![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've really been ignoring the blogging, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk a little bit about my work, because the reason I don't blog more is because I'm working, and also because it might be interesting for those who do not have an independent source of information about me to know that there is more to my life than watching Korean soap operas (Hotelier is really living up to our expectations, by the way…).
Recently I've been hitting the books again, taking detailed notes on books 1-3 of Proclus's Platonic Theology. I came to the realization that I had been coasting for two or three years now on the understanding of this text that I had acquired while writing my dissertation, and that some fundamental issues needed to be rethought before I went any further with the process of transforming chapters of the dissertation into stand-alone articles for academic journals. I'm perfectly happy with the article that appeared in Dionysius; that area of the material from my dissertation, which concerns the fundamental nature of the divine manifold, is not affected by this process of reformulation. Anyhow, in a small but satisfying milestone, yesterday I finally finished taking notes on book 3. The first vehicle with which to test my new understanding of this material will be the paper I'm giving at Fordham's annual ancient & medieval philosophy conference in October. The article is going to be on the intelligible Gods. It's going to be a challenge to get so much complicated material into a paper which probably shouldn't be more than ten pages long. The problem one has working with a philosopher like Proclus is that people don't have any previous familiarity with him, or if they think they do, most of the time they just have a lot of misinformation and prejudices. In other words, they think they know what's there when they don't.
A couple of recent rejections: Apeiron rejected "The Gods and Being in Proclus" with a cranky and less than helpful referee's report. I looked at the piece again, though, and saw that it needed quite a bit of work. I rewrote it substantially and sent it off to Classical Bulletin. The Journal of Religious Ethics rejected "The Ethics of Offering to the Gods in the Encheiridion Commentary of Simplicius," saying it was too narrowly focused. Perhaps they're right, but at the same time I wonder if there is a slight bias there, regarding the making of offerings as somehow more mundane than prayer or mystical exercises. Anyway, I really shouldn't have submitted the article to them when I'd had clear expressions of interest in it from Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, a new journal I heard about at the AAR conference. The editors there wanted me to add a lot more historical material to it, which I initially had little appetite for. I got to thinking that I would rather have it read as an article about the ethics of a religious practice rather than as part of the history of theoretical reflections on ritual. But you know what they say about a bird in the hand. Actually, there's a lot more that could be said about a bird in the hand, but that's a different matter...
I've also written two book reviews recently. One of them is of a book on Kierkegaard, unfortunately quite forgettable, for Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, an e-journal from Wales. The other is of a book on Roman Stoicism, for Metapsychology Online, a site I've reviewed for previously. The latter, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection by Gretchen Reydams-Schils, is a really fine piece of work. Writing reviews is good practice, I feel, for getting ideas across more clearly and concisely. Plus I love getting free books! I've been trying to get a better grasp of Roman thought recently, both religious and philosophical. On the religious end, Peter Wiseman's The Myths of Rome is really first-rate. Wiseman makes a strong argument that the influence of Greek colonization on the Latins in the archaic period is much more profound than has been appreciated, which provides fresh material for reflection on the perennially knotty issue of the relationship between the Greek and Roman Gods. I remain a hard polytheist on principle, but I am increasingly open to the idea that sometimes the Latins are referring to Greek deities by means of what amount to Latin epithets.
I have two side projects going right now which have a way of getting shoved further to the side when I am making a big push with my other work, but which are important to me nevertheless. One of them is a Yahoo group where we are reading the fragments of the Chaldean Oracles. This was a mysterious book, "channeled", as we would say now, by one Julian the Theurgist, a magician and Roman soldier under Marcus Aurelius. It was very widely read by successive generations of pagan Platonists, becoming part of their canon of scriptures, alongside Homer, Hesiod and "Orpheus". The fragments preserved in quotations by Neoplatonists like Proclus and Damascius were already collected into a book in Byzantine times, and brought thence to Europe in the Renaissance. Later on, they were much read by occultists in the circle of the Golden Dawn but most laypersons who investigate the Oracles nowadays seem to be devotees of Hekate. She features prominently in the fragments, the only named deity who seems to. The fragments are very strange and evocative, unmistakably the work of a single virtuoso. I read the Chaldean Oracles as the results of some very intense solo invocations and meditations, the author deliberately refraining from introducing much mythological material in order not to dilute the raw experiential data. No specific pantheon is referred to, except for Hekate, but there is a wealth of technical terminology for different positions and functions within the divine realm and for different classes of Gods. Here's a tidbit for you: the Oracles is probably the source that introduced the word jinx into English.
My other side project is continuing to develop the method for the "theological" interpretation of myths which I laid out in my article in The Pomegranate. This is a kind of synthesis of the methods the Neoplatonists used for interpreting myths, but distilled into a method which does not, in principle, have to use actual Neoplatonic conceptual categories. Its basic principle is that myths are theology; that a culture's myths express its basic theological concepts. In this it stands apart from reductionistic readings, which see in myths expressions of sociological or psychological structures, or any other reading which does not take its fundamental hermeneutical principle and orientation from the existence of the Gods of a culture in just the form that culture posits them. This approach draws not only on my experience with Neoplatonic interpretations of myth, but also on my background in Husserl's phenomenology. I wrote an article applying this method to the Egyptian text known as "The Book of the Heavenly Cow," which is under consideration at Antiguo Oriente, but right now I'm trying the method on the Iliad. Here one doesn't get as much of the sense of the method's transparency, of course, because it's a Greek text, and I start from the kernel of an interpretation of the poem offered by Proclus, namely that Helen at Troy can be read as embodied beauty; so I'm calling the essay "The Citadel of Embodiment." Despite that Neoplatonic "clue", I am doing my best to develop the interpretation immanently, that is, not importing Platonic ideas wholesale into the text. I'm learning a lot by doing this; these essays on myths are dear to me because they give the sensation of discovery.
That's all for now...
Recently I've been hitting the books again, taking detailed notes on books 1-3 of Proclus's Platonic Theology. I came to the realization that I had been coasting for two or three years now on the understanding of this text that I had acquired while writing my dissertation, and that some fundamental issues needed to be rethought before I went any further with the process of transforming chapters of the dissertation into stand-alone articles for academic journals. I'm perfectly happy with the article that appeared in Dionysius; that area of the material from my dissertation, which concerns the fundamental nature of the divine manifold, is not affected by this process of reformulation. Anyhow, in a small but satisfying milestone, yesterday I finally finished taking notes on book 3. The first vehicle with which to test my new understanding of this material will be the paper I'm giving at Fordham's annual ancient & medieval philosophy conference in October. The article is going to be on the intelligible Gods. It's going to be a challenge to get so much complicated material into a paper which probably shouldn't be more than ten pages long. The problem one has working with a philosopher like Proclus is that people don't have any previous familiarity with him, or if they think they do, most of the time they just have a lot of misinformation and prejudices. In other words, they think they know what's there when they don't.
A couple of recent rejections: Apeiron rejected "The Gods and Being in Proclus" with a cranky and less than helpful referee's report. I looked at the piece again, though, and saw that it needed quite a bit of work. I rewrote it substantially and sent it off to Classical Bulletin. The Journal of Religious Ethics rejected "The Ethics of Offering to the Gods in the Encheiridion Commentary of Simplicius," saying it was too narrowly focused. Perhaps they're right, but at the same time I wonder if there is a slight bias there, regarding the making of offerings as somehow more mundane than prayer or mystical exercises. Anyway, I really shouldn't have submitted the article to them when I'd had clear expressions of interest in it from Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, a new journal I heard about at the AAR conference. The editors there wanted me to add a lot more historical material to it, which I initially had little appetite for. I got to thinking that I would rather have it read as an article about the ethics of a religious practice rather than as part of the history of theoretical reflections on ritual. But you know what they say about a bird in the hand. Actually, there's a lot more that could be said about a bird in the hand, but that's a different matter...
I've also written two book reviews recently. One of them is of a book on Kierkegaard, unfortunately quite forgettable, for Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, an e-journal from Wales. The other is of a book on Roman Stoicism, for Metapsychology Online, a site I've reviewed for previously. The latter, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection by Gretchen Reydams-Schils, is a really fine piece of work. Writing reviews is good practice, I feel, for getting ideas across more clearly and concisely. Plus I love getting free books! I've been trying to get a better grasp of Roman thought recently, both religious and philosophical. On the religious end, Peter Wiseman's The Myths of Rome is really first-rate. Wiseman makes a strong argument that the influence of Greek colonization on the Latins in the archaic period is much more profound than has been appreciated, which provides fresh material for reflection on the perennially knotty issue of the relationship between the Greek and Roman Gods. I remain a hard polytheist on principle, but I am increasingly open to the idea that sometimes the Latins are referring to Greek deities by means of what amount to Latin epithets.
I have two side projects going right now which have a way of getting shoved further to the side when I am making a big push with my other work, but which are important to me nevertheless. One of them is a Yahoo group where we are reading the fragments of the Chaldean Oracles. This was a mysterious book, "channeled", as we would say now, by one Julian the Theurgist, a magician and Roman soldier under Marcus Aurelius. It was very widely read by successive generations of pagan Platonists, becoming part of their canon of scriptures, alongside Homer, Hesiod and "Orpheus". The fragments preserved in quotations by Neoplatonists like Proclus and Damascius were already collected into a book in Byzantine times, and brought thence to Europe in the Renaissance. Later on, they were much read by occultists in the circle of the Golden Dawn but most laypersons who investigate the Oracles nowadays seem to be devotees of Hekate. She features prominently in the fragments, the only named deity who seems to. The fragments are very strange and evocative, unmistakably the work of a single virtuoso. I read the Chaldean Oracles as the results of some very intense solo invocations and meditations, the author deliberately refraining from introducing much mythological material in order not to dilute the raw experiential data. No specific pantheon is referred to, except for Hekate, but there is a wealth of technical terminology for different positions and functions within the divine realm and for different classes of Gods. Here's a tidbit for you: the Oracles is probably the source that introduced the word jinx into English.
My other side project is continuing to develop the method for the "theological" interpretation of myths which I laid out in my article in The Pomegranate. This is a kind of synthesis of the methods the Neoplatonists used for interpreting myths, but distilled into a method which does not, in principle, have to use actual Neoplatonic conceptual categories. Its basic principle is that myths are theology; that a culture's myths express its basic theological concepts. In this it stands apart from reductionistic readings, which see in myths expressions of sociological or psychological structures, or any other reading which does not take its fundamental hermeneutical principle and orientation from the existence of the Gods of a culture in just the form that culture posits them. This approach draws not only on my experience with Neoplatonic interpretations of myth, but also on my background in Husserl's phenomenology. I wrote an article applying this method to the Egyptian text known as "The Book of the Heavenly Cow," which is under consideration at Antiguo Oriente, but right now I'm trying the method on the Iliad. Here one doesn't get as much of the sense of the method's transparency, of course, because it's a Greek text, and I start from the kernel of an interpretation of the poem offered by Proclus, namely that Helen at Troy can be read as embodied beauty; so I'm calling the essay "The Citadel of Embodiment." Despite that Neoplatonic "clue", I am doing my best to develop the interpretation immanently, that is, not importing Platonic ideas wholesale into the text. I'm learning a lot by doing this; these essays on myths are dear to me because they give the sensation of discovery.
That's all for now...
