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Storytime: Reading Synesius On Dreams

MRI of ventricles of the brain; the enlarged left lateral ventricle is clearly a sign of moist pneuma filling the space. "Nurse, get me some dream-divination, stat!"

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The On Dreams of Synesius is one of those works which, if you study ancient esotericism, you have seen cited hundreds of times but, if you’re like me, never actually sat down and read through. And, boy, does it reward the effort of doing so! This essay is the real stuff.

The reason for all the citations is that our work contains numerous Chaldæan Oracles fragments, and contains more details on the theory of the pneumatic soul-vehicle – its ascents, descents, purifications, and functions – than any antique text aside from Hierocles’ commentary on the Pythagorean Golden Verses (which we’ll be covering, naturally). It draws on a Hellenic wisdom lineage including the usual suspects, but with a strong ‘Chaldæan’ vein, and very much in a Iamblichean line vis à vis theory. If this work of Bishop Synesius is Christian, this is not your grandma’s Christianity; it is Platonising Christianity of a theurgic type.

But the essay may not be Christian at all, and in fact may be an esoteric anti-Christian response to the persecution and decline which Synesius and his generation saw all around them. This work’s written esotericism is fascinating. The text begins with a note to the effect that what you are about to read is, in the best tradition of Plato, a serious work hiding beneath a seemingly-nugatory surface. The work then goes on to recommend self-purification with the aim of having a subtle body pure and light enough to capture those evanescent true, clear, noetic dreams which unambiguously reveal to us the secrets of the future, protect us from harm, and, in general, bring the divine directly into our daily life; it suggests dream-divination as the best form of divinatory practice for the reason that its practitioners cannot be persecuted by ‘tyrants’; it lays out a detailed, medico-metaphysical theory of how the imagination functions through the pneumatic soul-body, allowing the gods to contact us directly; it details the signs and causes of diseases of this subtle body; it alludes to ‘secret philosophy’ and ‘purifying rituals’ which allow for the soul’s ascent to god. It ends with a return to the opening theme of the esoteric, suggesting that those who write works such as this, if their intentions are pure and in line with the divine will, should not hesitate to publish them in the hopes that time will prove a worthy guardian.

Works Cited in this Episode:

Primary:

Donald A. Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, editors. On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insomniis. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2014. Find it here for free on open access!

Secondary:

For Corbin’s theory of the ‘imaginal’, see e.g. Henry Corbin. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn Arabī, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969. Antoine Faivre. Access to Western Esotericism. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1994.

Antoine Faivre. Access to Western Esotericism. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1994.

Storytime: Reading Synesius On Dreams

Works Cited in this Episode:

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