CHAPTER
The Prisca Theologia
When the Christian humanists of the Italian Renaissance studied the newly-discovered writings of the ancient philosophers, a new era opened in the self-image of Western civilization. It had long been taken for granted that, as the Bible relates, humanity toiled in ignorance and wickedness until the true God chose to reveal himself: to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets, and finally in person as Jesus Christ. But these philosophers of antiquity, for all that they were pagans and polytheists, turned out to display a profound wisdom and a high spirituality. Some of them surely knew more than reason alone could explain: things that could only have come to them through divine revelation. The only reasonable conclusion was that God had not left his heathen children in total ignorance, but had revealed himself through their prophets (Zoroaster, Orpheus), priest-kings (Hermes Trismegistus), and inspired philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry).
The bearer of this good news was an enigmatic character: Georgios Gemistos Plethon (c.1356–1450). A high official of the Byzantine Empire (or what was left of it), he lived in Mistra in the Peloponnese, the last holdout of Christian Byzantium in the Greek peninsula. His public mission was to attend the Council of Florence and Ferrara, convened in 1438–39 in the hope of reconciling the Greek (Orthodox) and the Roman (Catholic) churches.1
More privately, Gemistos met with the Florentine humanists,2 to whom he explained his vision of a “primordial theology” (prisca theologia) periodically revealed to the pagan world. His lineage of the ancient illuminates began in Chaldea or Persia with Zoroaster, then moved to Thrace with Orpheus, whose disciple Aglaophemus was the link to Pythagoras and Plato. It was in honor of the latter that Gemistos had adopted the surname Plethon. The aged envoy made a powerful impression on his Italian hosts, and not least on Cosimo de’ Medici, father of the famous dynasty. After his departure, Cosimo founded a Platonic Academy in his villa at Careggi, near Florence, and placed the scholar-priest Marsilio Ficino at its head. This became the center for the celebration, study, translation, and propagation of the “perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis), the wisdom common to Jews, Christians, and pagans.
Gemistos could produce canonical scriptures for nearly all of his ancient theologians. To Zoroaster he ascribed the Chaldean Oracles; to Orpheus, the Orphic Hymns; to Pythagoras, the Golden Verses, and to Plato the Republic, Laws, and other works. To these the Florentine Platonists would add the Corpus Hermeticum and its author, who was confidently assumed to be the Egyptian philosopher-king Hermes Trismegistus (see chapter 2).3
In every case but Plato’s, these attributions were mistaken. The Chaldean Oracles, Orphic Hymns, Golden Verses, and Corpus Hermeticum all date from the early centuries of the Common Era, whereas Pythagoras lived in the sixth century B.C., Zoroaster goodness knows when,4 and Orpheus and Hermes perhaps never lived at all. The cold shower of modern philology has dispelled the dream of the ancient theologians, just as biblical scholarship has proved that Moses did not write the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). But this makes no difference to whatever intrinsic spiritual value they may contain.
Gemistos was an especial admirer of the Chaldean Oracles, whose origin as we now know it is the best-documented and the most provocative.5 There was in Rome during the second century A.D. a family of astrologer-magicians called the Juliani, who like most of their profession passed as “Chaldeans.” It would not be far wrong to compare them to the swamis and gurus of California, for in both places there was an openness to exotic cults. The senior Julianus, it appears, used his son as a trance-medium. While in trance, Julianus Jr. answered questions and uttered oracles that were believed to come from the gods. His material would have been utterly lost if the Neoplatonists had not preserved numerous fragments of it by quoting it in their works. From them it passed to Byzantium, where it was commented on by Michael Psellus (eleventh century), by Gemistos, and by the Italian Platonists, receiving monumental form in the edition by Francesco Patrizi (1593).
It would be correct to call the Juliani’s activity “channeling,” so long as the term is used in a precise and technical sense, not an emotional and derogatory one. The precise sense is this: the man or woman who speaks or writes the words in question does not claim to be their author, but to be acting as a channel for some other entity. The most famous and influential example is that of the Qur’an, for which Mohammed acted as channel, but never claimed authorship. In the case of the Oracles of the Juliani, they, like the Qur’an, were regarded as a divine revelation, not merely by cult members but by the greatest of Plato’s commentators, Proclus.6
On the whole, the Chaldean system accords with the Hermetic, Orphic, and Platonic ones, as Proclus was at pains to demonstrate. Leaving aside its complicated theology, it sees the human soul as having come down from a divine state and become temporarily united with the body. Spiritual practice has the goal of restoring the soul to its original heritage.
A few of the Oracles suggest that the Juliani and their circle also had an idea of bodily transmutation as a means towards immortality. For example:
The oracles of the Gods declare, that through purifying ceremonies, not the soul only, but bodies themselves become worthy of receiving much assistance and health: for (say they) the mortal vestment of bitter matter will, by this means, be preserved.7
Psellus, the Christian commentator, gives this explanation of the idea:
[The Oracle] exhorteth therefore, that we refine the Body (which he understands by the Dregs of Matter) by divine [acts], or that, being stripped, we raise it up to the Aether; or that we be exalted by God to a place Immaterial and Incorporeal, or Corporeal but Aethereal or Coelestial, which Elias the Tisbite attained; and before him, Enoch, being Translated from this Life into a more Divine Condition, not leaving the dregs of Matter, or their Body, in a Precipice; the Precipice is, as we said, the Terrestrial Region.8
As testified in the Bible, Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus left no physical body behind after their deaths.9 The same was believed of the Virgin Mary from the fifth century onward, and in 1950 the Catholic church proclaimed it dogma. Although always skeptical when told what I must believe, I have no difficulty in principle with this concept, on which I will enlarge in chapter 2. It seems quite feasible that a person’s physical body might be so transformed during life that it becomes indistinguishable from the subtle “radiant body.” The soul then takes the body with it, wherever it goes after leaving earth.
There is reliable evidence that this has happened in modern times in the case of Tibetan adepts.10 Eyewitness accounts support the tradition that adepts may achieve the “diamond body” during life. Then, within days after death, their physical body just disappears, leaving behind only the “vegetable” elements of hair and nails. A lesser phenomenon, well attested in Christendom, is that of saints’ bodies that remain uncorrupted, sometimes for centuries. Evidently there is a whole science here, studied in ancient Egypt and Tibet but temporarily in abeyance because of the limits of the Western imagination. Theoretical physics, with its concepts of matter, energy, and mind, might someday provide a framework within which such phenomena can be intelligently discussed.
The idea of the ancient theology is similar in many respects to the prophetic cycle in Islam. The Islamic list of prophets includes pre-Jewish ones (Seth, Noah), the Jews Abraham and Moses, and Jesus, before ending with Mohammed. As explained in the next chapter, Hermes Trismegistus and Agathodaimon gained admission as the prophets Idris and Seth. So Christianity, Judaism, and some forms of paganism were all accepted by the Muslims as inspired by divine revelation. In the West, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1400/01–64) was virtually alone in returning the compliment. On his journey in the opposite direction to Gemistos’s, going in 1437 as envoy to Byzantium, he received a revelation of the unity of religions. As a consequence, he faced the unavoidable fact that the Ottoman Sultan was conquering the Byzantine Empire by allowing that Islam and Christianity were not incompatible, and that Christian subjects could live under the secular rule of a Muslim.
In the Muslim world, the ancient theology had been formulated long before by the Persian theosopher Suhrawardi (“the Martyr,” 1153–91).11 He took the pagan teachings known to him—those of the real Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Plato—and combined them with Shi’ite Islam.12 At the center of Suhrawardi’s theosophy is the same concept of a spiritual body that is developed by prayer and meditation. In this body, the adept can explore an inner world of supreme variety and wonder. Suhrawardi calls it Hūrqalyā. His French translator and interpreter, Henry Corbin, uses the term mundus imaginalis (the Imaginal World), urging his readers never to confuse it with the “imaginary” world of fantasy and fiction.13 Hūrqalyā is a real world, only it does not have a material substratum. It answers to the requirements of the scientific method, namely that anyone with the right equipment will discover its objective existence. However, unlike the radio telescope or particle collider, which inform the scientist of invisible and almost unimaginable realities, the exploration of Hūrqalyā requires the special tool of a highly refined astral or spiritual body: something as rare and hard to obtain as any piece of expensive hardware.
The Persian theosophers made it their business to explore this imaginal world, which, being superior in the cosmic hierarchy to the material world, has a formative and controlling effect on the latter. As one reads in the encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, a tenth-century community of mystics in southeast Iraq, “it is the angels (whose symbols are the planets) who keep order in the motion of the heavens and who generate the minerals as well as plants and animals.”14 For want of contemporary guidebooks, Suhrawardi called on Zoroastrian scriptures such as the liturgical Avesta and the cosmogonic Bundahishn. These told stories of Zoroaster that only make sense when situated in Hūrqalyā: stories of his encounters with heavenly beings, ascent to inaccessible mountaintops, and the bestowal of his Xvarnah or radiant body.
The nearest analogue to this radiance on earth is fire. In the Zoroastrian religion, still surviving among the Parsees of India, all ritual centers around the sacred fire. As always, the symbols and rites of exoteric religion have an inner meaning that is first to be understood, then experienced by the esoteric adventurer. Likewise, the Chaldean Oracles, fragmentary as they are, are filled with fire imagery. Fire, as the subtlest of the four elements, is emblematic of the substances and energies out of which the God of the Oracles made the world.
The Juliani were “theurgists,” i.e., performers of rituals for obtaining communication with the gods. Some theurgy is objective, commanding or inviting the gods to manifest themselves. They may then appear visibly (usually as light-forms), or speak through a medium, or be felt as a presence. Another branch of theurgy is subjective, in which the communication takes place internally, as in prayer or vision. The voyages of the Persian theosophers to Hūrqalyā were of this nature (substituting angels for gods). The Chaldean Oracles contain evidence for both kinds of invocation. In the tremendous final fragments, with their description of the visions that throng in upon the adept after frequent invocation, one is told: “When thou shalt behold that holy and formless Fire shining flashingly through the depths of the Universe: Hear thou the voice of Fire.”15 Thomas Taylor, the eighteenth-century Platonist and translator, believed that while many of the Oracles came from the Juliani, some of them, including the one just quoted, went back to the original Zoroaster. If he was correct, there is a continuity of theurgists running from ancient Persia through the Juliani, Suhrawardi, and Plethon, feeding the stream of European magic (Ficino, Agrippa), and continuing to this day.