have made the goods of
sense common to all, but those of intellect only to the wise,
so the myths state the existence of Gods to all, but who
and what they are only to those who can understand.27

The value of myth for us is in discovering the hidden rather than just enjoying the story—although that’s often a good place to start.

We can just approach the myths as stories, perhaps even as historical stories. Euhemerus, a late fourth-century-bce historian, argued that myths were merely histories retold and distorted. The gods were just powerful men and women of the past. You will occasionally still find those who espouse Euhemerism, but Plato argues against it. For Plato, the myths are more powerful than mere stories: they are power that are to be treated carefully. Plato’s ambivalent attitude toward myth can be seen in his banning it from his imaginary ideal Republic.

Where Euhemerus sought a way to rationalize myth as historical, Theagenes (sixth century bce) understood myth as allegory: each of the gods is a personification of a natural force, and the actions of the gods in myth represent truths about those forces. Zeus’s philandering ways are therefore not an endorsement of morally reprehensible behavior but an allegory for the fructifying power of the rain that falls upon the earth without regard for difference. The value of the myths for Theagenes is that they hide truths about the world.

Later philosophers extend this allegorical interpretation into moral allegory. The Neoplatonist Porphyry, in his “Cave of the Nymphs,” interprets an episode in The Odyssey, converting the myth into a moral allegory. We can see, then, the figures of the myths standing in for moral vices and virtues and their interaction offering moral teaching. This kind of hermeneutic is not far from the common idea that stories must have morals that teach us something of value.

On the other hand, the value of a story isn’t the moral it gives us, and the value of a myth isn’t its allegory. John Michael Greer puts it succinctly, saying that a “pitfall that must be avoided in making sense of myth is the perception that myths are ‘about’ something other than themselves.”28 Myth, in his reading, is not a story about the world, but a story that gives meaning to the world. In other words, myth is primary and fundamental, and all the other narratives we tell ourselves about are experiences or reflections of these underlying myths.

I find the notion espoused in Jewish hermeneutics of four different readings of each text to be particularly useful in understanding these underlying myths. In this method of hermeneutics, each text can be read in four ways:

1. 1. The literal reading: What do the words mean in the literal context of the myth? Here we see that the gods live on Olympus, and we recognize that there is a Mount Olympus in Greece that is a very tall mountain. Or we see that Tefnut and Shu are born out of the semen or spit of Amun, and understand them not to have a second parent. We don’t necessarily believe in the literal truth at this level, but we see the facts of the case, as it were, laid out before us. We read it as a story on its own terms, just as we might read a novel for pleasure.
2. 2. The symbolic reading: What do the symbols of the text mean to the original authors and to us? A mountain like Olympus rises up into the sky while still connected to the earth: from it, we understand that the gods transcend humanity but nevertheless remain connected to our world. We see that Tefnut, moisture, and Shu, wind, both derive from Amun, the light: indeed, it is the light of the sun that powers the winds and the water cycle. The reader at this level is like a student of literature, analyzing the symbolism of the text and its historical and cultural context.
3. 3. The moral reading: What does this myth say we should do? Here is the dangerous bit, requiring a specific rule: humans should not strive to be like gods in the moral sense. Zeus turning into a swan and mating with a human does not mean we should do the same thing or anything like it. We can understand the moral teachings of myths in several ways. That the gods live on Olympus tells us we should look up toward them but not forget our own world; they do not live in the sky, disconnected from the earth, and so to reach them we must keep our feet on the ground no matter how high we rise. If Tefnut is life-giving moisture and Shu is separation, we understand that both generosity and our own limits should be defined in the light of wisdom.
4. 4. The mystical reading: This one is the hardest: in what way does this myth tell us how to return to the gods? What paths does it lay out for our henosis? Here rather than instructions for living the myth becomes instruction for ritual and contemplation. This is what Greer speaks of when he says, “The most productive way to view myths … is as fundamental patterns of human experience, from which a host of possible applications unfold.”29

Consider our lives to be like songs in harmony with particular myths. The psychological theories of C. G. Jung, while not particularly relevant in contemporary psychology, can be useful to our theology. He teaches that we play out particular characters, archetypes, that recur in the stories of our culture. We learn our roles at an early age from those stories and our experiences of the world, and as we go through our lives we play those roles out. For example, think of all the myths our culture tells about the attractiveness of the Rebel archetype. How many of us, then, chose our clothing in response to that archetype, perhaps trying to appear to be a Rebel or Trickster because we find such an image attractive? You can see such appeal to archetypes in advertisements for everything from cars to body spray. The old cigarette ads that used a cowboy as their image appealed, for example, to the Rootless Adventurer archetype of American cultural mythology.

And on the mystical level, we often play out the figures in myths on our own, even outside the allegory of Jungian psychology. This myth-making can be dangerous, because many of those old myths are tragedies. It’s useful to recognize when we’re playing ourselves into a disaster and choose to step out of our archetype. One of the powers of theurgy is the ability to select our archetypes based on the situation. Even if the gods didn’t exist, theurgy would be an incredibly powerful form of psychological therapy.

Perhaps these approaches to myth would be clearer if laid out with a particular example: the story of Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle is told in the Homeric Hymns. On the surface, it is an amusing story about a precocious deity. Does it have theurgic significance beyond that? I encourage you to read the entirety of the poem, available online in several places as well as in print. I like Thelma Sargent’s verse translation.30

First, on the literal level we see a story about two characters. Hermes, newly born and laid in his crib in a cavern, climbs free of the crib and finds a tortoise. Using sinews and horns from a cow, he fashions the shell of the tortoise into a lyre and plays it. Growing hungry, he goes in search of food and finds the cows of Apollo untended. He teaches fifty of them to walk backwards and upon passing an old man, cautions him to be silent about what he’s seen. After gathering the cattle, he kindles a fire and portions out twelve offerings to the gods. After enjoying the scent of meat but not tasting it, Hermes returns home.

Apollo discovers his cattle missing and goes in search. The old man recounts the sight of a child leading the cattle backwards and by omens Apollo discovers it was Hermes. He argues with the infant god, eventually ending up before the throne of Zeus for judgment. Zeus sees through Hermes’s deception but just laughs, and Apollo’s attempt to bind Hermes with willow fails because the willows fall from his wrists and take root. Hermes plays his lyre for Apollo, and entranced, Apollo agrees to take the lyre in payment for the fifty cattle. He takes up the lyre and gives Hermes the golden rod of the cowherd.

We could read this myth as a just-so story about how cattle herding became part of the domain of Hermes rather than Apollo, and possibly there is some such prehistoric impetus behind the myth. But we also have to understand what these things mean in the original culture: this is the symbolic reading that opens up the allegorical, moral, and mystical readings. First, consider the tortoise, a creature whose back is patterned in hexagonal tiles symbolic of geometric order. Hermes says of it, “Alive you will be a shield against baneful enchantment,/ But if you should die, then would you sing with great beauty.”31 The orderly patterning of the tortoise’s shell is a symbol of mathematical precision, and the silence of the tortoise is a contrast to its eventual fate as a singer. Similarly, the cattle can represent wealth and power. We can understand Hermes as the logos, the reason, which is newborn: this myth is about the beginning of consciousness. Apollo is the god of harmony and prophesy, a god partially outside of time.

On the moral level, we certainly would not want to read this myth as an encouragement to steal. The gods have moral rules that do not apply to humans; we can see this in the fact that the willow did not bind Hermes. But we do see the reflection of moral values held dear by the original tellers of the story: cleverness, fairness, beauty, and in this story above all, humor. These things are endorsed for both gods and humans.

Finally, on the mystical level, we can bring together the other three levels and really begin to dig into the meaning of particular passages. I want to look at two specific passages in detail: the invention of the lyre and the forgiveness of Apollo. In both passages, the lyre figures:

He fixed at measured intervals cut stalks of reed
Through the clean-scooped shell of the
tortoise and spanning his back,
And, by a stroke of wisdom, stretched
oxhide over the hollow.
He added two horns to the sides
yoked by a crossbar,
From which he stretched taut seven
strings made of sheepgut.32

On the literal level, this passage describes using a tortoise shell as a sounding board for a lyre. On the mystical level, if we see the shell’s regular pattern as a symbol of divine order, the creation of the lyre is the establishment of harmony out of underlying order. When we understand Hermes as the logos, the rationality of the Nous itself, we can see that this myth can be about the role of rationality in creating harmony. We move into this mystical layer of interpretation when we begin to see ourselves as playing out this noetic harmony in our lives.

Now, when logos or divine order confronts the beasts of Apollo, he controls their bestial nature and drives them backwards. Then he offers them up to the twelve gods. From this, we see a way to overcome our bestial nature. The divine logos in our own minds can order and control our bestial nature and offer it up to the gods. And the fact that the god who owns the cattle is Apollo signifies that the rational logos of the human mind is offered up to the divine intuition of inspiration. Apollo is the god of the divine inspiration represented by the Muses, an inspiration that Plato describes as a kind of madness in the Phaedrus.33

The result of imposing this order is a conflict—a conflict between human rationality and divine inspiration—but the conflict is resolved in a trade: the lyre for the rod: “Wrought of gold, triply entwined, to protect you, unharmed.”34 This wand is the caduceus, a rod surmounted with wings and twined with two serpents. (The caduceus is often mistaken for Aesclepius’s staff, a symbol of medical professionals, but they are not the same thing.) Interestingly, the rod is described as “triply entwined” in Homer, implying either one snake woven about it three times, or three snakes entwined on it. Apollo took over the temple of Python, which became the temple at Delphi after killing the sacred serpent for which it was named. This caduceus therefore links Hermes to that prophetic myth as well.

If we choose to assign allegorical values to these three divine figures, we might say that Hermes is the logos, the divine order underlying consciousness. Apollo is light, illumination, and divine inspiration. And Zeus is of course the judge of fairness. Tracing the progression of the lyre reveals the nature of divine harmony: it is created by Hermes, delivered to Apollo, and blessed by Zeus. In other words, it is founded in rationality, given over to inspiration, and sanctified by divine law. Moreover, the “divine word” of the caduceus moves from Zeus’s mouth, to Apollo’s wand, to Hermes: from divine balance to divine light to the logos.

We could assign any number of allegorical meanings that would be just as useful—and this, in fact, is one of the drawbacks of a purely allegorical reading of myth. The real purpose of this exercise is not to write a college essay on symbolism in Homer. The purpose is to begin to interact with the complex underlying realities of the myths for yourself. The best method for this is discursive meditation,35 a useful tool for exploring ideas and building a path to henosis.

Exercise 2.2: Discursive Meditation on a Myth

In contemporary spiritual traditions, discursive meditation is a Christian practice in which a passage of scripture is the object of meditation. But discursive meditation is much older than Christianity. When Plotinus speaks of meditation, he may mean something like discursive meditation. Yet most contemporary occultists prefer Eastern systems of meditation like mindfulness meditation (and, in fact, I don’t blame them: I find mindfulness meditation useful as well).

Discursive meditation differs from Eastern methods of meditation in that it seeks focus upon a single idea. A lot of people find it easier in that it is does not have the tendency to be boring that some forms of meditation do, like zazen. Of course for zazen and related meditations, working through the boredom is part of the point, and one could argue—with quite a bit of justification—that Eastern mindfulness meditation is actually discursive meditation with the breath as an object. Ultimately, the goal of discursive meditation is to see into the essence of an idea: in that regard, it is a bit like insight meditation in Buddhism. Yet the objects of contemplation in discursive meditation are selected from a wider variety.

So what does this kind of discursive meditation look like? How does one go about it?

Step 1: Select the object of meditation. Myth is a rich field for objects of meditation, but one may also meditate on particular lines of scripture or poetry, mathematical and geometrical truths, a musical passage, an image of a deity, an esoteric symbol, or any number of other things. Almost anything can be the subject of discursive meditation. We will focus on myth for now. Select a myth that speaks to you and that you know well. Prepare for your meditation by reading the myth several times, ideally in the original if you can find it rather than an adaptation (look for either a good translation or in the original language if you’re lucky enough to know it).

Step 2: Relax. In this kind of meditation, your position does not matter—you can sit upright in a comfortable chair or lie back if you are well-rested enough that there is no danger of falling asleep. If sitting, sit with your spine naturally upright. The best advice I’ve heard for this is to imagine a hook on the top of your head, pulling you upward. This will align your spine correctly. You may employ any technique you like for the relaxation itself, including the four-fold breath (inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, repeat), or progressive relaxation (starting with your feet, work up to your head, relaxing muscles in sequence). The goal is to be comfortable and relaxed.

Step 3: In your imagination, work through the myth step by step, as if you’re watching a movie. Experiment with the third-person perspective of a disembodied camera, and the first-person perspectives of various participants in the myth. You may run through it several times, adding or refining details each time.

Step 4: When your mind wanders—and it will wander—bring it back to the myth. That is the object of your concentration. In this process you will learn that concentration is like riding a horse: the trick is to learn to move with it and gently bring it back under control, rather than bear down and try to master it by brute force. Be gentle with yourself; if you find yourself getting frustrated, please remember that even experienced meditators have to bring their minds back repeatedly during a session.

Step 5: As you work through the myth perhaps over a period of several days, you may find your mind catching on a detail. For example, perhaps I keep thinking of the tortoise and the cattle. Why these two animals? Let your mind explore the relationship between them with a mixture of reason and intuition. What does Hermes do to the tortoise that’s similar to what he does to the cows? He kills them, of course, as sacrifices, one to music and one to the other gods, creating a link between music and divinity. He also pulls them out of their ordinary way of being: the horizontal and silent tortoise becomes vertical and capable of song, while the cattle are driven backwards. He also uses parts of cattle to modify the tortoise, which could link the two animals even more … As you trace this idea, try to keep track of the avenues you go down. This is the moment that requires the most concentration, because the mind is an expert at turning this sort of metaphysical consideration into the construction of a grocery list or a litany of anxiety about bills. You may begin with the allegorical level of interpretation, but the goal is to arrive at the mystical level and begin to see how you yourself play out parts of this myth in your life. However, when I say that is the goal, I do not mean that you must achieve that level of insight in every meditation or the meditation is a failure. I always tell myself that sitting down and just breathing is already victory enough whether or not I achieve any insight.

Step 6: Finish your meditation with a prayer or affirmation of what you have learned or understood, if anything. Remember that there are no such things as bad meditations: a meditation is good even if you break concentration a hundred times and come away with no insight other than that Hermes must have some stain-resistant baby clothes to sacrifice fifty cattle and come away clean.

Step 7: The next morning (or evening, or lunch hour), come back and do it again. This is important: meditation works best when you make it a habit. Stick with one myth or topic for at least a week. When you find yourself getting bored with it, that’s when you know it’s about to produce something interesting, so stick with it a little longer.

If, like me, you already find other meditative practices productive, you can mix and match to some degree. For example, I like to begin the discursive meditation with a few minutes of mindfulness meditation; I find it clarifies the entire experience.

Do not be surprised if during your day your mind returns to the topic of your meditation. If you catch yourself contemplating myths during the day, that’s a good sign: it means you’ve begun to train your mind in contemplation and concentration. You’ve begun to make the gods a part of your life and yourself, which is the first step on the path of theurgy.

[contents]

8 Algis Uždavinys. Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity. (San Rafael, CA: Sophia Perennis, 2010).

9 Gilbert Murray. The Five Stages of Greek Religion. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 218. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250 -h/30250-h.htm#Page_218

10 Valerie M. Warrior. Roman Religion: A Sourcebook. (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002). 2.

11 John Baines, Leonard H. Lesko, and David P. Silverman. Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice, ed. Byron E. Shafer. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

12 Geraldine Pinch. Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 111–112.

13 Pinch. Egyptian Mythology, 197.

14 Pinch. Egyptian Mythology, 174.

15 Pinch. Egyptian Mythology, 191.

16 Richard H. Wilkinson. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003), 198–199.

17 Wilkinson. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, 159–160.

18 Wilkinson. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, 119.

19 Pinch. Egyptian Mythology, 150.

20 Apuleius. The Golden Ass. trans. Robert Graves. (New York: Farrer, Straus, Giroux, 2009).

21 Wilkinson. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, 202–203.

22 Pinch. Egyptian Mythology, 146.

23 Gilbert Murray. The Five Stages of Greek Religion. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Accessed 10 May 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm#Page_207

24 My translation.

25 Sarah Iles Johnston. Hekate Soteira. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 42.

26 Sarah Iles Johnston. Hekate Soteira. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 147, n. 19. My translation of the Greek text.

27 Murray, Gilbert. The Five Stages of Greek Religion. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 201. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm#Page_201

28 John Michael Greer. A World Full of Gods. (Tucson, AZ: ADF Publishing, 2005), 165.

29 John Michael Greer. A World Full of Gods. (Tucson, AZ: ADF Publishing, 2005), 166.

30 Thelma Sargent, trans. The Homeric Hymns: A Verse Translation. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

31 Thelma Sargent, trans. The Homeric Hymns: A Verse Translation. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 31.

32 Thelma Sargent, trans. The Homeric Hymns: A Verse Translation. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 31.

33 Jowett, Benjamin, trans. Phaedrus by Plato. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

34 Thelma Sargent, trans. The Homeric Hymns: A Verse Translation. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 44.

35 I am indebted to John Michael Greer for teaching me this method of meditation.