Iamblichus

I may do some things online with it.

And I may do an expanded edition, depending on how it goes down the road, because I stuck with the primary Neoplatonists that Deep would have dealt with most outstandingly based on the library catalog, which isn't complete, but Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Michael Sellis.

I had a chapter where I was dealing with Damascus and the latter at the tail end of Neoplatonism, but that wound up getting left out because it was a little bit at the periphery.

And I figured at this stage, I wanted to zero in and keep it a little bit more focused at this stage, especially for the beginner.

One, the egregore, the thought form, the build up of years, you know, of eons behind the what archangels actually represent i think as part of that reservoir there's an energy that undoubtedly has contributed to by

you know

by countless practitioners feeding belief into it there's without a doubt another aspect of it which i'm i'm more and more convinced of uh that working with archangels and perceiving them as such a lot of times this is sort of a necessary stepping stone insofar as what the mind is able to deal with and conceive of, okay? If you look closely at the Neoplatonic tradition, when you're looking, especially somebody like, yeah, Iamblichus and Proclus both, there is a fabric, there is a covering given to an energy thought form or a genius, okay? And so, this fabric is something that can take the form that that is incorporated within the construct of an archangel as we penetrated through meditation and through consciousness and dealing with the news we are in essence unraveling that fabric we're approaching the core of what actually is what the supporting energy of it now when i think of um the vehicle of the soul And as I was, it's funny, I hadn't even really, I'm always so careful about language.

And I looked the other day, Akema, the chariot of the soul.

In the main, he reproduces what he has received.

We are able to compare his Pythagoras with those of Iamblichus and Porphyry, his Plato with that of Olympiadorus, his Solon with Plutarch's, and in none of these comparisons has he any reason to be ashamed.

End of Section 2 Section 3 of Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume 1 This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

So we'll see where that goes.

And I'm kind of at this point lost in the weeds a bit reading about like Iamblichus and theurgy and like, I don't know, then like some contemporary practitioners, like, uh, John Opsipaus, uh, is a contemporary theorist that, excuse me, that I admire.

So it's all over the place, but the, the book of banger will be a bit more focused of a project, I think.

Yeah.

It's-- it goes back to antiquity.

You find it in, uh, Neoplatonism, the, the concept of Hermetism in like Iamblichus and so on.

The-- oftentimes, the, the, the term itself, perennial philosophy or philosophia perennis, is associated sometimes with Leibniz.

People may know it from Aldous Huxley.

...

the generating primal images.

Or, or maybe, again, I mentioned Iamblichus, the-

Mm

And you'll see that like platonic ideals of like restraining the senses, of seeing the world as a fallen, ephemeral shadow realm, just an impression of the real all of those make their way into Christianity.

So in the second century AD in Alexandria, you have all these Neoplatonists like Iamblichus and others, and they're all hanging out in Ptolemy's museum, right? Like Ptolemy wanted to attract all the great learned minds of the Hellenistic world.

So he creates the most beautiful like university museum type hangout spot you could ever imagine.

There's like a Bengal tiger in a cage and there are all these like reflective pools and gardens and shit.

Yep.

There's a guy named Iamblichus who called it a spirit of fire.

Hmm.

A fiery pneuma-

Writing that this angel was the same presence other cultures had described under different names.

He equated it directly with the Orgoides of Iamblichus, the ancient Greek term for a radiant luminous self.

He equated it with the Atman of Hinduism, the very concept we traced earlier in this video, running straight back to the Upanishads.

And he equated it with the daemon the Gnostics described That spark of divine light supposedly trapped within physical matter.

So after Plato, when you get into the first, second, third centuries of the early Christian era, there was a lot of debate and theological discourse between the budding Christian church of that time and various flavors of Platonists.

So there's Plotinus, there's Iamblichus, there's these different figures that wrote a lot on kind of commenting on what Plato had said.

And so sometimes this is called middle Platonism or neoplatonism.

And so these figures tried to really continue the Hellenic approach as opposed to what Christianity was saying in terms of like the Bible and so forth.

But my analysis of the Western Hermetic tradition is that it's just kind of other instantiations or iterations of Neoplatonism.

So if you really want to understand Hermeticism, you have to read like Dionysus.

Yeah, you have to read Plotinus, Dionysus, Iamblichus, these characters, Proclus.

Um, because they're the skeletal outline for which all of the hermeticists draw from.

Pythagoras would be, you know, it was foretold.

I think it was in De Vita Pythagora, you know, by Iamblichus.

Where he told...

Porphyry wrote one about him too, I'm pretty sure.

That might have been Plotinus.

But anyway, Iamblichus, at least we attribute it...

We attribute the main biography that we get from Pythagoras to Iamblichus who wrote about him.

And I'm pretty sure in there it recounts this tale that was told to his mother that this would be one of the wisest men to walk the earth.