Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [211]
Heavenly ascent can also be easily seen in the Corpus Hermeticum, which eschews other religions and practices to advocate its own communal theosophical variety of community. At the very beginning of the Corpus, the narrator makes clear that the truths contained therein were received by revelation in an altered state of consciousness or RASC:
Once, when thought came to me of the things that are and my thinking soared high and my bodily senses were restrained, like someone heavy with sleep from too much eating or toil of the body, an enormous being completely unbounded in size seemed to appear to me and call my name and say to me: “What do you want to hear and see; what do you want to learn and know from your understanding?”39
This particular experience shares with apocalypticism a community of believers and a commitment to a particular religious lifestyle. But it makes use of the notion of the immortality and separability of the soul to make its point. The one word that best describes this new entrepreneurial spirituality of late antiquity is “theurgy.”40 Theurgy, more than anything else, represents the force that transformed “magical” and hermetic tracts and rituals into acceptable religion in the Roman Empire.
Theurgy is a Hellenistic neologism that pointed to a new kind of technique in religion, which we often consider to be magic. The theurgist, as opposed to a theologian, not only studied the divine arts but learned how to control and “work” the gods.41 Indeed, since “ergon” (work) can easily refer to a ritual in Greek, theurgy implies a religious “praxis,” a ritual. Theurgy itself had been brought into the Roman Empire through the agency of the Chaldeans.
As far as we know, the earliest person claiming this art was Julianus, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE).42 He, in turn, claimed an association with an earlier Julianus, who gave him the secrets of the Chaldean Oracles. The technique of theurgy became more and more associated with the late Neoplatonic school, to such an extent that Proclus could define theurgy grandly as “a power higher than all human wisdom, embracing the powers of divination, the purifying powers of initiation, and, in short, all the operations of divine possession.”43 This explains why the term “magic” and with it the notion of personal religious entrepreneurship became acceptable in some aristocratic circles. Simply, it became a consistent religion, appealing to philosophers as well as their aristocratic students because of its promises of spiritual power together with a kind of independence from organized cults, although theurgy tended itself to be practiced within philosophical schools or religious conventicles like the Hermetic community. Theurgy involved ecstatic trances and séances to unite with the God and to gain specific powers from the specific God.44 Whether the phenomenon was judged to be religion or magic depended on a long social discourse of conflict and resolution in any number of different contexts.45
The Hekhaloth texts in Jewish mysticism and also the documents known as the Hermetic Literature46 are very much part of the theurgic movement. They all involve the use of trance to ascend to the heavens and accomplish some religious end. By the end of the fourth century, whatever their diverse beginnings, these religious groups would have all been seen as similar phenomena. The relationship between theurgy and Hekhalot mysticism is especially interesting. For instance, one of