Beyond Physicalism by Edward F. Kelly

Author:Edward F. Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

Augoeides Ochēma: Taking the Shape of the Gods

As intermediary between immortal soul and mortal body it is the ochēma through which the soul becomes bound to and released from the body. For Platonists, the cosmos is animated by a universal ochēma, etheric and immortal, and the individual soul possesses an ochēma that corresponds to its universal counterpart. The existential problem faced by theurgists was identical to that of Plotinus, but they did not—as he did—abandon the body and physical world. Their solution was to integrate the mortal body with its immortal ochēma; more precisely, to weave the ochēma back into its divine and universal form and thus recover their continuity with the One even while in their bodies. The divine form of the ochēma was characterized as radiant and luminous—augoeides (“shining form”). For all Neoplatonists, light is the metaphor of divinity, so to recover one’s augoeides is to become divine. To use a Christian metaphor, theurgy was the art of resurrecting the ochēma from its tomb to a glorious body of light.[19]

The sixth-century Platonist, Damascius, describes the descent of the augoeides into a body:

In heaven our augoeides is filled with a heavenly radiance that flows throughout its depths and strengthens it, making it even more divine. But here below, deprived of that radiance, it is dirtied, so to speak, and becomes darker and more material. Heedlessly, it falls to the earth, yet it remains essentially the same in its identity. (Westerink & Combès, 2003, pp. 43–44; my translation)

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