author of the work on daemons, was not the same person as the Christian Origen,62 devoted his “Excursus XI” in Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy to establishing that Porphyry’s “long description of demonology” in On Abstinence, a discourse Porphyry attributes to “some Platonists” (τῶν Πλατωνιχῶν τινες), was, in reality, based on Origen’s work Concerning Daemons.63 This opinion is not limited to supporters of the two Origen hypothesis. Beatrice, who identifies the two Origens as one and the same person, agrees with Lewy about the likelihood that Porphyry’s demonology was based on this treatise.64 This work, as we will see in the next chapter, is not solely devoted to a discussion of evil daemons. Rather, it lays out a more complex hierarchy of spirits in the sublunary realm, both good and evil. But, as we will also see, Porphyry adopted many of Origen’s ideas about these good daemons as well.
We should not underestimate the significance of Porphyry’s likely adoption of some of Origen’s theories on evil daemons, especially given the fact that they directly contravene those of his most beloved teacher, Plotinus. Porphyry must have been absolutely convinced of the association of evil daemons with the blood and smoke of animal sacrifices. He must have been thoroughly persuaded that participating in these rites and ingesting meat were polluting practices, and highly compromising for those pursuing a philosophical path in hopes of union with spirits of a higher order. In light of Origen’s emphasis on the importance of ascetic practice to the life of the good Christian philosopher, and his belief in the ultimate transformability of the body itself, and, finally, his thorough allegorizing away of Jewish sacrifices in his Homilies on Leviticus, it is likely that he made a very strong argument for abstention in this regard.
Porphyry and Ancient Medical and Biological Thinking on Blood and Pneuma
Still, one might ask why Porphyry would adopt this view of blood sacrifice, given that it reflects in an almost wholesale manner the Christian consensus on this point. If, however, one considers some of Porphyry’s influences, and takes account of ideas in broader circulation in an educated, Greek-speaking, philosophically oriented milieu, this is a consistent and logical position for him to take because of a specific set of associations he makes between blood and embodiment.
For Porphyry, blood was a humor associated with the basest form of human existence, namely the appetitive part of the human soul. In this view, he follows both Plato and Galen.65 In the Galenic anthropology, which mirrors the tripartite Platonic one outlined in the Republic66 and the Timaeus,67 humans ingest food, which the body turns into blood in the liver. This substance is associated with that part of the human being that concerns itself with nourishment and reproduction. As the body continues to refine this substance, it rises until it reaches the heart, where it becomes a kind of enlivening force associated with what Plato calls the spirited part of the soul, that part that experiences passions of various kinds. Finally, this substance rises to the brain, where it is further distilled into what Galen calls psychic pneuma, which circulates in the “ventricles of the brain and throughout the nervous system.”68 For Galen, this tripartite physiological system helped to link the body and soul. It also served to explain how and why “changes in the body could alter one’s mental balance and behavior and vice versa.”69 A number of Porphyry’s works indicate that this model informs his ideas about blood and its connection with embodiment and the appetitive part of the human soul. The connection between body and soul based on the tripartite physiology may help to explain why, for Porphyry, the kind of food one ingests is important, as it directly affects one’s mental state.
In On the Cave of the Nymphs, a longish allegorical interpretation of ten lines from Homer’s Odyssey,70 Porphyry interprets the cave as a symbol of the descent and re-ascent of the soul into and out of the body. In his interpretation he ties the mistiness of the cave to blood. And he furthermore associates both blood and moisture with desire, pleasure, reproduction, and bodily existence. He writes that “right here in this world the spirit becomes damp or saturated, as a function of its sexual desire, and the soul drags a damp vapor along with it from its descent toward γένεσις.”71 According to Porphyry, this descent into genesis is accompanied by a certain kind of pleasure for the soul. As a parallel, Porphyry cites other celestial souls, which are, according to the Stoics, nourished by terrestrial vapors: “The sun was nourished by the vapors rising from the sea, the moon by the waters of spring and rivers, and the stars by vapors rising from the earth.”72 In this way, “There is a compulsion for souls, whether they are embodied or disembodied but still dragging along some corporeal material—and most of all for those souls that are just about to be bound to blood and moist bodies—to descend to moisture and, once they have been moistened, to become embodied.”73 In other words, for Porphyry, all souls that have descended into the celestial and sublunar regions are associated with some kind of body made up of varying proportions of fire, air, water, and earth. And the bond between their soul and body, that is, their pneumatic vessel, is nourished by moisture.
Porphyry also uses these elemental principles to explain how certain divinatory practices work by using the souls of the dead. These souls are “attracted by pouring out” the moist substances of “blood and bile.”74 Additionally, he explains the physical appearance of these ghosts and shades by employing elemental theory and the various characteristics associated with water (namely moistness and coldness). He thereby connects these elements and their characteristics with the humors of the human body (in this case, blood and bile). He writes: “souls in love with the body drag along with them a damp spirit that condenses like a cloud—for moisture in the air when condensed becomes cloud—and when the spirit in them condenses they become visible because of the excess of moisture. From souls of this sort come the apparitions that sometimes confront people, tinting and manifesting their spirits according to their fantasies.”75 Those among them who are “body-loving” take on this moisture and become visible. So just as the sun is nourished by the seas’ exhalations, the souls of the dead are, for a time, drawn to and nourished by spilled blood and bile. In On the Cave of the Nymphs, Porphyry does not explicitly mention evil daemons. But as discussed earlier, the same principles apply in the fall of good daemons into vice and a baser form of existence. According to Porphyry, the only difference between good and evil daemons is that the latter are spirits that have identified with their “pneumatic” part and seek to feed it excessively.
A similar sort of reasoning about the association of blood, materiality, and the realm of generation governs a number of things Porphyry says in On the Styx.76 Fragment 377F is particularly apropos in this regard. On the Styx, like On the Cave of the Nymphs, takes its departure from certain Homeric verses, in particular, things the poet said about Hades and its various rivers.77 The work exists in fragmentary form, and what remains draws on numerous authorities for its main arguments, from pre-Socratic philosophers such as Empedocles to historians such as Herodotus to the second-century Edessan Christian philosopher Bardaisan, whose accounts of certain Brahmanic water rites Porphyry finds particularly fruitful.
In Fragment 377F, Porphyry creates a map of the afterlife in which he situates various kinds of souls, both human and daemonic. He divides human souls into “buried” and “unburied,” by which he seems to mean those who have been released from the body and those whose souls are still attached to their corporeality in some way. In Homer, the buried and unburied are taken literally. In Porphyry’s case, the “unburied,” those who have not been allowed to cross the river and enter the gates of Hades proper, participate in the memory of the actions of their lives.78 This happens to those souls who failed to live justly or to work toward their release from embodiment. The memories they continue to experience serve as punishment and may also have a remedial effect. Porphyry writes, “For they receive appearances (phantasias) of all the terrifying things they have done in life and are punished.”79 Their earthly misdeeds are avenged in this manner.80 But the just, the ones who have sufficiently freed themselves from the bonds of corporeal existence and its attendant desires, passions, and pollutions, are able to
