Rituals and
Tools of Theurgy
All of our preparation and work so far has been chiefly mental. And this is the method chiefly preferred by the Neoplatonist Plotinus. Iamblichus, a student of Porphyry, took it a different route, though, realizing that in the material world, the rituals and their synthemata are a sacred reenactment of actions in the Psyche and the Nous. We can learn to control the course of our minds and souls by performing rituals. He looked specifically at the rituals in common use at the time—sacrificial rituals to the gods—as a way for the common person to achieve henosis. I will describe these sacrificial rituals in depth and discuss how we might perform them ourselves even if we are not exactly Romans of Late Antiquity or ancient Greeks. But before I get to that, I imagine some readers may have an objection to the idea of ritual, an idea shared by Philanike’s student Euthymios:
Euthymios: A toga? Are we going to a frat party?
Philanike: No, I’m reenacting a sacrificial ritual.
Eu: And … why?
Ph: Partially out of the fun of it, but also because it’ll help you see a particular avenue to henosis.
Eu: And this is authentic, then? Where are the cows?
Ph: By Late Antiquity, it was actually more common to sacrifice bread instead. Plus, it’s hard getting the stains out of the carpet, not to mention my soft side doesn’t like to watch things die, even if I am going to eat them later.
Eu: And the toga?
Ph: Highly inauthentic, actually. Togae were men’s clothing; if a woman wore one, she was a prostitute. But they’re comfortable.
Eu: I’m not a fan of ritual.
Ph: Oh? Really? Why not?
Eu: It just seems like empty posturing. If you were really good, you wouldn’t need ritual.
Ph: Let’s define our terms. What is “ritual”?
Eu: A set of actions, I guess.
Ph: All actions are rituals? If they come in a set? Is making soup a ritual?
Eu: It can be. If it’s something you do at a particular time or place. Making a turkey on Thanksgiving is a ritual in America.
Ph: What makes it a ritual on Thanksgiving but not if I decide to make a turkey for dinner tonight?
Eu: I suppose it’s the symbolic meaning, the community involved.
Ph: Do rituals always have a community component?
Eu: Often they seem to. So a ritual is a set of actions with symbolic meaning, often with a communal purpose.
Ph: If I, in a society where pagans are rather scarce on the ground, perform a pagan ritual, is it a ritual? What community does it serve?
Eu: It puts you in a sort of community with your gods.
Ph: Do you have to know the symbolic content for a ritual to work? There are some words, called Barbarous Words of Invocation, of which no one knows the meaning. But I use them in rituals.
Eu: That’s what I’m talking about: they become empty then. It’s just posturing.
Ph: But wait … do we have to know the meaning of a word to use it?
Eu: I’d say so!
Ph: What does “the” mean?
Eu: It’s a word that … it’s a definite article.
Ph: Meaning what?
Eu: That the word that follows it is—definite. It’s a particular one of a set of things, like …
Ph: “The Romans ruled much of Europe and Africa.” Is “the Romans” a particular Roman?
Eu: No.
Ph: Then that’s not what “the” means. Do you know exactly how to define “the” to cover all of its uses?
Eu: Guess not.
Ph: Yet you can use it and understand it. So I can perform some actions as part of a ritual whose exact symbolic meanings I do not know, but that have an effect in creating communion with the gods: are there any parallels to things in our world that are like that?
Eu: I suppose passwords. I don’t need to know what a password means to type it in and get access to a computer. So some ritual actions might be like passwords, signs of recognition to the Nous.
Ph: Exactly. Hardly wastes of time, then. What about your second objection, that one shouldn’t need ritual. Why is ritual a crutch?
Eu: Well, you used the word “crutch,” not me. But okay, it’s a crutch because it’s material.
Ph: And matter is bad? You almost sound like Plotinus.
Eu: No, I know you don’t agree with him that matter is corrupt. So it’s not just that it’s material, it’s that it’s … showy. It’s showing off.
Ph: You’re the only one here, so who am I showing off for?
Eu: If that toga slips and the blinds are open, the neighbors. But okay, I see your point.
Ph: So in what way is this a crutch?
Eu: Well, you should be able to do everything that ritual does with your mind alone.
Ph: “Should”? Says who?
Eu: It’s weak to rely on physical objects when you can just do
all the work in your mind.
Ph: Did you drive here or walk?
Eu: I drove.
Ph: Why? You could have walked.
Eu: It’s four miles, and it’s raining. It would have taken forever, and I’d be soaked.
Ph: So why is that okay but using ritual—which can be faster and easier for some people—not?
Eu: I guess it’s just that I feel ridiculous.
Ph: Does feeling ridiculous damage your soul or just your personality?
Eu: Just my personality. My soul can’t feel ridiculous.
Ph: Is your personality always right about what is good?
Eu: No, sometimes it just wants to eat or drink.
Ph: Then why trust it with this matter until you test it out in your soul?
Eu: All right then, fix your toga and let’s see how this works with my soul. But I’m wearing pants!
Anthropologists, archeologists, social scientists, and probably a few unemployed eccentric people have all studied and written about ritual. We can dig up long, elaborate accounts of the rituals of people from diverse cultures, analyze the parts of a ritual from them, and discuss at length their social function. But while that endeavor is probably valuable, it’s not going to help us understand how ritual can play a part in our theurgy.
Like Euthymios above, some people may dislike the very idea of ritual. Some of that dislike is, I think, a result of early religious training: the puritan antipathy to pomp runs deep in American culture. And some of it might also be a rejection of early religious training: for many people, being dragged to their church’s religious services on Sunday is a tedious memory of childhood. But for many others it is an exciting and stirring event, and I know people—ordinary, practical people and not religious fanatics—who enjoy going to church and look forward to Mass or communion every week. What they enjoy, if you press them, is the community and the sense of spiritual calm that comes over them after having participated.
This same kind of spiritual communion is at the heart of antiquity’s most important rituals. I will divide rituals into two broad classes and describe how the specific rituals in those classes were (or may have been) performed. The first is the ritual of communion, which almost always involves an exchange of offerings to create a relationship with a deity, hero, or daimon. The second is the mythic reenactment, a somewhat more freeform structure applicable to a broad range of theurgic uses.
Rituals of Communion
In ancient Greece and Rome, every ritual of communion operated on an often misunderstood principle expressed in Latin as do ut des, “I give, so that you may give.” Now, Latin is a very concise language but unfortunately a lot of people misinterpret this principle as one of the flaws of Pagan religion: that all relationships with the gods are merely utilitarian, and that one gives offerings and worship only in return for some material benefit. This interpretation may well have been one that some people held in antiquity, but by Late Antiquity Neoplatonic philosophers had reinterpreted this phrase in a more charitable (and frankly more reasonable) way.
A gift, as Marcel Mauss informs us, requires a return gift.55 It’s a universal cultural assumption that gifts create obligations, and gift customs arise as a means of negotiating those obligations in a peaceful way. Giving a gift to a god also creates a sort of obligation, one that must be repaid with an answering gift. Obviously what the human gives to the god in offerings is of relatively little value to the god. What need does a god have for food or drink or incense? Gods are not material, so none. But the offering is a pretext for the god to offer us what the gods already offer: a pathway to henosis.
The gods already give us form: it is form that makes the wheat, eggs, butter, and whatever else turn into cakes for us to sacrifice, or the grapes to turn to wine for us to pour out. This form is imposed onto the elements by the gods of those things, and when we offer them up what we’re acknowledging is that the form itself is a gift. We are paying the gods back: “I give because you gave.” At the same time, it gives the gods an excuse, a pretext, to lift us up beyond the world of matter as well.
Ultimately, offering is two polite people standing at an open door. “After you.” “Oh no, after you.” “No, I insist.” This sort of back-and-forth exchange might be useless for entering a building, but it’s how our human souls climb back up to their origin. This, I think, is something even Plotinus misses when he discusses how souls interact with bodies: the communication goes both ways, from the world of Ideas down to matter, and back from matter up to the world of Ideas. We don’t change the gods by offering them gifts; we change ourselves, making ourselves receptive to the gifts they offer in return.
Obviously, the fact that the sun does not go out or that people do not spontaneously fly off the surface of the earth indicates that the gods are not capricious, despite their bad reps from mythology. People who do not respect the gods or even believe in them live perfectly content and useful and even spiritually fulfilling lives. The gods are not establishing the road of particular kinds of offering as the only road to the One, nor are they forcing or demanding anyone to take that road. Other roads are also good roads, going to good places. I rather like this one, however, and maybe you do too, since you’ve stuck with me for a hundred pages or so.
The Things Shown and the Things Said
The ancient Greek mystery religions divided a ceremony into three parts: the things shown, the things said, and the things done. From a theurgic perspective, each of these is a symbol of the gods. The objects shown in the ritual—that is, the ritual implements or tools—each represent a faculty of the soul. The things said—the words of the prayers and hymns and incantations—create a relationship between the theurgist and the gods. And the things done are a participation in the maintenance and harmonizing of the world; by participating in this work of the gods, the theurgist becomes divine. To participate in the work of the gods is to become godlike.
Still, one of the greatest sins of the ancient world was hubris, attempting to become what one was not. The Greek oracle at Delphi had the inscription “know thyself,” something contemporary people often take to be an exhortation to contemplation. But it was also a warning: know that you are human, not divine; do not strive to be a god. At the same time, the mystery religions of Late Antiquity recognized that humans have a divine part—in one myth, we are sprung out of the ashes of the god Dionysos and the evil Titans who consume him. To reclaim and recognize that divine part is to indeed know oneself, and the theurgist must always guard against hubris.
Things Shown: The Ritual Tools
Classical sacrifice required relatively few implements: fire, water, a knife, and a basket. For some rituals in ancient Rome, the priest may have a special staff used to outline the sacred space. Other rituals may have involved other tools or embellishments, too. But for the most part these four objects are the necessities. In fact, as the basket exists mostly to transport the knife and the groats, we can reduce the typical religious ritual to three elements: fire, water, and a knife, and the knife is only used for blood sacrifices.
Fire is a symbol of divine Form and the realm thereof: it represents the Nous, the consciousness of the universe that becomes the thoughts it thinks. Of fire, Plotinus writes: “Always struggling aloft, this subtlest of elements is at the last limits of the bodily. It admits no other into itself, while all bodies else give it entry … It sparkles and glows like an Idea.”56 When the worshiper throws incense on the fire, it is a sacrifice of Form to the Nous, and a recognition of the connection between matter and Form. Fire, therefore, is ubiquitous in theurgic rituals, and a common theurgic implement is the sacred lamp. The instructions we receive for this lamp are simple. We get them chiefly from the Greek magical papyri, a collection of ritual notes from theurgists and thaumaturgists from Late Antiquity: “Put an iron lampstand in a clean house at the eastern part, and having placed on it a lamp not colored red, light it. Let the lampwick be of new linen.”57 The requirements for this tool in modern terms are these: it is a lamp never used for anything but theurgy—hence, the new wick—and it is not colored red, a color regarded as ill-omened in Egyptian magic. These lamp spells, which are various, are almost always spells of divination or revelation: the lamp is the light of the Nous, which by perceiving we gain knowledge of the Forms.
Water, on the other hand, represents Psyche, the soul. Where the lamp is the mind—illuminating the Forms—water is the soul, taking on the forms from above and transferring them to matter. The symbolism of purification is, of course, obvious: one washes with water. But the ritual of making chernips, or holy water, which will be discussed more fully later, involves extinguishing a burning stick in the water to make it sacred: this is a reenactment of the descent of the Forms into the world of psyche and hence to matter. A common recipe for holy water in the Greek Magical Papyri is to mix natron with the water. Natron is a naturally occurring mixture of salt, sodium ash, and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda); it has a number of practical uses as a detergent and antiseptic, and was used as such in Egypt throughout antiquity. While the ritual of chernips is a symbol of creation, natron water is a substance of cleansing.
The knife is the tool of death that brings the sacrifice over into holiness. As such, it’s hidden in the basket under the more benign sacrificial grains. But at the same time, the knife is used as a tool of demarcation. It is carried, hidden in the basket, around the sacred area to outline it before the ritual—much as ceremonial magicians or Wiccans today might inscribe their circle with the athame. As a tool of analysis and separation, it’s therefore a symbol of Logos or Ratio, the fundamentally rational order of the universe.
Theurgists and thaumaturgists alike sometimes use other, secondary tools as well. A particularly important one of these is the magic wheel, a historically difficult-to-identify object (or maybe variety of objects) that the theurgist used to participate in the creation of the universe as demiurge. Spinning the magic wheel apparently opens a gateway to the gods by emulating the circular motions of the heavens. Unfortunately, few such wheels have survived, and descriptions of them are sparse. In one of his poems, Theocritus describes a witch who uses a magical wheel as a tool to summon back a lost lover. This wheel is described as a “bronze rhombus” that “whirls by the power of Aphrodite.”58 Of course, Aphrodite is the goddess of the spell that Theocritus describes, so we cannot conclude that all such magic wheels were symbols of a single goddess. The word “rhombus” doesn’t just mean the shape we associate with that word; it can mean anything that spins and appears to be a common word for what we would call both tops and bullroarers. The bullroarer is a prehistoric musical instrument that involves a weight on a cord that is whirled about the head to create a humming or howling noise. In fact, many scholars suggest that Theocritus is describing two different instruments, a iunx and a rhombus, and that the terms are not synonyms.59
The iunx (plural iunges) is named after the wryneck, a bird with an unusually flexible neck and a distinctive song. It’s possible that actual wrynecks were attached to wheels, but the few specimens of magical wheels that we have have the wrynecks molded out of terra cotta. Probably, the idea that birds were tied to these wheels was merely a gruesome embellishment of popular literature. We have one particular example of a terra cotta iunx designed to be hung by cords on the circumference so that it hung horizontal to the floor. When spun, the cords along its circumference would twist it upward, and as it fell they would untwist. Inertia would then cause them to twist back up, raising the wheel, causing it to fall again and so on, until friction brought it to a halt.
The Chaldean oracles command the theurgist to “Operate with the magic wheel [στρόφαλον] of Hecate,”60 which indicates clearly that a magic wheel of some kind was dedicated to this goddess. This word strophalos, here translated “magic wheel,” appears to mean “something twisted or spun.” Marinus, in his biography of the Neoplatonic theurgist Proclus, describes his use of the “supplications of the Chaldeans, together with their divine and ineffable revolutions.”61 Michael Psellus, an eleventh-century scholar, describes the use of a special bullroarer sacred to Hekate, consisting of a sapphire enclosed in a golden sphere and swung about on a rawhide string. This is puzzling, since a sphere is too aerodynamic to make a good bullroarer; it will not whistle. But it may be that Psellus is trying to describe another kind of instrument related to both tops and bullroarers, and he makes it clear that there may be some variation in the structure of these stropholoi (which he explicitly equates to iunges), saying that they may be “spherical or triangular or some other shape.”62
It is my conjecture that all these objects—iunges, strophaloi, bulloarers—are tools similar to the prayer-wheel of Tibetan Buddhism: a mechanical object regarded as offering a prayer when spun. Psellus’s description, that it is inscribed with sacred characters, is evidence that it was regarded as a sort of solid prayer. Moreover, the model he describes is a simple (although hardly simple to create) model of the universe as understood at the time: a sphere—earth—surrounded by the spheres of the planets. I doubt, however, that the actual strophalos was spherical, as the noise it made was probably part of its psychological and symbolic efficacy. In fact, several objects appear to have been called iunges, including sacred objects that hung from a temple of Apollo.63 Since the word “strophalos” appears to come from the root for “to twist,” it may be that this object is what is often called a whirligig, a disk with two holes through which a cord loops. The disk can be twisted up, then the loops pulled, which causes the disk to spin and make a whistling noise. Since the iunx is associated in magic with attraction and bringing together, this conjecture seems likely.
Making this kind of strophalos is simple. You can get a length of cord from a craft supply store, as well as a small piece of wood to shape into a disk. Drill two holes, one on each side of the center of the disk; measure them carefully so that the centers of the holes line up with the center of the disk. Run the cord through the holes into a large loop. Give it a few twists, then set it spinning by pulling and relaxing the loop.
If you wish to inscribe it with sacred symbols, we are stymied by not knowing what sorts of things might have been on the strophalos of Hekate. The best bet is to simply inscribe the wheel with an appropriate versicle. In Hesiod, for example, Hekate is granted three domains, and it is suitable to write them on the strophalos: she is said to rule in the heavens
(ouranoi), in the sea
(thalassei), and on the earth
(gaiei). See the following illustration:
Fig. 9: Inscriptions on the Strophalos
This tool can be used at the beginnings and ends of rituals to enter into a ritual state of mind. The twisting and untwisting creates a double revolution, first inward then outward, which is worth meditating on discursively. The sound made by the wheel—which you can intensify by serrating the edges—can also induce trance and offer a sort of auditory scrying tool. Finally, the magic wheel is said to be particularly useful in summoning spiritual entities; the Chaldean oracles even call the intermediate deities between the world of matter and the highest gods iunges.
While probably a physical object, the strophalos also may have had a meditative analog. In other words, the external tool may have reflected an internal exercise. We cannot know for sure, but it’s possible that the material strophalos was only one part of the equation. The wheel about which the theurgist is to labor may have been internal.
Exercise 4.1: The Meditation of the Strophalos of Hekate
Step 1: Sit or stand upright. Calm yourself by deliberately relaxing and begin to breathe. Inhale from the bottom of your lungs, filling them to 80 percent capacity, hold briefly, and then empty them from the top to the bottom. Do this several times.
Step 2: Imagine a small blue light in your solar plexus. As you inhale, imagine it getting brighter.
Step 3: Visualize a golden light that surrounds this blue speck in a sphere. As you inhale, let it spin clockwise, stopping while you hold your inhalation for a second, then reversing when you exhale. As it spins clockwise, let it expand outward. As it spins counterclockwise, let it concentrate and shrink. It helps to work with an actual strophalos beforehand to get that physical sense of expansion and contraction.
Step 4: Let it spin for several breaths. With each spin, let the light concentrate on the contraction.
Step 5: Finally, exhale and imagine it fading out of your perception.
Try this exercise as a preparation for rituals that involve attracting the attention of forces or spirits. For example, you might use it as preliminary invocation. I have also experimented with placing the mental strophalos elsewhere. The third-eye area and the base of the spine seem to be particularly interesting places to imagine this spinning sphere concentrating the light.
Things Said: Prayer
In theurgy, the line between prayer, hymn, and incantation is blurred. Classical, formal prayer was rather formulaic while hymns were metrical and narrative, and incantations sometimes contained “barbarous words,” which were actually occasionally “barbarous” (in the sense of “foreign”) and were sometimes strings of vowels possibly meant to be sung. One quickly turned to another, however, and in various accounts we sometimes have prayers that turn to hymns, hymns that end in prayers, and incantations that bust out in the middle of either.
Prayer for the ancient Greeks and Romans was not merely communication with a deity. It was about establishing and maintaining a relationship. Valerie Warrior defines two broad categories of Roman prayer: the petitionary (asking for something) and the laudatory (offering praise).64 In this, Roman prayer was not much different from Judeo-Christian prayer. In fact, like Christianity, Roman prayer had an actual liturgy: certain traditional prayers spoken at certain times. Because they often made use of forgotten Etruscan or archaic vocabulary, these prayers sometimes crossed the line into incantation. Greek prayer, on the other hand, followed a formula but not a particular set liturgy of the Roman complexity. At least, no such Greek liturgy has come down to us. A Greek prayer breaks down into predictable sections:
- Identification: This stage involves naming the god, usually beginning “Hear, O … ” For the Greeks and to some degree for the Romans, naming a god wasn’t a simple matter. A name was important; it defined a relationship. To name a god wrongly was to imply the wrong relationship and prevent communion. So both cultures erred on the side of excess, and named every name or epithet that might be relevant, often ending with “or whatever you wish to be called.” Such a string of names ensures knowledge of that god’s names and attributes and also exerts a somewhat hypnotic effect. The identification is sometimes followed by mention of particular locales wherein a god may dwell or come from, often the locus of that god’s largest or most influential temple.
- Justification: This step might seem odd to a Judeo-Christian culture steeped in the concept of a god of grace who offers favors freely but whose favors cannot be earned. The justifications offered to the gods consist of previous acts of piety: “If ever I have made sacrifice, kissed my hand to your image, set up a temple” or whatever. This isn’t an attempt to wheedle or guilt the deity into listening (not to imply there probably weren’t worshipers who thought of it exactly in those terms, but then there are present-day Christians who think that Jesus cares about which football team wins the Superbowl). The purpose is to remind the theurgist the nature of the relationship: again, just as the names show knowledge of the god, the justifications remind the worshiper of his or her piety.
- Petition or Praise: Here, the worshiper asks for what he or she wants, or offers praise. Often in thaumaturgy and ordinary folk religion these were requests for material things, but philosophers stretching back to Socrates encourage people to ask more wisely in their prayers, and many later philosophers simply pray for the Good.
- Vow: Here is the do ut des—“I give so that you may give”—of classical religion that is much maligned but serves a very valuable spiritual purpose. The vow is a promise to the god. This kind of promise is familiar to those who pray when they find themselves in trouble: “I swear, if I get out of this, I’ll never go to the casino again!” That example is a negative vow, but the vows of classical prayer were positive. “I will offer you a hecatomb of cattle,” for example, or “I will burn you a handful of incense.” Such a vow serves again to cement the relationship between the worshiper and the god and also ensure gratitude.
I can imagine someone objecting that this formula drains all the life from prayer, but it serves a useful purpose. Probably, people still prayed in a more informal manner from time to time, and I certainly do, but following the formula allows one to hit the bases, as it were. For example, I’ve occasionally launched into a prayer to a god and found myself in the justification section with nothing to say. That’s an indication that perhaps I need to work with that deity a bit more before I start making requests. In other words, the formula outlines the nature of the relationship itself.
The attitude and posture of prayer is also important. In praying to most gods, the Greeks and Romans stood, with hands in the air and palms facing upward. For chthonic gods or the dead, hands might not be raised and the prayer may be murmured. Finally, prayers to the gods of the sea—and perhaps to nymphs and spirits of the earth—are spoken with the arms spread wide. Kneeling is not common, although clutching the knees of sacred statues is sometimes described. These vertical postures mark the worshiper as worthy of respect: again, it is not the relationship of slave and master but a reciprocal relationship. Certainly nothing we give the gods can improve them or change them, but by standing up we acknowledge the divine inside of us.
Things Done: The Thysia or Offering
The central ritual of offering is called a thysia (Greek )or a sacrificium (Latin). Let’s clear the air about what a sacrifice consists of and what it does not.
First, although there are attested instances of human sacrifice in Greek and Roman culture, the practice was entirely abhorred in most periods. Lurid depictions of such things in myth are meant to be lurid: they are meant to shock, not be a familiar part of what one does. In the late empire, the gladiatorial games were sometimes conceived of as a kind of human sacrifice, but many philosophers spoke against those games as a repulsive failure of social virtue. So a sacrifice is not a human sacrifice, and the concept of human sacrifice is not central to the classical concept of sacrifice with which we will concern ourselves. Of course, one particular religion centered on a human sacrifice became quite popular in Late Antiquity: this cult, Christianity, spread effectively. Few people now even consider that the central organizing myth is one of human sacrifice, although of course it is.
The second delicate issue is that of blood sacrifice. While human sacrifice was abhorred, blood sacrifice of animals was not. For most citizens of Rome or any given Greek city state, the meat of sacrifice was the only available meat. Many people only ate meat at the public barbecue that was sacrifice. While authors sometimes squirm to imagine the rivers of blood involved in sacrificing a bull (let alone a hundred bulls, enough to feed a town), such rivers of blood flow in our own culture—we just keep them tidy and out of sight. Watching the bull or goat be slaughtered was one way to assure its quality, at least, without government inspectors. Our own squeamishness about the origin of our meat is a peculiarity of our culture, not a universal law or a sign of moral superiority.
That said, I do not advocate you practice blood sacrifice for a number of important practical and spiritual concerns. First, it may be illegal for you to do so in your jurisdiction, at least if you are in the United States. Some religions such as Santería that still practice animal sacrifice are allowed to do so by United States law, but you would need to prove that it is necessary and fundamental to the practice of theurgy, and I don’t think it is. In addition, it often violates local husbandry laws to raise or slaughter animals within a city limit. Second, you may not have the knowledge to do so effectively and painlessly, which not only may put you up against charges of animal cruelty but may also offend the gods. According to the traditional rituals, the animal must come willingly to the slaughter and consent to its death (usually accomplished by sprinkling water on its head to make it nod). I interpret this to mean that undue pain should not be caused, and slaughtering an animal is a complicated process requiring skill and physical strength. Third, doing it wrong can kill you: if you nick the wrong part of the viscera while slaughtering some animals, you could make yourself very sick off the meat. Fourth, it’s frowned on in our culture. While I’m not by any means an advocate of doing only what is socially acceptable, you will create a bad name for esoteric spirituality by making use of blood sacrifice. And finally and most importantly, it is unnecessary. We can do perfectly well with bloodless sacrifice, and since cattle no longer symbolize wealth to us, it is more or less meaningless to kill one.
If you are a farmer with a permit to slaughter meat and you intend to use it for your family and you have the facilities and know-how and are willing to undertake the research and the responsibility, and perhaps you already slaughter your own meat and wish to do it in a sacred manner—then by all means, look into it. Or if you are a hunter who dresses his or her own deer and wishes to make that act a sacred offering to Artemis, then be my guest. If, however, you have read a ritual in the Greek Magical Papyri or other ancient source that involves sacrificing a cat or strangling a bird and you want to do that ritual … then I suspect you merely selected a spell in that text of hundreds of spells that would allow you to torture an animal, and then I think very, very little of you as a person. In fact, such rituals are almost always easily and effectively adapted to remove the requirement of animal sacrifice.
It is not a cop-out to avoid animal sacrifice. Theurgists of Late Antiquity were already arguing against animal sacrifice. Porphyry wrote “On Abstinence from Animal Food,” a work that makes the argument that animal sacrifices were a recent invention and that the most ancient sacrifices were of grain, fruit, and bread. Consequently, these sacrifices pleased the gods more, and were to be preferred. Porphyry also advocated for vegetarianism and laid out a thorough philosophical case against the teachings of Stoics and Epicureans in that regard.65
The bloodless sacrifice practiced by the ancient Greeks and Romans has much in common with similar practices throughout the area settled by the Indo-European people in about the fourth millennium bce. The cultures descended from those Indo-European people all exhibit the ritual sharing of food, both of animals and of grain: the Norse, the Celts, and the Vedic religion of India. The thysia, to use its Greek name, is the ritual consumption of food with the gods. This ritual partakes of the powerful symbolism of the banquet: what we eat with the gods makes us companions of the gods. The etymology of words of Latin origin often reveals interesting symbolism: the word “companion” is from two words: con, meaning “with” and panis, meaning “bread.” We become companions with those with whom we share bread.
The ritual of thysia had a set order.66 I should point out here that the Roman and Greek rituals differed in details. For examples, Romans usually covered the head with a fold of the toga before offering the sacrifice. Other details may differ from festival to festival or even region to region. There was not a universal, standard missal. But from what we gather from ancient sources, these eight steps remained more or less constant throughout the Greco-Roman world.
Procession: This is a procession toward the place of sacrifice. In the home, of course, this was simply approaching the lararium or shrine, but a larger festival may have a procession with music, dancing, and so forth. We have many images from Greek vases depicting these processions featuring lines of dancing boys and girls, cattle or other animals, and at the front a basket and a jar of water. This basket contained groats and a sacrificial knife, used to slit the animal’s throat. The water was for purification, the next step.
Purification: The Greeks created “lustral water” by dousing a brand into pure water. This water was used for washing the hands. The act of ritual purification is common throughout the ancient world; the idea that one must have clean hands to approach the gods is an old one. Symbolically, it is the evacuation from one’s being of the extraneous, the dirty, or the day-to-day. Like the procession, it serves to mark us out as being in a different place, a new state of mind. More elaborate purifications are not unheard of for certain rituals, such as ritual baths made to expiate a flaw or crime or in preparation for magical workings.
The formula for holy water here—the quenching of a brand from the sacrificial fire into the water—is called chernips (literally “hand washing”). In other sources, and especially it appears in Roman rituals, the water was sacred due to its origin: particular sacred springs produced holy water.67 Although we do not know the exact recipe, you can make chernips very easily by lighting an appropriate herb—rosemary is always appropriate and easy to come by—and extinguishing it in the water. This chernips is not only used to wash the hands, but also sprinkled over the altar, sacrifice, and so on. This, along with the circumambulation of the holy objects, creates a sacred space and is, I suspect, a precursor to the magician’s circle, which later became the circle of Wicca.
The chernips is also sprinkled over the head of the sacrifice, which nods in response. This nod is important: the animal to be sacrificed had to seem willing to undergo the procedure. Sometimes modern authors sneer at this as a “trick” to get the animal to nod, as if the Greeks and Romans didn’t realize that the animal was merely responding to droplets of cold water. Of course they realized this, but they wanted to make it clear that they understood the importance of this act, and this action symbolized that this was not an act of violence but an act of communion between three participants: the worshipers, the sacrifice, and the gods.
These first two steps establish a typical opening ritual for all theurgic ceremonies whether of worship or more practical magic. The next steps involve sacrifice specifically, but often sacrifice is folded into the practical magic of the ancient world.
Invocation and Immolation: The next step is the invocation of the deity through an invitation and a libation of wine and an offering of barley mixed with salt. In animal sacrifices, the barley and salt were thrown on the sacrificial fire, an act referred to as immolatio, from which we get our word “immolation.” The grain and wine are offered not by the priest in charge of the sacrifice but by the audience. In this way, everyone has a hand in preparing the offering and so they all participate in not only the eating of the meal but its creation. It’s not unlike the wonderful custom in some Christian churches in America of having parishioners prepare and bake the bread to be used at communion.
No matter the sacrifice’s intended recipient, it is very common that particular gateway deities are invoked first. In Roman ritual, this is Janus Pater, who is invoked before almost all sacrifices because it is he who opens the door to the gods. In Greek rituals, the deity invoked first is often Hestia, who is thought to preside over the sacred fire just as she presides over the sacred hearth, although in theurgic rituals Hekate often fulfills this role of gatekeeper.
Dedication: The priest in charge of the ritual approaches the animal to be sacrificed and produces the knife from the basket. He cuts a small lock of hair from the forehead of the animal, and throws that hair on the fire. This dedicates the animal to the god and is regarded as the first stroke of sacrifice, even though no blood has spilled.
Prayer: The priest says a prayer. Sometimes this is a formulaic prayer, and in ancient Rome the prayers that have survived sound more like legal contracts than prayers of devotion. The prayer is loud enough for the crowd to hear. This is not private or whispered or silent prayer, but prayer on behalf of the community.
Killing: The priest kills the animal according to a prescribed manner. Smaller animals have their throats slit, larger animals are killed by a blow to the head. This is actually almost exactly the procedure used to kill animals in modern slaughtering, by the way: it is efficient, quick, and minimizing suffering. Of course, there is still some suffering and in response to that the attendant participants—especially the women—raise a ritual cry variously interpreted as sympathy with the animal, “life crying over death,” or an expression of grief.68 In any event, the custom strikes me as more humane in many ways than the quiet and clandestine way we now produce our meat.
Examination: In both Greek and Roman rituals, the entrails are examined for flaws. This custom probably began as a way to ensure that the animal was healthy and the offering good. If any flaw was found in the entrails, the meat was discarded and the sacrifice redone. The result is that diseased animals were not often eaten.
It is a small step from deciding that the meat is unfit for offering to deciding that the gods have rejected the sacrifice. And it’s a small step from that conclusion to the idea that the sacrifice becomes a place where the gods communicate: by examining the sacrifice, we can determine the future. Particular patterns of development on the liver and other organs could be read as a sign from the gods, and even variations in a healthy liver may indicate a sign. This practice was called haruspicy. More fully developed in Rome, haruspicy is the result of this chain of reasoning, which must have come about very early. The Etruscans, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula before the arrival of the Romans, had already written handbooks and guides to the art of haruspicy, to the point where it was sometimes called the Etruscan art.
Sacrifice and meal: The animal’s bones were laid out to reconstruct the original form and covered in fat, which was then lit. This, mingled with incense and fueled by strong wine, was the offering to the gods. The worshipers ate the meat, with a common prohibition that the meat must be eaten on site and not taken out of the sacred precinct described by the circumambulation. The reconstruction of the skeletal form can be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the underlying Form or Idea of the animal being offered. The restraint on the location of the sacred meal is a symbolic recognition that the act of sacrifice has elevated this particular earthly location above and beyond, for a moment, the rest of the earth. To take what is holy out of it would be to enact a sort of Pagan fall-of-man. To eat it in the sacred temenos or precinct was to commune with the gods.
At its most basic level, this ritual of thysia is a ritual of communion. To get tied up in the blood (as many modern writers do) is to miss the point. The slaughter of an animal appears to us as disturbing and barbaric, with our modern sanitized practices, so we hide it from sight. But the sacrifice rituals of ancient Greece and Rome made it a sacred thing. Far from barbaric reveling in blood, this practice underlined the human need to kill to preserve life, making of it an appropriately solemn act.
My vegetarian readers may well point out that they do not in fact need to kill to live; they get by on plant foods just fine. Interestingly, vegetarianism was not unknown in ancient times: there were those who forewent meat under much the same moral objections as those raised by contemporary vegetarians. The most famous of these ancient vegetarians was Pythagoras, who famously managed to go without both meat and beans, something modern vegetarians might find difficult. The rationale for his vegetarianism is spiritual: he believed in the transmigration of souls and did not wish to violate the cannibalism taboo by eating a body belonging to a once-human soul. Why he eschewed beans is another question entirely, one subject to a lot more debate and speculation than it deserves.
The thysia is not always a blood ritual, even among those who are not vegetarians. In fact, later thysias were often simply symbolic of blood rituals, and the practice of offering cakes shaped like animals began in Late Antiquity. Probably this innovation was in response to the difficulty of staging a full public sacrifice in populations that were increasingly Christian.
The choice of what to sacrifice also has symbolic significance. While certain things are always appropriate—wine, bread, grain—other things are set aside for particular deities. Dogs, for example, were offered to Hekate (don’t even think about it), and virginal animals were given to the virgin goddesses such as Athene. The offering of the wrong sacrifice could obviate the whole ritual or even cause a rift in the relationship between the god and the theurgist.
Offerings to the Dead
Where the thysia reaches upward, the offerings to the dead reach downward. The sacrifice for the dead differs from the thysia in several points. Instead of an altar, there is a trench—a clear reflection of the symbolism of up and down. The dead were regarded as below us, even the blessed dead and heroes, and so offerings to them were placed in the earth. The Greeks referred to such daimones as chthonic, “of the earth.” In fact, even deities like Hades were given sacrifice in this chthonic manner. The offering itself was burned completely, rather than shared out like a thysia. This offering is less a communion with the dead than a nourishment of them.
Symbolically, the theurgist stands between two extremes: the world of matter and the world of the nous. She reaches up to the world of the nous by making offering to the gods. She reaches down to pull up the world of matter by making offering to the chthonic deities and heroes. To eat the sacrifice to the dead would be to “stoop below into the dark-gleaming world beneath which an abyss is spread.”69 But there is a responsibility to go back into the dark, just as the person who escapes in Plato’s allegory must return to free the others. The theurgist therefore becomes a bridge between the world of matter and the world of the nous.
The theurgist, through sacrifice, becomes a synthema of the gods. The ritual cry of the women as the throat of the sacrifice is struck identifies the worshipers with the object of sacrifice, acknowledging mortality and the necessity of death-in-life. But it also is a cry of exultation, a raising up of the self beyond death. The sacrifice illustrates the process of death and offers a promise in the fire. As the fire consumes the flesh but doesn’t become it, so does our soul inhabit our flesh but not become it. As it raises up, so do we. And as form is found in the midst of the ashes, so does form descend into matter from above. For the theurgist, the sacrifice is a ritual of contemplation of divine mystery, not merely an excuse for a barbecue.
Libation
A widespread Indo-European custom of pouring out drink offerings to the gods as well as the dead points to an ancient origin for the custom of libation. The Greco-Roman practice was ubiquitous. Every banquet involved a libation, as did nearly every prayer. And libations solemnized agreements. The verb for “they make a treaty” is spendontai, which literally means “they pour out a libation for themselves.” Three particular liquids are widely offered in Greco-Roman traditions: wine, which is probably at the top of the list because of its commonness, the ordinary drink of day-to-day life; honey, often offered to the dead specifically; and oil, poured over sacred objects as an offering.
The process of offering a libation has three parts: First, a small or large portion of the liquid is poured out. To the dead, this may be the whole quantity, and if it is oil, it almost certainly will be. Second, a prayer is made. Then, finally, if wine is the libation, the remainder of the wine is drunk by the worshiper. This last stage may be done rather cavalierly, without much pomp, almost exactly as we might drink our afternoon cup of coffee. A libation, unlike a sacrifice, can be made anywhere, at any time, to any deity at all. The symposium, a formal drinking party, has a specific ritual of libation in which libations are poured for Zeus and the Olympians, the heroes, and then Zeus Teleios, Zeus the Finisher, god of endings. Alternately, the order can run Agathos Daimon (the person’s personal spiritual guardian, like a guardian angel in our terms), the heroes (which may include cultural heroes as well as ancestors), and Hermes.70 Each of these orders is significant, of course: the first addresses the heights, then the depths, and then establishes order around the two by invoking Zeus Teleios. The second order addresses the good spirit who watches over each person, the dead who came before, and the mediator between them. After this somewhat formal ritual, however, the libations may flow as individual desire, piety, or whim directs.
I used to imagine that Greek and Roman houses had floors stained a sticky purple from all the libations offered. Archeological evidence, however, has turned up many stone tables with hollows in them to receive liquid: these libation tables probably served as small altars for daily prayer, as well as a way to keep the floors clean. There’s every reason to guess that dishes for the purpose may also have been used then emptied outdoors after the meal or simply allowed to evaporate over time.
The symbolic significance of the libation is in many ways more profoundly communal than that of the sacrifice itself. Where the sacrifice burns matter to reveal the form beneath, the libation takes the formless and pours it out. The libation is a reenactment of the soul’s descent to trigger a corresponding ascent. The word for “treaty” is, as mentioned before, the same as that for “libation.” Hence, libation makes peace with the gods.
Other Offerings
Food isn’t the only thing offered to the gods; there is a long tradition of offering incense as well. The practice of offering incense is simple: a sacred fire is lit, usually with fire gathered from the temple of Hestia or by other ritualized means, and then grains of fragrant gums and bark are sprinkled on the fire. These were usually imported from the east, but Ovid waxes nostalgic, longing for the day when:
As yet no foreign ship had brought bark-distilled myrrh cross the
blue seas; the Euphrates had sent no incense, India no spice;
nor were the threads of red saffron then known to man. The
altar would smoke, content with Sabine herbs, and the laurel
would burn up, crackling loud … And the knife that now lays
bare the entrails of the stricken bull then had no work to do
in sacred rites.71
We know now that Ovid is historically wrong in some sense: the practice of blood sacrifice is ancient. But he was already imagining that blood sacrifice might be replaced with the sacrifice of sacred herbs, not the fancy myrrh and expensive saffron of the east, but local, ordinary fragrant herbs: laurel (which we usually call bay) and the “Sabine herbs,” or juniper.
Not every sacrifice or offering is poured out or burned. Archeologists have discovered pits of artifacts in the midst of sacred temple precincts. Often, these pits contain small terra cotta figures of men and women, sometimes holding animals as if for sacrifice. Sometimes, they are sculptures of body parts, chariots, ships, and various other objects. Other times they’re just plaques with inscriptions. Usually the inscriptions are short: a name and the name of a god. Sometimes, they are more elaborate, offering a testimony of miracles accomplished by the god.
The practice of making a votive offering, or anathema is a symbol in honor of a vow.72 In making the offering, the worshiper is saying not “I give so that you give,” but “you gave, so I give back.” These offerings could not leave the sacred precinct, as they belonged to the god after being dedicated, so they would pile up and priests would even bury them in pits for storage. These pits are treasure troves of archeological information; hopefully the gods are not offended when we take these objects away for study.
The joke, ancient in its origin, is that although there were many votive objects of those who had been saved, there would have been many more if those who had not been saved had been displayed. This cynicism about traditional religion is very common even in the ancient world, and it’s a welcome shot of critical thinking in the midst of a topic sometimes open to wishful thinking. However, the practice from a spiritual, rather than a practical, sense is a kind of thanksgiving and not necessarily evidence-gathering.
While the votive offerings filled up temple grounds, private citizens offered their own votives to the gods of the home. In Rome, for example, a young man surrendered “symbols of his boyhood” when he came of age.73 A young girl would offer her old childhood playthings and clothing. Here, the young man or woman becomes a bloodless sacrifice to the family gods, a rite dedicating oneself to a life of piety and moral virtue.
So, what’s the payoff for us, living in the twenty-first century? How can these rituals of offering help us in our new theurgy? The answer to that is obvious on one level: we can make offerings to the gods to establish a relationship with them and participate in their work. By participating in divine work, we become divine ourselves—not gods (that’d be hubris), but what we as humans already are and have forgotten: partners with the gods in the great work of creation.
Exercise 4.2: Performing a Libation to a God
Step 1: Have a glass of liquid, preferably something you like to drink.
Step 2: Pour a small amount out onto the ground or into a libation dish. Imagine the essence of this libation expanding throughout the local space, becoming available to the god.
Step 3: Pray, beginning with “To you,” and the name of the god. Feel free to use this prayer of Socrates as a model:
Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this
place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and
may the outward and inward man be at one.
May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and
may I have such a quantity of gold as a tem-
perate man and he only can bear and carry.74
Socrates directs this prayer to Pan, a god of nature, which is not insignificant, but you could direct the same prayer to any god of your liking.
Step 4: Drink. Moderately, please, if you are drinking alcohol.
Exercise 4.3: Performing a Sacrifice to a God
Preparation: You will need something to sacrifice, a source of fire, and a bowl of water. Tap water in a small bowl works fine. You will also need a stick or match or taper that can be lit. I find a sprig of rosemary to work well, and it also has the benefit of smelling nice.
Step 1: Kindle a fire on charcoal or a simple lamp for less elaborate rites. Make sure you know what you’re doing—keep the room ventilated if using charcoal and don’t burn anything on it you wouldn’t want to inhale. (A single pinch of hot pepper might be very symbolically appropriate to Mars, but it’s hard to complete a ritual when suffering the results of being pepper-sprayed. Trust my hard-won experience on this, and accept my plea of youthful ignorance.)
Probably you’re lighting this with a match or lighter. So it goes. But it might be worthwhile to sanctify this fire with an incantation. Even if such actions were not done traditionally in sacrificial rituals, they were done in theurgist rituals. You can use the following, which I’ve stitched together from various bits of the Chaldean Oracles, or you can devise your own formula of sanctification. The goal is to identify the fire itself with the Nous so we can use it as a gateway:
The Sun is the outpouring of Fire and the steward of
Fire. For the maker of the fiery cosmos is the mind
of Mind, and everything is engendered from a
single fire. And when you see that most sacred
holy fire leaping and shining down through the
whole world, hear and know the voice of the fire.
For a mortal, having drawn near this fire, will
apprehend the light from god.75
Step 2: Light a small stick, a sprig of rosemary, or even a match in the fire and plunge it into the water. In doing so, realize that you are mingling the water of soul with the fire of mind, and while the fire seems to be extinguished in the process, it actually infuses the water with its heat, just as the forms in the mind infuse our souls and hence matter.
Step 3: Walk about clockwise, holding the water and—if using it—a sacred knife. If not, the water will suffice. When you return to the altar, sprinkle the altar and the ground within the circle with the water. If you like, you can say something signifying that the water is purificatory, such as this verse from the Chaldean Oracles: “Foremost, let the priest undertaking the work of fire himself be sprinkled with the icy waves of the deeply roaring sea.”76 (If that sounds familiar to those inclined to ceremonial magic, it should: the same verse was cribbed for the same purpose by the Golden Dawn although with a different translation.) Pour some water on your hands to clean them.
Step 4: Offer a small amount of the offering to the fire to sanctify it. Use the sacred knife to cut it if it is a cake or piece of fruit; otherwise, just throw a pinch on the fire or begin to light the stick of incense in the lamp flame. Offer this to Janus or Hestia or some other gateway deity of your choice with a simple formula like “First, for you, Janus, this offering.”
Step 5: Pray, stating the goals of the sacrifice and to whom it is directed. This may be multiple gods, of course, so this prayer could be lengthy. Pray aloud unless praying to chthonic deities or doing some form of practical magic, in which case it is appropriate to mumble or whisper.
Step 6: Sprinkle the remainder of the incense on the fire, or if offering food, cut the portion in half, leaving one half on the altar and eating the remainder, unless offering this to a chthonic deity or the dead, in which case leave it whole and on the altar. If using stick or cone incense, just place it in the holder. Again, imagine the essence and form of this sacrificing expanding out, multiplying, and becoming available to the god.
Step 7: Watch the smoke for omens, if you like. A strongly rising column is a good sign. A broken, wavy, or diffuse cloud is sometimes an omen that you have left something out of the sacrifice or are in a state of spiritual ill health, although it may also just be an omen that you need better weatherstripping.
Step 8: Clean up by putting the offering outside and putting away ritual tools. If offering incense, simply let it burn out over time.
Rituals of Reenactment
The various types of sacrifice and libation are rituals of communion, but the mystery religions, in addition, ritually reenacted particular myths. These reenactments allow the theurgist to participate in the work of the gods and thus elevate himself or herself to the nous and hence to the One.
Unfortunately, we don’t know much of what went on in the mystery religions, but we do know that reenactment was a part of the initiation. For example, the initiate into the Eleusian mysteries apparently underwent certain ritual experiences including drinking kykeon, or water flavored with barley, something Demeter also drinks in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.77 The mystery at Eleusis and other mysteries elsewhere are lost, and attempting to reconstruct them is probably a fool’s errand. Anything we create will not be a reconstruction but at best a new mystery.
That said, these rituals of reenactment point to a powerful theurgic technique in which the theurgist endeavors to experience the myth of a god as a mystery. However, it’s hard to imagine how this might look, written in a book as a series of discrete steps. Some of the power of the mystery religions lay in their surprise, which is why they insisted on secrecy. If, as some Christian writers claim, the ultimate culmination of the cult of Eleusis was the showing of a single ear of wheat, this could be a profound symbol demanding contemplation and realization if the initiate had been prepared beforehand.78 Merely reading about it robs it of its power.
We find public rather than secret reenactment rituals in the festival practices of Greek and Rome, such as the Lupercalia festival in which boys would whip girls with strips of hide, which was (somehow, apparently) a reenactment of Romulus and Remus’s establishment of Rome.79 These rites were public, but re-creating them now runs into the problem of cultural expectation. Lupercalia wasn’t just a couple people doing a reenactment; it was a holiday like Christmas or Thanksgiving, and part of the significance was that the entire city participated. We lack this communal significance of the reenactment ritual and thus most of its point. Re-creating such ancient festivals would not be a theurgic act but a cultural and artistic one, worthwhile in its own way but not necessarily useful for the practical purposes of theurgy.
If a theurgist should wish to make use of the power of mythic reenactment, rituals could be constructed rather than restored from the myths of antiquity. For example, we could take the hymn of Hermes described earlier and break it down into ritual actions and words. Begin, for example, with the music of stringed instruments. Then a backward circumambulation (tricky!), followed by twelve individual sacrifices to the twelve gods—I’d probably content myself with twelve grains of incense there, as twelve loaves of bread would get awkward. Next, a prayer and justification to Apollo, a prayer and confession to Zeus, and a vow of devotion to Apollo’s harmony with another offering of music and the taking up of the caduceus and the responsibility of shepherding—viewed symbolically, of course.
What effect this or any other ritual would have depends entirely on the strength of the worshiper’s contemplation. It loses the sense of surprise, other than that surprise that arises as a result from contemplation. Therefore, the theurgist must cultivate a ritual state of mind—and this is true of all ritual work—that is hyper-contemplative. Nothing just means one thing in ritual, and every object must be perceived not only with all the physical senses but as its ideal object in the Nous. Regular contemplative practice will help with this.
Enlivening Icons
For any ritual, it’s helpful to have an image of the god or gods who are the focus of that ritual. This is especially true in ritual reenactment, because an ensouled statue of a god can stand in for that god’s position and function in the original myth. For example, a statue of Zeus can be addressed directly during the Hermes reenactment mentioned above. Such enlivened statues were probably part of the “things shown” in these rituals, and I suspect that the famous “ear of wheat” the initiates beheld in the mystery of Demeter was an enlivened or ensouled image of the goddess in the shape of grain.
In chapter 3 you created a statue infused with some of the synthemata of the god. The following ritual is about animating the statue, as you now have the background and knowledge to do so. I mean the word “animation” in its original sense: to put a soul into. I am not suggesting that your statue will get up and move around physically. Although frankly, if it did, I’m not sure how surprised I’d be.
I would not undertake this ritual unless you have built up a relationship with the god in question. I’d strongly advise several libations, sacrifices, and prayers of praise in the weeks or months before attempting this ritual. And consider carefully: you will have a god in your house, and you can’t exactly decide to throw it out when you move. At the very minimum, you will be responsible for dusting it and keeping it clean. Probably you will need to make libations and offerings of incense to it occasionally. It’s not exactly as complicated as having a pet and certainly not as complicated as having a child, but you are inviting a powerful being into your life.
Our ancient instructions for how to complete this ceremony are limited. It’s clear that the concept of the animation of statues comes from the Egyptian practice of opening the mouth, which was done to newly created mummies as well as divine images in order to enliven them. This practice involved touching the mouth with a forefinger or a special iron instrument. We have the entire ritual from ancient Egypt, but unfortunately it requires several participants and is extremely lengthy and difficult to perform without the full force of a theocracy behind you. Since we don’t live in a theocracy, we need to modify our approach—and, doubtless, the Greco-Roman world modified this ritual as well, to the point where it may not have had any resemblance to the original.
Here is one ceremony I have constructed from ancient and modern sources. You can modify it as you wish. For the sake of clarity, I will give this ritual for the enlivening of a statue of Artemis, but I will place the names and incantations specific to her in italics so you can modify them to fit the god you wish to work with.
Exercise 4.4: Ritual for the Animation of a Statue
Step 1: Prepare the altar with a dish for libations, another for sacrifice, a censer with a charcoal fire, and the statue behind it. Also have a cup with wine or an appropriate beverage, a symbolically significant sacrifice (such as bread or grain), and an incense significant to the deity or otherwise appropriate (in this case, I am using myrrh). You will also need some water (about a half cup is usually more than enough unless you really get into your purifications) in a bowl, a sprig or twig to light in the fire, and a candle or lamp. You can also do this ritual with stick incense rather than charcoal, which might be more convenient for those of you with sensitive fire alarms.
Step 2: Light the lamp, saying, as before, a prayer sanctifying the fire, such as this:
The Sun is the outpouring of Fire, and the steward of
Fire. For the maker of the fiery cosmos is the mind
of Mind, and everything is engendered from a single
fire. And when you see that most sacred holy fire
leaping and shining down through the whole
world, hear and know the voice of the fire.
For a mortal, having drawn near this fire,
will apprehend the light from god.80
Step 3: Light the twig with the lamp, then use it to light the charcoal (this is easier said than done, so you may just wish to use a match or several, but the goal is to get the fire of the lamp to the charcoal; depending on your brand of charcoal, you may have to be persistent), and extinguish the twig in the water, saying the following:
Inflame the water of the soul with the light of
Mind, to purify matter and drive out all the profane.
Pour some of the water over your hands and dry them on a clean cloth.
Step 4: Circumambulate the altar, holding the statue in your right hand and the water in your left. When you return to the center, put down the statue and dip the three fingers of your right hand into the water, sprinkling it over the altar and then in the four directions.
Step 5: Perform the contemplation of matter from exercise 1.1 on the statue until it is reduced to formlessness in your mind.
Step 6: Recite the following from the Hermetica while looking upward and aspiring as much as possible to the Nous:
Holy is God, and the parent of everything.
Holy is God, whose will is done by his own powers.
Holy is God, who wants to be known
and is known by his own.
Holy are you, having coalesced existence in a word.
Holy are you, from whom all nature takes form.
Holy are you, whom nature did not shape.
Holy are you, the strongest of all powers.
Holy are you, better than all goodness.
Holy are you, too great for praise.
Accept pure spoken offerings from a soul and a
heart stretching out to you who are ineffable,
inexpressible, named in silence.
Give a sign to me that you will not reject my
petition for the knowledge of our being.
Empower me, and with this grace I will enlighten
those of my kind who dwell in ignorance—
my siblings, your children.
Therefore, I believe and I witness:
I progress to life and light.
You are the basis of rationality,
and your people want to join with you in
the sacred work, as you provided them
with the power to do so.81
Step 7: Recite a prayer to the god in question, like this:
Hear me, Artemis of Ephesus, Potnia Theron, mistress of
animals, Phoebe the bright, Locheia who guards the
newly born, and Kourotrophos the nurse of the world,
Agrotera, Cynthia, Diana, or by whatsoever name
it pleases you to be called. Come from Ephesus, quickly,
quickly, for you are able, goddess. If ever I have kissed
my hand to the moon, burned you sweet herbs, or
written poems in your honor, or offered you prayers
of gratitude and praise, hear me. Come from Ephesus
and dwell within this image, as a body upon the earth,
which I will clean and honor and dress for you while
it pleases you and while I am able. Come, goddess,
and dwell herein, which I have made a fit place for
your habitation.
Step 8: Build, as you pray, a phantasm of the god in question standing behind the statue. After the prayer, continue to strengthen the power of that phantasm while reciting the following words of power, taken from the Greek Magical Papyri:
Allow the phantasm to give form back to the statue, in your mind reconstituting all the qualities you have taken away from it back into place, but this time, their divine counterparts.
Step 9: Perform a libation to the deity, then recite a poem or sing a song in honor of the relevant deity. You can compose one yourself, or you can simply chant one of the shorter of the Homeric Hymns or one of the Orphic Hymns to the appropriate deity, or speak extemporaneously.
Step 10: Burn part of the offering (a few crumbs will suffice) on the charcoal along with a few grains of incense, and say:
O Artemis, I have brought this to you. I have offered
this to you. Take of it and be glad, and enter into
this image, to walk among the gods.
Step 11: Touch the mouth of the figure and say three times:
O Artemis, I open your mouth with the finger.
I bring your mouth to the earth. I open
your eyes. I bring your eyes to the earth.
Step 12: Add more incense, then pray again:
Artemis of Ephesus, who has come from your
home to set foot in this place and join me
in holy conviviality, be praised and thanked.
Step 13: Contemplate the god as long as you wish. This can be a few minutes or quite a long time, depending on your personal desire. There’s no extra credit for taking longer, but also don’t rush through it.
Step 14: When finished, offer a short prayer of thanksgiving such as the following:
I give thanks to the gods, the daimones, and the
ancestors who have led me to this place and
who support an aid me in the great work of
creation. May there be friendship between us.
Step 15: Close the ritual by placing the statue in an appropriate place (some statues you may wish to cover from prying eyes). When done, kiss your hand to it, turn around and leave the room in silence. Make sure you can easily clean and care for the statue as well as burn incense to it periodically. Pour out the libation outdoors, and let the incense burn down and cool before putting it away.
Step 16: To prevent foggy-headedness, I find it helpful to eat and do something mundane after a ritual like this one.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this statue itself is a god; it is the dwelling of a god, and the god is not bound to it and can and will come and go as it pleases. Moreover, it may very well not be a god at all, but a daimon or messenger of the god (see chapter 6 for more on daimones). As Plutarch explains, to call the statue of Artemis “Artemis” is a convention like calling a collection of Plato’s writings “Plato.” When I buy a copy of Plato’s dialogues, I might say “I’m buying Plato,” but of course I’m doing nothing of the kind. Similarly, when I’m anointing the statue of Artemis, I am not anointing Artemis.83
I like to think of it as a telephone hotline to the god and an easy way to work with a deity for a long period of time without necessarily having access to a temple. You will notice that once animated, the statue does seem to take on a certain additional presence to the sensitive. It may be my imagination, but they almost seem to have facial expressions and react to events, although they do not move, of course. I suspect the mind anchors the phantasm to the statue, and what one perceives is the movement of that phantasm. You don’t need to make such an object to be effective at theurgy, and while it may be tempting to fill a room with statues of gods, the cost is prohibitive and the work is considerable. Instead, carefully choose particular gods you wish to work with in this intensive way, based on your previous experiences, resonance with particular myths, and even insights gained through divination.
55 Marcel Mauss. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
56 Elmer O’Brien, trans. The Essential Plotinus. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1975), 37.
57 Hans Dieter Betz. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 133. PGM VII 540
58 Georg Luck. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 69.
59 Fritz Graf. Magic in the Ancient World. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 179–180.
60 Ruth Majercik. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 1989), 127.
61 Mark Edwards, trans. Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by Their Students. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 100.
62 Sarah Iles Johnston. Hekate Soteira. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 90.
63 Sarah Iles Johnston. Hekate Soteira. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990).
64 Valerie M. Warrior. Roman Religion: A Sourcebook. (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002), 38.
65 Porphyry. On Abstinence from Animal Food. Thomas Taylor, trans. http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Porphyry_Abstinence
66 Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 54–59.
67 Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 77.
68 Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 55.
69 Majercik, Ruth. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 1989), 111.
70 Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 70–71.
71 Valerie M Warrior. Roman Religion: A Sourcebook. (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002), 42. Fasti 1.337–61.
72 The contemporary meaning of the word in English comes from the fact that anathemata were set aside and sacred. To touch or remove them was considered very improper. Later, it was used as a word to describe those that the Catholic church wished to separate or set aside from communion—in other words, the excommunicated. In this way, the idea of sacredness was reversed and to be anathema was to be cursed rather than sanctified.
73 James B. Rives. Religion in the Roman Empire. (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 119.
74 Benjamin Jowett, trans. Phaedrus by Plato. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html
75 I have modified and translated freely various fragments of the oracles, from the Greek text in Ruth Majercik’s The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 1989).
76 Again, I have been very free and easy with the Greek in Ruth Majercik. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary.
77 Marvin W. Meyer. The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 18.
78 Meyer. Ancient Mysteries. 19.
79 Valerie M. Warrior. Roman Religion: A Sourcebook. (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002). 60–62.
80 This is, again, my own translation and free adaptation of the several Chaldean fragments. I have taken my Greek text from Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation and Commentary. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 1989).
81 My fairly free translation of Corpus Hermeticum I:31–32.
82 Instructions for pronunciation of Greek vowels are available in the appendix.
83 James B. Rives. Religion in the Roman Empire. (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 37.