The Addresses
of the Gods
If you wish to contact me, a mortal, there are many ways you can do it. You can write to my publisher, whose address is in the front of this book. You can ask me for my home address and write me there. You could find my email address and email me.36 You could look up my phone number and call me. What do these modes of communication have in common? Each of them requires a sort of address: a symbolic representation of my location to which you can appeal. Without getting the right symbols, you won’t reach me. Add one wrong letter to my email, leave off the city on your letter, and nothing will happen.
While theurgists like Iamblichus didn’t have email or addresses in the conventional sense, they understood very well the importance of these symbols as a means of communication. And just as I would have to give you my home address, the gods give us their symbolic addresses. The author of the Chaldean Oracles writes: “The Paternal Intellect has sown symbols throughout the cosmos.”37 In the psyche, then, both the individual soul and the Psyche of the world are symbols sowed by the demiurge, just as I sowed my email in an earlier footnote. These symbols are addresses back to the gods, and can be used as points of contact.
Iamblichus defines three levels of these addresses, or synthemata: the material, the intermediate, and the noetic. The material synthemata are those that exist in the world of hyle, the matter that we (think we) know. Iamblichus uses the example of Helios, the sun, but let’s instead use Selene, the moon, as our example, just to mix it up a bit. We have this goddess whose domain is change and reflection, perception and transformation. We want to understand her better, so we look around the world of matter and look for items that reflect this idea. The most obvious is that pretty hunk of rock orbiting the earth, of course. This is a synthema of Selene. To say “Selene is the goddess of the moon” is to make an error from a strictly theurgic perspective: the moon, the object, is a symbol of Selene.
But we don’t have to stop with that symbol, especially since it’s hard to manipulate the moon in our rituals (although not hard to time our rituals with the moon). So we look in the world of matter for manifestations of the gods which Iamblichus enumerates as “stones, plants, animals, aromatic substances, and other such things that are sacred, perfect and godlike.”38 Among stones he includes other such materials like metals, and when we look at the world of metals we find a metal that is silvery and tarnishes black over time, but can be wiped clean again. Silver is much like the moon and hence a synthema of Selene. Among herbs we find night-flowering plants, among animals the dog, the cow, and the cock, and among aromatics I suggest gardenia.
There are two ways to identify the synthemata of a particular god: the doctrine of signatures and the weight of tradition. The doctrine of signatures suggests that every idea or form in the Nous imprints itself on matter more or less distinctly. In the above example, silver shares the signatures of Selene: changeable, reflective, and so on. Understanding the doctrine of signatures allows us to innovate when the materials we might want are not easily at hand. Often, at least in English, the names of particular herbs and stones can be an indication of their signatures: moonstone, for example, or artemesia, signify that people at one point or another saw such things as containing the signatures of goddesses like Selene or Artemis. On the other hand, the weight of tradition offers traditional associations: for example, the association of the dog with Selene is perhaps obvious: the dog tends to howl at the moon. The cow’s horns share its shape. The rooster, like the dog, may well crow at a full moon. But fundamentally, these associations are traditional; they come from ancient sources, and we may not immediately see the logic or signature of them. The association of the dolphin with Apollo, for example, arises from a particular myth, rather than any obvious signature the dolphin displays of the god.
The intermediate synthemata are those symbols which partake not just of matter but of the soul. They are matter embodied and deliberately shaped with some feature of the god. Where material synthemata arise naturally out of nature, the intermediate synthemata require some participation of human intelligence. Here are images of the gods, their names and conventional appearances, statues, drawings, and hymns.39
The names of the gods come from tradition, but there is also a tradition that secret names of the gods may be given to some theurgists, personal only to them, just as we give particular nicknames to our friends, or permission to call us in certain ways to certain people. A god may have many names and epithets. If we look at Apollo, we can find that not only does he have the name Apollo in Greek, but this name appears in Etruscan as Apulu, in Doric as Apellon, and so on. In addition to their names in various dialects and languages, most gods have epithets of two varieties: characteristic epithets, and toponymic epithets. Characteristic epithets recall one of the features of the god: For Apollo, he is sometimes called Phoebus (meaning “bright”), Phanaeus (“light-bringer”), Hekaergos (“far-shooter”), and so on. One could literally fill a page with the characteristic epithets of Apollo, an important and popular god. Toponymic epithets recall particular locations where the god performed some feat or was worshiped in a particular way or with particular devotion. Apollo can be referred to as Delphinius, referring to his oracle at Delphi or Actiacus after the promontory of Actium, where there was an important temple to the god. Sometimes, toponymic names can be reinterpreted, such as Sminthius which originally referred to a town of Sminthe, becoming confused with the Greek word for mouse, sminthos, thus leading to Apollo becoming a mouse-god.
With such a proliferation of names, it stands to reason that there might be some names of the gods that worshipers are not aware of, so a common formula in ancient Greek and Roman prayers is something amounting to a list of names followed by a phrase like “or whatever name it pleases you to be called.” They recognized that the names of the gods are not what the gods might call themselves: their names among themselves might be nonlinguistic labels of which we cannot even conceive. And, of course, for those highest ideas of the gods in the Nous, no name can symbolize them: they are, themselves, what the names symbolize.
Just as names are multiple and unbounded, so are images. The earliest cult images of deities were bare pillars or planks, although small representative cult images were not unknown.40 The large marble statues that we know from our museums are a later innovation. In ancient Greek religion, the gods were thought to dwell within the statue: by taking on the form of the god, the statue invited the psyche of the daimon to dwell within it.
Much of what we know about the use of cult images in Late Antiquity comes from the writings of Christians very much opposed to the practice. The term “idol,” originally an ordinary Greek word meaning “image,” became an insult. The Christians inherited this attitude toward cult images from the Jews, of course, whose deity was—at least at this late stage—so perfectly transcendent of matter that to give Him an image was insulting. Psalm 135:15–18 condemns the use of idols because they lack clear signs of life; they are mere objects unworthy to represent the perfectly transcendent God whose only image is the human form itself. The Pagan gods, however, are not perfectly transcendent: as we’ve already discussed, they are the immanent part of an ultimately transcendent reality. Their very immanence is what gives them the power to affect us for the better. The Pagan worship of idols, then, is not mere ignorance as it’s often painted but a profound philosophical statement about reality.
The Greek and Roman attitude toward images of their gods was quite practical. A worshiper could pray anytime, anywhere, without an image. But if a worshiper wanted to pray specifically to a particular god, the prayer could be more efficacious if he or she attended a temple. Temples were not places of congregation; festivals and religious ceremonies took place outside of the temple itself. Temples were locations where the gods were particularly immanent, and one could look upon the image and speak to it directly.
The dual nature of the divine, that it straddles immanence and transcendence, lends an interesting tension to Neoplatonic and later Hermetic thought. Plotinus argues that the efficacy of statues is built upon the Neoplatonic theory of forms:
IV. 3, 11. The olden sages, in seeking to procure the presence
of the Gods by erecting temples and statues, seem to me to have possessed deep insight into the nature of the universe:
They felt the All-Soul to be a Principle ever at our call; it
is but fitly preparing a place in which some phase of it may
be received, and a thing is always fit to receive the operation
of the Soul when it is brought to the condition of a mirror,
apt to catch the image.41
For Plotinus, the statue is a site of contemplation of the One, through the intermediaries of the gods. As Algis Uždavinys explains it, “Since all manifested reality is established as theophany, a deity … is a priori present in the raw materials gathered to create the image.”42 Which is to say, since matter itself is a function of the divine, a sort of divine appearance or manifestation, then forming a statue out of that matter exalts it and brings forth its divine qualities.
The Asclepius, a hermetic tract written in Latin, instructs the hermetic student how to make an efficacious cult image, and where its divine power comes from:
“It comes from a mixture of plants, stones, and spices,
Asclepius, that have in them a natural power of
divinity. And this is why those gods are entertained
with constant sacrifices, with hymns, praises and
sweet sounds in tune with heaven’s harmony: so
that the heavenly ingredient enticed into the idol
by constant communication with heaven may
gladly endure its long stay among humankind.”43
For Trismegistus in the Asclepius, the statue is a synthema of the gods, and it brought into greater focus and harmony by uniting it with the material synthemata as well. The statue therefore represents two levels of the reality of the god: the material things that bear the god’s print in the realm of hyle or matter, and the ideal form of that god in the mind that appears in the statue itself.
Yet one needs more than just the matter to “fashion a god.” More rarified intermediate synthemata—songs, hymns—are added to the mix, with acts of sacrifice in accord with even more rarified, noetic synthemata of “harmony.” I will address the noetic synthemata more fully in a bit, and we will explore the ritual of sacrifice and how we can reap its benefits without staining our carpets or calling down the wrath of the ASPCA. Suffice it to say that the chickens and goats are safe from me.
The ultimate goal is to harmonize all the realms of synthemata— the material, the intermediate, and the noetic—all in one place. The statue becomes a god then not in the physical sense, but in the sense of being a locus of the god’s forces in all three worlds. The statue is a line drawn through the worlds, touching on the nature of the god at all levels, and that line acts as a phone cord back up to the divine.
Exercise 3.1: Creating an Image
Step 1: Select a deity with whom you wish to have a closer relationship. If you have been contemplating the deities, you may very well already have one in mind as a possible patron, but it could also be a god outside of any pantheon. If in doubt, solar and lunar gods are good places to start, and liminal gods are often helpful places to begin.
Step 2: Research the deity in question. You can find tables of correspondence about the gods in several places, but the best way to find what you need is to dig through the myths, either in their original forms or in condensations like Edith Hamilton’s or Bulfinch. Ultimately, you are looking for the material synthemata of that god in the form of metals, stones, herbs, and animals.
Example: In researching Artemis, I discover that she is associated with wormwood, silver, and traditional magical correspondences that link her to the moon and all of its relevant correspondences. But she also has a traditional association with the temple of Ephesus, where in addition to her statue there was a sacred stone believed to be a meteorite.
Step 3: Gather what synthemata you can. Ideally, you want at least something herbal and something mineral. Animal parts, if used, should be collected respectfully, humanely, and legally, and make absolutely sure that the god is not likely to find it disgusting that you have taken apart one of its sacred animals (I do not think that Apollo would look kindly on your using a dolphin bone, even if you somehow got it legally, and breaking the law to get a bald eagle feather in the United States would probably do more to annoy Zeus—as a god of law—than please him).
Example: As I wish to create a statue to Artemis, I gather herbs sacred to her from her myths, specifically some wormwood. I find a small meteorite to use as a sacred stone, and a strip of deer leather gathered from a hunter friend who got the deer hunting it, rather than hitting it with his truck.
Step 4: Acquire or construct the image. If you lack artistic talent, it’s okay if your creation is crude. Such crude statues, called xoana, were often used in archaic temples and were sometimes as simple as pillars draped with cloth. If you have artistic talent, you can sculpt your own out of clay; even oven-baked polymer clays will work fine. Alternately, you could draw or paint the image. And yes, you can even buy the image if you want a particular one.
Example: Since I’m interested in Artemis of Ephesus, I acquire a replica of the famous statue of her there.
Step 5: Create a receptacle somewhere on the image for the material synthemata. You can bore a small hole in the back or the bottom of the base. If you sculpted the image yourself, you can create a hole as part of the process of sculpting. One of the unsung tools of the modern occultist, a rotary tool is handy for creating holes in purchased statues. Remember, for store-bought statues, especially those made of stone rather than resin, slow and easy does it.
Step 6: At a time appropriate to the deity, if possible, fill the receptacle with the objects and attach them in some way. You can seal over the hole with clay, or you can just use a blob of silicon epoxy.
Step 7: If you wish, dress, decorate, or drape the statue in appropriate materials. Example: I tie a thin thong cut from the leather around the shoulders of my statue.
Step 8: This last step is animating the statue, but we will leave that for a later exercise. For now, feel free to use the statue in your devotions and as an object of contemplation. Simply interacting with it as a representative of the god is enough to begin the process of animating it, because the god is already present in the materials used. Of course, treat it with respect. You should keep it clean and not let people treat it with disrespect; roommates, children, and parents can be respectfully and politely informed to keep their hands off. If you wish to lock it away, you can put it in a small and attractive box with appropriate offerings (such as flowers, please, and not food—roaches tend not to inspire pious thoughts).
Noetic Synthemata
Material synthemata are those objects in the world of hyle or matter that take on the imprint of the gods. Alternately, we might say they are the pieces of matter we ascribe to the deity through some process of association or analogy. Intermediate synthemata are those symbols that we ascribe to the gods more directly and are more culturally determined: names, images, hymns. But a third kind of synthema, the kind that Iamblichus argues is the highest and most powerful of the synthemata, are those which reside not in human consciousness but in the consciousness of the universe itself. These are things like geometry, time, and the abstract divisions of the sky known as the Zodiac. In order to anchor us on the ground and not fly away into mystery, let’s once again drop in on Philanike and her student Euthymios.
Euthymios: What’s in the oven?
Philanike: Cupcakes. What’s more important is, what’s on the table?
Eu: Looks like a ruler and a drawing compass. And lots of paper. And some pencils.
Ph: Good. What else do you notice?
Eu: I notice that it’s a crappy ruler, since it has no markings. Otherwise, that’s it.
Ph: You’re right: it has no markings, because it’s not a ruler. It’s just a straight-edge. If I hold it up here and you extend the end far beyond where the straight-edge ends, what do you get?
Eu: An imaginary line?
Ph: And where does it end?
Eu: It won’t end, unless it’s stopped by something.
Ph: And if we take up the compass, we notice it has two parts. What are the parts?
Eu: The writey-bit and the stabby-bit. You poke the cute girl in math class with the stabby-bit because you secretly like her. At least, that’s what I did.
Ph: What did I ever do to deserve—fine, it’s the stabby bit. When you stab little Susie—
Eu: Kate.
Ph: When you stab little Kate with it, what does it leave?
Eu: A mark on her skin. A little one. And then I ended up in detention and learned how not to talk to girls.
Ph: Like the mark, the point, I’ve made on the paper. And if I swing the other arm around, I make a circle.
Eu: Sure.
Ph: If I draw a line from the point to the edge of the circle, what’s the result?
Eu: Um. I don’t know.
Ph: What if I make another circle, with the line equal to that length, and my stabby bit on where the first circle cuts it off. Voilà. What’s this?
Eu: Two overlapping circles.
Ph: Not just overlapping. They overlap in a very specific way. The center of one is on the circumference of the other.
Eu: What does this have to do with theurgy, now?
Ph: Wait for it. Now, I can draw a line from the point where each circle touches the other. And a line connecting the ends of that longer line to the ends of the smaller line.
Eu: Two triangles.
Ph: Two equilateral triangles.
Fig. 5: Construction of a Triangle
Euthymios: Your point is?
Philanike: Our two tools are the straight-edge, which makes an infinite line, and the circle, which makes a point and ascribes a limit around that point. We have, therefore, the infinite and the limited. We start with one thing: a single point. That point implies a plane of possible points, and if we choose to mark those points a certain set distance from that first point, we get a circle.
Eu: I hope there won’t be a test.
Ph: Life is your test. But listen: Within that first circle, there is the implication of a second circle—or rather, an infinite number of second circles, all taking their centers from those new points.
Eu: And in that overlapping circle—
Ph: The vesica piscis.
Eu: Gesundheit. In that overlapping circle, there’s the implication of two lines.
Ph: Which themselves imply …
Fig. 6: Construction of a Square
Euthymios: Two equilateral triangles.
Philanike: Where else do you see a right angle like this?
Eu: In a right triangle or—oh, a square.
Ph: Go ahead. Extend the horizontal line at the base of our triangles outward. Now draw a circle from where they cross, to cut them off at an equal distance. Connect the corners.
Eu: So a single circle implies a second circle, a line, a triangle, and a square.
Ph: A single point, not a single circle.
Eu: So all these structures come out of a point that has—
Ph: Nothing at all in it but location. It’s featureless. It’s just One. But out of it comes the two points that define a line, the three points that define a triangle, and the four points that define a square.
Eu: So order can derive from featureless unity.
Ph: Exactly. Oh, good, the cupcakes are done. Not yet, they’re too hot.
Eu: I see what you’re doing. You’re arranging them in a triangle. This is a lesson I better get to eat.
Ph: Once I frost them, yes. But they need to cool anyway. How many have I baked?
Eu: Ten.
Ph: And how have I arranged them?
Eu: In rows of one, two, three, and four. I get it. Ten is completion, and the four elements and so on and so forth. Is it cream cheese frosting?
Ph: Better than that. So these first two rows are in a ratio of—
Eu: One to two. Then two to three. Three to four. Buttercream is good too.
Ph: Ever see a monochord?
Eu: Is that what that is? I thought it was a cheese-slicer.
Ph: Nope. It’s an instrument with a single string and a movable bridge. We can divide this string into any proportion we like. I’ve marked a few on the sounding board. Here, let’s move the bridge to the halfway point, which divides the string in what proportion?
Eu: One to two. Oh, clever. Where are you going with this?
Ph: Pluck.
Eu: Pardon me? Oh, pluck. Yes. Sounds nice.
Ph: It’s harmonious to your ear: an octave, to be technical. If I play the whole string, then cut it in half and just play half, I get an octave. Now let’s set it to a proportion of 2/3.
Eu: Again, nice sounding.
Ph: It’s what’s called a fifth. And now for 3/4.
Eu: Pretty, once again.
Ph: A fourth. Now let’s just pick any ol’ random proportion.
Eu: Less pretty.
Ph: Quite. Now, Pythagoras noticed that these three proportions are harmonious, and also the proportions represented in my cupcakes, which Pythagoras called the tetrakys.
Eu: He called your cupcakes tetrakys?
Ph: ... He concluded that harmony, the experience of beauty itself, was inherent in the very nature of number. It’s in the very mind of the universe itself.
Eu: Trippy.
Trippy indeed, but what’s the point? The point, of course, as Philanike well knows, is that harmony is not only inherent in the system of mathematics that governs geometry and arithmetic: it is demanded by it. Of course, perhaps we only perceive harmony because we get used to it: but why do we get used to it? Take the well-used and well-abused golden ratio of 1:1.618. We see this ratio in a number of proportions of the human body, in the growth of some plants, in some crystals, and all over art. Why do we like the proportions of the golden rectangle? We like it because we see it all the time and are used to it, but we see it all the time because it occurs all the time in nature.
Skeptics of this kind of mathematical mysticism rightly point out that the golden ratio does not, actually, occur all the time in nature. It occurs often, but so do other proportions. The famous claim that the nautilus shell grows in the golden ratio is easily debunked by measuring some nautilus shells, and while the proportion occurs all over the human body, so do many other ratios and proportions, depending upon what you wish to measure. The reason it seems so mystical is that we notice it.
With all due respect to the skeptics of this sort of number mysticism (for whom I have some sympathy), they are missing the point. Of course, so are a lot of would-be mystics. The golden ratio, the harmonies of 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, and other important ratios are not important because they show up all the time, but because they don’t. Things take on meaning because of difference. If every proportion in the universe were the golden ratio, it’d mean nothing. Instead, because it occurs in some proportions and not others, we can take it as a mark—or, in Greek, a synthema—of a certain kind of harmony.
The full exploration of this kind of sacred geometry and number mysticism would quickly eat three hundred pages of this book and leave much left undone. But it’s important to know that the theurgists of Late Antiquity regarded the synthemata of number and geometry as the highest, most perfect synthemata, and—for those with the inclination and ability—the fastest way to understand the mind of god. Those theurgists took their inspiration ultimately from Pythagoras and Euclid. For Pythagoras, numerical harmony was the underlying structure of the universe: perceiving this harmony would make a person’s mind over in the shape of the divine. For Euclid, the principles of the extended line and the bounded definition was all that was necessary to construct reality.
We now know that certain activities cannot be performed by Euclid with his simple tools of straight-edge and compass. For example, Euclid could not trisect an angle, or square a circle—and, using his rules, neither can you. Seriously, you can’t. It’s mathematically impossible.44 Which means it’s not in the idea of the Nous that such a thing can be done using only the principles of extension and circumscription. This means that while certain geometrical shapes can be constructed by straight-edge and compass—we’ve seen the triangle and square, but you can also construct a pentagon (and the pentagram inscribed within it), the hexagon (6gon), an octagon (8gon), and a decagon (10gon). You cannot construct a 7gon or a 9gon using just a ruler and straightedge. Of course, you can come close and approximate, but Euclid’s rules are about exact relationships, not approximations. You may notice that you rarely see 7gons or 9gons in nature, while 6gons and 8gons are common enough, and 5gons are almost everywhere you look.
What leads to this impossibility? From a mathematical standpoint, the math inherent in the tools. Analog computers are limited, and compass and straightedge are early analog computers for doing complex arithmetic. From a mystical standpoint, these impossibilities are worthy of contemplations because not only is the mathematical explanation true, but we can assign mystical significance to it as well. There’s one particular number encoded in the compass itself that opens up entire worlds of impossibility: pi.
Pi is what mathematicians call an irrational number, not because it’s crazy but because it cannot be described by a ratio of whole numbers. Another irrational number, the square root of two, is the ratio of a side of a square to its diagonal. And a third, the square root of three, is the ratio of a side of an equilateral triangle to its height. These numbers can never be described as a fraction of integers. Pi has another quality as well, which mathematicians name “transcendental,” an appropriate name although they mean nothing mystical by it. Pi not only cannot be described as a ratio, it cannot be derived from any arithmetic operation. There are algorithms that can derive pi, of course, but arithmetic—addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and their extensions of powers and roots—cannot derive pi. Since the straight-edge and compass constitute a computer designed to do arithmetic, we cannot derive pi. Pi is automatically created by every swing of the compass, but any operation that requires us to derive it by some other means is impossible. We can actually bisect an angle: this only requires arithmetic. But trisecting an angle means trisecting an arc, and trisecting an arc requires us to arithmetically derive pi with tools unsuited to it. Now, we can cheat—we can mark our ruler, for example—and then trisection becomes trivial. And this is an analogy for creation.
In order to create all the polygons using a ruler and straightedge, we need to impose our own order upon the tools. Order arises out of the structure of the mind of universe, and we speak back to it. We contribute something, potentially, to creation. Of course, heptagons (7gons) and trisected angles occur in nature—but not often. And so we as conscious beings, reflective of the Nous, can fill in the gaps. Yet it’s important to remember that even the order we impose upon the tools is inherent in that point: it all comes out of a single dot, a location without magnitude.
All these meditations are inspiring and worthwhile, but as I said, I could spend hundreds of pages on them and never scratch the surface. For our more practical theurgic purposes, we can make some use of these geometrical shapes as synthemata without necessarily learning the whole of geometry in the process. I would encourage you, in using these geometrical shapes, to construct them yourself out of compass and straightedge (or string and chalk line) according to the ancient fashion; geometrical construction is itself a ritual invoking the gods. You will not receive the same effect just copying them out of a book.
The best use to make of these noetic synthemata is as objects of meditation. For example, if you were to construct the triangle in your mind (after having practiced it on paper a few times), you can use this mental construction as a contemplative device. Where, for instance, does the complexity of the triangle come from? The simplicity of a featureless point. What does that tell you about existence of the divine? At more advanced levels, you can begin to play with the constructions. Once you construct a triangle, it’s fairly simple to construct a hexagon. What does the process of doing so tell you about the nature of the hexagon? My mind is immediately led to the fact that the process involves connecting the corner of the first triangle to its center, and then extending the line outward to the circle, which makes me think that the hexagon is latent within the triangle, and is therefore a symbol of reflection and balance of the hidden and the apparent. You, of course, will arrive at different ideas as you contemplate these symbols.
As you do this contemplation, you will begin to build up a vocabulary of geometrical shapes that will be more alive and powerful for you than any list of correspondences. I could tell you that a certain god relates to a certain shape, but you will more productively make such connections yourself, through construction and contemplation, because then they will become living symbols. At the same time, you will also gain insight into the nature of the mathematical universe, and therefore—from a theurgic perspective—the world of Ideas.
Time
The timing of our lives is determined by the regular geometrical movement of the earth and various heavenly bodies. We often forget it, those of us who live in cities, but the sky is a giant clock (or rather, our clocks are miniature skies) that moves through a bewildering array of sweeping and interlocking cycles to spell out particular times. One of the original schools of mathematics was calendrics: the study of these cycles, intimately connected to astronomy and hence astrology. Our current popular understanding of astrology as mere sun signs is a pale reflection of the sophisticated system that once existed, and I find myself joining the skeptics in sneering at it. But there are insights in the movements of the planets and the earth that can help us understand the nature of the divine, and time itself is a noetic synthema.
If we take the wheel of the year, we can chop it into four chunks, which mark the longest and shortest days, as well as the two day/night pairs that are absolutely even. We know these four points as the turning of the seasons, and we have assigned the name Aries to the turning of the spring season, then divided the sun’s motion into thirty-degree chunks throughout the sky, assigning a sign with a name taken from a related constellation to each. It’s a common misconception that the astronomical constellation Aries marks the beginning of spring. At one point this was true, but now the sun does not enter the constellation of Aries on the first day of spring. Instead, it enters a space in the sky we call “Aries,” in honor of where that astronomical constellation once was. It’s common every few years for some reporter to breathlessly announce that our astrological signs are “wrong.” This isn’t news for any astrologer, nor is it true. The astrological signs are named after, but not contiguous with, the astronomical constellations of the zodiac.
These four seasons have a large influence on the earth. For much of North America and most of Europe, winter is the season of quiet and rest, spring the season of fecundity and new growth, summer the season of heat and activity, and fall the season of dying and harvest. This cycle of seasons is particularly significant to fertility and vegetation deities, such as Osiris, who can be seen to be living out his life cycle over and over, promising resurrection in the spring.
Interlocking with this cycle of four is the natural lunar cycle of 29.5 days giving us months (named after the moon). This cycle can itself be divided into four points: new, first quarter, full, third quarter.
Fig. 7: Order of the Planets
Often it is thought that the full moon is more propitious than the new, and that the moon increasing through first quarter is better for growing and increasing than the moon falling from full through its third quarter to new.
We have an association of each of the seven days of the week with the planets dating back to the second century, which I’ve previously mentioned. Each day is sacred to one of the planetary gods, and activities and rituals dedicated to that god may be done on that day.
Finally, we have a later innovation: the division of the day into hours, each of which is sacred to a god. These hours are divisions of the period between sunup and sundown for each day, so they are of uneven length most days of the year; they rarely are sixty minutes in length. Many computer programs exist that can calculate these hours for you, some of them online and most of them free. In brief, the hours follow the Chaldean sequence of the planets. You will notice if we arrange the planets in a heptagram, we can see an interesting relationship between the sequence of the planetary days and that of the hours. Following around the circumference of the circle reveals the sequence of the days, while following the line of the heptagram gives us the order of the Chaldean hours.
Another set of sacred days we can use to time our theurgic workings can be gleaned from the ancient calendars of antiquity. Here, rather than geometrical divisions of the sky and the motions of celestial bodies, festivals are established by human cultural convention. These, then, are intermediate rather than noetic synthemata, but they still have their uses as a gesture of recognition of original contexts. At the same time, we as theurgists are not reconstructing ancient religion. Reconstruction is a worthwhile goal but not the goal of theurgy, so I would not be bound by the traditional holidays and ceremonies of the gods.
Because Roman festivals followed a solar calendar like ours—in fact, Romans invented our solar calendar—they can be dated with some precision. Most Roman festivals were several-day affairs, and they had many, many more holidays than we do. It is not unusual for a single month to have, potentially, a week or two of festival days. Of course, just like most Americans do nothing more on Flag Day than put up a flag, many of these festivals were probably relatively cursory affairs, excuses for barbecues. And since the only meat many people got on a regular basis was that served at the sacrifices, the needs of protein may have driven the festival calendar more than any particular religious feeling.
Greek festivals, on the other hand, were set on a lunar calendar, and individual city-states had their own festival calendars. Because these lunar calendar days do not coincide with the seasons, they are hard to pin down on our modern calendar. Moreover, it’s almost impossible to make a full list of all the festivals of all the city-states without filling in almost every single day of the year with a sacrifice or ritual game. Not all festivals occurred every year: some occurred every so many years, some occurred when the local government decided it was time. The only one of these festivals we still celebrate is the Agon Olympikos, the Olympic Games, in honor of the gods of Olympus, held every four years. The games themselves were a tribute to Zeus, showcasing the most perfect and beautiful achievements capable of the human body. But not only physical achievement was displayed: artistic and poetic talent also had their competitions. The festival was an offering of human beauty to the gods. Our modern Olympics, restored after the ban on the games in the fourth century, are quite different.45 We have more different kinds of events, the athletes are clothed, and the games travel from country to country.
We could easily revive the practice of some of these festivals, although others would require a larger cultural participation. It’s ill-advised, for example, to slap a crowd of girls with raw-hide to increase their fertility if you don’t have a willing crowd of girls. The reestablishment of the ancient holidays is more the project of a reconstructionist. I have experimented with adding in elements of holidays to existing holidays in our culture—adding, for example, offerings to Saturnus to Christmas, a holiday the ancients called Saturnalia. Overall, I have not found this particularly religiously significant for my own practice. I have found it more useful to time my religious practices to astrological phenomena.
It would be convenient, therefore, if we could simply assign gods to months or astrological signs and thus have a series of theurgic festivals for our own devotional use without having to rely on translating a lunar calendar to a solar one, or cultural traditions from antiquity to contemporary times. Plato, in the Phaedrus, indicates a possible correspondence between thirteen gods and the astrological signs, with an explanation of how to arrange thirteen
gods on twelve signs:
Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot,
leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of
all; and there follows him the array of gods and demigods,
marshaled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home
in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned
among the princely twelve march in their appointed order.46
The Phaedrus is an important text to later Neoplatonists because it establishes some of the methods and metaphors that permeate the practice of theurgy in the West. Here we see a hint of the organization of the gods on the zodiac, with Hestia remaining in the center and Zeus leading the eleven other gods around the ring. Sadly, Plato never adequately explains what gods fit what signs. Perhaps he thought it would be self-explanatory, or perhaps it was esoteric knowledge only given to members of his school.
Some evidence for the latter explanation exists throughout the later Roman period in the form of various mosaics establishing correspondences between the gods and the signs or months. Unfortunately, few of these correspondences agree with each other.47 Evidence for the former conjecture, the idea that this correspondence was common knowledge, exists in the names of some of the months themselves.
The earliest Roman calendar, that of Romulus, consisted of ten months of thirty or thirty-one days each. Obviously, since the year is 365.256 days long, this calendar is not going to work long term, which is why we have uneven month-lengths in our current calendar, as well as two extra months. The names of the first four months—starting with March—are associated with Etruscan deities, the precursors of many of the Roman deities not borrowed from the Greeks. Later months were named for the numbers from five to ten (of these, only four of them—September the seventh month, October the eighth month, November the ninth month, and December the tenth month—preserve their numbers, the earlier ones having been renamed after Julius and Augustus Caesar). Clearly, this was a calendar of agricultural people, beginning in the spring and consigning other months to mere numbers. The first month, Martius, is named after Mars, who is both an agricultural god and a god of war. It makes sense that the first month of spring is a time of planting as well as a time of beginning military campaigns. The second month, Aprilis, may be named after the Etruscan god Apru, while the third month, Maias, is named after Maia, a goddess of fertility and the earth. Finally, the fourth month, Iunius, is named in honor of Iuno.
Where to place the gods if we wish to align them to the calendar? One could, of course, simply assign the gods to the months on the basis of their public festivals, but the Roman and Greek festivals were not evenly spaced around the year, as those of Wicca are, so this correspondence can prove more troublesome than it appears, especially since different cities honored different customs at different times. Alternately, one could import one of the existent correspondences wholesale, which may appeal to reconstructionists even if the immediate logic is not quite clear. Some of the correspondences, however, do offer some reasoning. For example, Manillius arranges the gods according to the zodiac, as follows:
Pallas (Minerva) watches over the Woolbearer (Aries);
Cytherea (Venus) over Taurus;
Phoebus (Apollo) the shapely Gemini;
You, Cyllenius (Mercury), over Cancer;
and Jupiter, you yourself rule Leo
with the Mother of the Gods;
Virgo who bears ears of grain belongs to Ceres;
and the forged scales to Vulcan;
quarrelsome Scorpio clings to Mars;
Diana cherishes the hunting man part horse (Sagittarius);
and Vesta the contracted stars of Capricorn;
opposite Jupiter is Aquarius, the star of Juno;
and Neptune acknowledges his own
Pisces in the upper air.48
There is, at least, a certain logic to this arrangement, and it is the one that I prefer.
I prefer this arrangement for its symmetry as well as its logic. In Figure 8, you can see that each pair of male and female deities is set opposite each other. And there is some rationale given for each of the correspondences. Astrologers may find it itches their mind to place, for example, Mercurius in charge of Cancer, but remember that the planetary gods are a separate arrangement from those of the twelve.
For those with a less ceremonial bent, this arrangement may not be of much use. But it can help us time particular theurgic rituals to coincide with auspicious seasons. For example, the Spring equinox, when the sun enters into Aries, is especially useful for the worship of Minerva. And if you wish to cultivate a particular relationship with a god, then performing rituals during their month is a good way of aligning your theurgic goals with cosmic timing.
The Theurgist as Synthema
Saturday Night Live, a comedy show running since 1976, had a skit several years ago in which a pious housewife—played by Sally Field—goes through her morning praying for her daughter at school, her husband at work, and finally for the characters on her favorite soap opera. At that moment, Jesus appears and asks her to stop praying so much, since it requires him to do a lot of work just to keep the rice from getting sticky and helping her vacuum the stairs. The skit ends with Jesus feeling a bit guilty and erasing her memory of the event, whereupon she goes back to praying about trivial things.
We all know people who are so enthusiastic about their religion that they tie it to all aspects of their lives, and while we might find that a bit ridiculous and risible, especially when those facets of life include trivialities, we also—I think—kind of admire it. After all, who can be so dedicated and single-minded but a saint? The pious housewife that Sally Field plays in that skit is earnest and likeable even as we laugh at her.
I think what I find ridiculous in that attitude is the abdication of life involved in giving over every daily activity to a deity. Humans are creatures that choose and create, and when we decide to give up choice in order to subject our entire will to a deity, we reduce ourselves to programmed robots. I cannot imagine that’s what the gods want or find appealing. After all, what good is a praise from a robot? So in writing this section, I put myself in a sticky position: I want to suggest, even advocate, an enthusiastic immersion into your theurgy without necessarily becoming a Pagan update of the old skit.
Another reason the pious housewife in the Saturday Night Live skit seems ridiculous is that she’s asking a transcendent deity for help in housework and cooking. At one point, she suggests that perhaps she has gone too far in asking for help for her daughter in her algebra class, to which Jesus replies something like, “No, that’s okay, she’s going to need algebra in her later life.” This sends her into confusion: how can a transcendent deity support the study of algebra but not care about the vacuuming?
As theurgists, we have no such problem: the gods do work, and we do work with the gods. They are not transcendent or not purely so. Their immanent part is present as synthemata in our daily life, and in our practice of theurgy we can strive to make ourselves synthemata of the gods.
Consider your daily activities. When you cook dinner, you are in the immanent presence of Hestia, goddess of the hearth, even if your modern hearth is a microwave. If you are locking your door in the morning, you are honoring Janus Bifrons, god of doorways. If you are driving to work, you are in the temple of Hermes. If you are drafting a memo about a new policy, you are making an offering to Zeus. If you are, either as father or mother, caring for your child, you are doing the godwork of Hera. And when you sleep, you enter the domain of Hypnos. Every act, every area and domain of life, is a temenos, a sacred precinct of one or more gods. When we overtly recognize this fact, we begin to make our lives a synthema.
This doesn’t mean you must change your life to become a saint (although it might lead to you changing your life to become a more effective father, a more caring partner, a more honest businessperson). It means that your life as it is, as it currently stands, is a synthema of the divine, a manifestation of the logos that guides and undergirds the cosmos. Even the dull, everyday details of your life are under the gaze of a god. As the old occult maxim has it, there is no part of you that is not of the gods.
The theurgist recognizes this and makes of these activities an opportunity for contemplation. We don’t need to drop to our knees. In fact, no one needs to know what we’re doing at all for most of these activities. In the next chapter we’ll talk about more overt ritual actions we can take such as libations and offerings. But here are some gestures we can make to recognize the domain of the gods in our lives and begin to act as a synthema in our own right.
The simplest and quietest way of recognizing the gods’ actions in our lives is to call up a phantasm, even for just a second, of the god or goddess connected to any given activity. For example, while cooking we can imagine the image of Hestia at her sacred hearth, just for a moment. If that’s too much, one can simply recall the god’s emblem: Hestia’s fire or Hermes’s staff, for example.
If you wish to audibly or silently recognize the deity, you can do so with a short verbal formula. For Greek gods, you can say khaire (pronounced, approximately, “hhai-reh” with a harsh h) and the name of the god in the vocative. For Roman gods, you can do the same after saying io, pronounced “ee-oh” or “yo.” For Egyptian gods, the introductory word is dua pronounced however you darn well please, since scholars really have only a vague notion anyway. You can say these formulae aloud or to yourself. I tend to mutter a quiet “khaire Herme” if I find a coin on the ground, but mostly I keep it to myself. You can also use your native language to recognize the god by name; don’t worry excessively about linguistic authenticity.
One useful traditional formula is a quick blessing of Janus on leaving home. The phrase “Io Iane, pro itu et reditu” means “Hail Janus, for going out and coming back.” If you keep in mind Janus’s cosmic role as not only god of your personal doorways but also the doorways of the universe, you’ll find this a useful way to train yourself to recognize those liminal spaces in which magic can occur.
Certain physical gestures, traditional salutes to the gods, can also be used to subtly invoke a god at the appropriate moment. For example, ancient Greeks might kiss the fingertips of the right hand on seeing the sun or the moon for the first time in a day. Socrates mentions saluting the sun this way, and Burkert describes it as a common salute to the images of the gods.49 It’s easy enough to perform unobtrusively and good practice in keeping conscious of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as well as the gods they represent. A clockwise circumambulation of a sacred object is also a symbolic salute to the deity it represents or houses. This may be a sacred spring, tree, or an artificial object like a statue. In doing both of these gestures, the theurgist identifies himself or herself symbolically in relationship to the god. The kiss is a small offering of breath, a dedication of the soul to the divine presences of the moon and sun. The circumambulation identifies the theurgist with the path of the sun, of course, and it also inscribes a circle with the sacred object at the center and the theurgist describing its circumference. As we know, a circle is a powerful geometrical shape, representing the emanation of the world from the elaboration of the One. The choice of the sun and the moon as primary objects of this kind of veneration is also significant: the sun is a metaphor for the One, and the moon is therefore the Nous that reflects the One. These simple gestures are—to those in the know—profound philosophical and metaphysical statements.
Other more elaborate physical rituals may be undertaken, but we will cover them more fully in the next chapter. So far, these are all intermediate synthemata that have the benefit of bringing our bodies into accord with the divine and making our actions synthemata of the gods. Secondarily, they are easy to perform: it requires no particular training to kiss one’s hand. We know, however, that noetic synthemata also exist and are in some ways more powerful. Iamblichus argues that the material and intermediate synthemata are starting points for theurgy given to those with little training or skill, while the more skilled theurgist works with the mind. I lean toward a blended position in which all these forms of theurgy work best when in harmony: when the material synthemata are chosen well and the intermediate synthemata are performed mindfully, all guided by a mind shaped by the noetic synthemata.
Plato describes a simple meditation that can lead one very far into becoming a synthema of the gods. Plotinus, we are told by his biographer Porphyry, used this meditation to achieve henosis.50 Plato presents it in a dialogue in the Symposium, in which Socrates reports the words of the wise woman Diotima. She suggests an exercise by which one climbs a ladder of abstraction toward the Form of beauty:
Exercise 3.2: Contemplation of Beauty
Step 1: Select a single beautiful object, one that you love intensely. This can be a person or an object. Contemplate this beauty discursively, seeking out what it is that makes this particular form beautiful. Identify its abstract, rather than physical beauty. Perhaps you admire the way your lover’s hair falls: recognize that it’s not the hair, but the grace of the hair, that you find beautiful.
Step 2: You will begin to see that this beauty exists elsewhere in other things as well: the fall of a waterfall, the movements of a cat, and so on. Recognize and contemplate the nature of these beauties, all of a kind together with each other, each representing some instantiation of the same ultimate beauty.
Step 3: As you continue with this contemplation, you will begin to see the beauty of virtue superseding that of the body itself. Contemplate those virtues that are beautiful, leaving behind physical form. Muscles are beautiful because they are power in control: the control of power is a virtue separate from any physicality, so contemplate the virtue of self-control or balance and harmony.
Step 4: As you do so, you will begin to see the beauty of systems of knowledge, ideas, and laws. Contemplate the beauty of these until you begin to recognize that what is beautiful in a society or a system of knowledge is the same thing, no matter how it is instantiated. Recognize that cultural customs may change but they reflect ultimately the same underlying values of the family that is humanity.
Step 5: Ultimately, you will begin to move up to realize that all beauties, all virtues, all beautiful customs and systems of knowledge partake of a single ineffable beauty, the Good. This experience is henosis, and achieving it, even for a moment, makes your mind the same as the Good, which is the One.
The Noetic Synthema of Memory
The art of memory was a central part of Renaissance esoteric practice, and the Greeks also honored and admired the power of memory, so much so that Socrates, perhaps ironically, calls writing a poison that kills memory and suggests that we shouldn’t write down the things he says. Of course, he does this in a dialogue that Plato did, fortunately, commit to writing.51 Training your memory is also useful in the rituals of the next chapter, so you can memorize how to do them rather than reading them off of notecards. Since the Logos is organized, training the human mind makes it a synthema of the universe.
The goddess of memory is Mnemosyne, a Titan or primordial deity and mother of the nine muses who inspire all knowledge and art in humanity. She is a personification of memory itself, and she had no cult, no temple, and few myths. In later Neoplatonic and Hermetic religious beliefs it was thought that she presided over a spring in the underworld, the Pool of Mnemosyne, whose waters countered the forgetful effect of the waters of the river Lethe. Those who died usually drank of Lethe, and forgot their lives before being reborn. Initiates in the secrets of the underworld, however, could choose instead to drink from the Pool of Mnemosyne, and thus remember who they had been in their previous lives. Memory was a type of religious salvation.
The basic key of memory is this: we remember phantasms to which we have an erotic link, and we do not remember things that are not linked to a phantasm by an erotic connection. Now, by “phantasm” I mean sensory image, and by “erotic” I mean emotive, not necessarily sexual. I use these particular terms rather than more contemporary psychological terminology, because they are evocative of the way in which the training of memory creates a synthema out of the mind. Eros is a god: you see supposed depictions of him on Valentine’s day, a cute cherub with a bow and arrow. But in the Orphic tradition, Eros is not just a cute cherub, but another name for Phanes, a fundamental god that orders reality and establishes the “first origin”: he is the god that brings things together, the god of gravity, magnetism, sympathy, and love.52 In modern terms, he is the god of the fundamental forces that bind atoms. He also lends structure to the mind, making memory possible. One of the easiest ways to make these erotic links is by using the method of loci, or places.
Since I mentioned the method of loci, I am now required by law to tell a particular story. Every book on memory tells this story, so I assume there must be a law requiring me to tell it: Once, during a banquet, Cicero tells us, the blind poet Simonides was called out of the hall to answer a message. While gone, the hall collapsed, killing everyone inside. When they cleared the rubble, they could not identify the dead, so Simonides walked among them naming the bodies, because he had memorized their locations in the short time he had been in the hall.53 I don’t find this a particularly unlikely story, and it has very little to do with the method of loci, so—there it is. My obligation is fulfilled.
The method of loci takes advantage of our sense of space to create an orderly mental framework upon which we can hang ideas. You can use any space with which you are familiar, or even an imaginary space, as long as it matters to you in some way. If you wish to remember a sequence of things—a grocery list, ritual actions, the names of your nephews—you simply enter in the imagination into a space you are familiar with and begin placing phantasms of those things to be remembered in various orderly locations.
This is easier exemplified than explained. Let’s imagine I wish to remember my grocery list: eggs, butter, apples, cherries, tuna, bread. I enter—in my imagination—my front door, which I imagine dripping with broken eggs, the yolk running down over the threshold and the front steps. The tea table inside the front door has been spread with a thick coating of butter; I’ll never get it cleaned off the glass top. My piano has had all its white keys replaced with apples, all its black ones with cherries. The bookshelf against the wall has flopping tuna-fish between the books, and the couch has been replaced with a comfortable-looking giant loaf of bread.
This example exemplifies four essential principles of this technique:
- 1. Order: The items are placed in a specific sequence, set by the pattern I walk into the house when I enter the front door. This pattern never varies. These locations are called loci.
- 2. Phantasm: Each item to be remembered is remembered not as a word but as an image, a phantasm, with as much sensory detail as one can call up. The more vividly they can be imagined, the more successfully they will be remembered.
- 3. Brevity: Objects with natural groupings can be grouped together: it makes sense to include apples and cherries in the same locus. One can cluster a large number of objects together, up to eight or even more, thus expanding a relatively small number of loci.
- 4. Eros: Each image is arresting. They are not particularly erotic in the usual sense (although they could have been) but they cause a reaction of attraction or repulsion that helps them stick in the mind. The objects interact with or replace the objects in question: the connection is active, not passive. An object changing, replacing, or modifying a locus creates a stronger erotic link than merely having an object sit in a particular locus.
Your home is one simple set of loci you already have, and the Greeks and Romans used other systems as well. Later Renaissance thinkers elaborated into very large, abstract collections of loci. A common set was the twelve signs of the zodiac, which already come with specific images that are easy to incorporate into phantasms. Other masters of the art of memory created elaborate temples or palaces called memory palaces where they could store their ideas. Renaissance Neoplatonists like Giordano Bruno structured memory palaces out of geometrical relationships so one could not only store ideas but link them together in geometrical relationships: their memory palaces became engines for thinking.
The point of all of this was not simply to memorize shopping lists or the points one wished to make in a speech. The point is to construct and order the mind according to principles of order or cosmos, thus putting the mind in order to mirror the order of the universe. Doing so brings the mind closer to the Nous wherein dwell all the ordering principles of the universe. The beneficial side effects of memory should not be discounted (with my native memory being what it is, that I have these techniques is a godsend). They are, however, side effects: the real result is an ordered mind which can see more clearly into the world of Ideas.
Exercise 3.3: Ordering the Mind
You can, of course, simply use your home as a source of loci, but unless you are careful to walk through it exactly the same way in your imagination each time, there is room for confusion. A more elaborate and useful temple can be constructed in the mind that can hold any number of objects. We will construct such a temple now.
Step 1: Sit comfortably and close your eyes as you imagine the loci I describe. Place them in the spatial order described, as if you are walking through the space. You’ll need to get in the habit of walking through this space many times, each time visualizing each of the details as the same. This exercise will be easier if you already are familiar with occult symbols: otherwise, you will need to memorize the symbols as described for the first time. This will require native memory to some extent, but you will find it easier if you can imagine yourself viewing them in space rather than memorizing them in the abstract.
Imagine a door of wood, with a brass handle. Open it and step into a foyer. On each of the walls of the foyer is a mural. Begin with that behind you and go clockwise around the room.
Behind you is a mural of three parts. On the bottom is a rocky environment, with plowed fields in the distance. Standing above this environment is a gnome, a small man in a peaked green hat. Above him stalactites hang down. To your right is a similar mural of three parts. This one has waves on the bottom part, a beautiful naked woman standing on the waves in the middle part, and a sky of heavy rainclouds above her. The wall to the right of that wall, the one facing you as you enter the room, also has three parts. On the lower half is a lake of lava, smoking. Above that stands a curling lizard. Above him, the sky is lit red with lightning and smoke. To the right of this mural (on the wall to your left as you enter the room from the outside) is another three-part mural: on the lower part, white fluffy clouds float through a blue sky. Above those clouds is a young man with wings, rising upward with a satisfied look on his face. Above him is a soft yellow glow, as if the sun is just out of the frame.
The center of the room contains an altar with a golden lamp and an offering dish.
Step 2: Once you have built this structure, you will find it easy and useful to employ in your daily life. For example, if I am going shopping for the ingredients for a cake, I need sugar, vanilla, eggs, milk, lemon juice, cocoa powder, flour, baking soda, and salt. These are nine items, so I can place them on the murals by starting with the earth mural. I call up the scene I’ve built on that mural, then place sugar on the lower part: in the rocks there is a visible vein of glittering sugar, rather than precious stones. The gnome is swigging from a brown bottle of vanilla extract with visible delight. The stalactites have round, white eggs dangling off their ends. In the mural of water, the ocean waves are white and frothy: they’ve become milk. The undine is biting into a lemon and making a face, and the rain clouds in the back are dropping cocoa into the milky sea. The mural of fire takes the next three items: the lava has been sprinkled with flour and so has become breaded and browned; it looks tasty. The salamander has swallowed baking soda, and so he is rising like a biscuit: he’s all puffy. The smoke in the sky has crystallized into square salty crystals.
Obviously these images are weird, and you may feel strange taking what are essentially sacred images and applying often ridiculous phantasms to them. In fact, one of the reasons the art of memory finally died out in the middle ages is that theologians felt much the same way: applying vain images to often holy scenes was seen as impious. I would encourage you to think of it otherwise: the universe has a sense of humor, and by ordering these things in whatever way helps us remember them, we too begin to understand the humor of such incongruities and their underlying reason.
Step 3: The altar in the center of the room has another use: to sacrifice those memories and thoughts that cause us pain. We can use it to offer our flaws, our painful memories, and our weaknesses to the gods to take care of. Essentially, you can imagine the source of your pain as an object in the offering dish, then burn it to white ash with the flame of the lamp. You will not forget painful memories this way, but it is a way to understand the alchemical process of transforming pain into something more useful.
As this last step implies, the palace of memory is also a place where we can work on ourselves in a safe mental environment. It becomes a psychological tool as well as a practical tool, and in bringing it into order we bring our own minds into order. The more ordered our minds, the more we are able to think and consider and hold, the more we become like the universal Nous.
You don’t need to build this kind of esoteric memory palace in order to have an effective place to store and organize ideas as well as a space for psychological work. Any structure will work. This particular example has some advantages: it’s organized already, built out of already available esoteric symbolism, and not tied to a particular place. One disadvantage of using a physical place is that those places change and move about. I was using my childhood home for years after it was torn down, and now I often use the front room of my house with the awareness that it might well no longer resemble that in the future. You can also build different palaces. For example, you will eventually find twelve slots to be a bit crowded (although you can double or even triple up the things you store in those slots), so you can add additional murals—the seven planets, the twelve signs, and so on. Essentially, any ordered system of easily visualized symbols can be used as a memory palace.
The method of loci isn’t the only means of memorization, of course, and in fact I use it much less often than I use more versatile methods like the peg system, in which each number is assigned an iconic object. I would heartily recommend that those interested in such methods read a book such as Your Memory by Kenneth Higbee.54
Lares and the Shrine
A shrine is a small space set aside for household or private worship. A shrine may house a cult figure just as a temple does, but it is the center of personal, not civic, devotion. Shrines in Neopaganism are popular, giving rise to the saying about a Neopagan’s house: “Every wall a bookshelf, every surface an altar.” These altars are really, usually, shrines, containing one or more deity figures, certain tools of religion, and perhaps an offering bowl or dish. Every Roman household had a particular shrine, some more ornate than others, known as the lararium. The lararium usually consists of a peaked roof or painting of one, supported by two pillars. In the middle of this portico is the figure of the family genius or guardian spirit flanked on either side by two lares figures. The lares were household gods, supporters and protectors of the family. Below these figures there is often the depiction of a serpent, representing the land’s fertility. In addition, there may be a shrine to the penates, the guardians of the cupboard.
These shrines, the ancient lararia and the modern Neopagan altars, are collections of synthemata to achieve a particular theurgic effect. When the young Roman boy offered a lock of hair to the lares of his family, he symbolically sacrificed himself to his own duty as an adult: he became the synthema of sacrifice. And when Neopagans burn incense or make offerings to the goddesses and gods on their private altar, they are situating themselves in relationship to those deities, reenacting the establishment of divine order.
The minimum a shrine requires is an image of a deity—which can be simple or complex—and a means of offering. An incense burner and a forked twig may be enough for a witch of certain traditions, while some of us may prefer more complex arrangements. Working tools, devices of divination, and whatever other impedimenta we gather in our esoteric practices may end up on the table as well.
A shrine may also be made portable and can consist of nothing more than a drawing of the deity and a bowl or cup. The point is simply to focus one’s mind on the deity; complexity isn’t required.
It is useful to establish a place for theurgy in your home, so you can work with the material and intermediate synthemata while simultaneously training your mind in harmony with the noetic synthemata.
36 pwdunn@gmail.com
37 Ruth Majercik. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 1989), 91.
38 Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell, trans. Iamblichus: On the Mysteries. (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2003), 269. DM 233: 9–12.
39 Gregory Shaw. Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 170–188.
40 Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 88.
41 Plotinus, The Ethical Treatises, being the Treatises of the First Ennead, with Porphry’s Life of Plotinus, and the Preller-Ritter Extracts forming a Conspectus of the Plotinian System, translated from Greek by Stephen Mackenna (Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1918). Chapter: X: Soul and Body. Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1272/6766 on 2013–05–08
42 Algis Uždavinys. Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity. (San Rafael, CA: Sophia Perennis, 2010), 173.
43 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), 90.
44 Really. No, you didn’t. Please don’t write me, or worse, random math professors, saying that you did.
45 Historical information about the Olympics may be found at http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/olympic.htm.
46 Benjamin Jowett, trans. Phaedrus by Plato. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html
47 For a thorough treatment, see Ken Gillman. “Twelve Gods and Seven Planets.” http://cura.free.fr/decem/10kengil.html. Accessed 8 May 2013.
48 Gillman. “Twelve Gods and Seven Planets.” Accessed 8 May 2013, http://cura.free.fr/decem/10kengil.html.
49 Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 75.
50 Mark Edwards, trans. Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by their Students. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 44.
51 Benjamin Jowett, trans. Phaedrus by Plato. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html
52 W. K. C. Guthrie. Orpheus and Greek Religion. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 80.
53 This account is found in Cicero’s de Oratore 2.74.299–300, which is available online at http://www.utexas.edu/research/memoria/Cicero.html, accessed 11 May 2013.
54 Kenneth Higbee. Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It. (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001).