Theurgy by P. D. Newman

Author:P. D. Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company

Homer, for his part, calls the cyclical progress and rotation of metensomatosis “Circe,” making her a child of the sun, which is constantly linking destruction with birth and back again with destruction and stringing them together. The island of Aiaia is both the fate that awaits the dead and a place in the upper air. When they have first fallen into it, the souls wander about disoriented and wail and do not know where the west is.

Or where the sun that lights mortal men goes beneath the earth.

[OD. 10.191]

The urge for pleasure makes them long for their accustomed way of life in and through the flesh, and so they fall back into the witch’s brew of [genesis], which truly mixes and brews together the immortal and the mortal, the rational and the emotional, the Olympian and the terrestrial. The souls are bewitched and softened by the pleasures that lead them back again into [genesis], and at this point they have special need of great good fortune and self-restraint lest they follow and give in to their worst parts and emotions and take on an accursed and beastly life.

The “meeting of three roads”* that is imagined as being among the shades in Hades is actually in this world, in the three divisions of the soul, the rational, the passionate, and the appetitive. Each path or division starts from the same source but leads to a life of a specific sort appropriate to it. We are no longer talking about a myth or a poem but about truth and a description of things as they are. The claim is that those who are taken over and dominated by the appetitive part of the soul, blossoming forth at the moment of transformation and rebirth, enter the bodies of asses and animals of that sort that lead turbulent lives made impure by love of pleasure and gluttony. When a soul that has had its passionate part made completely savage by hardening contentiousness and murderous brutality stemming from some disagreement or enmity comes to its second birth, gloomy and full of fresh bitterness, it casts itself into the body of a wolf or a lion, projecting as it were this body as a defense for its ruling passion and fitting itself to it. Therefore where death is concerned, purity is just as important as in an initiation, and you must keep all base emotion from the soul, put all painful desire to sleep, and keep as far from the mind as possible all jealousy, ill will, and anger, as you leave the body.

Hermes with his golden staff—in reality, reason [logos]—meets the soul and clearly points the way to the good. He either bars the soul’s way and prevents its reaching the witch’s brew or, if it drinks, watches over it and keeps it as long as possible in a human form.

Porphyry’s analysis in the above unnamed fragment is very much in agreement with that presented by the author of the Life of Homer. Proclus says

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