embedded in the work of his opponent. But it may very well be that Porphyry was genuinely hoping to query Iamblichus concerning a series of questions about which Porphyry had not entirely determined his own position. Ritual was not unimportant to Porphyry, as we will see in subsequent chapters. And Iamblichus is likely simplifying and overstating Porphyry’s view for effect. But what is certain is that Iamblichus set more store by rituals and their efficacy for uniting the soul with divinity than did Porphyry.
Indeed, Iamblichus’s response to Porphyry’s letter involved a thoroughgoing defense of ritual. He used the term “theurgy” to represent his theorization of sacrifice, emphasizing the importance of theurgy, above theology and philosophy.94 The term “theurgy” (θεουργία), meaning “god work,” originated with second-century Platonists who used it to refer to the “deifying power of Chaldean rituals.”95 Porphyry seems to have been the first person to use this term after the Chaldaean Oracles, and Porphyry and Iamblichus were actively defining it in the course of discussing it.96 Iamblichus’s definition of theurgy was comprehensive and all-encompassing. He argued that the traditional rituals of ancient polytheisms were established and given to human souls by the gods and that these cult practices exemplified divine principles that provided for the deification of the human soul.97 The human soul, according to Iamblichus, was the lowest of divine beings (ἔσκατος κόσμος) and the one most entangled with matter. Hence, it needed to be freed from the body to realize its true nature.98 Theurgy was, in part, the ritual process of loosening the bonds between the human soul and matter. But Iamblichus also held the view that there were ritual actions appropriate to every stage of the soul’s re-ascent.99 Furthermore, as Gregory Shaw has noted, one of Iamblichus’s primary concerns was to redress the distorted vision of the soul’s participation in embodiment depicted in the works of Plotinus and Porphyry, a depiction that their successor felt effaced the vision of embodiment of the Timaeus tradition and exported the “demonic” from within the soul out into the cosmos.100 According to Iamblichus, the Plotinian/Porphyrian vision denied the soul’s participation in the demiurgic project of creating the material cosmos. This demiurgic work was mirrored in the work of the theurge, both being forms of “god work.”101 Everyone who practiced religion in the proper way and participated in god-ordained rituals practiced theurgy and could attain some measure of communion with the higher gods.
It is not surprising that we find a variety of viewpoints concerning embodiment among followers of Plato. As Dominic O’Meara points out, these philosophers had to contend with an apparent contradiction within the writings of Plato regarding how and why the soul comes to be embodied. According to O’Meara, the Timaeus suggests that the soul “had a constructive mission in the world to vivify, organize, and perfect it.”102 The Phaedrus, on the other hand, relates the story of the winged soul, which, “due to some moral failure,” has “fallen from the heavenly retinue of the gods and was plunged into a life of misery in the body.”103 Plotinus resolved this contradiction by positing that the soul “always retained in part its presence in the intelligible world from which it came.”104 Hence, for Plotinus, the soul does not fully descend into matter. Iamblichus, however, supported a view of the soul as fully descended. He resolved the same contradiction by positing different orders of souls. He divides souls between those “that are in close contemplative union with true intelligible being and are companions (sunapadoi) and akin to the gods, and those souls who, already before the descent to the material world, are morally corrupt.”105 The former can “preserve their freedom and purity from the body,” and as a result they can “purify, perfect, and ‘save’ the material world.”106 The latter descend for “moral improvement and punishment.”107 For Iamblichus, it was the role of those souls descending for the benefit of others, that is, true theurgists, to know how to lead others along the right path to moral correction and salvation.
Given this soteriological aspect of Iamblichus’s theurgic program, it is not surprising that his criticisms of Porphyry’s questions and philosophical views are often pointed. He frequently represents his former teacher as naïve and confused. But there was a great deal at stake for both participants in this debate. As already noted, Porphyry was concerned that philosophers avoid demonic pollution, and he considered participation in animal sacrifice to be an impediment to the salvation of the philosopher’s soul. Iamblichus, on the other hand, was more generally concerned about the salvation of all souls and the role cultic practices played in the soteriological process. The question of the nature of evil daemons and their association with blood served as a flash point in the disagreement between the two Platonists.
Iamblichus and Porphyry on Evil Daemons and Blood Sacrifice
Throughout significant portions of On the Mysteries, Iamblichus chides Porphyry for the latter’s apparent failure to understand the nature of daemons, both good and evil, as well as that of other kinds of spiritual beings. In Book 1, Iamblichus presents Porphyry as baffled about whether gods and daemons have bodies and precisely how they relate to their corporeality.108 But the main bone of contention between the two on the matter of daemons arises in Book 5. There, Iamblichus takes issue with Porphyry’s assertion that some spirits “are ensnared by the vapors of, in particular, blood sacrifices.”109 Iamblichus places this statement about evil daemons beside Porphyry’s other assertions about the way in which terrestrial vapors nourish heavenly bodies, in order to critique Porphyry’s view that deities, and specifically daemons, somehow depend on humans for nourishment. Iamblichus writes:
For it is surely not the case that the creator has set before all living creatures on sea and land copious and readily available sustenance, but for those beings superior to us has contrived a deficiency of this. He would not surely, have provided for all other living things, naturally and from their own resources, an abundance of the daily necessities of life, while to daemons he gave a source of nourishment which was adventitious and dependent on the contributions of us mortals, and thus, it would seem, if we through laziness or some other pretext were to neglect such contributions, the bodies of daemons would suffer deprivation, and would experience disequilibrium and disorder.110
Here Iamblichus appears to misunderstand Porphyry; whether willfully or not, we cannot be certain.111 As mentioned earlier, Porphyry held the view that the pneumatic vessel associated with celestial and sublunary spirits is nourished by vapors, but he in no way makes the well-being of the deities and daemons themselves dependent on these vapors or on sacrifices. Evil daemons, in identifying with their material aspect, seek to feed that aspect through blood and smoky vapors. However, this is a perversion of the proper relationship between soul and pneumatic vessel; this is indeed “disequilibrium and disorder.” The details of Iamblichus’s and Porphyry’s respective views on the vehicle of the soul are not of primary importance here, but Iamblichus casts the debate in these terms, taking issue with Porphyry’s interpretation of blood sacrifice as polluting and demonic.
Iamblichus himself does not have much to say on the nature of evil daemons and other maleficent spirits. He is generally far less preoccupied with their existence and nature, and unlike Porphyry, he does not have a speech about how they related to good daemons. He also attributes less responsibility to them for cosmic evil than does Porphyry. In general, Iamblichus engages with questions about evil in the context of discussing proper and improper ritual. Evil arises when a soul attempts to put certain portions of the universe into contact with other parts in such a way that it violates cosmic harmony. In other words, when one uses the natural sympatheia and philia built into the fabric of the cosmos improperly, phantoms, delusions, false images, and distorted epiphanies can arise. And in the context, in particular, of faulty “theurgic” or divinatory practices of this sort, evil daemons, those who have identified with the realm of generation, are able to deceive human beings and direct them to unjust ends. By this, Iamblichus means those ends that disrupt cosmic harmony, supplanting divine philia with the illusion of divine contact, ends that perpetuate the disunity that is part of the realm of generation.
For
