Now I think we may be getting somewhere. Good observations all around.
I suspect "perfect" in conjunction with "unchanging" suggests that the gods are so good that they can never be better, since, as it's been noted by others elsewhere, for them to be improved on would imply that they were not perfect in the first place. This begins to convey, albeit only imperfectly, the absolute nature of the gods, a characteristic imparted them by The One.
As for the number of gods, I believe elsewhere (maybe it was Proclus?) it is noted that there is a finite number of gods, although the exact number is unknown to us mortals. It would seem that the Greeks settled on a "main 12," although there seem to plainly be more that that, given their mythologies.
And if we are talking about a more modern Neoplatonic approach, a la Butler's polycentric approach, its conceivable that we can extend this way of thinking, of the panoply of gods from across various cultures: Olympians, Titans, Æsir, Vanir, Orixas, et al., each of which seems to be have discrete "personas," although there are sometimes overlap in the tokens that are ascribed to them by each different culture.
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Date: 2021-11-16 04:23 pm (UTC)I suspect "perfect" in conjunction with "unchanging" suggests that the gods are so good that they can never be better, since, as it's been noted by others elsewhere, for them to be improved on would imply that they were not perfect in the first place. This begins to convey, albeit only imperfectly, the absolute nature of the gods, a characteristic imparted them by The One.
As for the number of gods, I believe elsewhere (maybe it was Proclus?) it is noted that there is a finite number of gods, although the exact number is unknown to us mortals. It would seem that the Greeks settled on a "main 12," although there seem to plainly be more that that, given their mythologies.
And if we are talking about a more modern Neoplatonic approach, a la Butler's polycentric approach, its conceivable that we can extend this way of thinking, of the panoply of gods from across various cultures: Olympians, Titans, Æsir, Vanir, Orixas, et al., each of which seems to be have discrete "personas," although there are sometimes overlap in the tokens that are ascribed to them by each different culture.
Axé