by E R Dodds
In the Bacchae, is practised first on the Theban cattle and then on Pentheus; in both cases it is described with a gusto which the modern reader has difficulty in sharing. A detailed description of the would perhaps have been too much for the stomachs even of an Athenian audience; Euripides speaks of it twice, Bacchae 139 and Cretans fragm. 472, but in each place he passes over it swiftly and discreetly. It is hard to guess at the psychological state that he describes in the two words but it is noteworthy that the days appointed for were "unlucky and black days,"50 and in fact those who practise such a rite in our time seem to experience in it a mixture of supreme exaltation and supreme repulsion: it is at once holy and horrible, fulfilment and uncleanness, a sacrament and a pollution—the same violent conflict of emotional attitudes that runs all through the Bacchae and lies at the root of all religion of the Dionysiac type.51
Late Greek writers explained the as they did the dancing, and as some would explain the Christian communion: it was merely a commemorative rite, in memory of the day when the infant Dionysus was himself torn to pieces and devoured.52 But the practice seems to rest in fact on a very simple piece of savage logic. The homoeopathic effects of a flesh diet are known all over the world. If you want to be lion-hearted, you must eat lion; if you want to be subtle, you must eat snake; those who eat chickens and hares will be cowards, those who eat pork will get little piggy eyes.53 By parity of reasoning, if you want to be like god you must eat god (or at any rate something which is And you must eat him quick and raw, before the blood has oozed from him: only so can you add his life to yours, for "the blood is the life." God is not always there to be eaten, nor indeed would it be safe to eat him at common times and without due preparation for the reception of the sacrament. But once in two years he is present among his mountain dancers: "the Boeotians," says Diodorus (4.3), "and the other Greeks and Thracians believe that at this time he has his epiphany among men"—just as he has in the Bacchae. He may appear in many forms, vegetable, bestial, human; and he is eaten in many forms. In Plutarch's day it was the ivy that was torn to pieces and chewed :54 that may be primitive, or it may be a surrogate for something bloodier. In Euripides bulls are torn,55 the goat torn and eaten;56 we hear elsewhere of of fawns57 and rending of vipers.58 Since in all these we may with greater or less probability recognise embodiments of the god, I incline to accept Gruppe's view59 that the was a sacrament in which God was present in his beast-vehicle and was torn and eaten in that shape by his people. And I have argued elsewhere60 that there once existed a more potent, because more dreadful, form of this sacrament, viz., the rending, and perhaps the eating, of God in the shape of man; and that the story of Pentheus is in part a reflection of that act—in opposition to the fashionable euhemerism which sees in it only the reflection of a historical conflict between Dionysiac missionaries and their opponents.
To sum up: I have tried to show that Euripides' description of maenadism is not to be accounted for in terms of "the imagination alone"; that inscriptional evidence (incomplete as it is) reveals a closer relationship with actual cult than Victorian scholars realised; and that the maenad, however mythical certain of her acts, is not in essence a mythological character61 but an observed and still observable human type. Dionysus has still his votaries or victims, though we call them by other names; and Pentheus was confronted by a problem which other civil authorities have had to face in real life.
NOTES TO APPENDIX I
Appendix II
Theurgy
The last half-century has seen a remarkable advance in our knowledge of the magical beliefs and practices of later antiquity. But in comparison with this general progress the special branch of magic known as theurgy has been relatively neglected and is still imperfectly understood. The first step towards understanding it was taken more than fifty years ago by Wilhelm Kroll, when he collected and discussed the fragments of the Chaldaean Oracles.1 Since then the late Professor Joseph Bidez has disinterred and explained2 a number of interesting Byzantine texts, mainly from Psellus, which appear to derive from Proclus' lost commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, perhaps through the work of Proclus' Christian opponent, Procopius of Gaza; and Hopfner3 and Eitrem4 have made valuable contributions, especially in calling attention to the many common features linking theurgy with the Greco-Egyptian magic of the papyri.5 But much is still obscure, and is likely to remain so until the scattered texts bearing on theurgy have been collected and studied as a whole6 (a task which Bidez seems to have contemplated, but left unaccomplished at his death). The present paper does not aim at completeness, still less at finality, but only at (i) clarifying the relationship between Neoplatonism and theurgy in their historical development, and (ii) examining the actual modus operandi in what seem to have been the two main branches of theurgy.
I. The Founder of Theurgy
So far as we know, the earliest person to be described as was one Julianus,7 who lived under Marcus Aurelius.8 Probably, as Bidez suggested,9 he invented the designation, to distinguish himself from mere the talked about the gods, he "acted upon" them, or even, perhaps, "created" them.10 Of this personage we know regrettably little. Suidas tells us that he was the son of a "Chaldaean philosopher" of the same name,11 author of a work on daemons in four books, and that he himself wrote That these "hexameter oracles" were (as Lobeck conjectured) none other than the Oracula Chaldaïca on which Proclus wrote a vast commentary (Marinus, vit. Procli 26) is put beyond reasonable doubt by the reference of a scholiast on Lucian12 to To and Psellus' statement that Proclus "fell in love with the called by their admirers, in which Julianus set forth the Chaldaean doctrines."13 By his own account, Julianus received these oracles from the gods: they were Where he in fact got them we do not know. As Kroll pointed out, their manner and content suit the age of the Antonines better than any earlier period.15 Julianus may of course have forged them; but their diction is so bizarre and bombastic, their thought so obscure and incoherent, as to suggest rather the trance utterances of modern "spirit guides" than the deliberate efforts of a forger. It seems indeed not impossible, in view of what we know about later theurgy, that they had their origin in the "revelations" of some visionary or trance medium, and that Julianus' part consisted, as Psellus (or his source Proclus) asserts,16 in putting them into verse. This would be in accordance with the established practice of official oracles;17 and the transposition into hexameters would give an opportunity of introducing some semblance of philosophical meaning and system into the rigmarole. But the pious reader would still stand badly in need of some prose explanation or commentary, and this also Julianus seems to have supplied; for it is certainly he whom Proclus quotes (in Tim. III. 124.32) as . Marinus is probably referring to the same commentary when he speaks of rd (vit.Procli 26), and Damascius (II.203.27) when he cites Whether it was identical with the mentioned by Suidas we do not know. Proclus once (in Tim. III.27.10) quotes Julianus iv which sounds like a section of the dealing in seven chapters with the seven planetary spheres through which the soul descends and reascends (cf. in Remp. II.220.11 ff.). On the probable content of the see below, section iv.
These pages are reprinted with a few minor changes from the Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37 (1947). I must express my gratitude to Professors M. P. Nilsson and A. D. Nock, who read the paper in manuscript and contributed valuable suggestions.
1 For numbered notes to Appendix II see pages 300-311 below.
Be the origin of the Chaldaean Oracles what it may, they certainly included not only prescriptions for a fire and sun cult18 but prescriptions for the magical evocation of gods (see below, p. 298). And later tradition represents the Juliani as potent magicians. According to Psellus,1' the elder Julianus "introduced" his son to the ghost of Plato; and it seems that they claimed to possess a spell for producing an apparition of the god They could also cause men's souls to leave and reenter the body.21 Nor was their fame confined to Neoplatonic circles. The timely thunderstorm which saved the Roman army during Marcus' campaign against the Quadi in 173 a.
d. was attributed by some to the magic arts of the younger Julianus;22 in Psellus' version of the story Julianus makes a human mask of clay which discharges "unendurable thunderbolts" at the enemy.23 Sozomen has heard of his splitting a stone by magic (Hist. Eccl. 1.18); and a picturesque Christian legend shows him competing in a display of magical powers with Apollonius and Apuleius: Rome being stricken with a plague, each magician is assigned the medical superintendence of one sector of the city; Apuleius undertakes to stop the plague in fifteen days, Apollonius in ten, but Julianus stops it instantly by a mere word of command.24
II. Theurgy in the Neoplatonic School
The creator of theurgy was a magician, not a Neoplatonist. And the creator of Neoplatonism was neither a magician nor—pace certain modern writers—a theurgist.25 Plotinus is never described by his successors as a nor does he use the term or its cognates in his writings. There is in fact no evidence26 that he had ever heard of Julianus and his Chaldaean Oracles. Had he known them he would presumably have subjected them to the same critical treatment as the revelations "of Zoroaster and Zostrianus and Nikotheos and Allogenes and Mesos and others of the sort," which were analysed and exposed in his seminar.27 For in his great defence of the Greek rationalist tradition, the essay Against the Gnostics (Enn. 2.9), he makes very clear both his distaste for all such megalomaniac "special revelations"28 and his contempt for (c. 14, I.203.32 Volkmann). Not that he denied the efficacy of magic (could any man of the third century deny it?). But it did not interest him. He saw in it merely an application to mean personal ends of "the true magic which is the sum of love and hatred in the universe," the mysterious and truly admirable which makes the cosmos one; men marvel at human more than at the magic of nature only because it is less familiar.29
Despite all this, the article "Theurgie" which appeared in a recent volume of Pauly-Wissowa calls Plotinus a theurgist, and Eitrem has lately spoken of "Plotin, dont sans doute derive la théurgie."30 The main grounds for this opinion seem to be (i) his alleged31 Egyptian birth and the fact that he studied at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas; (2) his allegedly profound32 knowledge of Egyptian religion; (3) his experience of unto mystica (Porph. vit. Plot. 23); and (4) the affair at the Iseum in Rome (ibid., 10, quoted and discussed in section in below, p. 289). Of these considerations only the last seems to me to be really relevant. On the first point it must suffice here to say that Plotinus' name is Roman, that his manner of thought and speech is characteristically Greek, and that in the little we know of Ammonius Saccas there is nothing which warrants calling him a theurgist. As to the acquaintance with Egyptian religion displayed in the Enneads, I cannot see that it amounts to more than a few casual references to matters of common knowledge: Porphyry learned as much or more by reading Chaeremon.33 And as to the Plotinian unio mystica, it must surely be clear to any careful reader of passages like Enn. 1.6.9. or 6.7.34, that it is attained, not by any ritual of evocation or performance of prescribed acts, but by an inward discipline of the mind which involves no compulsive element and has nothing whatever to do with magic.34 There remains the affair of the Iseum. That is theurgy, or something like it. It rests, however, only on school gossip (see below). And in any case one visit to a seance does not make a man a spiritualist, especially if, like Plotinus, he goes there on someone else's initiative.
Plotinus is a man who, as Wilhelm Kroll put it, "raised himself by a strong intellectual and moral effort above the fog-ridden atmosphere which surrounded him." While he lived, he lifted his pupils with him. But with his death the fog began to close in again, and later Neoplatonism is in many respects a retrogression to the spineless syncretism from which he had tried to escape. The conflict between Plotinus' personal influence and the superstitions of the time appears very plainly in the wavering attitude of his pupil Porphyry35—an honest, learned, and lovable man, but no consistent or creative thinker. Deeply religious by temperament, he had an incurable weakness for oracles. Before he met Plotinus36 he had already published a collection under the title Some of these refer to mediums, and are themselves clearly what we should call "seance-room" products (see below, section v). But there is no trace of his having quoted the Chaldaean Oracles (or used the term theurgy) in this work; probably he was still unaware of their existence when he wrote it. Later, when Plotinus has taught him to ask questions, he addresses a series of decidedly searching and often ironic-sounding inquiries on demonology and occultism to the Egyptian Anebo,38 and points out, among other things, the folly of attempting to put magical constraint on gods.39 It was probably later still,40 after the death of Plotinus, that he disinterred the Chaldaean Oracles from the obscurity in which they had survived (as such books do) for more than a century, wrote a commentary on them,41 and "made continual mention of them" in his de regressu animae.42 In the latter work he held that theurgic could purify the and make it "aptam susceptioni spirituum et angelorum et ad videndos deos"; but he warned his readers that the practice was perilous and capable of evil as well as good uses, and denied that it could achieve, or was a necessary ancillary to, the soul's return to god.43 He was, in fact, still a Plotinian at heart.44 But he had made a dangerous concession to the opposing school.
The answer of that school came in Iamblichus' commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles45 and in the extant treatise de mysteriis.46 The de mysteriis is a manifesto of irrationalism, an assertion that the road to salvation is found not in reason but in ritual. "It is not thought that links the theurgists with the gods: else what should hinder theoretical philosophers from enjoying theurgic union with them? The case is not so. Theurgic union is attained only by the efficacy of the unspeakable acts performed in the appropriate manner, acts which are beyond all comprehension, and by the potency of the unutterable symbols which are comprehended only by the gods. . . . Without intellectual effort on our part the tokens by their own virtue accomplish their proper work" (de myst. 96.13 Parthey). To the discouraged minds of fourth-century pagans such a message offered a seductive comfort. The "theoretical philosophers" had now been arguing for some nine centuries, and what had come of it? Only a visibly declining culture, and the creeping growth of that Christian which was too plainly sucking the lifeblood of Hellenism. As vulgar magic is commonly the last resort of the personally desperate, of those whom man and God have alike failed, so theurgy became the refuge of a despairing intelligentsia which already felt la fascination de l'abîme.
Nevertheless it would seem that even in the generation after Iamblichus theurgy was not yet fully accepted in the Neoplatonic school. Eunapius in an instructive passage (pit. soph. 474 f. Boissonade) shows us Eusebius of Myndus, a pupil of Iamblichus' pupil Aedesius, maintaining in his lectures that magic was an affair of "crazed persons who make a perverted study of certain powers derived from matter," and warning the future emperor Julian against "that stagy miracle-worker" the theurgist Maximus: he concludes, in words which recall Plotinus, , . To which the prince replied: "You can stick to your books: I know now where to go"—and betook himself to Maximus. Shortly afterwards we find the young Julian asking his friend Priscus to get him a good copy of Iamblichus' commentary on his namesake (Julianus the theurgist); for, says he, "I am greedy for Iamblichus in philosophy and my namesake in theosophy i.e. theurgy], and think nothing of the rest in comparison."47
Julian's patronage made theurgy temporarily fashionable. When as emperor he set about reforming the pagan clergy, the theurgist Chrysanthius found himself of Lydia; while Maximus as theurgic consultant to the imperial court became a wealthy and influential éminence grise, since (Eunap. p. 477 Boiss.; cf. Amm. Marc. 22.7.3 and 25.4.17). But Maximus paid for this in the subsequent Christian reaction, when he was fined, tortured, and eventually in 371 executed on a charge of conspiracy against the Emperors (Eunap. p. 478; Amm. Marc. 29.1.42; Zosimus 4.15). For some time after this event theurgists deemed it prudent to lie low;48 but the tradition of their art was quietly handed down in certain families.49 In the fifth century it was again openly taught and practised by the Athenian Neo
platonists: Proclus not only composed a and a further commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, but also enjoyed personal visions of luminous "Hecatic" phantasms and was, like the founder of the cult, great at rainmaking.50 After Justinian theurgy went underground again, but did not wholly die. Psellus has described a conducted by an archbishop on the lines of pagan theurgy which he asserts took place at Byzantium in the eleventh century;51 and Proclus' commentary on the Oracles was still known, directly or indirectly, to Nicephoros Gregoras in the fourteenth.52
III. A Séance in the Iseum
This curious passage has been discussed by Hopfner, OZ II.125, and more fully by Eitrem, Symb. Oslo. 22.62 ff. We should not attach too high a historical value to it. Porphyry's use of shows that his source was neither Plotinus himself nor any of the actual "sitters"; and since he says that the affair prompted the composition of Plotinus' essay, (Enn. 3.4), it must have taken place, like the composition of that essay, before Porphyry's own arrival in Rome, and at least thirty-five years before the publication of the vita. The testimony on which his story rests is thus neither firsthand nor (probably) close in time to the event. It cannot, as Eitrem rightly says, "avoir la valeur d'une attestation authentique."54 Nevertheless, it affords an interesting if tantalizing glimpse of high-class magical procedure in the third century.
