Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [319]
The Mithras Liturgy is the record of a magical journey by a magician to visit the god, asking him to become a supporter.72 It is the equivalent of an audience with an earthly ruler. It cannot be completely parallel to the process of appointing a parhedros because the divinity visited in The Mithras Liturgy is greater than an angel so the adept must go to heaven to visit him. Indeed, the boon he asks for is greater than that of the parhedros. He asks the god Helios Mithras to make him immortal and to give a prophecy. The request is granted, as the divinity takes up residence in the adept.
O Lord, while being born again (palingenomenos), I am passing away; while growing and having grown, I am dying; while being born from a life-generating birth, I am passing on, released to death-as you have founded, as you have decreed and have established the mystery. I am PHEROYRA MIOURI (lines 693-721)73
Though clearly not Jewish or Christian, these magical papyri stories have many, many formal similarities with the journeys that the Hekhaloth mystics made: trance (RISC), “magical” procedures, presentation of charms, strange and sometimes garbled and magical formulas, explanations or prophecies for the future. The pagans were reborn (palingenomenos) and then immortalized (apanathanatismos) by the procedure, just as Christians are “born again” by their faith. Jews already expected immortality so they concentrated on other benefits, like the ability to memorize more law or to receive material benefits, which were also asked for in the magical papyrus.
The Hermetic Corpus
SOMEWHAT similar notions can be seen in the Hermetic literature. In the Poimandres, the first tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum, the narrator, ostensibly Hermes (who is also identified with the Egyptian god Tat or Thoth), falls into a trance and sees a vision of a huge almost unlimited person, whose body seems to melt into light.74 After a dialogue with this savior and an ascent to heaven, he learns that the secret of immortality is the knowledge of one’s true nature:
let him (who) is mindful recognize that he is immortal, that desire is the cause of death, and let him recognize all that exists.
“Those who lack knowledge, what great wrong have they done,” I asked, “that they should be deprived of immortality.”75
There is a clear message to realize the immortality that rests within us, normally discovered through ascent and heavenly revelation. The heavenly journey is coterminous with the RASC. In the Jewish and Hermetic literature there is also an ethical context. The magical papyri promise rewards only for the person who pays the magician for the rewards, though the magical papyri seem to be a grimoire, a magician’s spell-book, which assumes that the possessor will at least observe the professional ethics of a member in good standing in the magical guild. One supposes, at the very least, that would entail not revealing the mysteries in the book.
Under the guise of theurgy these “magical” ascent procedures and many rites like them (which have been lost) gain a degree of respectability in the Late Antique world. To understand this we must investigate the entire phenomenon of theurgy-which means “working the gods” and is to be contrasted with theology, which means “studying the gods.” As a phenomenon it is attributed to Julian the Chaldean and his son, also called Julian. Indeed, ergon, the second stem in the word “theurgy,” is as good way to designate “ritual” in Greek, as there otherwise is