The sacking of Rome by Alaric and his Visigoths in the year 410 was an ideologically-charged event that left a permanent imprint on the culture of the west. We discuss two contemporary readings of what this event meant – one a polytheist and one a Christian – and, starting from these case-studies, a few of the crucial themes set in motion by the ‘Fall of Rome’ in the history of western esotericism.
As we near the end of our Julian and his Amazing Friends series, we dive back into the text of Eunapius of Sardis to excavate Maximus of Ephesus, the wonder-worker who became Julian's closest friend and advisor. What happens when the Roman empire is guided by the insights of a theurgist, his gods, and the stars? We find out in this episode.
We discuss Sosipatra of Pergamum, an otherwise-unknown late polytheist holy woman and philosopher, depicted by her biographer Eunapius as a living goddess as well as a philosophic teacher in the lineage of Iamblichus. Come for the Late Platonist resistance to Christianity in the fourth century, stay for the mysterious Chaldæan strangers.
We get into Porphyry's reception of Greek and non-Greek wisdom, and the ways in which esoteric truth is to be found in various cultural locales. We also discuss the one place where it is most definitely not to be found: Christianity.
We discuss the universe of Porphyry, which is crawling with gods, powers, and daimones, and some of the ways a human being might expect to navigate such a place. The episode features a long discursus on the theory of metempsychosis and a brief discursus on divine possession.
We discuss the Sibylline Oracles, a strange, sprawling, extremely complex collection of oracular hexameters from antiquity. Matthew Neujahr is our guide through a textual and prophetic labyrinth of ancient woman sages, Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian prophetic concerns, and the high uncanny.
Origen's theory of prophecy – what it is, how it works, who constitutes a prophet, and so on – is fascinating, but he never lays it out in a straightforward way. For that you need Dr Claire Hall and Jaffa Cakes.
In antiquity the gods sometimes communicated with mortals through dreams. But sometimes the gods can be fickle; in cases like this, you need to head to the sanctuary and go see the god at home. You need ritualised dreaming, or incubation.
In this episode we look at three different homemade myths found in Plutarch's writings. All of them deal with the fate of the soul after death, all of them put the land of the dead in the sky, and all of them are exceedingly difficult to interpret. We have seen Plutarch interpret a myth esoterically; now we see him making his own esoteric myths.
We introduce Plutarch of Chæronea: first-century man-of-letters, pioneering biographer, and transmitter of ancient esoteric Platonism to the western tradition.
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