Theurgy: The Divine Work

Theurgy means divine work. The word can be read in two ways, and both are intended: work done for the gods, in the sense of worship, and work done by the gods in the soul of the worshipper. It names what many writers have held to be the highest aim of ceremonial magic in the West, which is not to obtain anything but to purify the soul and lead it back to its source. In the modern scheme of the three parts of the philosophy it is the third, the operation of the gods.

Where the word comes from

The term first appears in the second century of the common era, attached to a father and son called Julian, to whom a collection of oracular verses known as the Chaldean Oracles was attributed. The younger Julian was called the theurgist, to distinguish him from the theologians who merely spoke about the gods. The Oracles taught that the soul had descended from the divine fire, and that it could be led back by rites of purification and ascent.

The Platonist philosophers of late antiquity took up the idea, but they did not agree about it. Their disagreement is the best introduction to what theurgy is.

Porphyry and Iamblichus

Plotinus, the founder of the school, taught that the highest part of the soul had never fully descended into the body. It remained above, in contemplation of the divine, and the task of philosophy was to wake the rest of the soul to what that part already enjoyed. On this view the way up is a way of thinking. Rituals may help the uninstructed but are unnecessary for the wise.

His pupil Porphyry pressed the point. In an open letter to an Egyptian priest he asked a series of awkward questions. If the gods are beyond all passion, how can they be moved by offerings? If they are good, why do they need to be invoked? How can material things such as stones, herbs and sounds have any effect on beings without bodies?

The reply came from Iamblichus, writing in the person of an Egyptian priest, in the book known as On the Mysteries. He answered that the soul has in fact descended entirely, and that this is the human condition: we live in bodies, among things, and cannot climb out by thinking alone. Nor do the rites compel the gods. The gods do not change. The rites change the soul, making it fit to receive what was always being given. And they work, he insisted, not because the theurgist understands them. In substance his argument runs: it is not thought that joins the theurgist to the gods, for then philosophers would be joined to them by their theories, but the faithful performance of sacred acts beyond understanding, and the power of symbols known to the gods alone.

The debate has never been settled, and every serious practitioner meets it in some form. Is the work an inward discipline, for which the outer forms are aids, or is the outer form itself the means? Iamblichus gave the answer on which most later ceremonial magic has rested: a human being is a soul in a body, and the whole of that being must take part.

Tokens and correspondences

How can a stone or a plant serve a divine work? The theurgists answered with a doctrine of tokens. The divine powers, they said, have sown signs of themselves throughout nature, as a seal leaves its impression in wax. Each god has its chain of correspondences reaching down through the levels of the cosmos: certain stars, certain animals, certain plants, metals, scents, sounds and names. To gather the tokens that belong to a god, and to offer them in the right way, is to set up a resonance between the soul and that god.

The fifth century philosopher Proclus gave the classic example. The heliotrope, he observed, turns through the day to follow the sun, and its movement is a kind of hymn, the only one a plant can sing. The theurgist learns to do consciously what the flower does by nature. The same idea lies behind the passage in the Hermetic Asclepius describing how the Egyptians made statues live by drawing divine presences into them with herbs, stones and spices that shared their nature. And it lies behind the tables of correspondence still in use, which began as lists of tokens.

Three kinds of worship

Iamblichus did not think that one form of theurgy suited everyone. He described three. Most people, he said, need a worship that is largely material, with offerings, places and objects, because they live largely among material things. Some, further along, combine material rites with inward prayer. A very few, at the end of a long life of purification, worship in a wholly immaterial way, in silence and in mind alone. He insisted that the higher does not despise the lower, and that it is a mistake to attempt the third kind before one has been made fit by the first.

The same judgment applies today. A student who wishes to skip the forms and go straight to formless contemplation usually discovers, after some years of vague effort, the reason the forms exist.

Theurgy and goetia

From the beginning theurgy defined itself against its shadow. The Greek word goeteia, from a word for a wailer or enchanter, came to mean sorcery: the manipulation of spirits for private ends, often by threats and compulsion. The theurgists drew the line not by method, since both used names, images and rites, but by aim and orientation. Goetia seeks to bend powers to the will of the operator. Theurgy seeks to bring the operator into accord with the powers above.

Renaissance writers kept the distinction. Pico della Mirandola condemned goetia as wholly bad while praising natural magic as the perfection of philosophy, and later manuals that listed spirits for summoning came to bear the old name. On this site we follow the theurgists. Our page on ethics and safety explains why the art is turned toward one's own transformation and away from control of others.

The Renaissance revival

Marsilio Ficino, the translator of the Hermetica, revived theurgy in a cautious form in the third of his Three Books on Life, published in 1489. He taught that a fine, airy substance he called spirit joins soul to body, and that this spirit can be tuned to the life of the cosmos through music, scents, colors, foods and images chosen according to the planets. He sang the Orphic hymns to his own accompaniment on the lyre. Anxious about the Church, he presented all of this as natural magic, working through the stars and the spirit of the world rather than through demons, but its aim was plainly the elevation of the soul.

Cornelius Agrippa, writing a generation later, made ceremonial magic the third and highest part of his system and insisted that it required the purification and dignification of the operator before anything else. His prescriptions included long fasts and severe disciplines. We report them as history. They are not part of the practice described on this site, for the reasons given under care of the mind.

Theurgy in modern practice

The magicians of the nineteenth century revival took theurgy as the meaning of their whole art. In their system every ritual, however practical its occasion, was finally an exercise in the purification and elevation of the operator, and the goal of the training was conscious union with the higher self. They kept several theurgic practices in recognizable form: invocation, in which a divine power is called into the operator rather than outside; the assumption of a divine image, in which operators imagine themselves clothed in the form of a god, as the Egyptian priests had been thought to do; and the consecration and eating of simple food and drink at the close of a rite, so that the ordinary is received as something more.

The modern student can approach theurgy under any of the models described elsewhere on this site. On the psychological model it is the deliberate cultivation of the highest in oneself through symbol and devotion. On the older models it is what it claims to be. The practice does not depend on settling the question, and the test of it is the same either way: whether the person who practices becomes clearer, steadier and kinder.