Midnight Meditations

[sdi]

Porphyry wrote in his Sentences (which I said I wouldn't study yet, but a few of them stuck with me like it or not):

7. [The] soul is bound down to the body by adverting to the passions arising from it, and it is loosed again by impassivity to it.

8. What Nature has bound, Nature also looses; and what the soul has bound, that it also looses. Now Nature bound the body in the soul; but the soul bound itself in the body. Nature, accordingly, looses the body from the soul; but the soul looses itself from the body.

9. Death, therefore, is twofold, that which is generally recognized, when the body separates from the soul; and that of the philosophers, when the soul separates from the body. And the one does not at all follow the other.

Recall that the soul moves in circles. This is because it has desire for something, and thus orbits it.

But what does it orbit? Mortal souls orbit the earth (or something itself within the earth's orbit). When one dies, where they go depends on what their soul desires: and if it desires the things of earth, the soul will simply circle back to the earth and begin a new revolution around it. And so most souls cycle back and forth between the world (life) and the underworld (death), around and around.

But if, when one dies, a soul desires something else, it will instead move to orbit that other thing. This is the basis of classical philosophy: to train a soul to desire something else, to move within the gravity well of that something else, so as to no longer be bound by the gravity of earth. This is the upward ascent of a soul from the world (life) through the ætherial (the process of training: philosophy, love, theurgy, etc.) to the empyrean (afterlife).

There are several associations that jump out at me regarding all this.

• What Porphyry means when he says there are two deaths is: if the body slips from the soul, the soul's desire is presumably in the same place, and it returns in a new body. (This is like, in the case of Plotinus' axe, the axe gets damaged beyond repair but an axe is still desired, and so a smith melts down the iron and reforges the axe.) But if the soul slips from the body, by desiring incorporeal things, then it doesn't return. (This is like no longer needing an axe, and so the smith melts it down and makes a pot or whatever.)

• I've seen it said that the mystic's path is "faster" or "more direct" than other paths to the divine. I don't know if that's so, but if it is, the above gives the reason why: the basis of mysticism is love, and having a desperate love for something unearthly is perhaps the obvious form of the soul orbiting something else. (But I think that this is really just showing that mysticism is an effect, rather than a cause. It's not "faster," it's just that more of the way was hidden from view.)

• This is one of the meanings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus looked back as he ascended from the underworld and was thereby denied bliss.

• This is why Dorothy could always return to Kansas whenever she wanted: her desire was only for home. Even with all the other things she accomplished, it was all in the service of that one goal.

• Many religions teach that desire is evil and one must purge themselves of it. But this isn't quite right: it's that earthly desire binds one to the earth, but heavenly desire binds one to heaven. (I guess it's right if you assume that earth if evil, but I think that's kinda silly.)

• If you hate life, great! That's as good a starting point as any.

I guess none of this is new or surprising, but it's on my mind. Maybe writing it out will help me get back to sleep.

Comments

[barefootwisdom]

Very much so. For an exquisitely beautiful example of how this plays out in practice, here's a bit of Proclus' Hymn to Athene, as translated by R.M. van den Berg. Proclus has just devoted the first 30 lines of verse to praising the Goddess and recounting some of her myths; he now proceeds to start his petitions:


Hearken to me, you, from whose face flashes forth holy light. Give me, as I am roaming around the earth, a blessed harbor. Give my soul holy light from your sacred myths, and wisdom, and love. Breathe into my love a power so great, and of such a kind, that it pulls me up back again from the vaults of matter to Olympos, into the abode of your Father...


"Love" in both instances translates the Greek eros.

[sdi]

Thanks for mentioning this! I've read Proclus' Hymns (that's Thomas Taylor's version), but I must confess I've always had a lot of difficulty with Pallas—my fault, not Hers 😉—and I did not give Her hymn the attention I should have. I will have to remedy that!