March Twitter Archive
Mar. 30th, 2013 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endymions_bowerThank you to all my interlocutors, whose views are not to be regarded as adequately conveyed by the snippets I include here…
1 Mar
@cole_tucker: In the Papyrus of Khnememḥab, Horus weighs the heart of the deceased instead of Anubis. #hmmm
Two ways to look at this: Horus as avenger-of-his-father seeing what you've done to vindicate mortal being, or Horus as divine authority of the state, seeing what you've done for the cause of civilization.
4 Mar
@_shrine_ : How does the myth shape space?
Space and time are both ways in which units form series, differing specifically in how they deal with contradiction: in space, the contradiction is not-here, while in time, the contradiction is not-now.
***
@t3dy: "it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is "purely descriptive"." -Wittgenstein
Though Wittgenstein's description sounds like a modest vocation for philosophy, description is far more powerful than reduction.
@t3dy: One explains away, but one doesn't describe away.
8 Mar
So many of the misinterpretations of Platonism can be resolved by recognizing that there are only a few genuine "Ideas". Hence, there are not "Ideas" of every species of animal or polity. These species are holistically determined. There is not an "Idea" corresponding to every noun, nor every ideal. "Animal" is an Idea. Wear that one out before you look for more.
(With this, we sweep away the notion that Platonism is incompatible with evolutionary biology, for example.)
***
@JohBri: Am I wrong, or does Bruno's De Magia seem to espouse the very sort of dualism that De la causa, principio, et Uno sought to refute?
I've argued (in an article I can't seem to get published) that the dualism in such a text ought to be read as purely relative, "bracketed", as it were, by the ontology of De triplici minimo and the account of bonding from De vinculis. The virtue would be to see the dualism of De Magia as something one is doing, a certain pattern of bonds and selection of minima.
15 Mar
@janmpdx: Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to shortchange it.
This is just what Apollon told Diogenes to do, advising him to "adulterate the currency"—the result being Cynic "Cosmopolitanism".
16-19 Mar
@MaStarPassion: 'For Intellect is not without the Intelligible: All fountains & principles whirl round always remain in a ceaseless revolution' ~ Chaldaean
Interesting. A mashup of Chaldean Oracle frags. 20 & 49. "Fountains" (pêgai, also trans. "sources") are intelligible forms, "principles" (archai) are intellective forms. Fr. 20 says "For intellect is not without the intelligible, and the intelligible does not exist separate from intellect." Fr. 49 says "For [Eternity] alone, copiously plucking the flower of intellect from the strength of the father, can perceive the paternal intellect and impart [intellect] to all sources and principles and whirl them about and maintain them forever in ceaseless motion." Fr. 20 is quite important to Damascius, because it speaks to the question of whether intellect has *really* proceeded, or whether its inseparability from "real being" (to ontôs on) means that it effectively remains on the henadic plane. Basically, the issue Damascius sees addressed in fr. 20 is whether genuine cognition is ontic, or divine. On one level, the fragment simply says that intellect reaches its goal, successfully cognizes its object, but since the intelligible isn't being dragged down to the level of the intellect, what are the consequences of intellection, of cognition, being raised to the level of real being?
I would be most interested to hear your experiences, if you've been doing practical work with the CO.
@MaStarPassion: Pythagorean mysticism/mathematics/shadow work. Working a few things, mainly the New Testament being purely Pythagorean. I go straight to the Monad, Dyad and Triad, circles, spirals. Also read between the lines. Terrestrial, aerial, aquatic alchemy.
17 Mar
@Apophatos: Disappointed that, after arguing compellingly of pro-lit bias in study of religion/anthropology, one would subsequently embrace "reading" and "texts" as best metaphors for hermeneutics. Why not dance/performance?
Or, as per the demotic "Book of Thoth", hunting?
@Apophatos: That's a good one too! Am not familiar with the work, but my first thought was Set as hunter, Osiris as prey.
No, it refers primarily to the trapping of birds in nets. There's also a sexual connotation to it. Both activities involve capturing souls. In fact, much of the "Book of Thoth" (so-called) seems to be comprised of metaphors for hermeneutics. These can be quite mundane: one passage seems to use a farmer's setting aside some of his harvest for tax purposes.
@Apophatos: Ah, the image of catching birds with nets sounds familiar.
Yes, because it's a common image in tomb paintings. One sees it either with waterfowl, or with swarms of little migratory birds. The crucial elements are the swarm and the net; and these are the terms of the model of hermeneutics. The name "Book of Thoth" is something of a misnomer, by the way, as it seems that Seshat is rather more important in the text.
23 Mar
@MaStarPassion: Some say the word 'human' is a breakdown of color for hue & man for mind. I think it's 'hu' as in humidity & 'man' for mind. Cosmic fluid
Etymology of "human" is generally traced to words having to do with earth, common with Greek chthonios, for example. This would mean that all earthlings are "human".
@MaStarPassion: as a single element of Earth or all elements?
Well, the Indo-European root branches out to some words that imply "earth" in the narrow sense, like "humus", and to others that seem to imply "earth" just as what is down here, rather than up there, like chthonic.
23-25 Mar
@vajramrita: There are no new weapons in religion, not in the Deluzian sense of weapon-creation, as any new form of discourse ceases to be "doctrinal".
@cole_tucker: Perhaps @epbutler's distinction between pagan and doctrinal faiths would be useful here?
@vajramrita: my point was that religion cannot be other than doctrinal.
@cole_tucker: "conduct indicating a belief in a divine power" is very different from "belief in a divine power"
I believe in the Gods, and if that constitutes "doctrine" then my paganism is doctrinal. I don't approve of the new "humanistic/atheistic paganism" meme. My definition was meant to indicate the primacy, for the pagan, of the Gods as persons. Some would say that to believe in the personhood of anything is "doctrinal".
@cole_tucker: […] I'm of the opinion that in indigenous societies, knowledge of the Gods wasn't a belief.
Greek pistis ["faith"] connotes allowing oneself to be persuaded (peithomai) by one's experience to posit beings correlative to that experience. By contrast, epistêmê, "knowledge", might not be available for many real entities. So for that culture at least our dichotomy in modern English of "knowledge" and "belief" fails.
***
@RedMaistre: […] The self is vanity, God is great, and next year, the revolution.
With nobody to revolt, the "revolution" is going to be pretty quiet.
@RedMaistre: the preacher of Ecclesiastes was not saying nothing existed at all when he said all is vanity. He proclaimed futile existence
Where do I sign up for the revolution against that notion?
@RedMaistre: Nietzsche and his train I suppose are more in the direction you are thinking of. Never mind us "Preachers of Death" ;)
I'm no Nietzschean, just an old fashioned Platonist who believes that the world is good, and the self an agency for good.
@RedMaistre: I would blaspheme to deny that. But the alienation of pride rejects grace, making both the self nothing and the world forsaken. Negation as the path back to the vision of agathon as the source of all things...
***
Tired of people who think that nihilism is an achievement. What's really narcissistic, I think, is needing to say that something doesn't exist, in order not to feel in bondage to it.
One can have one's liberation without ontological clear-cutting. I believe in everything.
Hence, when people negate, I affirm the positivity of that act, but nothing goes away.
***
@sdv_duras, to @cole_tucker, re: "in indigenous societies, knowledge of the Gods wasn't a belief": why were the gods not believed in?
I would say they absolutely were, and are now, so I'm no part of that discussion. The argument that one hears sometimes is that "knowledge" of the Gods renders "belief" otiose. I think it is confusing to talk this way. But there is a valid point concerning the notion of "belief" peculiar to certain monotheistic discourses.
@vajramrita did the Greeks have a "snake/rope" analogy for belief/knowledge as the Indians did?
Not in such stark terms, I would say, though it is tricky to generalize. Sometimes the distinction between doxa ("opinion") and epistêmê ("science") looks almost like this. But there is always a countervailing tendency to see in dokein something like Husserl's Evidenz.
@vajramrita: … or between the exact sciences & human sciences, or mathematics & language.
I would say that the divisions are quite different than we draw them today. Mathematics and language can both be examples of analytic rigor, while physics can share with ethics a certain constitutive inexactitude.
(General response to discussion among @cole_tucker @vajramrita @sdv_duras)
Is it strange I have no problem with personhood? Or feel the need to render everything "processual"? I say that even if the concept of personhood is irremediably problematic, it's a problem worth having.
@cole_tucker: It seems that the favored understanding of personhood are in completely accidental terms. In terms of the accidental personality, it's often difficult to see what value personhood brings.
What makes a personality "accidental"?
@cole_tucker: That any number of formative influences are outside of agencies.
Personhood does not require mastery of the influences that have formed it.
@cole_tucker: Yes, but within a solely emergent/interactionist frame, what benefits does the concept provide, beyond historical convention?
I'm not persuaded of the utility of that frame.
@cole_tucker: I'm extremely hesitant to embrace any ontological claims.
Why, though? Why the ontological austerity? A new orthodoxy.
@cole_tucker: I don't know how I would even evaluate the claims.
@sdv_duras: in what sense is personhood different from subject?
Do you mean "subject" as substrate of attributes, or as site of utterance?
@sdv_duras: as in human subject…
@vajramrita: I wonder in what sense we can say that subjects are assigned attributes in the same way objects are.
At first there was no philosophical distinction between "subject" and "object" relative to attribution; these were alike hupokeimena, "substrates". Since the distinction arises in Scholasticism, in context of intentionality, perhaps only the predicates a "subject" assigns herself are proper.
@t3dy (re: @cole_tucker on 'pantheism' and privilege of 'individuating' over 'individuals' in, e.g., Guattari, Deleuze's Spinoza): so the death of the author vs. the death of the divine metaphor?
@khaoid: unsure about death of author; machinic and enunciative assemblages acquire 'identities'
26-27 Mar
@cole_tucker: Have you done much consideration regarding coercive formulas with the Gods, like in the PGM?
Iamblichus discusses this at De Mysteriis IV. 1-3. Needless to say, Gods are not actually coerced. I've considered the issue myself only with regard to Egyptian formulae that appear to threaten the Gods. Upon close inspection, one finds that these formulae operate as counterfactuals. In particular, this comes about through identifying one's immediate situation with some myth, and saying that if the corresponding results don't obtain, then the framework is broken (in a way stating the obvious).
@cole_tucker: Thank you for reminding me of Iamblichus related thoughts, though the threatening formula were particularly what I had in mind, and they seemed distinct to me, at least in degree if not kind, from what Iamblichus was discussing.
It might be easier treating specific examples.
@cole_tucker: This one appears to bind Persephone - http://goo.gl/H8kDN (The text is PGM IV. 2241-2358, "Document to the waning moon", p. 78f in Betz.)
This seems like a textbook example of what Iamblichus says at DM IV. 2. For note that the spell addresses a specific cosmic power of Persephone's, namely, the waning moon. "…the art both naturally invokes the powers from the universe as superiors, inasmuch as the invoker is a man, and yet on the other hand gives them orders, since it invests itself, by virtue of the ineffable symbols, with the hieratic role of the Gods." One could eliminate the human from the equation, and say that one simply constrains a part of Persephone by the whole of Her. There are constant references in the text that serve to establish the encosmic context. Within such a frame, the human can always say, as the Gnostic does, that she comes from "outside". Persephone, of course, is a fortiori outside this frame; but her powers may be treated as inside it.
@cole_tucker: I'm not quite clear what you mean by encosmic.
"Encosmic" means within the cosmos, internal to the cosmic frame.
@cole_tucker: Do you mean to frame the speaker as Persephone-Hermes?
No, I just mean that the capacity of the human operator to claim a position outside the cosmic frame could apply to the Goddess too.
@cole_tucker: And that, by reason of "he is in a manner encompassed with the sacred dignity of the Gods", the threats to overpower this aspect are not well considered blasphemy?
Well, I think you can see from Iamblichus's further remarks that he would rather not frame spells this way, but I don't think that blasphemy is the point of such a spell, and to brand it such is a failure to grasp the praxis.
The distinction Iamblichus is talking about works like this: a human qua divine agent can "constrain" the God qua cosmic power. This is a transitory, situational inversion of the normative state, where we recognize the God as supra-cosmic. But it is correct, properly understood, that the powers of the Gods, viewed purely as a set of cosmic potencies (albeit this is not the primary state of these powers) can be regarded as ontologically posterior to a mortal agent when that agent is regarded in his/her absolute dignity, i.e. not as an accident of the cosmic substance.
@cole_tucker: That seems to comprise the first prelude, "which conserves our rank in the universe as it exists in the sphere of nature." Do you see second prelude, "confirmed by divine tokens... also in all likelihood be invested with the external form of the gods" - referring to the ritual arrangements, and would those include the self-identification with a God, as we see in this example?
(Here's the Iamblichus quote under discussion in full: "[…] the whole of theurgy presents a double aspect. On the one hand, it is performed by men, and as such preserves our natural rank in the universe; but on the other, it controls divine symbols, and in virtue of them is raised up to union with the higher powers, and directs itself harmoniously in accordance with their dispensations, which enables it quite properly to assume the mantle of the Gods. It is in virtue of this distinction, then, that the art both naturally invokes the powers from the universe as superiors, inasmuch as the invoker is a man, and yet on the other hand gives them orders, since it invests itself, by virtue of the ineffable symbols, with the hieratic role of the Gods," (trans. Clarke, Dillon & Hershbell, p. 207).)
Yes, but explicit self-identification with a deity is not necessary, inasmuch as what Iamblichus is really indicating is the operator's simultaneous membership in two series, the symbolic and the eidetic. When I step into the symbolic series, I am no longer the product of eidê ("forms"), but their generator.
@LilithsPriest: YES The Kosmos, by not forbidding it, requires the development of complexes of forms with the power to create forms.
This is interesting, and I'd like you to elaborate it. The Iamblichean doctrine I'm talking about is different, though. It's not about a complex of forms creating new forms, but about two different perspectives on the same forms. That is, I am in one sense the passive recipient of these forms, and in another sense, their active producer. We can treat all our properties this way; in one sense, they are all repeatable, common, in another, unique.
Properties (of Gods or of beings) taken in their uniqueness, belong to the symbolic/synthematic series.
***
(On the Timaeus, to @LilithsPriest)
The key to reading the Timaeus, I believe, is to recognize in Demiurge and Paradigm, not two particular Gods but any two Gods in the Subject and Object positions, or even one God objectifying him/herself. This is how the cosmos acquires form. So the Timaeus cosmogony is not a cosmogony Plato is setting alongside, e.g., Hesiod's, but a key to the cosmogonic reading of any myth.
1 Mar
@cole_tucker: In the Papyrus of Khnememḥab, Horus weighs the heart of the deceased instead of Anubis. #hmmm
Two ways to look at this: Horus as avenger-of-his-father seeing what you've done to vindicate mortal being, or Horus as divine authority of the state, seeing what you've done for the cause of civilization.
4 Mar
@_shrine_ : How does the myth shape space?
Space and time are both ways in which units form series, differing specifically in how they deal with contradiction: in space, the contradiction is not-here, while in time, the contradiction is not-now.
***
@t3dy: "it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is "purely descriptive"." -Wittgenstein
Though Wittgenstein's description sounds like a modest vocation for philosophy, description is far more powerful than reduction.
@t3dy: One explains away, but one doesn't describe away.
8 Mar
So many of the misinterpretations of Platonism can be resolved by recognizing that there are only a few genuine "Ideas". Hence, there are not "Ideas" of every species of animal or polity. These species are holistically determined. There is not an "Idea" corresponding to every noun, nor every ideal. "Animal" is an Idea. Wear that one out before you look for more.
(With this, we sweep away the notion that Platonism is incompatible with evolutionary biology, for example.)
***
@JohBri: Am I wrong, or does Bruno's De Magia seem to espouse the very sort of dualism that De la causa, principio, et Uno sought to refute?
I've argued (in an article I can't seem to get published) that the dualism in such a text ought to be read as purely relative, "bracketed", as it were, by the ontology of De triplici minimo and the account of bonding from De vinculis. The virtue would be to see the dualism of De Magia as something one is doing, a certain pattern of bonds and selection of minima.
15 Mar
@janmpdx: Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to shortchange it.
This is just what Apollon told Diogenes to do, advising him to "adulterate the currency"—the result being Cynic "Cosmopolitanism".
16-19 Mar
@MaStarPassion: 'For Intellect is not without the Intelligible: All fountains & principles whirl round always remain in a ceaseless revolution' ~ Chaldaean
Interesting. A mashup of Chaldean Oracle frags. 20 & 49. "Fountains" (pêgai, also trans. "sources") are intelligible forms, "principles" (archai) are intellective forms. Fr. 20 says "For intellect is not without the intelligible, and the intelligible does not exist separate from intellect." Fr. 49 says "For [Eternity] alone, copiously plucking the flower of intellect from the strength of the father, can perceive the paternal intellect and impart [intellect] to all sources and principles and whirl them about and maintain them forever in ceaseless motion." Fr. 20 is quite important to Damascius, because it speaks to the question of whether intellect has *really* proceeded, or whether its inseparability from "real being" (to ontôs on) means that it effectively remains on the henadic plane. Basically, the issue Damascius sees addressed in fr. 20 is whether genuine cognition is ontic, or divine. On one level, the fragment simply says that intellect reaches its goal, successfully cognizes its object, but since the intelligible isn't being dragged down to the level of the intellect, what are the consequences of intellection, of cognition, being raised to the level of real being?
I would be most interested to hear your experiences, if you've been doing practical work with the CO.
@MaStarPassion: Pythagorean mysticism/mathematics/shadow work. Working a few things, mainly the New Testament being purely Pythagorean. I go straight to the Monad, Dyad and Triad, circles, spirals. Also read between the lines. Terrestrial, aerial, aquatic alchemy.
17 Mar
@Apophatos: Disappointed that, after arguing compellingly of pro-lit bias in study of religion/anthropology, one would subsequently embrace "reading" and "texts" as best metaphors for hermeneutics. Why not dance/performance?
Or, as per the demotic "Book of Thoth", hunting?
@Apophatos: That's a good one too! Am not familiar with the work, but my first thought was Set as hunter, Osiris as prey.
No, it refers primarily to the trapping of birds in nets. There's also a sexual connotation to it. Both activities involve capturing souls. In fact, much of the "Book of Thoth" (so-called) seems to be comprised of metaphors for hermeneutics. These can be quite mundane: one passage seems to use a farmer's setting aside some of his harvest for tax purposes.
@Apophatos: Ah, the image of catching birds with nets sounds familiar.
Yes, because it's a common image in tomb paintings. One sees it either with waterfowl, or with swarms of little migratory birds. The crucial elements are the swarm and the net; and these are the terms of the model of hermeneutics. The name "Book of Thoth" is something of a misnomer, by the way, as it seems that Seshat is rather more important in the text.
23 Mar
@MaStarPassion: Some say the word 'human' is a breakdown of color for hue & man for mind. I think it's 'hu' as in humidity & 'man' for mind. Cosmic fluid
Etymology of "human" is generally traced to words having to do with earth, common with Greek chthonios, for example. This would mean that all earthlings are "human".
@MaStarPassion: as a single element of Earth or all elements?
Well, the Indo-European root branches out to some words that imply "earth" in the narrow sense, like "humus", and to others that seem to imply "earth" just as what is down here, rather than up there, like chthonic.
23-25 Mar
@vajramrita: There are no new weapons in religion, not in the Deluzian sense of weapon-creation, as any new form of discourse ceases to be "doctrinal".
@cole_tucker: Perhaps @epbutler's distinction between pagan and doctrinal faiths would be useful here?
@vajramrita: my point was that religion cannot be other than doctrinal.
@cole_tucker: "conduct indicating a belief in a divine power" is very different from "belief in a divine power"
I believe in the Gods, and if that constitutes "doctrine" then my paganism is doctrinal. I don't approve of the new "humanistic/atheistic paganism" meme. My definition was meant to indicate the primacy, for the pagan, of the Gods as persons. Some would say that to believe in the personhood of anything is "doctrinal".
@cole_tucker: […] I'm of the opinion that in indigenous societies, knowledge of the Gods wasn't a belief.
Greek pistis ["faith"] connotes allowing oneself to be persuaded (peithomai) by one's experience to posit beings correlative to that experience. By contrast, epistêmê, "knowledge", might not be available for many real entities. So for that culture at least our dichotomy in modern English of "knowledge" and "belief" fails.
***
@RedMaistre: […] The self is vanity, God is great, and next year, the revolution.
With nobody to revolt, the "revolution" is going to be pretty quiet.
@RedMaistre: the preacher of Ecclesiastes was not saying nothing existed at all when he said all is vanity. He proclaimed futile existence
Where do I sign up for the revolution against that notion?
@RedMaistre: Nietzsche and his train I suppose are more in the direction you are thinking of. Never mind us "Preachers of Death" ;)
I'm no Nietzschean, just an old fashioned Platonist who believes that the world is good, and the self an agency for good.
@RedMaistre: I would blaspheme to deny that. But the alienation of pride rejects grace, making both the self nothing and the world forsaken. Negation as the path back to the vision of agathon as the source of all things...
***
Tired of people who think that nihilism is an achievement. What's really narcissistic, I think, is needing to say that something doesn't exist, in order not to feel in bondage to it.
One can have one's liberation without ontological clear-cutting. I believe in everything.
Hence, when people negate, I affirm the positivity of that act, but nothing goes away.
***
@sdv_duras, to @cole_tucker, re: "in indigenous societies, knowledge of the Gods wasn't a belief": why were the gods not believed in?
I would say they absolutely were, and are now, so I'm no part of that discussion. The argument that one hears sometimes is that "knowledge" of the Gods renders "belief" otiose. I think it is confusing to talk this way. But there is a valid point concerning the notion of "belief" peculiar to certain monotheistic discourses.
@vajramrita did the Greeks have a "snake/rope" analogy for belief/knowledge as the Indians did?
Not in such stark terms, I would say, though it is tricky to generalize. Sometimes the distinction between doxa ("opinion") and epistêmê ("science") looks almost like this. But there is always a countervailing tendency to see in dokein something like Husserl's Evidenz.
@vajramrita: … or between the exact sciences & human sciences, or mathematics & language.
I would say that the divisions are quite different than we draw them today. Mathematics and language can both be examples of analytic rigor, while physics can share with ethics a certain constitutive inexactitude.
(General response to discussion among @cole_tucker @vajramrita @sdv_duras)
Is it strange I have no problem with personhood? Or feel the need to render everything "processual"? I say that even if the concept of personhood is irremediably problematic, it's a problem worth having.
@cole_tucker: It seems that the favored understanding of personhood are in completely accidental terms. In terms of the accidental personality, it's often difficult to see what value personhood brings.
What makes a personality "accidental"?
@cole_tucker: That any number of formative influences are outside of agencies.
Personhood does not require mastery of the influences that have formed it.
@cole_tucker: Yes, but within a solely emergent/interactionist frame, what benefits does the concept provide, beyond historical convention?
I'm not persuaded of the utility of that frame.
@cole_tucker: I'm extremely hesitant to embrace any ontological claims.
Why, though? Why the ontological austerity? A new orthodoxy.
@cole_tucker: I don't know how I would even evaluate the claims.
@sdv_duras: in what sense is personhood different from subject?
Do you mean "subject" as substrate of attributes, or as site of utterance?
@sdv_duras: as in human subject…
@vajramrita: I wonder in what sense we can say that subjects are assigned attributes in the same way objects are.
At first there was no philosophical distinction between "subject" and "object" relative to attribution; these were alike hupokeimena, "substrates". Since the distinction arises in Scholasticism, in context of intentionality, perhaps only the predicates a "subject" assigns herself are proper.
@t3dy (re: @cole_tucker on 'pantheism' and privilege of 'individuating' over 'individuals' in, e.g., Guattari, Deleuze's Spinoza): so the death of the author vs. the death of the divine metaphor?
@khaoid: unsure about death of author; machinic and enunciative assemblages acquire 'identities'
26-27 Mar
@cole_tucker: Have you done much consideration regarding coercive formulas with the Gods, like in the PGM?
Iamblichus discusses this at De Mysteriis IV. 1-3. Needless to say, Gods are not actually coerced. I've considered the issue myself only with regard to Egyptian formulae that appear to threaten the Gods. Upon close inspection, one finds that these formulae operate as counterfactuals. In particular, this comes about through identifying one's immediate situation with some myth, and saying that if the corresponding results don't obtain, then the framework is broken (in a way stating the obvious).
@cole_tucker: Thank you for reminding me of Iamblichus related thoughts, though the threatening formula were particularly what I had in mind, and they seemed distinct to me, at least in degree if not kind, from what Iamblichus was discussing.
It might be easier treating specific examples.
@cole_tucker: This one appears to bind Persephone - http://goo.gl/H8kDN (The text is PGM IV. 2241-2358, "Document to the waning moon", p. 78f in Betz.)
This seems like a textbook example of what Iamblichus says at DM IV. 2. For note that the spell addresses a specific cosmic power of Persephone's, namely, the waning moon. "…the art both naturally invokes the powers from the universe as superiors, inasmuch as the invoker is a man, and yet on the other hand gives them orders, since it invests itself, by virtue of the ineffable symbols, with the hieratic role of the Gods." One could eliminate the human from the equation, and say that one simply constrains a part of Persephone by the whole of Her. There are constant references in the text that serve to establish the encosmic context. Within such a frame, the human can always say, as the Gnostic does, that she comes from "outside". Persephone, of course, is a fortiori outside this frame; but her powers may be treated as inside it.
@cole_tucker: I'm not quite clear what you mean by encosmic.
"Encosmic" means within the cosmos, internal to the cosmic frame.
@cole_tucker: Do you mean to frame the speaker as Persephone-Hermes?
No, I just mean that the capacity of the human operator to claim a position outside the cosmic frame could apply to the Goddess too.
@cole_tucker: And that, by reason of "he is in a manner encompassed with the sacred dignity of the Gods", the threats to overpower this aspect are not well considered blasphemy?
Well, I think you can see from Iamblichus's further remarks that he would rather not frame spells this way, but I don't think that blasphemy is the point of such a spell, and to brand it such is a failure to grasp the praxis.
The distinction Iamblichus is talking about works like this: a human qua divine agent can "constrain" the God qua cosmic power. This is a transitory, situational inversion of the normative state, where we recognize the God as supra-cosmic. But it is correct, properly understood, that the powers of the Gods, viewed purely as a set of cosmic potencies (albeit this is not the primary state of these powers) can be regarded as ontologically posterior to a mortal agent when that agent is regarded in his/her absolute dignity, i.e. not as an accident of the cosmic substance.
@cole_tucker: That seems to comprise the first prelude, "which conserves our rank in the universe as it exists in the sphere of nature." Do you see second prelude, "confirmed by divine tokens... also in all likelihood be invested with the external form of the gods" - referring to the ritual arrangements, and would those include the self-identification with a God, as we see in this example?
(Here's the Iamblichus quote under discussion in full: "[…] the whole of theurgy presents a double aspect. On the one hand, it is performed by men, and as such preserves our natural rank in the universe; but on the other, it controls divine symbols, and in virtue of them is raised up to union with the higher powers, and directs itself harmoniously in accordance with their dispensations, which enables it quite properly to assume the mantle of the Gods. It is in virtue of this distinction, then, that the art both naturally invokes the powers from the universe as superiors, inasmuch as the invoker is a man, and yet on the other hand gives them orders, since it invests itself, by virtue of the ineffable symbols, with the hieratic role of the Gods," (trans. Clarke, Dillon & Hershbell, p. 207).)
Yes, but explicit self-identification with a deity is not necessary, inasmuch as what Iamblichus is really indicating is the operator's simultaneous membership in two series, the symbolic and the eidetic. When I step into the symbolic series, I am no longer the product of eidê ("forms"), but their generator.
@LilithsPriest: YES The Kosmos, by not forbidding it, requires the development of complexes of forms with the power to create forms.
This is interesting, and I'd like you to elaborate it. The Iamblichean doctrine I'm talking about is different, though. It's not about a complex of forms creating new forms, but about two different perspectives on the same forms. That is, I am in one sense the passive recipient of these forms, and in another sense, their active producer. We can treat all our properties this way; in one sense, they are all repeatable, common, in another, unique.
Properties (of Gods or of beings) taken in their uniqueness, belong to the symbolic/synthematic series.
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(On the Timaeus, to @LilithsPriest)
The key to reading the Timaeus, I believe, is to recognize in Demiurge and Paradigm, not two particular Gods but any two Gods in the Subject and Object positions, or even one God objectifying him/herself. This is how the cosmos acquires form. So the Timaeus cosmogony is not a cosmogony Plato is setting alongside, e.g., Hesiod's, but a key to the cosmogonic reading of any myth.
