THEURGY 2018

WHY NOT THEURGY?
And What Is It, Anyway?
Iona Miller, (c)2018

"The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable
in an incomprehensible manner." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book

"At last I discovered that they [The East] call the unconscious consciousness,
indeed enlightenment." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 204.

"Seeing into darkness is clarity.
Knowing how to yield is strength.
Use your own light and return to the source of light.
This is called practicing eternity."
--Lao Tzu

INTRODUCTION

"The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be. Every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model." --Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Like our Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment counterparts, we are rightly concerned with the true nature of reality. Philosophies and rituals evolve over time. The 'New Renaissance' paradigm recognizes an urgent need for change and multidimensional renewal in a period of crisis for philosophy, the arts, science, and society. Our awareness allows us to confront and engage the symbolic dimension of the imaginal.

The great enigmas of our existence remain the riddle of matter, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the human mind or consciousness (including supramental activity). Post-metaphysical philosophy has become a matter of therapy and discovery. We are looking at them now as self-organizing, open systems beyond the individual self, appearing as the phantasmagoria of the unconscious.

Consciousness, dimensions, and infinity consciousness are divine forces. Extended consciousness and the laws of nature impact and influence us and we are impacting and influencing there -- a greater capacity for life and creation.

Phenomenology investigates the consciousness-self as lived experience. Deeper understanding comes only through direct experience which kindles the light of knowledge. In modern terms, it concerns ego-transcendence into cosmic selfhood. Self, a dynamic multiplicity, is the unifying archetype and the organizing principle of Psyche.

Archetypal Cosmos

“Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists...
But 'the heart glows,' and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.” --C.G. Jung

We are philosophers; we seek wisdom. We are in a romance with the Cosmos, the dark hunting ground of the Unknown. What is reality and what is it to be a human being? Like pandisciplinarian research, natural philosophy explores the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Form maps onto meaning. Nature is integrated biological wisdom. 

Theurgy, natural magic, is the intuitive handmaiden of natural philosophy, a conscious experiential approach. Theurgy allows the soul to participate in creation as a co-evolving, co-creative presence in spiritual practice and psychological inquiry. The felt presence of direct experience is direct experience of felt Presence.

Consciousness experience is constructive in the sense that it is the result of ongoing self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic) processes. The combined effect is an 'associational trance,' accomplished through associational strategies which access experiential responses.

We either consciously or unconsciously co-create the world we cognize. In the transcendental sense the word “world” signifies the absolute totality of the sum total of existing things. Self , (the stateless state prior to thoughts, memory, emotions, associations, perceptions, attention or intentions), increases while ego diminishes within the intentional relational field.

What is driving our psychology? What is the one concept that organizes everything in our
life? Disidentification clears the content of consciousness so we can celebrate the Self (multivocal dialogical nature).

Lived experience includes both self-referencing and no-self-referencing states of mind. Only self-referencing contains the constitutional shifts reflecting major changes in development and health. The indivisible continuum of life is a therapeutic premise.

It's not enough to just have a philosophical discussion. We extract from the code what it is we are to be doing. It's not what we learn but the doing that matters. Real magic is the imaginal power of the psyche, divine inspiration. It is a natural acquisition of human development, refinement of the soul, the spirit of fluid movement, expanded consciousness.

Consciousness, self-organization and information are connected at the level of semantic significance. Transpersonal consciousness, interconnects nonlocally in a participatory holistic and indivisible way with all levels of the universe. The unconscious is a source of latency, ingenious expressions of natural intelligence, indeterminacy, and pure potential.

"That is how we should understand the pleroma, the fullness, which is the origin of the existence of the world, where everything is contained but in potentia, as a possibility, anything can come out of it." (Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pg. 254).

What is the potential of awareness? Are we entangled with all minds? Is there a collective unconscious? What is the focus of consciousness, attentive awareness, and role of intention? How does it relate to the information of perception and objects of perception?

What is objective and what is subjective? What are the roles of learning, habits, and phenomenology, the distinctions of perception and reality, positive and negative feedback? Is consciousness always unchangeably subjective, while information and the energy fields that carry it are always unchangeably objective? 

Theurgy is an integral art, rather than integral knowledge, opening doors into the realm of the collective unconscious. It clarifies ways of dealing with this primordial ocean, full of dangers and creative potentials. It presumes  an engaged spirituality transforms the world and that the world can exercise an influence on the foundational structures of human consciousness.

As transitional objects, symbols are the origins of works of art and the life of the mind. Magical consciousness is an associative mode of thought, a compliment to rational analysis. Theurgy generates and integrates patterns of experience, connected living systems within a timeless matrix, a phenomenological map of the “cosmic man.”

The first lesson in magic is to “Know thyself,” after the Delphic oracle: "My advice to you, whoever you may be, Oh you who desire to explore the Mysteries of Nature; if you do not discover within yourself that which you seek, neither will you find it without. If you ignore the excellence of your own house, how can you aspire to find excellence elsewhere? Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures. Oh Man! Know thyself, and you will know the universe and the Gods." (Temple of Delphi)

Characterized by its diffuse and holistic orientation and sense of permeability of boundaries between material and non-material perceptions of reality, magical consciousness leads to a certain “knowing with others.”

Al-Jili (Jili, 1983), the 12th century Sufi, says: "Each individual of the human species contains the others entirely, without any lack, his [her] own limitation being but accidental... For as far as the accidental conditions do not intervene, individuals are, then, like opposing mirrors, in which one fully reflects the other..." (p. xxv)

Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the dynamics of psychic reality. 
Consciousness of archetypes extends the limitations of our observations and knowledge base. This is the looking-glass of the soul, our imaginal interface with the divine and the laws of form.

The Cosmic Sublime

A cosmic sublime implies a noetic or global consciousness. The 'cosmic sublime' is an aesthetic ideal of a grandeur captured by a cosmic perspective, a sublime glimpse of cosmic power. It can be obtained from contemplating phenomena of a planetary scale, as well as the emotions associated with experience of the sublime -- unrepresentable grandeur.

Likewise, Cosmic Consciousness is grand, sublime, and beyond description. The mind and speech return from it baffled. This divine cosmology reflects an infinite cosmic space perpetually expanding into the exhilarating infinite.

Our awe of the sheer power of the universe is a transcendental engagement with space. The mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other. The passion aroused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment.Understanding is the inner sense to which the outer senses are connected.

Kant said that as an earnest exercise of the imagination, the sublime permits the mind to go beyond limiting sensibility. The cosmic forces affecting human inner and outer senses are represented in the concepts of human understanding and in the ideas of human reason. All life “belongs to a single cosmic, dynamic system,” subject to a cosmological system of forces or primordial matter.”

What could be more simply magical than art which can continue to exert its influence and grandeur over centuries? The evolution of art styles through historical art cultures demonstrates the evolution of consciousness. 

The sublime works both in human art and cosmic nature. As an aesthetic category, the cosmic sublime provides a vantage point for us to view how the human mind confronts and conceptualizes grandeur of an infinite dimension. A Taoist approach merges the aesthetic subject with the primal simplicity.

The cosmic sublime arising from a material point of origin rather than the rhetorical is more sublime. A spectrum runs from painful finite experience of the cosmos to joyful ideas of the vastness of space.

Transcendence becomes immanence, thinking in terms of cosmic space. Energy, matter, and time are rendered transcendent in the cosmos, beyond space and time, beyond the Big Bang singularity, beyond ourselves, and narratives of spiritual transcendence.

Do we need this transdisciplinary approach for a better understanding of both Nature and human arts? Why is aesthetics more related and applicable to cosmology than other divisions of metaphysics? One arguments is that cosmology is not solely metaphysical but must relate to physics for the completeness of its conceptual representations. 

There is am inherent relation between aesthetics and cosmology. Aesthetics investigates the appearance of physical objects, human understanding, sense-intuitions, and sensory perceptions. The source of any aesthetic concept arises in the way cosmic forces communicate human inner and outer senses.

We need a simultaneous transition between the sensible and supersensible realms for the completeness of human understanding. We apprehend transition only when the moving forces do not exceed our intellectual or intuitive capacities. Our sense-intuitions and understanding can't apprehend and conceptualize any motion beyond our imaginative capacity.

Poetic approaches claim contact with the gods for inspiration, passion, and poetry -- a flight of the mind, generating thoughts of the sublime. Poetry can create a sense of transcendence, grandeur and the infinite, through which we can penetrate the very heart of the universe and confront its immensity, even if those depths are overhead.

The sublimity is of the depths within heights or the bottomless heights. We stare down into the abyssal void where it all takes place. Infinity opens out into a vast depth, the innermost treasure of the sky, concealing nothing in any direction. 

Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment. There are interdependent unconscious neural, phenomenological, and cognitive levels of embodiment.

Mind is not separate from bodily experience, but is naturally more than our conceptual experience. It is irrational. nonlinear, and entangled. There are no consistent level-independent truths. Even embodied truth is not absolute, objective truth, nor does it need to be but it allows us self-reflection.

Magic is a mytho-poetic irrational aspect of consciousness with its own form of reason -- associative thought, understood as a form of knowledge in its own right. What is going on when we communicate with spirits, divine the future or heal the sick? How can magic, as a mode of consciousness, be examined while avoiding the polarization of materialistic reduction and an uncritical belief in spiritual presence?

Lévy-Bruhl tried to described mystical mentality in terms of participation mystique, a mytho-poetic attitude with multi-leveled analogical relationships, a metaphorical holism with its own 'logic'-- a correspondence between phenomena. It is direct experience of the co-existence and identity of things that critical thinking would separate.

The two type of thought are present in all societies -- in pop terms, left and right brain thinking, a reasoning in different categories. Symbolically rich rituals amplify right-brain processing, the alternative consciousness of magical thinking. The psychological approach to such material is to engage it as an 'as if' reality, including autonomous personifications.

Pablo Neruda spoke of a literary genre, magical realism, a genre of narrative fiction, art (literature, painting, film, theatre, etc.) It encompasses a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world, and adds or reveals magical elements. This narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.

Amplifying our experiences can reveal their depth, purpose and significance. It creates sacred narratives. We inhabit a multiple metaphor environment. Initiates participate in myth as a lived experience through metaphor, gesture, and imagination.

Despite historical changes and enlightenment thinking, mystical and imaginal notion exist side by side with empirical knowledge. A magical orientation of mind makes analogical connections (rather than logical separations). Meaning, significance, purpose, and intentionality are hallmarks of magical thinking. Magical consciousness is a living, breathing unity-in-multiplicity, an intuitive “metaphorical language.”

Any dualisms of mind and body. mind and culture, or self and other are irrelevant in this perspective. The imaginal world is full of non-physical minds, acting not by mechanical laws, but by the entangled psychic laws of motivation, intention, desire, and emotion. 

Animism is a relational psychic ontology found cross-culturally. Magical thinking is predominantly animistic; indeed, magical consciousness could be said to be animist thinking in action. The psychic worldview requires no explanation with physical facts. Even consciousness does not arise from known physical laws.

Echoing Neoplatonic notions, physicist Nick Herbert suggests in Elemental Mind that, far from being a rare occurrence in complex biological or computational systems, mind is a fundamental process in its own right, as widespread and deeply embedded in nature as light or electricity.

Theurgy is a panpsychic philosophy. Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe. Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view.

The universe is an organism that possesses a mind. It is stronger than animism, which holds only that all things are alive. Panpsychism doesn't believe that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.

In context, mystical thought is normal, complex, and developed and not necessarily taken literally. To the mythmaking mind, rituals don't recall a miraculous event; they are that psychic and spiritual event. The environment as a holistic behavioral field is neither inner nor outer, but both/and non-material and material. 

This orientation can be described as analogical rather than logical, a web of connections. Within this conception, there is no contradiction between apparently mutually incompatible and exclusive states such as “life in death” or “unity and multiplicity of being.”

The key concept is engagement with an inspirited or ensouled world, primary process discourse working on conscious and unconscious processes. The core human psyche is an analogical mode of consciousness, multiples centers of consciousness.

A felt sense of the participatory awareness of magical consciousness and non-material perception of reality do not exclude a search for the naturalistic, with wide ramifications that affect the whole organism and its environment.

Analytical and analogical thought in reality occur simultaneously all the time. Such universal features of human thought were first reported by Plato and Aristotle and carried forward in Neoplatonism. Plotinus argued that the universe should be considered a god itself. 

Aristotle called the soul equivalent to the psyche, the animating “principle of life." He imagined psyche as the form or soul of all living organisms, including plants and other animals, as well as human beings. 

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1453–1494) regarded magic as an elementary force pervading natural processes. Iamblichus and Proclus insist that true communion with Truth and the Divine are achieved not through rational contemplation alone.

Philosophy involves “theurgy” or ritual acts involving affective, associative magical thinking. There is no way to truly approach and connect with the Divine and highest level of knowledge without accessing non-verbal, physiognomic, and ecstatic/ emotional modalities. 

Magical experience is intrinsically personal, a network of connections special is its relation to a synchronous pattern of connections. Meaning comes through a process of associations. Experience changes how magic is perceived.

Magical Consciousness

Magic is an orientation of consciousness and mode of thinking. Jung notes, "Thinking is life just as much as doing is." Magical consciousness is affective, associative, and synchronistic, shaped through individual experience within a particular environment. The real impact of magic happens at a more fundamental level of individual awareness that includes emotions, feelings, and beliefs. 

Theurgy is an active intentional imaginal act. Archetypes [or gods] are rooted in gestalt, figure-ground perception. We look for objects that we can distinguish and name to make sense of what we see, and so interact with them. The figure-ground principle states that we instinctively perceive objects as what we should be focusing on.

Poets exploit our habitual figure-ground organizations in extra-linguistic reality to shift attention from one aspect to another by inducing us to reverse the habitual figure-ground relationships through poetic effect -- the event-structure metaphor, instinctive event cycles.

Theurgy is a primary modality for mythodrama, combining a variety of arts -- a transpersonal approach in the interdisciplinary sense, transforming old conceptual frameworks to account for new experiences and inner sources of human existence.

It is not so much about curing people as about assisting in psychospiritual growth, which can solve the pathologies of one stage by advancing a person to another, a profound personality transformation. Bringing to consciousness all deeper suppressed feelings liberates us from dependencies, fears and superficial boundaries.

Psyche is a multi-layered being relatively autonomous from consciousness, which encompasses the divine element. Mind, matrix, and metaphor integrate patterns of experience. If we talk too freely about anything within us that carries power, it starts to lose that power.

One tacit metaphor is the event structure metaphor "PURPOSEFUL ACTION IS A JOURNEY." The purpose of the action is expressed by the place   to which the journey leads. A more specific instantiation of this metaphor is "LIFE IS A JOURNEY," and it is revealed in autonomous self-arising images.

Purpose is reintroduced by the metaphor: light as knowing, understanding, or proper guidance. Emergence is a holistic approach to change. The nothingness or openness is light, luminous radiance, is the primordial ground of all that is.

Consciousness-at-rest and conscious-energy are the two primary manifestations of the one ultimate, self-contained consciousness. The power of the ground includes biological instincts, emotive potentials, autosymbolic imagination. It is a source of psychic energy, covert impulses, and unconscious projections. 

The fluid self reveals the myth of the fixed personality. The thoughts we experience as idle and free-flowing, for example, echo the flow of figures moving in and out of the ground that is the conscious mind. If we focus, these figures can become more fully formed and brought completely into awareness by attending to them more vigorously.

Figure-Ground

Figure-ground organization shows that, “Insight is a patterning  of the perceptual  field in such a way that the significant  realities are apparent; it is the formation of a  gestalt in which the relevant factors fall into  place with respect to the whole.” (Heidbreder, 1933)

We are strengthened by exposure to a range of perspectives. The figure is the image that stands out from the ground. The gestalt principle that applies most to space is that of figure-ground. The principle of figure/ground is one of the most basic laws of perception. A figure 'stands out' against an undifferentiated ground.

The unbounded and formless ground does not move us towards meaning-making and figure formation. But it provides the "context that affords depth for the perception of the figure, giving it perspective but commanding little independent interest" (Polster & Polster, p. 30).

Ground evolves from our past experiences, from our unfinished business, and from the flow of the present experience. Our entire life forms the ground for the present moment (p. 32). Perceptual organization drives us to creating a figure to pay attention to. They are based more on our creative application of prior experiences instead of the data and information directly available to us in the moment.

We need to consciously understand patterns being constructed in the human pre-conscious mind. These pre-conscious effects simultaneously impact the human psyche and beliefs: Enhance, Obsolesce, Reverse and Retrieve (McLuhan, Laws of Media). They impact our memory storage and retrieval. Our technologies and religions are all about re-membering.

Our environment is structured by our paradigms or worldview. The deeper we go the more the ground comes to the fore. It reminds us to attend to what is out of awareness where nothing is determined as much as what is in awareness.

Thought-creating beings live in a mental universe beyond conceptualization (universal mind), patterns of continuity and discontinuity, unremitting invisible effects that shape us whether we notice or not, and natural consequences. The One is ineffable, incomprehensible, super-celestial unconditioned reality. Plotinus's maxim claims the Absolute "has its center everywhere but its circumference nowhere."

Root drives animate archetypal expression, forms, and metaphors drive its action in the psychological landscape it operates in. The confluence of the rational and irrational that helps or hinders the soul's ascent to the divine is perhaps best described as imaginal -- the realm of soul. Ordinary consciousness becomes extraordinary.

Even our physics tells us we only experience an illusory sliver of an infinitely larger reality. There is a kind of progression that leads us to wisdom. Contemporary art also explores and questions notions about vague beliefs and subliminal conceptions. 'The Other' means that the subject is imaginal, the otherness within the self, beyond the artist's own range.

Jung’s archetypal Self is the archetype of wholeness or unity, ultimately and inescapably  otherness itself. This “ultimate other” is always purely potential, forever beyond our experience. There are elements of consciousness -- objects, ideas, beliefs -- that may be illusory. Religion is a natural phenomenon.

Imagination is the liminal space that is essential for consciousness and the unconscious to connect. Ritual practices encourage us to reconnect to the renewing function of affect and imagination. Imagination is a piece of heaven concealed within us, a divine connection to the cosmic One Mind, “the Star in Man, a celestial or supercelestial body.” (Rulandus, Lexicon of Alchemy, 1612). We voice various possibilities.

The tacit self is grounded in embodied practices, generally inaccessible to conscious awareness. Tacit, inarticulate, taken-for-granted contexts of human meaning are grounded in our embodied capacities, dispositions, shared practices and forms of life. They constitute a fundamental condition of intelligibility of meaningful human activities and expressions.

Our individual encounter with our psyche, dialogical otherness within the self, and the bringing of its elements into consciousness is central to the process. The sense of the other in self is animated by its own agency. The Other can't speak for itself, so we speak for the Other, and as we do the Other becomes us. From necessity, myth breaks into being. As Blake said, "Imagination is not a State: it is Existence itself."

Philosophy of nature (Latin, philosophia naturalis) is described as the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe. Theurgy, a Neoplatonic practice, is active participation in the theurgic world as theophany, a 'breathing with' the divine, divine inspiration, a living moment granted by a deliberately and exquisitely configured universe.

Some people may be genetically predisposed to ritual by the VMAT2 gene, associated with mystic experiences, including the presence of God and feelings of connection to a larger universe. It plays a key role in regulating the brain levels of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

A 40% of the variation in self-transcendence is due to genes, but beliefs are social memes. In one sense, we approach religion like a relationship: the fantasy that there is a Magical Other out there who will fill all our voids and meet all our needs.

We are wired to experience God. Different researchers have slightly different names for the religious syndrome. Ramachandran calls it “the God module.” Persinger calls it the “God experience.” Both researchers indicate waves of temporal lobe excitation with hemispheric coherence underlie spiritual experience and religious belief. “The Kingdom of heaven is within.” Sub-clinical temporal lobe epilepsy also correlates with so-called spiritual experiences.

This later spiritual interest can be rooted in subjective experiences of a variety of phenomena kindled by electrical instabilities in the brain. They include, but are not limited to depersonalization, time distortion, anxiety or panic, floating or falling sensations, peripheral imagery.

A sense of presence either sacred or malefic, apparitions, downloading of memory sequences and false memory confabulations or fantasies, voices and visionary experiences range from heavenly to hellish, and a panoply of psychophysical manifestations.

Grounded in the fundamental nature of the soul, consecrated ritual work is directed towards the gods. We create simulations of alternative realities. By becoming receptive to their illumination, we become like them. Gods that had once been worshiped as idols became worshiped through the whole living self.

Knowing their ontological essence means we learn to live ethically through them. Our living reality is that as individuals we secure our being by transcending our individuality for identification with the universal.

The theurgist performs actions, facilitating natural sympathies in the quest for transcendence that align soul with continual revelation. It affirms primordial particularity while elevating the particular to the universal. The private realm of introspection is a non-social phenomenon that simulates an encounter, so we can 'live out' fulfilling imaginative occurrences within that analogue space.

Soul participates in all material things. Connectedness is a biological imperative. The physicality of ritual affirms the divinity of the material cosmos against thoughts that it is irredeemably fallen. All objects naturally participate in the divine. All objects are considered images or symbols of the gods -- the immanence of divine energy. The universal is only active and authentic in the particular.

Psychic influence can be drawn down into terrestrial likenesses. Theurgy connects heaven and earth; theurgists are those who connect the heavens and earth, who gain mastery over the illusory nature of reality itself, while realizing there is no question of 'controlling' the gods. The universe and the unconscious are inherently irrational.

An aesthetic approach to astrological symbolism and significations aligns it with the hieratic arts, particularly through visual representation, poetry and music. Music of the spheres, like harmonious sensory music, is divinely rational, though capable of manipulating the irrational parts of the soul for the purpose of the ascent to the divine or the One, the hypercosmic realm.

Neoplatonism included a complex relationship between divination, rationality, and ritual. Theurgic magic neither seeks to manipulate nor constrain the gods. Theurgy and contemplation were interlinked ways to truth of transcendental mysticism.

The help of the gods for the soul to ascend was actualized through theurgy. The general non-coercive theory of ritual practice is that symbols draw down divine energy into the theurgists's soul, permitting a union with the gods.

The highest stages were noetic, immaterial, and incorporeal conceptions -- 'seeing' drom the perspective of the gods. Inner ritual needs no overt physical expression for transforming the theurgist's consciousness. Truth is perceived beyond reason. The final stage of union is non-discursive.

The gods 'call' to us and the theurgist 'calls' back by invocations.  The cosmic feedback loop is closed, like the serpent biting its tail. Theurgy works by invoking the gods through their symbols connected to their divine causes, a continuous emanation of divine energy, or divine love allowing sympathy to arise. The Chaldean Oracles alluded to divine love and reversion of the soul to the divine and the transcendent One.

Plotinus claims that magic is always already there in nature. It culminates in a loss of self, absorption into the divine by becoming one (henosis) with God. The last words of Plotinus were "Strive to bring back the god in yourselves to the God in the All" (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 2).  Such transcendental idealism and self-consuming love was the telos of post-Medieval philosophy. 

Renaissance theurgy and alchemy were concerned with techniques to transfigure or spiritualize the human body, to divinize the soul. The body is considered a location of greatest individual authenticity. The most authentic center of Individual soul and the All-Soul are one (Ennead IV.1). Nature is Soul's expressive act. Pico emphasized that high magic is not
so much working wonders as diligently serving nature as she works them.

Consciousness is the crown of Nature. Consciousness of Crown is super-consciousness. The entire universe implodes through our consciousness. It remains our greatest mystery and frontier. It is rooted in the internal qualitative aspect of the quantum functioning of the 'ground of being,' at the threshold of psyche and matter. The “threshold” represents the metaphorical separation of conscious mind from the unconscious, the invisible, unbounded realm. 

Indivisible awareness of the absolute space of all phenomena is beyond the duality of external and internal space. Primordial consciousness of the process of reality is non-dual consciousness/awareness. Absolute space is the central metaphor, void of of matter but not devoid of an infinite subquantal ocean of energetic potential.

Natural  philosophy  returns as the concept of mind, life  and matter emerging from the
nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime. Space is no longer secondary to matter. Absolute space of the vacuum is the primary reality.

Things we know as matter (mass, with properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. Our “essential nature” must be here, now. And in the emerging concept there is no "absolute matter," only an absolute matter-generating energy field.

All manifestations emanate from configurations of this absolute vacuum. Empty space is full of seething energy. Psyche or soul is a purposeful self-regulating system that is directed toward amplifying innate consciousness and individuation. We can consciously realize our role in the universal drama taking place.

So, knowledge of the source field is self-knowledge. Consciousness is described as the root of matter, including our own matter. Whether we call it the boundless reality of God, or the pre-spacetime vacuum that gives rise to matter, this Mystery is the quintessence of impenetrable darkness that contains the spark of life.

Ervin Laszlo proposed that the quantum vacuum, the field from which the universe is born, is conscious with all the information from the Big Bang to now. Laszlo says the universe as conscious life emerges from the quantum vacuum. Such field theories are a metaphysic so can never be known in their entirety.

Even Scientific American (Kastrup, Stapp, Kafatos; 2018) reports, "our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche." (May 29, 2018, "Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics").

"The claim is thus that the dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to transpersonal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity—which is also made of matter—corresponds to personal mentation. This notion eliminates arbitrary discontinuities and provides the missing inner essence of the physical world: all matter—not only that in living brains—is the outer appearance of inner experience, different configurations of matter reflecting different patterns or modes of mental activity."

"According to QM, the world exists only as a cloud of simultaneous, overlapping possibilities—technically called a “superposition”—until an observation brings one of these possibilities into focus in the form of definite objects and events. This transition is technically called a “measurement.” One of the keys to our argument for a mental world is the contention that only conscious observers can perform measurements."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics/

"What preserves a superposition is merely how well the quantum system—whatever its size—is isolated from the world of tables and chairs known to us through direct conscious apprehension. That a superposition does not survive exposure to this world suggests, if anything, a role for consciousness in the emergence of a definite physical reality."

"Now that the most philosophically controversial predictions of QM have—finally—been experimentally confirmed without remaining loopholes, there are no excuses left for those who want to avoid confronting the implications of QM. Lest we continue to live according to a view of reality now known to be false, we must shift the cultural dialogue towards coming to grips with what nature is repeatedly telling us about herself." (Bernardo Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, Menas C. Kafatos)

Jung said, "Consciousness is essentially the psyche's organ of perception,
it is the eye and ear of the psyche." (ETH Lectures, Vol. II, Page 98).

Deific Self

Arguably, individuation can do without the teleological goal of attaining the Self in all its humanity and divinity, but in magic it is primary. The presence of this deific self is not indicated by wonderful personal powers but by archetypal images. "As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal … ‘Archetypal’ here refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is” (Hillman 1977 b). 

The glorification of a subject to divine level, apotheosis, means"making into a god", a belief, and an art. It isn't tools that set humans apart, but art, including the invocation of cosmic apotheosis. From earliest times art and religion went together, the power to represent and create -- the genius of artistic instinct.

If the expression isn't rigid or blank, even a statue can signal interiority and invite us as spectator to psychologize it. It acquires a body, a soul and that is what allows us to interact with it, to bring it into existential partnership. The ideal body proportions, a god-like or perfect form, embodies harmony and virtue of the cosmos.

Art is an adventure into an unknown world. Art engages our spiritual impulses and has always been used to express our spiritual longings. The noetic field is the most inviting medium because it is not flat, but multidimensional.

"...mythical figures... provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.” We are, "deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination." (Hillman)

The collapse of superpositions of all potential, a multiplicity of perspectives, into the singular embodiment of the aspirant means transformation and augmentation as an archetypal image. Archetypal images universalize, depersonalize, and amplify. Everything has a symbolic dimension. This conviction evokes the deific self-image, enlivens the deific mask as we recognize its essential and collective importance.

What do we assume about how the human self reacts in the presence of God, gods, or other 'divine' forces, entities, or elements? What does it mean to physically embody human as temple and cosmos in material being -- juxtaposition, fusion, blending? What is the essential nature of our lived relationship to the divine, the blended self, the centripetal and centrifugal self, divine fluidity and embodiment -- divine/nondivine self-conception? 

Magic is an archaic way of encouraging the unfolding potential of natural individuation, including a way of thinking about the world. In “Access to Western Esotericism,” Antoine Faivre says that magic rears its head when we try to process correspondences that “unite all visible things and likewise unite the latter with invisible entities.”

Magic has always been a traditional but controversial approach in which action precedes reflection. Theurgy is an esoteric approach to enlightenment -- a great multidimensional magical system of self-cultivation through initiation and divine works of consciousness rooted in the subliminal realm. "The magical word is one that lets “a primordial word resound behind it”'; magical action releases primordial action." (Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63)

The mystical center or inner temple of humanity is an internal numinous reality,  the way we perceive and interpret the world and intuitive recollection of implicit memories. An important part of memory actually belongs not solely to what emerges on the surface of our affective consciousness but equally to what stays in the background.

The past remains: not as hidden senses or traces in some deep repository of the mind, but rather in the way these events shape and change one’s experience and thereby prefigure the totality of one’s attitudes towards the present and the future. The unconscious past-horizon is what enables the present itself to be experienced in a way that has a meaning within, and is coherent with, the whole of our experience. 

Unconscious Goal Pursuit

In nature, the “unconscious mind” is the rule, not the exception. We can discover the intentional nature of the unconscious, the unsuppressed mind. Raising subliminal content to consciousness intensifies it. The unconscious mind is a pervasive, powerful influence over such higher mental processes, priming and automaticity effects; it is highly intelligent and adaptive.

The interaction of unconscious reflexes and explicit, conscious memory is to simulate future, potential actions --being and becoming. Unconscious goal pursuit is an open-ended system. The active goal or motive is the local agent by which the genetic influence from the distant past finds expression. Evolution works through motives and strategies. Studies show that unconscious goal pursuit produces the same outcomes as conscious goal pursuit.

Conscious goal pursuit makes use of already-existing unconscious motivational structures (Campbell, 1974; Dennett, 1995). The goal operates on whatever goal-relevant information happens to occur next in the supraliminal experimental situation, which could not be known to us beforehand. The unconsciously operating goal is able to adapt to whatever happens next and use that information to advance the pursuit of the goal.

The goal concept, once activated with or without the participant’s awareness, operates over extended time periods, with or without the person’s conscious monitoring, to guide thought or behavioral impulses towards the goal. This is essentially the transformative process and multidimensional source intelligence.

In contextual priming, the mere presence of certain events and figures automatically activates not only our representations of them, but all of the internal information (goals, knowledge, affect, symbol chains) stored in those representations that is relevant to responding back. The unconscious is no less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than conscious awareness. Individuation actualizes the latent existential self which is creative, living, fluid.

Spirit Becomes Personal

Theurgy is a sacramental mystery rite that overlaps into the realm of magic and the occult. It is a ritual process in which the initiate’s mind and vision is purified to behold and “see” the majesty of the gods, through consecrations, prayers, unintelligible incantations and various meditative practices.

The theurgists were concerned with purifying and raising the consciousness of individual practitioners to the point where they could have direct communion with the gods. They inherited the tradition of ancient Greek Mysteries which aimed to introduce the candidate directly to the gods.

Magic, a triggering stimulus, develops a relationship between them. With theurgy, ideally one could experience union with the divine and prepare ritually for the peak experience of encounter and union with the innermost core of reality. The transcendental condition of the possibility of all knowledge is human as a concrete, embodied, spiritual being who is not above and outside empirical reality but is distinct from purely natural human.

The theurgist had a concrete embodied experience of the doctrines and truths developed on paper. The new living reality comes alive. We are a small universe is the basis for knowing ourselves. Truth as a living force creatively transforms reality. This theurgic aspect of knowledge is the field effect of absolute space.

Direct experience became the only way to determine fact from legends of antiquity. The Egyptian theory of salvation became the purpose of Greek philosophy. The doctrines of Plato are traced to their Egyptian origin, as he taught nothing new. Magic is the key to the interpretation of ancient religion and philosophy.
http://www.thehouseofsankofa.com/books/eBook%20Stolen%20Legacy.pdf

To be a philosopher was a vocation and a commitment to a way of life. In their day Greek philosophers were a minority of undesirable citizens, who were victims of relentless persecution at the hands of the Athenian government. Anaxagoras was imprisoned and exiled; Socrates was executed; Plato was sold into slavery and Aristotle was indicted and exiled; while the earliest of them all, Pythagoras, was expelled from Croton in Italy.

That conscious-unconscious connection is honed down through time into the beyond, not blocked by their philosophy. Concept activation and primitive associative learning can occur unconsciously, enhancing our ability to process subliminal-strength information. (Bargh, Morsella, 2008)

Sacred Art of the Adepts

Magic is a holistic approach prioritizing transpersonal aspects of the unconscious, enhancing complementarity of conscious and unconscious. There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious.

The second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious, the pre-cognitive life of subjectivity. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our interactions with meaning. Archetypes are our non-representational relation to the past, a sort of over-the-horizon GPS from our archaic past.

Theurgy means ritual knowledge, theoretical and operative which connects the aspirant with the one Self, "One" or "All", or "Universal Mind", the unitive agent, ‘perfectly ineffable’,  even "God," to experience other entities and spiritual realities. Divinity is nothing other than the Gods themselves.

A wealth of esoteric knowledge is managed and deployed in an intuitive system organized in a contemporary operational key. Each of these experiences have powerful consequences in the awareness of the Initiate. Proper alignment with the divine current is what true, authentic, and genuine initiation does.

Magic and theurgy share similarities but differ in approach, agency, and intentionality. Both employ varying degrees of ritual, and use mental imagery or words to express the desired goal. In magic, the rituals, mental imagery, and words are used to raise and empower the personal ego and its egoic will. Theurgy is not personalistic, and the rituals, mental imagery, and words are used to merge the personal will with God's Will, The Way of the Heart.

The theurgist gets into a special state of mind, direct access to the wondrous mystery of existence, an ascent into darkness and silence, contacts universal knowledge or Source, and unites in a non-dual epiphany, an experience of sudden and striking self-realization. We can extract meaning from stimuli of which we are not consciously aware.

Theurgy is presented as more elevated than theoretical philosophy, as a legitimate method of ascent in Neoplatonism. It is really a self-selecting path for the very few who are called to the ancient philosophical practice, a synthesis of magic and cosmogony.

Understanding is crucial to properly engage the material and non-material cosmos through the hieratic art. The "hieratic" style, means "sacred" or "holy" -- a sacred aesthetic of awe. “Sacred art,” hieratics implies ritual bound art is a relating quality, awareness of the aesthetic dimension. The hieratic image of an immobilized body is neither passive nor idle, but a disciplined body keeping still -- a statement of undisturbed presence, focus and concentration, even transport.

Visionary Art combines the Humanist and Hieratic Styles throughout history. Hieratic design can be understood anthropologically as an iconographic and ritual mode rooted in imagery, body habits, and physiological disposition. It is characterized by enhanced body postures and embodied power. It elevates the visual and acoustic environment.

Inspired Philosophy

Theurgy is a stepchild of Platonic philosophy, but part of a more ancient tradition -- the hieratic discipline of the Egyptians passed by the Pythagoreans on to the Hellenic Greeks. The story pf spiritual ascent and mystical union has history in it, but it is also a mystery tradition invented and maintained by writing about it. The audience are already philosophers with reverence for the written word. Divine revelation alone is true philosophy.

Theurgy can be applied in principle to any ritual. It flourished and evolved from its original, pagan associations with The Chaldean Oracles in the second century, through a peak in the 3rd to 6th c., to the Christian mystical theology of “Pseudo”- Dionysius the Areopagite in the early sixth century.

“For the theurgists do not fall into the herd which is subject to Destiny,” says the Chaldean Oracles. It implies, the theurgist is not compelled to reincarnate, but may choose to do so to help others on the path.

Porphyry was a skeptic, while Iamblicus was an enthusiast. Critics naturally wondered if theurgy is really essential and whether it achieves what its supporters claim. Each stage must be viewed in its own context. Philosophical discipline and theurgic practice is largely private but sometimes performed with a small group of initiates.

All eras or stages don't map onto one another, but contain discontinuities in timeline, theory and practice, different elements and emphasis, with common underlying themes within the ascension mode, connecting humans and the divine, and producing visions.

Theurgy is the work that the gods themselves do, presumably in and through the theurgist, who becomes a vessel for divine action. It helps enable activation of the full potential of the individual soul at the highest level possible in the hierarchy of reality.

The ancient philosophy, in its original Orphico-Pythagorean and Platonic form, is a way of life in resonance with the divine or human intellect (nous). It is also the way of alchemical transformation and mystical illumination achieved through initiatic 'death' and subsequent restoration at the level of divine light. Cosmic initiations were aimed at the pneumatic and luminous vehicles of the soul. The aspirant is made whole again after dispersion into multiplicity.

The divine way of life that had been the inheritance of Platonists and Pythagoreans was being lost, according to Iamblichus, due to mistakes in metaphysical thinking, especially the exaggerated importance of abstract thought over the direct experience of the gods. He encouraged theurgists to receive the gods in their bodies. For Iamblichus, our aesthetic experience is not an obstacle to deification; it is, in fact, the only way to embody the god.

This is the practice of primacy of experience over belief signifying a heightening in the sensory and imaginal dimensions -- a convergence of  the peculiar properties of visual space,  tactile space, kinetic, proprioceptive, and cosmic space. It emphasizes manifestation of the divine in the created world, as natural objects, the self, and art.

Modern philosophy mirrors the old notion of animism. Animism is mirrored in modern scientific theory as panpsychism, the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. Emergent panpsychism denies that macroexperience is grounded in microexperience.

Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious: they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems. If it is the ground of macroexperience, all phenomenal truths are grounded in protophenomenal truths concerning these entities -- for example, fundamentals of mass and charge.

This ground for both physical and phenomenal properties may be mixed -- some  phenomenal and some protophenomenal or unrelated to the phenomenal. Panprotopsychism does not need subjects at the bottom level. (Chalmers)

The idea that some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties is a modern retrieval of archaic thought. It's all ensouled psychic being with phenomenal properties. Animism is the extension of human mind into nature.

Neoplatonics is a philosophy, metaphysics, and magical practice. The practice of natural magic is one of its major recommendations. The theurgist enters that ontological reality 'as if' it was real. Shaw (1967) contends that theurgy was a coherent approach, a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. We wake up to ignorance to transform it into wisdom.

Theurgy (3rd-6th c. CE) defines not what the soul does, but what the gods do through the soul. Iamblichus replaced the philosophical ascent of Plotinus with the divine ascent of the theurgists. Both begin with quieting the senses. The later Platonists were after more than a rational understanding of divinity. They wanted to recover an “innate gnôsis of gods ... superior to all judgment, choice, reasoning, and proof.”

Psyche fosters the deliteralization of life. Animism informed all life as the worldview that animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess a soul or spiritual essence. As Plotinus said, "The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment on the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: "Everything breathes together."

To recover this gnôsis was to recover our divinity and Iamblichus maintained that the Greeks had lost touch with this sacred mystagogy -- radical non-dualism. Iamblichus unified the teachings of Plato and Aristotle within a Pythagorean framework and integrated this philosophic synthesis with the oldest forms of traditional worship.

Proclus integrated theurgy with culture, religion, philosophy, myth, and ritual. His key principle was that theurgy and philosophy are both rooted in imitation of the divine demiurgical activity of the cosmos.

Theurgy ritually enacts a way to enter mysteries that discursive thinking, necessarily divided, cannot penetrate. Theurgy is not opposed to philosophical thinking but is its culmination. The theurgy of the later Platonists followed Plotinian lines of reflection to the very roots of thought. The Lesser Mysteries, cleansing of the soul from bodily fixation, is a means to receive the transformative vision, the Greater Mysteries.

Theurgy is described as an effort to bring the Platonic tradition closer to Plato himself (and Pythagoras) and away from the radical dualism of the Gnostics. Theurgy implies a worldview whose consideration of the sensible world is deeply embedded in Plato's demiurgic cosmogony and Hermetic rebirth. The writings of theurgic Platonists and Hermetists share a common purpose: to make the soul immortal and divine. 

Unlike the dualistic and gnostic deprecation of matter, material embodiment became the vehicle of salvation for theurgists,  an attempt to ritually realign the human soul with the cosmos. The practice of this hieratic art united theurgists with gods through rituals specifically coordinated with their conditions and capacities. Deified theurgists do not escape from their bodies or from nature. They embrace both from a divine perspective. 

An initial mistake is to read Platonism as dualism, assuming that Platonists want to escape from the material realm to enter the noetic world of immaterial Forms. This misreading of Plato is based on a literalizing his mythical language regarding the Forms.

It is certainly a misreading of theurgic Platonism. From a theurgic perspective, dualism and acosmicism mark a preliminary stage of the initiate’s experience followed by a monist or non-dualist embrace of the entire cosmos, one that marks the culmination of rebirth and immortalization. The initiate's limited, mortal view is replaced by the universal perspective of a god, the goal of both theurgy and Hermetism. (Shaw)

Hermes insists that rebirth into divinity “cannot be taught.” Hermes demonstrates rebirth as  becoming united with the will of the Demiurge, participating in cosmogenesis, chanting or singing the universe into being. Entering this state is shifting orientation from part to whole, from mortal to immortal.

Rebirth is giving birth to the cosmos. The trigger for this transmission is silence, when the mind becomes still, when we become utterly receptive. What cannot be thought can still be received and enacted.

Iamblichus maintains that theurgy cannot even be thought. For Iamblichus “contact with the divine is not knowledge (oude gnôsis).” True knowledge of the gods, he says, cannot be reached through dialectical discussion, for “what would prevent theoretical philosophers from achieving theurgic union with the gods?

Generated by the gods, this world is the channel of return: “Iamblichus’s solution was that the blessedness of embodiment as portrayed in the Timaeus was available to the particular soul only by imitating the activity of the Demiurge, and this was possible only through theurgic rites” (Shaw, 55).

Magic was pursued as enactment of the divine will and an aid in regeneration. Organic unity of the cosmos was held together by natural correspondences that could be harnessed. Active natural magic can positively reshape identity and destiny.

Theurgy is way beyond our ordinary frame of reference. Even among those occultists, mystics, mages, or Jungians who might flirt with alchemy, qabalah, and astrology for symbolic insight, few become masterful practitioners of such arcane mantic arts and magical formulae. 

The real revival of Neoplatonism ignited when humanists revealed the treasures of late antique Greece to the Renaissance intelligentsia of Italy, France, and Germany. A quintessential religious philosophy, Neoplatonism has motivated the development of both systematic metaphysical speculation and mysticism. Plotinus tried reconciling the Platonic paradigm of the philosophical life with highly elaborate metaphysics. 

The orientation of this movement was an avid intellectual curiosity directed toward imaginal contemplation mainly in terms of the classical ideas and Gods, and by a particular devotion to Eros and to soul. It was held in the net of Neoplatonic metaphysics dependent on the Platonist fantasy of the psyche. Consciousness itself is essentially non-local existing outside of time and space.

Plotinus described an order of three primary, hierarchical realms or hypostases: the One or Good, Intellect (nous), and World-Soul (psyche). The One, worshiped in silence, is a complete unity-in-itself, nondual. The Intellect, the second hypostasis, is a unity-in-diversity. Its nature is undivided while multiplicity simultaneously subsists within it. As the Intellect is a unity-in-diversity, the World-Soul is a unity-and-diversity.

Plotinus asserts that our world and all entities are ensouled. The World-Soul is immanently present everywhere and in everything. This soul is the bearer of a precise form of consciousness. The plurality of souls subsist within a totality. Individual souls are the many facets of the world soul itself.

They also inform the human microcosm (immanence), as well as the universe of the macrocosm (transcendence), and the path of aspiring to the Good -- a participatory metaphysics. This Neoplatonic cosmology of reciprocal sympathy is a top-down view of the universe that is very human, namely what it means to be human.

Theurgy in Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism designates a strand of Platonic philosophy that began with Plotinus in the third century CE against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. Neoplatonist notions on the subtle body inspired Renaissance thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus in their formulations of the (World or Cosmic) Soul, spiritus, and the astral body.

In Neoplatonic metaphysics, spiritus governs and animates the body. Ficino defines spiritus as the element which links the immaterial soul to the material body. It retains images and memories perceived by the soul and elaborates new representations. Our memories are encased in fantasy. Through establishing contact with this spiritus we can contact the World Soul and the stars, for they are present in this spiritus.

The corpus mundi and anima mundi became linked by the ‘spiritus mundi’. According to Ficino it was ‘necessary’ to practice the ‘magia naturali’, natural magic. He rejected the more ‘demonic’ magic and conjuring that needed to be excluded, to nourish the spiritus and to support a healthy state of being.

Renaissance Neoplatonists developed the overall idea that the microcosmic Soul could merge with the macrocosmic World Soul that enables us to participate in universal wisdom. Spiritus was considered the first instrument of the Soul and it took a central place in the discourse of magic.
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/docserver/18725473/6/1/18725473_006_01_S03_text.pdf?expires=1525679051&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=C0DB68FDE2A3C17C084D798794B3EA0E

The three basic principles of Plotinus' metaphysics are called by him ‘the One’ (or, equivalently, ‘the Good’), Intellect, and Soul. Plotinus believed in one universal soul, which correlates with the Anima Mundi in which symbols are adoring the immaculate holiness of life. When Proclus proclaimed, "The God is One, the gods are many," he distinguished philosophical monism from polytheistic theology.

The objective psyche is the imaginal world revealing the secret essence of the gods. In the soul psyche is as real as the physical world. Finding, knowing and using mystical signs characterizes the theurgist, a master of the hieratic art. That symbolic understanding becomes fully incarnated by the grace of divine revelation and different modes of 'presence' at all levels of reality.

The Neoplatonists also referred to an imaginal body, theochema, a vehicle for operating in the subtle realms -- a subtle body or virtual reality. Synonyms include the astral body, the glorious body, the spirit-body, the radiant body, the resurrection body, the luciform body, the celestial body, the ‘augoeides’ (radiant) or ‘astroeides’ (star-like or sidereal body), and the diamond body. 

The Western origin of the subtle body is rooted in Hermetic, Platonic, and Gnostic literature. The phenomenon was considered the heart of several forms of magical, mystical, and alchemical practices related to esoteric traditions such as (Tibetan) Buddhism, Theosophy, and Hermeticism.

This body of light, the central structure of worship, can be developed by magical (theurgic) practices. Theurgy is experimenting with the underlying categorical structure of imagination. The symbols of the gods are opaque to the human mind and do their work by themselves. They are for use, not explanations.

Theurgy relates ultimately to nondual experience beyond discourse. The dialogical self can be seen as a multiplicity (radical plualism) of I positions or possible selves, with a decentralized, polyphonic character. This view dissolves the sharp "self-not self" boundary. 

Transpersonal theory is wholly based on the "Dynamic-Dialectical Paradigm," conversations between the ego and the dynamic ground of psyche (Washburn, 1988).  Its static representation is the "Structural-Hierarchal Paradigm." In the therapeutic context, Jungians refer to this dialectical process as "active imagination," engagement of the ego and the unconscious.  

Proclus thought that since philosophy is related to the divine, it should not disregard mythology and theurgy. Myth represents relationships outside space and time as events in mythological history.

Theurgy's invocations symbolically evoke divine illumination. The awakening of the occult life residing in the Divine Name is an image which enlarges the soul's field of vision. Symbolic operations resonate with the imagination and permit communication with the gods. Initiation is theurgic, and ideally culminates in nondual experience.

The history of theurgy is the history of the soul and our cosmological relationship to it and to spirit. Theurgy is an emotionally-loaded topic and magic, naturally, has been the object of religious persecutions in an attempt to keep paganism at bay, as described in Gregory Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul:

"Theurgy and the Soul is a study of Iamblichus of Syria (ca. 240-325), whose teachings set the final form of pagan spirituality prior to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The theory and practice of theurgy was the most controversial and significant aspect of Iamblichus's Platonism. Theurgy literally means 'divine action.' Unlike previous Platonists who stressed the elevated status of the human soul, Iamblichus taught that the soul descended completely into the body and thereby required the performance of theurgic rites--revealed by the gods--to unite the soul with the One. ...Iamblichus's ideas persisted well into the Middle Ages and beyond. His vision of a hierarchical cosmos united by divine ritual became the dominant world view for the entire medieval world and played an important role in the Renaissance Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. ...But modern scholars have dismissed him, seeing theurgy as ritual magic or 'manipulation of the gods.' Theurgy was a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. (Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul)

Magic is more than the mere use of occult qualities or invisible principles to bring about, by invisible media, a certain effect. The Greek word for magic means wisdom. How should wisdom be pursued and activated? Neoplatonism was an evolutionary leap from the dubious superstitious magic, conjuring, and necromancy of the Middle Ages. 

The special knowledge of the magician is an understanding of the invisible cords which connect everything. Since the only means for manifesting the supra-cosmic gods was through the unity and sympathy of the material world, the theurgies which worked in both orders (spiritual and physical) have the same divine cause and are integrally related. 

Magic is transformation, and the magician causes transformations in the inner world as well as the outer world. We must start with the inner world, however, in order to achieve the necessary self control. 

There is a theurgy which concerns itself with worldly or material benefits from the intramundane gods working through sympathy. Another higher type of theurgy makes use of the lower level of reality but transcends it by analogically becoming it.

The aspirant is raised to the divine level and communes with the transcendent gods for immaterial benefits which concern the very 'salvation' of the soul and union with the radically transcendent divine. The writings of theurgic Platonists and Hermetists describe a common purpose: to make the soul immortal and divine.
 
They Know the Self

The central idea of philosophy is to 'Know Thyself.' If the theurgists were not interested in the ego-fulfillment of lower magic, what exactly were they seeking in rituals of unification? The profound understanding of the one self, the depth of the human being, and the nature of ultimate reality...the mind looking at itself. Cosmological mysticism with theurgy is a means to that nondual end -- using ritual to ignite the unitive state that transcends it.

There was a time when being a true philosopher meant loving wisdom in its nakedness, seeking the underlying principles which embodied her through direct experience -- pure awareness of awareness. The magician finds Nature beautiful in her essential nakedness, and hopes for a sacred union. We should pursue wisdom in that same nakedness -- non-conceptual, pure, intrinsic or natural primordial awareness -- empty awareness. 

The "Great Perfection" of Tibetan Buddhism aims at discovering and continuing in the natural primordial state of being. Dzogchen refers to such self-liberation as 'the ground of primordial perfection,' sustaining our experience of being in naked awareness, by remaining within the field of timeless awareness, wisdom awareness, the radiance of awareness. Kabbalah calls it Ain Soph Aur, Limitless Light, "boundless (infinite) light." Radiant wholeness is the energetic field of being.

Light is an excitation of empty space, which is really a plenum. It is an unobservable infinite energy field – a sparkling, radiant diamond-expanse. This diamond-like clarity of truth unveiled is perceptible through meditation, wisdom, inspiration, creativity and genius. Undifferentiated creative energy is the source of Knowledge, gnosis.

There is tremendous spiritual potential in emptiness. A return to the absolute void is a return to the womb for rebirth after destructuring or creative regression. It means a process of ego dissolution and personality deconstruction, swimming upstream against the flow of the stream of consciousness to our Unborn roots. We reach “escape velocity” beyond our personalistic behaviors, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs about who "we" are. 

The ego "takes the plunge." It lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness. The "wave merges with the ocean," and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature.

It awakens to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, "your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death." All substances are part of our own consciousness. This consciousness is vacuous, unborn, and unceasing. (Leary, 1964)

Jung associated universal mind, as the transpersonal source of being, with the Collective Unconscious, which contains all information in subtle form. All things in the universe have a connection with the universal mind. Nothing can exist without that unmanifest connection to everything else. Separation is an illusion for we are all one.

Jung termed the nondual "Pleroma," where nothingness is the same as fullness"...an Absolute in which there is no division between subject and object. Jung intuited this nondual Pleroma to be a collective transpersonal reservoir, an ocean of collective unconscious. From this omnipotent universal Pleroma our individual psyches coalesce around "attractor archetypes." In this sense Jung echoed the eastern axiom: "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness."

Cutting through mere stillness reveals an undivided, wide-awake, clear and vivid state. Jung described his intuitive apprehension of the Pleroma exhaustively in Seven Sermons to the Dead. Jung's Plenum is a field of universal potential, unbound luminosity and infinite awareness. We penetrate the true nature of all phenomena.

Only the radiant state of clear consciousness remains. All clarity comes from this luminous substrate shining through normal sensory and mental phenomena. All phenomena emanate from absolute space, including those that constitute our subjective phenomenal experience. Absolute vacuum is only realized by contemplative insight in primordial consciousness. Awareness becomes limitless in scope. All states are permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. 
https://photonichuman.weebly.com/wisdom-light.html

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"If the soul rises up to the gods, she becomes god-like and able to know the above and the below; she then obtains the power to heal diseases, to make useful inventions, to institute wise laws. Man has no intuitive power of his own; his intuition is the result of the connection existing between his soul and the Divine Spirit; the stronger this union grows, the greater will be his intuition, spiritual knowledge. Not all the perceptions of the soul are of a divine character; there are also many images which are the products of the lower activity of the soul in her mixture with material elements. Divine Nature, being the eternal fountain of Life, produces no deceptive images; but if her activity is perverted, such deceptive images may appear. If the mind of man is illumined by the Divine Light, the ethereal vehicle of his soul becomes filled with light and shining." -IAMBLICHUS, 333 AD

"Neoplatonism abhorred outwardness, the literalistic and naturalistic fallacies. It sought to see through literal meanings into occult ones, searching for depth in the lost, the hidden, and the buried (texts, words, leftovers from antiquity). It delighted in surprising juxtapositions and reversals of ideas, for it regarded the soul as ever in movement, without definite positions, a borderline concept between spirit and matter. ... [I]t recognized the signal place of imagination in human consciousness, considering this to be the primary activity of the soul. Therefore any psychology that would have soul as its aim must speak imaginatively. It referred frequently to Greek and Roman mythical figures - not as allegories, but as modes of reflection." [Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology 198]

~ooOoo~
Archetypal psychology is rooted in a philosophical and psychological Neoplatonism. To live a fully human life, to become téleos (complete), we need to unify, integrate, and harmonize the conscious and unconscious aspects of our souls. We can maintain truth in spirit to that with which we begin our adventure.

Individuation connects us with the archetypes and their unified root, called the Higher Self, the Highest Soul, the God-image in the individual soul. The inward heaven is universal, whether imagined in psychic or subquantal imagery.

Knowledge of God requires more than a correct concept of what a God is. It requires conjunctions between the ordinary and the divine. The ultimate principle of Absolute Being is unconditioned and beyond limitation and conceptions, “beyond being,” an undetermined vacuum potential in the natural world.

This plenum/void lies at the heart of matter, the interface of psyche and matter that underlies all manifestation. We are initiated through a loving conjunction with the external natural world by participating in the Mystery that is pulsating with life, connecting with inner and outer transformation. Ideas are only made true by events.

We invite psychic forces more fully into our lives to aid spiritual realization. Both philosophy and theurgy include contemplation and action (ascent), conceived of as a spiritual way of living in accordance with the divine patterns and autonomous archetypes to fulfill our telos, endless repetition of the human repertoire, including the death/rebirth cycle. To enter that world is to enter eternity, here and now.

For the late Neoplatonists, theurgy is in fact, performed by the gods themselves (including all traditional liturgies, rites, and sacrifices. They are ordained, revealed as essential if the initiate priest is to attain the divine through the ineffable acts which transcend all intellection (Iamblichus De mysteriis 96.43-14).  Iamblichus remarks, “the light of the gods illuminates its subject transcendently” (De myster.31.4).

Theurgy cannot be viewed simply as a ritualistic appendix of Platonism, but rather as its innermost core and its hidden essence. All acts are theurgical which involve the direct assistance of the superior classes (angels, daimons, and semi-mythic teachers) and which activate the self-revelatory illumination in re-ascending from the inferior to the prior, the human prototype.

Theurgy is not about the force of will. We reach out with theurgy, but are transformed by grace. So, a theurgic union with the gods is the accomplishment of the gods themselves acting through their sacramental tokens. The awakened divine symbols by themselves perform their holy work, thereby elevating the initiate to the gods whose ineffable power recognizes by itself its own images.

According to the late Neoplatonists, the gods are present immaterially in the material things, therefore the theurgic seats of elevating power are regarded as receptacles for the invisible divine irradiations involved in the cosmic liturgy of descent and ascent. The body, in its perfect primordial form serves as an image (eikon) of divine self-disclosure, the condition and quality of embodied matter indicate the soul’s internal condition.
http://www.radikaliai.lt/didysis-zaidimas/3235-voices-of-the-fire-ancient-theurgy-and-its-tools


Operative Theurgy

The contents of the Hermetica tend to be deeply varied; its approach to God and creation at times panentheistic (God is the whole cosmos and beyond), monist, at other times dualist (gnostic), polytheistic, pantheistic, and at other times just confusing. The main message of The Hermetica, following Hermes Trismegistus, is toward a direct knowledge and experience of God through gnosis. It still takes the Great Work to turn consciousness states into mature stabilized traits.

It begs the question: what is the nature of the Divine, and is it possible for us to achieve gnosis of that nature? One can practice philosophical theurgy or philosophical polytheism without joining a cult, developing a public occult persona, taking on the full magical lifestyle, Hellenic polytheism, or associating with dark forces or the black arts.

Hermeticism or Hellenism is not an organized movement though it has a theistic aim. It transcends the current prejudices and group think of contemporary paganism/polytheism.

The psychological approach is simply rooted in love of psyche, a devotional polytheism with no dark metaphysical pessimism, compensating theological virtues, or conceptions of faith. It simply recognizes the dynamics of the psyche as an intermediary of the lowest to highest experiences available to mankind.

Proclus believed that a philosopher “should be the hierophant of the whole world in common.” He was a true polytheist, who also honored the goddesses and gods from many pantheons and traditions. Polytheism and its practice of theurgy can promote pluralism, individuality, non-conformity, multiplicity, and an openness to encountering, experiencing, and honoring the divine in many different forms.

Theurgy is a way of transmuting personal into universal experience and life-enriching wisdom, a sanctification through devotion celebrating cycles of renewal and change. Theurgy is a practice that facilitates our circumabulation of psyche, recognizing all other divinities.

We don't have to believe in its ontological reality to use it for self-knowledge. We can simply make the experiments and see for ourselves what creating depth relationships with cosmic principles brings to our lives. Each Hermetic text had an anonymous, eclectic, and spontaneous origin, recognizing the many and the one. A well-informed mature practice can be self-directed and practiced in much the same way as meditation. While a teacher can help one avoid pitfalls, we don't have to to submit to anyone's 'power.'

All the negative cliches are from occult, not psychological or philosophical practice. Theury is magic without spells, though it uses ritualized language and correspondences. Alchemy and astrology are related arts also used as creative practices in archetypal psychology.

Philosophical theury is less about power and will, and more about wisdom and knowledge. It is a Middle Way, a balanced path, not a willful or traditional practice, controlled by a rampant heroic ego or the ideas and influence of others. The whole point is to find our own specific way, and formulate our own means of experience and engagement, without taking it literally.

There is no need to think in Absolute terms, or to strive for ultimate unities. In fact, that runs counter to the spirit of archetypal psychology, and a number of Hermetic commentators. For example, Hillman rejected a metaphysics of of an idealized zealous striving. Winther believed that Jung’s and Swedenborg’s emphasis on achieving the unity (conjunction) of a multifarious self is detrimental.

"After all, it is a form of one-sidedness to be obsessed with a this-worldly self-ideal, always striving after completeness. The self as a complexio oppositorum isn’t the whole truth about the human self. The self is really complementarian" (Mats Winther, 2011b, here). 

Curiously, though rooted in Neoplatonism, Archetypal psychology has largely ignored its technology of theurgy, (practices/rituals aimed at uniting with the divine), preferring alchemy and its abstruse symbol language to the direct experiential mode of the traditional magus. Perhaps this is because the notion of 'magic' is controversial and has been co-opted by an eclectic melange of new age practitioners.

Widely embracing such notions brings accusations from 'magical thinking' to 'black magic.' It could be seen as an epistemic rupture with the science fantasy underlying psychology. The implications range from insanity to a selfish appropriation of divine resources, but it is simply a means of raising the ordinary human to the universal. Each movement of theurgy appears to communicate distinct moods and aspects, weaving a quasi-narrative of progress through struggle and darkness toward resolution and light. 

Imagine the hapless client who comes for therapy and finds a core of magical practices and Neoplatonic metaphysics at the center of the therapeutic practice. Yet, Archetypal psychology likes to deny any spiritual root and present itself as no method, no metaphysics, and no dogmatic spirituality.

But just because psyche likes to express itself in a certain way, as archetypes, it says nothing about the metaphysical constitution of the world. Its truths are true in the imaginal, in the 'as if' reality. To bring such notions into the ordinary world would be an invasion by the unconscious. We simply seek to become conscious of our diversified nature, our personal complexes, and to transcend their direct and indirect domination over the soul. The psychological goal is to engage and unite the soul, or to make it whole again. 

Perhaps one problem, besides skepticism and loathing of esoteric paradigms, is lack of contemporary exemplars who demonstrate the 'proof of the pudding.' It's safer for self and clientele to remain at the plateau of Jungian conventionality with its bullseye target of the Self, with its archetypal ducks all in a row, march through the agility course of persona, shadow, anima/animus, and self. Jung often echoed failed worldviews from history while attempting to unpack, justify, and reconcile his therapeutic and spiritual ideas. That can be part of a sincere search for soul.

Hillman intentionally marginalized what he called Jung's metaphysics (and the notion of the Self), but engaged in a curious denial of his own, even while recognizing its roster of philosophical antecedents.

We don't need to continue that denial, but can boldly experiment with the magical technology without taking it literally or reacting to it religiously as a Christianized, Kabbalistic, or pagan heresy. Kabbalah promotes human participation in the process of divine manifestation and unification of divine attributes. The transcendent aim enhances our theurgical, alchemical and mystical life, but also to bring the Spirit into the matter, to symbolically unite the King with his Queen.

Wolfson makes the important point that “it is necessary to reintegrate the theurgic and mystical elements of the religious experience of the kabbalist," too. Dr. Israel Regardie suggested that western esoteric tradition dispensed with the religious and metaphysical aspects of kabbala leaving a simple philosophical system based on the glyph of the Tree of Life as the framework of practical magic for direct experience. Other theurgic mystical paths are the deity work of Vajrayana Buddhism and the 'body of light' tradition in Sufism.

Neoplatonic theurgy traces back to its roots in Ancient Egypt. The ancient philosophy, in its original Orphico-Pythagorean and Platonic form, is a way of life in accordance with the divine. It is also the way of alchemical transformation and mystical illumination achieved through initiatic ‘death’ and subsequent restoration at the level of divine light. 

Philosophy restores the soul’s wings and leads the purified lover of wisdom to Heaven. As a means of spiritual reintegration and unification, ancient philosophy is inseparable from the hieratic rites. The Platonic tradition of philosophy ultimately derives from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian temple liturgies and rituals, reinterpreted and revived by the Neoplatonists under the name of ‘theurgy’ in late antiquity. (Algis Uzdavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity)

The Neoplatonic world view has moved closer to psyche by giving experience and observation priority over philosophical, metaphysical, or epistemological theory. What the Neoplatonists demonstrated was a willingness to at least make the experiment for themselves, without assuming magical practice was a reviled ticket to eternal damnation. Rather, as a way of realization, it instantiates a return to our psychic and spiritual roots. 

A Participatory Approach

Theurgy offers us a participatory understanding of creation, engaging soul through the minds of the gods with sacred ceremonials. For theurgist, the magical energy that they use comes directly through the deity that they are focusing upon. Acknowledging many gods simply recognizes the irreducibility of religious pluralism. Growing always takes experimentation, risk, and willingness to change and transform -- the core of archetypal freedom.

Participatory thinking doesn't have to trap us in relativistic dilemmas. We can simply remain open to the potential heuristic value and validity of alternative epistemic frameworks, archetypal principles, and embodied spiritual potentials and transformative energies. We recognize the imagination as an epistemic bridge between embodied experience and mental conceptualization.

Sure, we can also retain recognition of the value of fragmentation, dissolving, breakdown, and descent -- but in our self-directed practice, we don't have to be limited to that. Isn't this the basis of the royal marriage of soul and spirit, embracing the whole cycle of human potential?

We need to move beyond the strictures of outmoded postmodern dialectics and deconstruction to define our reality. This is the realm of noetic states that emerge through meditative, visionary, ecstatic, and contemplative practice. It includes the centrality of the body in spiritual and practice and experience, the role of empathy, the erotic, and emotion in spiritual knowledge, and the connection between the sexual and mystical.

Perhaps, these are some of the reasons that Jungian and post-Jungian practice has lost traction in the general public and in the psychological and spiritual supermarkets. But this has been largely due to inability to compete against psychiatric drugs and the monopolization of treatment by object-relations, ego-psychology, and quick-fix brief therapy that treats problems not people.

All that is spiritual is not developmental, heroic, or escapist. Transpersonal therapies are more open to embracing spiritual technologies for integration, but theurgy has not made inroads there, either, through oversight or whatever reasons. They speak of theurgy bluntly as the use of magic to achieve spiritual salvation. Theurgy remains the less appreciated 'road not taken,' except perhaps by those powerless to resist its call.

The failure of anti-depressants and other psychoactive treatment have led to studies showing that talk therapy remains just as effective, but more difficult to bill. It is time to implement and experiment with the core practices that underlie this philosophy of treatment, whether in the consulting room or in self-directed pursuit of self-knowledge.

Yes, it is complex, symphonic, and elegant, but it is also engaging and perhaps more fulfilling. We don't need to fear the complexity that is inherent in learning any artform at a masterful level. Would you deny your God a mere 10,000 hours of joyful practice?

That impulse is at the root of Theurgy as a Way of Return, through which we realize that the other world already exists in this world. It is a means to share or participate in the creative energies of the gods by constructing and consecrating their material receptacles. Theophany was resonance between the individual and god through the holy work, an emergent theosophy. Eternity is eternal presence.

Natural magic recognizes the creative power of the imagination and the value of caring for the soul by creating sacred space and time for such epiphanies. Individuation is a natural developmental process which can progress unaided to its natural end (Jacobi), as we see in those who have grown into wisdom and spiritual authority.

The Neoplatonic invocation of pagan deities was for the purpose of attaining unity with them. This unitive state is identical with von Franz’s alchemical goal of the union of the total person with the unus mundus.” The soul is our shared living presence -- that radiance we share with the divine, one infinite, all-embracing presence that infuses us all with life and vitality.

The concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns is also the energetic principle, the world-soul, unified psychophysical reality. Jung's archetypes are psychophysical patterns that reside in this transcendental layer of the universe.

Theurgy is an ancient philosophical spiritual practice, rooted in shamanism. Ancient Egyptian hieratic rites deal with spiritual alchemy including gnostic paideia as well as in transformation, elevation, and immortalization of the soul of the true philosopher or the initiate.

The Greek term theourgia may be some now forgotten Egyptian, Akkadian, or Aramaic term related to the complicated vocabulary of temple rites, festivals, and hermeneutical performances. Hermeneutics is the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of systems of meaning, including interpretations of experience, or human behavior generally, including language and patterns of speech, social institutions, and ritual behaviors. 

Theurgists follow the paradigms of cosmogony and serve as vehicles of ascent conducted by the divine powers themselves. Accordingly, it would be incorrect to think that the Chaldean Platonists of Roman Syria, those who allegedly created and promoted this term, theourgia, also invented the thing itself, that is, the tradition of hieratic arts and of their secret, theurgical understanding.

Neoplatonic theurgy attracted deities with whom the theurgist could connect and be transformed. Given that Neoplatonism was a philosophical system, these deities did not need to be assimilated with the gods of mythology. They personified the symbolic ontology of primordial forces.

Theurgy includes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature. The magus emulates the creative forces of the Primordial Presence, but more than emulation, he or she participates in a continuous creation with moments of eternity breaking through. Paradoxically, the highest heaven equates with the deepest stratum of the unconscious, or unus mundus, our natural abode beyond time and space. 

The theurgists invoke the action or evoke the presence of one or more gods, with the goal of a unitive experience. "...enlightened with the knowledge of visions, being both consecrated and consecrators of mystical understanding, we shall become luminous and theurgic, perfected and able to bestow perfection." (Dionysius EH372B)

The elementary universe is as much psychic as physical, as much consciousness as informed matter. Theurgy is the Art of raising the human soul to its own divinity through ritualistic practices which bring that soul into harmony with the divinity and diversity of the World Soul. These practices transcend the rational mind, and partake of the deeper Mind pervading the natural world. 

Initiation begins the process, whether it is natural individuation, traditional, or self-initiation. Initiation magic is any act that sets these transformative forces in motion. We choose to commit to an arduous self-directed symbolic process.

Ritual evocation of the secret divine names was important because language is a foundational means of ascent to the divine. For example, in ancient Egyptian ritual, speech not only makes the archetypal realm of noetic realities manifest in visible symbolic tokens and actions, but also performatively accomplishes theurgical transition and transposition of the cultic events into the divine realm, thereby establishing relationship between the domain of noetic Forms and series  of manifestation. In this hieratic context, the term akhu means “radiant power”, “noetic light”, “solar intelligence”, and is closely related with the conception of eidetic and demiurgic name (ran, or ren).  Instead of supplying definitions, Egyptians would state names, that is, the sacred and secret names of things and actions that the priests had to know to exercise the radiant power of the words” http://www.radikaliai.lt/didysis-zaidimas/3235-voices-of-the-fire-ancient-theurgy-and-its-tools

Initiation into magic is self-dedication -- the moment when we make an explicit commitment to fulfill two obligations: 1) to realize to the utmost our individual potential, and
2) to serve other people with everything we have.

These two themes express the Great Work. They are often one in the same thing. That meaning unfolds slowly like individuation. The visionary grace is experiential contact with the archetypal gods in a spiritual dimension through a mystical theology. The theurgist can only prepare to accept the divine operation of symbols. We encounter these entities as real. They appear as distinctly other, like the presences we meet in dreams.

Such visionary experience was called a daimon by the poet Yeats, and an angel by Henri Corbin. The archetypal image emerges from the anima mundi, as a theophanic manifestation mediating between the sensible and the intelligible world. Theurgy is a bridge through which higher beings reveal themselves. It's a truism that the gods never appear alone. The theurgist takes on the shape of the gods, connecting spiritual and physical world.

Enactment & Engagement

Theurgists themselves are of the archetype Mystic or Saint. For them "philosophy was conceived as a sacred rite" and Plato a hierophant that revealed the world as theophany. Plotinus, once valorized as a “rational mystic,” practiced visualizations with all the features of a theurgic rite. His reason become an organ of theophany or cosmogony. 

The Platonists of late antiquity believed that Plato was "divine and Apollonian." They recognized divine power throughout all of nature. The supernatural was not elsewhere but here, in nature. Gods were everywhere: in plants, in rocks, in animals, in temples and in us.

Theurgic images (godforms) can be incredibly elegant and complex depending on the aesthetics and ritual spaces available. Thee more corresponding elements employed in the archetypal field, the clearer the atmosphere of that form. Ideally, nothing in the field gives a dissonant signal because it doesn't fit.

We invite the figures, let the dialogue take its course, focus on ethics, and consciously perform the symbolic behavior. Focusing on personal meaning, its intrinsic value arises from the experience itself. The symbols themselves are healing and promote integration. Theurgists not only believed in God, but knew Him through their knowledge of His attributes as they exist in the Astral Light, or, as the old world Kabbalists called it, the Matrix of the World. 

Theurgy demands commitment, preparation, and focused Intention. The rituals of Theurgy are accomplished through ritualistic prayers, which result in focusing the mind with symbols or archetypes that represent thoughts, qualities, virtues. One of the powers of theurgy is the ability to select our archetypes based on the situation. 

What Jung called individuation, the Neoplatonists called henôsis, known only through a theurgical processes of Union. In Neoplatonism, the Inexpressible One is the ultimate principle of unity beyond all duality, beyond conceptualization, beyond Existence and Non-existence, beyond even Being and Non-being.

Individual Gods are understood as expressions of this ineffable Unity, as Beings radiating from The One, unified by Sameness and distinguished by Diversity. Neoplatonism recognizes the procession of The One into Multiplicity and Matter, and their return to The One in an eternal (timeless) cycle, often symbolized by the Ouroboros serpent. In the sacred  myth, the Child's return, reborn, restarts the story, the essence of the Ouroboros cycle.

Both individuation and Neoplatonism, which fused Plato with other mystical traditions, suggest waiting until one is well-established after midlife to begin such practice. We learn to see with imaginal eyes the panoply of available images of the anima mundi, world soul and world mind. Often divination helps us discover something about the past that illuminates the present.

An expansion of consciousness includes unconscious contents so far as possible. First they are discriminated, then integrated. This integrative process brings one into contact with the unconscious archetypal forces that regulate all human lives, that is, to encounter the gods and goddesses. These eternal forms are as important to us as to our ancestors.

We learn to use their power to experience the intense awareness and recognition of a state of emotions symbolized in an imaginal pattern, natural principles, or universal prototype. Three shared phases include purification (soul/discursive mind), illumination, and unification. The gods can be consulted by oracles, but it works best if we are in a quandry and remain open to the question of interpretations.

Religion, philosophy, and theurgy were all ancient ways of life to learn how to live better, including practice using prayers, offerings, sacrifice, if  not dogma and belief. What is important is to honor the gods not what you believe about them. Hence, it remains a Mystery.

The mutual goal of Jung's active imagination and theurgy is to live in partnership with the unconscious, self-discovery, and integration of the individual psyche. Communication is through the language of symbols and interaction with archetypes and complexes. When we invoke gods and daimons through symbols, they respond in symbols.

We complete the circuit between heaven and earth. We learn to see with the eyes of the soul. Jung stressed that it is mysterious and paradoxical, because it unifies all opposites, transcending being and not-being. It is beyond discursive reason and can be approached or grasped only by means of metaphors and symbols. 

To speak of a world ensouled is to recall the Platonism and Neoplatonism. The Neoplatonists describe the fundamental nature of reality and allow us to peer into the reality construction process that separates us from our Source. The Renaissance Neoplatonists imagined the universe as a fountain with the flow of the soul of the universe running through all things of the world and then circling back to the ultimate source.

"In the Plotinian view, the soul at its highest in the Intellectual-Principle "has a nature lending itself to divisional existence" and is "attached to the Supreme and yet reaches down to this sphere." It partakes of the nature of both the infinite and finite-the unified and eternal and the multiple and ephemeral. But it "is parted without partibility" because no matter how fully it seems to divide itself among the transient multiplicities, its eternal unity is never sundered. I'll say more below about how the soul can appear to fragment and yet never lose "the vision inherent to that superior phase." (Mansfield)

Psycho-Physical Reality

According to James Hillman, archetypal psychology is rooted in the Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. Proclus describes the cosmos as the holiest of shrines, suggesting, “[Plato] speaks of the cosmos as an agalma (shrine) of the everlasting gods because it is filled with the divinity of the intelligible gods."

Proclus conceived of theurgy as a ritual method of recreating the characteristics of a god and tool of spiritual development. He systematized Plato's doctrines of recollection to include the soul's universal concepts and innate knowledge to bring them to conscious recognition. 

Hillman argues  that the rediscovery of soul and its paradoxical nature enabled the Renaissance. While psyche is in us, we are also in it. This ancient philosophy was a system of practices constituting a way of life and essentially a sacramental mystery rite -- a philosophy now seen as a prototype of Analytical and Archetypal psychology. 

All things are one and the pleroma of being is indestructible.  Divine powers knit together the energies of the sun, planets and stars, and they operate on all bodies, animate or inanimate.  This is the notion of cosmic sympathy. This doctrine of sympathy applies to man in both body and spirit, in the magico-religious worldview of The Magus.

Hillman credits Plato's “Myth of Er” as his own source of understanding the notion of the daimon. The personal daimon is always grounded in the impersonal and unknowable depths of the psyche, but is also a manifestation of the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the imaginal world  -- Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino's concept of Anima Mundi.

Mythic persons and archetypal events influence the psyche by conditioning perceptions, generating meanings, and shaping our lives. Our journey is a deepening, a 'seeing through', as James Hillman expresses it.

The three basic principles of Plotinus' metaphysics are called by him ‘the One’ (or, equivalently, ‘the Good’), Intellect, and Soul.  Plotinus believed in one universal soul, which correlates with the Anima Mundi. The objective psyche is the imaginal world of the soul where psyche is as real as the physical world. The Neoplatonists also referred to an imaginal body, theochema, that carried you like a vehicle, or subtle body.

Hillman's theory is phenomenological Neoplatonism which means that only what we see should be regarded real, i.e., only what is apparent to consciousness is existent. Connections between our life and soul embody our soul-making process. Beauty has been defined by the neoplatonists as invisible presence in visible form and a divine enhancement of earthly things. According to Hillman, beauty is food for the soul. 

Everything is personified and speaks through the masks of image and symbol, a matrix, field, or infinity of  metaphor. 'Truth' is a semiotic fiction, ultimate rooted in fundamental Uncertainty, making the boundary between real and illusory fuzzy, a Cloud of Unknowing. It is more pursuit of the truth that is important than any particular truth.

The central question, “What is the nature of psychic reality?” can only be answered by direct experience.  We can enter this Renaissance world of angels, daimons, gods and goddeses, aesthetics, personification, divination, poetics, and spiritual abstraction in our philosophical inquiry to rejuvenate our own souls.

An information transduction process occurs in our lives when we translate ideas into action or live what we aspire to.  We can manipulate our reality and harness our energies, through concentration on purpose.  Through this means we have the ability to change our desires into a new reality through skill, preparation, effort, persistence, commitment and integrity.  We need to be aware where we are focusing our energy; what our objectives are; how we are communicating with others, and what we want others to see and believe.

We need to let Spirit guide that process of unfolding potential. The Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus was full of this metaphysical spiritual power.  He is the godfather of all the Hermetic Arts, the mystic arts and occult powers, as well as science.  He has power over language, writing, and signs like his predecessor, the Egyptian god, Thoth.

The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy.  These texts were based on notions of sympathetic magic, that like substances sharing an essence could influence one another through resonance effects.  Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.

Renaissance theurgy was described by Ficino as the translator of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, the Hermetica, the Orphica, and especially Iamblichus and his largest surviving text, “On the Mysteries.” But Pico changed the character of western theurgy and esotericism by introducing the Jewish Kabbalah. Agrippa matured his predecessors’ work into a encyclopedic system, to which the physician Paracelsus wed alchemy while founding modern medicine. Bruno burned for dreaming of a bigger restored Pagan world.

Jung's is a more aspirational spiritual psychology (height), whereas Hillman prioritizes polyphonic psyche and soul-making (depth), including darkness and descent. Multiplicity of consciousness shows in the dissociability of the psyche into many complexes.

Renaissance Neoplatonists also evoked ancient thinkers in their personified images. The great men of the past were living realities to them because they personified the soul's needs for spiritual ancestors, ideal types, internal guides and mentors who can share our lives with us and inspire us beyond. We can also invoke the inspiration of our philosophical ancestors in Depth Psychology.

Jung related archetypes, unconscious potentials for psychical activity, with Platonic Ideas. These archetypal ideas or forms define the transpersonal structure of mind and correspond to phenomenological investigations of the Neoplatonists and of Jung. The deepest parallels or correlates arise because both conducted phenomenological experiments in the structure of the psyche, using techniques with similar effects that map onto one another.

Theurgy is an arcane tradition. Activating archetypes and complexes, theurgy invites or invokes, calls up or calls in the gods and daimôns, in much the same way that divination invites synchronicities. Theurgy, consciously performed symbolic behavior, is an often-overlooked multidiscipinary creative and expressive artform that meets and invites the grace of the transcendent function.

Modern theurgy is a valuable psychological soul process.  Service means an imagination of caring for soul. Invocation is divine union. For the theurgist, the imaginal opens an epiphanic space, arousing images from suspension in a visionary apperception of reality with their own goals, techniques and outcomes. More than artistic or poetic, true theophanic vision is a wellspring of esoteric meaning.

In a pamplet W.B. Yeats wrote for the Golden Dawn in 1902, he contends that, "The central principle of all the Magic of power is that everything we formulate in the
imagination, if we formulate it strongly enough, realizes itself in the circumstances of life, acting either through our own souls, or through the spirits of nature."

Psychoid

Psychoid means the transcendental and psychophysical aspect of the archetype that describe the  archetypal structures and behavior of organic and  inorganic matter. Both inside and outside, psychical and physical are rooted in archetypal numbers and complex dynamics, for example as shown in Pythagorean theory and the 10 spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its extensive lists of archetypal correspondences and correlations. The soul guide initiates the transformation process. 

How can the demands of the archetypes (our genetically and neurologically encoded paleolithic gods) be satisfied in the context of modern life? This is one purpose of both Jungian techniques (such as Active Imagination) and Neoplatonic theurgy (and similar spiritual practices), which facilitate negotiation between the conscious ego and the unconscious.

Invocation conjures the image of the theurgist as primordial man in the imaginal realm of the breath and human speech expressing the creative power of the divine. The theurgist participates in the continual creation of the divine -- all things are manifestations of the breath of God. Breath speaks itself as a microcosm of the cosmic macrocosm.

Theurgy is a valuable technique for evoking and invoking the gods, which is rarely used in Jungian work, though praised in Neoplatonism. It should be added to the typical dreamwork, alchemy, and active imagination as an interdisciplinary means of connecting and relating to archai or paleo-gods. 

The theurgist is in a conscious archetypal relation with the divinity, and the image becomes a medium for interaction, that is, for exploring specific archetypes and complexes residing in the unconscious. In Magick, we transcend the limits of ordinary consciousness and commune with various forms of divine consciousness.  

The identification with a given energy is accomplished by a three-fold ritual.  1). Separation from the profane or ordinary state of consciousness.  Dissolution of the ordinary state of consciousness.  2). The transition stage, or twilight zone which lies between.  Creative or chaotic consciousness.  3). The new order or perception of reality which occurs in the sacred time of the soul.

Identification with an enhanced sense of self, greater well-being. Hermes is the lord of boundaries, or doorways, the threshold or liminal area.  The inbetween, or twilight zone, in enables a state of receptivity to become established.  It allows an emptying process, a letting go.

Ritual acts reawaken deep layers of the psyche.  This brings the mythological or archetypal ideas back to memory. Though the basic, or original forms of Magick and schizophrenic fantasy (wish fulfillment) spring from the same roots, they are not synonymous.  Magick is, in general, the transition from passivity to activity.  The Will is essential.

Realistic action does not follow schizophrenic magic or magical thinking.  The fantasy is a substitute for action.  In lower forms of magic, practiced for personal gain or ego gratification or power, the ego is either weak or absent, or over-inflated.  In ceremonial Magick there is a conscious effort directed at self-transformation, by harmonizing conscious and unconscious cycles or rhythms. 

Sacred Rites

Theurgy doesn't need to imply literal worship, except through attention, nor is natural magic an artifact strictly of the overweening heroic ego. It does not even have to be aspirational or developmental, as much as a relational ritual tradition.

Stimulating right brain activity with creative engagement produces revelation, feelings of conviction and discovery, numinosity, and mystery, opening worlds of becoming and being. The theurgist is in a conscious archetypal relation with the divinity, and the image becomes a medium for interaction, that is, for exploring specific archetypes and complexes residing in the unconscious.

Hermeticism was not embodied in a single religious group, but instead was a philosophical system that is at the root of many traditions, some of which remain robust. Among the original esoteric texts, The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance.

Hermetics is a Spiritual Technology. This natural means of self-initiation demands self-honesty, self-responsibility and an overarching desire to live life as a spiritual path. Generic symbolic languages such as esoterics, alchemy, and Qabalah help articulate the phenomenology of inner experience.

Hermeticism is a blend of ancient Egyptian religion, philosophy, science and natural magic, with elements of Greek Paganism, Alexandrian Judaism, ancient Sumerian religion and Chaldaean astrology/astronomy, and Zoroastrianism. It is associated with the philosophical schools of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism and Pythagorianism.

Unlike Plotinus who broke from Platonic tradition and asserted an undescended soul, Iamblichus re-affirmed the soul's embodiment in matter believing matter to be as divine as the rest of the cosmos. He contended that that "the entire body of the cosmos is ruled by the World Soul..." and that macro/micro dynamics [as above; so below], requires that our vehicles both reveal and veil our essences.  Marie-Louise von Franz (1974, 7) says, “The
lowest collective level of our psyche is simply pure nature.”

Iamblichus insisted on a special position for the human soul. It is separate from nous and the other higher souls, and holds an intermediate position between them and nature below. Hermetic rebirth and immortalization of the soul is realized as giving birth, not escaping from the world but creating it. Without the physical body it would not be rebirth.

Natural Philosophy & Natural Magic

To read hermetic rebirth as an escape from the material world is to miss the demiurgic dimension of the soul’s immortalization; this is certainly important for theurgists and Hermetists as well. He thought the goal of theurgy is insight and to “establish the universal soul in the demiurgic god in his entirety, distinguishing the universal soul from the particular soul. 

One’s physical body is no longer a prison but becomes the nexus through which divinity is hermetically revealed and concealed. The initiate then exists in a particular mortal body but at the same time, as Hermes reports, “I went out of myself into an immortal body ...that is co-extensive with the cosmos." Hermetic rebirth means the initiate is reborn by giving birth to the world from the mystery of original silence. The way of Hermes is the way of immortality concealed and revealed in our mortal existence.

For the later Platonists, divinity is not a state; it is as an activity, an energy. Theurgy is demiurgy, world-generation via the ordering of pre-existent matter. Theurgy is "god work" that enables the embodied person to participate and communicate with divine energies. Archetypes are empirical, stable, and public sources of transcendent meaning, giving rise to archetypally meaningful situations or relationships that are numinous (hallowed, miraculous, uncanny, supernatural).

For example, in ancient Egyptian ritual, speech makes the archetypal realm of noetic realities manifest in the liturgical realm of visible symbolic tokens and actions. It  also performatively accomplishes theurgical transition and transposition of the cultic events into the divine realm, thereby establishing relationship.

Theurgy is an archetypal process of mythic renewal. Theurgy is concerned with the work of spiritual regeneration, an ancient discipline, revered and nurtured throughout history by those few who know it, yet, barely acknowledged or understood by most.

The theurgist is in a conscious archetypal relation with the divinity, with the image as a medium for interaction. A convergence of related symbols activates an archetype or complex and invites projection of the corresponding god or daimon onto the image. The symbols tune the image animating it to become a vehicle to facilitate communication.

Exploring specific archetypes and complexes residing in the unconscious, the
theurgist is in a conscious archetypal relation with the divinity, and the image becomes a medium for interaction, that is, for exploring specific archetypes and complexes residing in the unconscious.  initiates participate in this and actualizes it in themselves -- the archetype manifests in them. Hillman comments that “we become precisely the activity we enact, the memory we remember; man is many, Proteus, flowing everywhere as the universal soul and potentially all things” (Hillman, Loose Ends, 1978, p.151).

Theurgical practices facilitate individuation by enabling an accommodation and assimilation between our conscious minds and the personal and collective unconscious. This process advances from the daimons of the personal unconscious, to the archetypal gods of the collective unconscious, toward their root and source, the archetypal Self, the God-image, The Unspeakable One. 

This contact is accomplished by means of symbolism, the discursively inexpressible and logically unconnected.  Jung calls the symbol-making faculty of the mind the
transcendent function . In theurgy a symbol is something in the seira (the lineage) of a god,
whether it is an animal, plant, or stone, a mineral or a myth, a hymn or poem, a
drawn character or even a number.

A symbol is an inherent component of an archetype or complex, which can activate the archetype or complex, or by which the archetype or complex manifests in consciousness. A symbol serves both to invoke a god or daimon and to signal the arrival of a paleo-god or daimon.

Some symbols are inherent in the phylogenetic structure of an archetype and
are therefore universal, common to all humankind. Other symbols are in the
personal associative network that constitutes a complex or sub-personality arising
from the archetype. These symbols may be personal, cultural, or common to some
other group. In effect they invoke or signify a specific daimon (complex) that is engendered by a generic god, but associated with the individual or group.

Iamblichus understood the soul’s divinization as non-dual: "The benevolent and gracious gods shine their light generously on theurgists, calling their souls up to themselves, giving them unification, and accustoming them, while they are still in their bodies, to be detached from their bodies and turned to their eternal and noetic principle."

http://www.esotericarchives.com/oracle/iambl_th.htm
https://www.princeton.edu/~hellenic/Hermeneutica/ShawPaper.pdf
https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~mclennan/papers/EvolutionJungTheurgyUPS.pdf
http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~mclennan/papers/MacLennan-ISNS-2012.pdf
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/658b/e80b1da95ecdf3245a6e00229244507f2906.pdf
https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~mclennan/papers/MacLennan%20ISNS%202014%20rev.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242238106_Individual_Soul_and_World_Soul_The_Process_of_Individuation_in_Neoplatonism_Jung

https://books.google.com/books?id=LxBg-ldSBUkC&pg=PA185&lpg=PA185&dq=,transpersonal+psychology,+theurgy&source=bl&ots=bMWgHwWBBl&sig=nNBXQwTM6dhUUKHl66Pwt7APV7A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjBtvGGqdvaAhVQs1kKHSBfDLkQ6AEIcjAI#v=onepage&q=%2Ctranspersonal%20psychology%2C%20theurgy&f=false

https://books.google.com/books?id=tTuJK1aovJEC&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=,theurgy,+paleo-gods&source=bl&ots=EUetxd94Hk&sig=NOfYQ9Cawc95kGd_mho3KIzq0yA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwih45TcmNbaAhUJ3VMKHXIZAF04ChDoAQgtMAE#v=onepage&q=%2Ctheurgy%2C%20paleo-gods&f=false

Corbin’s mundus imaginalis was also called mundus archetypus, a concrete
spiritual world of archetypal figures,60 apparitional forms and angels, an
epiphanic space where the images of the archetypal world lie suspended--
Corbin used the expression “images in suspension”.61 Visionary
apperception of reality, and therefore true theophanic vision, was granted
by a spiritual faculty called active imagination, an intermediate power
which could produce symbols (archetypal figures could be intended as
symbols too).
C. G. Jung, Tibetan Tantra, and the Great... (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209675_C_G_Jung_Tibetan_Tantra_and_the_Great_Goddess_An_Exploration_of_Sacred_Entities_and_Archetypes [accessed Apr 26 2018].

http://www.radikaliai.lt/didysis-zaidimas/3235-voices-of-the-fire-ancient-theurgy-and-its-tools

For Plotinus the order of reality consists of three primary1, vertically graded realms or hypostases: the One (to hen) or Good (to agathon), Intellect (nous) and World-Soul (psuche). Plotinus says that the three hypostases endure within the human microcosm as well as in the universe of the macrocosm. The One/Good is the first2 cause, primal existent, source and goal of all things3 and the central axis upon which Plotinus' overall worldview revolves around4. The One is a God-beyond-God, transcending all predications of being, number5, essence6, existence7, name8, form, attribute, thought and limitation; a complete and absolute self-contained unity-in-itself. It is the Supreme Reality and Being-beyond-being (metaousia). The One is identified as such so as to deny all multiplicity of it9.

From the One proceeds a second principle, the Intellect (nous), which, as the Divine Mind, functions as the efficient cause of all things. Nous is the Intelligible universe holding the Ideal Forms (eidos) or perfect archetypes of every existent within itself and as such is the realm of Being (ousia)10. Therefore, it would be more correct to call the Intellect Theos (or God) rather than the One. Intellect begets the World-Soul which in turn engenders nature (phusis) and the material cosmos. At the furtherest end of this reality is privational Matter (hyle) - absolute negation and source of evil.

The procession of hypostases from the One to the World-Soul is one of necessary emanation. The One is superabundant source and it overflows and emanates Intellect without in anyway diminishing11. Intellect contemplates its Source, overflows and emanates its offspring, the World-Soul,

Towards the paternal Harbour
Proclean theurgy and the contemplation of the Forms
Robert van den Berg
http://www.kheper.net/topics/Neoplatonism/Proclus-theurgy.html
R. M. Van Den Berg
Proclus' hymns: essays, translations, commentary‎
"Proclus' Attitude to Theurgy"
Anne Sheppard
The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1982), pp. 212-224

Iamblichus' De mysteriis: a manifesto of the miraculous‎
Emma C. Clarke

Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus
by: Gregory Shaw

Iamblichus: De Mysteriis (Writings from the Greco-Roman World, V. 4.)
by: Iamblichus, Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, Jackson P. Hershbell
J.dillon "Iamblichus' Defense of Theurgy: Some Reflections"
The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 1 (2007) 30-41
The Greeks and the Irrational by: E. R. Dodds

Gregory Shaw "After Aporia: Theurgy in Later Platonism" in
Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts (SBL Symposium Series, No. 12.)
by: John D. Turner, Ruth Dorothy Majercik

Offering to the Gods: a Neoplatonic perspective.(Critical essay)
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft | June 22, 2007 | Butler, Edward P. |
Sarah Iles Johnston "Rising to the Occasion: Theurgic Ascent in its cultural mileu" in Envisioning Magic
ed. Schafer, Kippenberg
Riders in the Sky: Cavalier Gods and Theurgic Salvation in the Second Century A.D.
Sarah Iles Johnston
Classical Philology, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 303-321
Witchcraft and magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome
By Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark
G. Luck, "Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neo- platonism," in Religion, Science and Magic: In Concert and
in Conflict, ed. Jacob Neusner
Luck, G. (1985). Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds.
Naomi Janowitz
Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002)

The Chaldean oracles: text, translation, and commentary‎
Julianus (the Theurgist.), Ruth Dorothy Majercik - Philosophy - 1989
Hans Lewy The Chaldean Oracles and Theurgy
Garth Fowden The Egyptian Hermes


Pseudo-Dionysius and Theurgy
Shaw, Gregory, "Neoplatonic Theurgy and Dionysius the Areopagite"
Journal of Early Christian Studies - Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 1999, pp. 573-599
Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonist Tradition (Ashgate Studies in Philosophy & Theology in Late
Antiquity) by: Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon
Coughlin, Rebecca. “Theurgy, Prayer, Participation, and Divinization in Dionysius the Areopagite.”
Dionysius 24 (2006): 149-174.
Burns 'Proclus and the Theurgic liturgy of Dionysius', Dionysius 22 (2004), 111–132.
The theurgical self: The theological anthropology of the Pseudo-Dionysius
by: Hotz, Kendra G., Ph.D.
Carine Van Liefferinge, La Théurgie des Oracles Chaldaïques à Proclus. Kernos Supplément 9. Liège: Centre International d'Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique, 199. Pp. 319. ISBN (ISSN) 0776-3824. EUR 40.00. reviewed here http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003-07-40.html
Theurgy in Kabbalah
Kabbalah: New Perspectives by Moshe Idel
Bernd Roling "The Complete Nature of Christ: Sources and Structures of a Christological Theurgy in
the works of Johannes Reuchlin
in The metamorphosis of magic from late antiquity to the early modern
by Jan N. Bremmer, Jan R. Veenstra - 2002
Wolfson, Elliot R
Abraham Abulafia - Kabbalist & Prophet: Hermeneutics,Theosophy,Theurgy
Wolfson, Elliot R
"Language, Secrecy, and the Mysteries of Law: Theurgy and the Christian Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin,"
Kabbalah: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 13 (2005): 7-41.

Seth Lance Brody, "Human hands dwell in heavenly heights: Worship and mystical experience in thirteenth century Kabbalah" (January 1, 1991). Dissertations available from ProQuest. Paper AAI9211913.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9211913
The Enlightened Will Shine: Symbolization and Theurgy in the Later Strata of the Zohar (S U N Y Series in

 
 Sources on Late Neoplatonic Theurgy
EGYPTIAN MAGIC RELATING TO LATER CLASSICAL THEURGY
Boylan, Patrick, Thoth: The Hermes of Egypt, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 1922 (Laysthe groundwork for the later “thrice-great” Thoth who becomes Hermes Trismegistus.Dieleman, Jacco, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts andTranslations in Egyptian Ritual, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 2005Ritner, Robert Kriech, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, The OrientalInstitute of the University of Chicago,