Porphyry on Spirits and Sacrifice

[sdi]

This comes from Porphyry's On Abstinence From Killing Animals II.36–43, speaking about the nature of spirit-beings and the sacrifice of animals:

The Pythagoreans, who are committed students of numbers and lines, made their main offering to the gods from these. They call one number Athena, another Artemis, and likewise another Apollo; and again they call one justice and another temperance, and similarly for geometrical figures. And they so pleased the gods with such offerings that they obtained their help when invoking each one with their dedications, and often used them for divination and for anything they needed in investigation. But for the gods within the heaven, the wandering and the fixed (the sun should be taken as leader of them all and the moon second) we should kindle fire which is already kin to them, and we shall do what the theologian says. He says that not a single animate creature should be sacrificed, but offerings should not go beyond barley-grains and honey and the fruits of the earth, including flowers. "Let not the fire burn on a bloodstained altar," and the rest of what he says, for what need is there to copy out the words? Someone concerned for piety knows that no animate creature is sacrificed to the gods, but to other daimones, either good or bad, and knows whose practice it is to sacrifice to them and to what extent these people need to do so. For the rest, "let it remain unsaid" by me; but it is not blameworthy to set before those of good understanding, to illuminate the discussion, thoughts which some Platonists have made public. This is what they say.

The first god, being incorporeal, unmoved and indivisible, neither contained in anything nor bound by himself, needs nothing external, as has been said. Nor does the soul of the world, which by nature has three-dimensionality and self-movement; its nature is to choose beautiful and well-ordered movement, and to move the body of the world in accordance with the best principles. It has received the body into itself and envelops it, and yet is incorporeal and has no share in any passion. To the other gods, the world and the fixed and wandering stars—visible gods composed of soul and body—we should return thanks as has been described, by sacrifices of inanimate things. So there remains the multitude of invisible gods, whom Plato called daimones without distinction. People have given some of them names, and they receive from everyone honours equal to the gods and other forms of worship. Others have no name at all in most places, but acquire a name and cult inconspicuously from a few people in villages or in some cities. The remaining multitude is given the general name of daimones, and there is a conviction about all of them that they can do harm if they are angered by being neglected and not receiving the accustomed worship, and on the other hand that they can do good to those who make them well-disposed by prayer and supplication and sacrifices and all that goes with them.

But the concept of daimones is confused and leads to serious misrepresentation, so it is necessary to give a rational analysis of their nature; for perhaps (they say) it is necessary to show why people have gone astray about them. So the following distinction should be made. All the souls which, having issued from the universal soul, administer large parts of the regions below the moon, resting on their pneuma but controlling it by reason, should be regarded as good daimones who do everything for the benefit of those they rule, whether they are in charge of certain animals, or of crops which have been assigned to them, or of what happens for the sake of these—showers of rain, moderate winds, fine weather, and the other things which work with them, and the balance of seasons within the year; or again, for our sake, they are in charge of skills, or of all kinds of education in the liberal arts, or of medicine and physical training and other such things. It is impossible for these daimones both to provide benefits and also to cause harm to the same beings. Among them must be numbered the "transmitters," as Plato calls them, who report "what comes from people to the gods and what comes from the gods to people," carrying up our prayers to the gods as if to judges, and carrying back to us their advice and warnings through oracles. But the souls which do not control the pneuma adjacent to them, but are mostly controlled by it, are for that very reason too much carried away, when the angers and appetites of the pneuma lead to impulse. These souls are also daimones, but may reasonably be called maleficent.

All these, and those that have the opposite power, are unseen and absolutely imperceptible to human senses. For they are not clad in a solid body, nor do they all have one shape, but they take many forms, the shapes which imprint and are stamped upon their pneuma are sometimes manifest and sometimes invisible, and the worse ones sometimes change their shape. The pneuma, insofar as it is corporeal, is passible and corruptible. Though it is so bound by the souls that the form endures for a long time, it is not eternal; for it is reasonable to suppose that something continuously flows from them and that they are fed. In the good daimones this is in balance, as in the bodies of those that are visible, but in the maleficent it is out of balance; they allot more to their passible element, and there is no evil that they do not attempt to do to the regions around the earth. Their character is wholly violent and deceptive and lacking the supervision of the greater divine power, so they usually make sudden intense onslaughts, like ambushes, sometimes trying to remain hidden and sometimes using force. So passions which come from them are acute. But healing and setting to rights, which are from the better daimones, seem slower, for every good thing is gentle and consistent, progressing in good order and not going beyond what is right. If you think like this, it will never be possible for you to fall into the worst of absurdities: that is, supposing that there is bad in the good ones and good in the bad ones. This is not the only way in which the argument is absurd, but most people have acquired the most contemptible ideas even about the gods, and pass them on to others.

One thing especially should be counted among the greatest harm done by the maleficent daimones: they are themselves responsible for the sufferings that occur around the earth (plagues, crop failures, earthquakes, droughts, and the like), but convince us that the responsibility lies with those who are responsible for just the opposite. They evade blame themselves: their primary concern is to do wrong without being detected. Then they prompt us to supplications and sacrifices, as if the beneficent gods were angry. They do such things because they want to dislodge us from a correct concept of the gods and convert us to themselves. They themselves rejoice in everything that is likewise inconsistent and incompatible; slipping on (as it were) the masks of the other gods, they profit from our lack of sense, winning over the masses because they inflame people's appetites with lust and longing for wealth and power and pleasure, and also with empty ambition from which arises civil conflicts and wars and kindred events. Most terrible of all, they move on from there to persuade people that the same applies even to the greatest gods, to the extent that even the best god is made liable to these accusations, for they say it is by him that everything has been thrown topsy-turvy into confusion. It is not only lay people who are victims of this, but even some of those who study philosophy; and each is responsible for the other, for among the students of philosophy those who do not stand clear of the general opinion come to agree with the masses, whereas the masses, hearing from those with a reputation for wisdom opinions which agree with their own, are confirmed in holding even more strongly such beliefs about the gods.

Literature, too, has further inflamed people's convictions, by using discourse designed to astound and enchant, able to cast spells and to create belief in the most impossible things. But one must be firmly convinced that the good never harms and the bad never benefits. As Plato says, "cooling is not done by heat but by its opposite," and similarly "harm is not done by the just man." Now the divine power must by nature be most just of all, or it would not be divine. So this [harmful] power, and this role, must be separated from the beneficent daimones for the power which is naturally and deliberately harmful is the opposite of the beneficent, and opposites can never occur in the same. The maleficent daimones harass mortals in many respects, some of them important, but in every respect there is no way that the good daimones will neglect their own concerns: they forewarn, so far as they are able, of the dangers impending from the maleficent daimones, by revelations in dreams, or through an inspired soul, or in many other ways. And everyone would know and take precautions, if he could distinguish the signs they send; for they send signs to everyone, but not everyone understands what the signs mean, just as not everyone can read what is written, but only the person who has learned letters. But it is through the opposite kind of daimones that all sorcery is accomplished, for those who try to achieve bad things through sorcery honour especially these daimones and in particular their chief.

These daimones abound in impressions of all kinds, and can deceive by wonder-working. Unfortunate people, with their help, prepare philtres and love-charms. For all self-indulgence and hold of riches and fame comes from them, and especially deceit, for lies are appropriate to them. They want to be gods, and the power that rules them wants to be thought the greatest god. It is they who rejoice in the "drink-offerings and smoking meat" on which their pneumatic part grows fat, for it lives on vapours and exhalations, in a complex fashion and from complex sources, and it draws power from the smote that rises from blood and flesh.

So an intelligent, temperate man will be wary of making sacrifices through which he will draw such beings to himself. He will work to purify his soul in every way, for they do not attack a pure soul, because it is unlike them. If it is necessary for cities to appease even these beings, that is nothing to do with us. In cities, riches and external and corporeal things are thought to be good and their opposites bad, and the soul is the least of their concerns. But we, as far as possible, shall not need what those beings provide, but we make every effort, drawing on the soul and on external things, to become like God and those who accompany him—and this happens through dispassion, through carefully articulated concepts about what really is, and through a life which is directed to those realities—and to become unlike wicked people and daimones and anything else that delights in things mortal and material. So we too shall sacrifice, in accordance with what Theophrastus said. The theologians agreed with this, knowing that the more we neglect the removal of passions from the soul, the more we are linked to the evil power, and it will be necessary to appease that too. For as the theologians say, those who are bound by external things and are not yet in control of passions must avert that power too, for if they do not, their troubles will not cease.

(Gillian Clark's translation, very hastily transcribed, so I apologize for any errors.)

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Interesting the amount of dualism here, despite the polytheism; even the notion that this "chief" of the maleficient daimones aspires to "be thought the greatest god" (?). Something in the water of that time, perforce...

[sdi]

I was thinking the same! Funny how Theodosius II ordered all of Porphyry's books burned, he sounds just like the Christians :)