This book attempts to explore and revitalize the spiritual techniques of diverse times and places all under the loose heading of “theurgy.” Theurgy is a collection of spiritual practices ranging from antiquity to modern times by people of many different religious and philosophical backgrounds. In its heyday, in Late Antiquity, it competed with Christianity and other religious and philosophical movements. In fact, ideas from theurgy planted themselves in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish practices and remain there even today.
This book does not attempt to reconstruct the religious practices of Late Antiquity or ancient Pagan religions. Any attempt to revitalize an ancient way of life that ignores the cultural differences between now and antiquity cannot, in my opinion, succeed. We do not live in ancient Greece or ancient Rome. We don’t even live in places like ancient Greece or Rome. Ancient Greece would be, to modern American minds—or modern European minds, for that matter—an alien culture, with institutions we would not recognize and practices like slavery we could not support. We can admire their accomplishments, learn from their teachings, even revitalize some of their practices, but we must ultimately understand, as L. P. Hartley said, that the past is a different country.
Nor do I throw ideas and concepts together willy-nilly, because this kind of irresponsible eclecticism doesn’t work either. It also ignores the cultural context, and leads to muddied thinking and contradiction. The ancients were themselves a bit eclectic, worshiping Isis alongside Zeus, but I prefer to approach this kind of eclecticism with care.
The attitude with which I approach this book, then, is neither eclectic nor reconstructionist. It is postmodern. I am an unusual breed of postmodernist in that I think there is an ultimate truth that is not culturally constructed. But at the same time, the paths we cut to this truth are indeed made by our hands. In other words, the terrain exists but we know it only by our maps, which we have made. When I pray to Iuppiter, I am praying to a god who exists, I believe, independently of any culture. At the same time, I’m taking a Roman name and image and method of prayer, applying it to the reflection of the god I have constructed in my mind, and using those as a way back to that ultimate ideal deity. Someone wise (and I don’t remember who) once put it this way to me: The gods give the world its being; we give gods their forms.
That’s why at some points in this book I delve into original sources and put on the hat of a scholar, while at other points I gleefully make something up that works. My promise to you is that I will cite my scholarship and identify those things I have made up to fill the gaps. When I guess at what an ancient source meant, I’ll give my reasoning for that guess and other possibilities. When I make a claim, I will try to back it up or explain why I cannot.
I am no authority. The only authority is your own experience with the gods: not your wishes and fantasies, but your genuine experiences. I hope that by engaging with the exercises in this book, you will have enough experience of the divine that you can edit and modify and add to these practices as needed in order to continue your theurgy. Always, throughout this book, my watchword is practicality: how can this be used, now, today, by us?
We naturally begin with this question: How was it used then?
Historical Context
The practice of theurgy—a word that comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “godwork”—probably began when humans looked up at the stars for the first time. But the Greco-Roman tradition that we’ll be examining and that we’ll trace up to modern times began in Greece with a group of philosophers called the Pre-Socratics. The most important of these for our purposes is Pythagoras. He laid the foundation for later philosophers in suggesting that reality was not as multifarious and divided as it appeared, that instead a single principle may underlay the whole thing. For him, this principle was mathematical. He discovered the fundamental harmonies of music and various principles of geometry that were suggestive of a reality outside of mere matter. After all, if we can predict the harmony of strings by their length, those laws of harmony must exist separate from the strings themselves. Since those ratios are nonmaterial, they must exist outside of the world of matter in a world somehow inhabited by mathematical abstraction.
It’s significant that we call philosophers like Pythagoras “Pre-Socratic.” Socrates was such an important figure to the history of Western thought that he split philosophy in two: pre- and post-. Living from 469 to 399 bce, around the same time as the historical Buddha (who died circa 480), he took Pythagoras’s idea of mathematical reality and developed it. He suggested that the world of Ideas might be inhabited by more than just mathematical abstractions; it might contain a prototype of “goodness,” for example. His student Plato developed these ideas further—or according to some, came up with them himself. The notion that our physical reality is a reflection of archetypal and perfect images in a world of Ideas is therefore called Platonism.
Plato’s student Aristotle broke with Plato, suggesting that while these prototypes exist, they do not exist in a separate nonmaterial world. Instead, we build them in our minds as we experience the material world. This is more consistent with the modern and postmodern ideas of what reality consists of, but it’s not universally accepted even today. In our postmodern era, there are those—like me—who remain unconvinced that these archetypes do not exist separate from matter.
Plenty of people at the time also remained unconvinced, and these came to be called “middle Platonists” by later scholars (although they no doubt just called themselves “Platonists,” not having anything to be in the middle of yet). They continued teaching and developing Plato’s doctrines. The turn toward Platonism in the late empire—a period of time that historians call “Late Antiquity”—would later be named “Neoplatonism.” The Neoplatonism of these late philosophers was more mystical and simultaneously more practical than the pure philosophy of Middle Platonism. It was more mystical because it aimed toward a particular spiritual goal: henosis, a sense of unity with the divine. It was more practical because the Neoplatonists offered specific techniques for achieving that henosis.
Two schools of Neoplatonism offered techniques for henosis: the contemplative and the ceremonial. The contemplative school, typified by Plotinus, emphasized purely mental exercises: meditations and contemplations. The ceremonial school, typified by Iamblichus, offered a ritual technique, in which religio-magical practices united the worshiper upward to the One. Individual practitioners probably did not maintain hard and fast lines between the approaches.
Hermeticism also influenced theurgic practices. Hermeticism consisted of a loose conglomeration of vaguely Platonic mystical and religious writing. These writings are less philosophically unified than the Platonic tradition and less rigorous in terms of method of reasoning, which is one reason they are mostly ignored by contemporary philosophers. They do have value, however, as an example of how these philosophical ideas worked their way out in different populations of worshipers and practitioners.
The rise of Christianity did not kill theurgy; in fact, in many ways it invigorated it. Theurgic practices adapted well to the theology of Christianity and were sometimes incorporated wholesale. The gods became angels, the One became God, and the logos became Jesus. When the gospel of John begins “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” 1 the Greek for “word” is logos. We could do a Neoplatonic translation of this just as easily, without having to modify the original Koine text at all: “In the beginning was the rational basis of the universe, and the rational basis of the universe was with the One, and it was also the One.” Late Christian Neoplatonists such as John Dee, Henry Agrippa, and so forth all contributed their philosophies to the practice of magic.
Each of these phases illustrates an important point: the theurgic practices of antiquity developed, changed, and adapted to the changing context of the time. This is why I am leery of a strict reconstructionist approach to these practices. The fetishization of research and the past is counterproductive to a living tradition, and if theurgy is to be anything it needs to be alive.
The Renaissance, one of the high points of practical theurgy, had such a well-developed Neoplatonic view of the world that it was almost an assumption about reality, as obvious to the thinkers of that time as gravity is to us. Of course, there’s a danger in that, too: what is obvious is what goes unquestioned, and what goes unquestioned is what is often misunderstood. Hence when the scientific revolution started, many thinkers regarded the empirical method as a refutation of Platonism. It was not really such a refutation, not if one understands the philosophies behind those movements. But the cursory and unquestioned assumption of Platonism fell before the new vivid empiricism. Empiricism, in destroying Platonism, destroyed a straw man—but few realized that something beyond that straw man existed. Only a few thinkers, mostly poets like William Blake and (to the great discomfort of many contemporary historians of science) Isaac Newton, recognized that a real, vibrant, and living Platonism lived behind the unquestioned assumptions. Sadly, it was too little to preserve the tradition, and instead of the new empirical science offering its insights alongside the mystical and practical theurgy of Platonism, we abandoned one and embraced the other.
So where does that put us? Where we find ourselves now is a strange stage in the history of ideas, because we have taken empiricism so far it has begun to show some cracks. We recognize that as powerful and wonderful as science is, there are questions it cannot approach, and many people are looking back at mysticism for the answers. The problem is, a lot of those old—and very effective!—methods are lost, so what we have on things like theurgy is whatever a few people in the early twentieth century were able to gather and cobble together with their limited materials. Now, granted, people like S. L. Macgregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, and Israel Regardie were fair to middlin’ good scholars, but they had few sources and fewer resources. We have a great advantage over them—access to not just our local research library but to any library in the world. Moreover, we have found some lost sources, and scholars have found new reason to look again at old texts. And a few magicians trained in the traditions of good scholarship are looking at Renaissance stuff and even materials from Late Antiquity as well. Sure, much is lost and must be wired together out of the scraps whether we like it or not if we’re to make a practical go at it. But much remains, and we’re in the unique position of caring and being able to do something about it, perhaps for the first time in an age. It’s an exciting time to be a Pagan, a magician, and a mystic.
So that’s the purpose of this book: take what remains, find what can be found, and build a working system out of it. I don’t pretend that I’ve reconstructed the theurgy of Late Antiquity since I feel quite free borrowing from Renaissance Christian sources as much as the old Pagans. And as I said before, from time to time I’m willing to invent and experiment and figure out a new path through some thicket of lost knowledge that otherwise we’d have to detour around forever. At the same time, I’m keeping the star of scholarship in my sights and aiming toward it as I travel. I may not always hit it; errors have a tendency to pop up like mushrooms in work like this. But I’ll certainly try.
Early chapters of this book will explore the divine technology of theurgy, offering some methods and exercises and techniques we can use to start experiencing the results of godwork in a practical sense. They’ll also lay down the theory, so that we know why we’re doing what we’re doing. We’ll investigate what we mean by “god” and what kind of “work” is involved. In chapter 4 we’ll start looking at ritual, and in chapter 5 we’ll discuss the most theurgic of magical works—divination. We’ll turn to the much confused issue of daimones in chapter 6. In chapter 7, we’ll ground our study of theurgy in thaumaturgy, the art of practical magic. The final chapter will explore the concept of spiritual development from a theurgic perspective.
It is my hope that this book will revitalize the practice of theurgy in magic and inform those strains of it already present. Theurgy is the engine of magic and the component that makes magic itself a spiritual path of great value.
1 John 1:1