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a meditation.80 The visualization uses the active but directed powers of the imagination and the sustained presence of imaginative meditation as a way to change human self-awareness. By emphasizing this inwardness in a new, more dramatic form, Plotinus begins to fix on inward experience as the path to the ascent. He did not invent the notion that altered states of consciousness are a path to God. He systematically tried to incorporate ecstasy into his philosophical experience while Plato and Philo among others merely assumed that these experiences were part of their intellectual and religious lives. He tried to offer an adequate philosophical account of the flight of the soul toward God. Plotinus and his students, the pagan Neoplatonists, may not have been either Jewish or Christians but they were deeply religious people and their religion adhered to their philosophical praxis, especially with askesis or asceticism used to trigger these RISC states.

If Plotinus was the theorist of the soul’s ascent, Iamblichus was the engineer and technician of the soul. According to Iamblichus, theurgic rituals and prayer were essential for the well-being of the soul and could even affect the disposition of the soul after death, as Plato himself had stated:

No operation, however, in sacred concerns, can succeed without the intervention of prayer. Lastly, the continual exercise of prayer nourishes the vigour of our intellect, and renders the receptacles of the soul far more capacious for the communications of the gods. It likewise is the divine key, which opens to men the penetralia of the Gods; accustoms us to the splendid rivers of supernatural light; in a short time perfects our inmost recesses, and disposes them for the ineffable embrace and contact of the Gods; and it does not desist till it raises us to the summit of all. It also gradually and silently draws upward the manners of our soul, by divesting them of every thing foreign to a divine nature, and clothes us with the perfections of the gods. (On the Mysteries, 272)81

Iamblichus explicitly contradicts Plotinus on this point for Plotinus explained the suffering of the soul as a product of its incomplete descent to the material world. Because the soul had descended, it could suffer but because it had not descended fully into matter, it could not totally be subsumed within materiality and destroyed. Iamblichus finds this doctrine of the soul to be both illogical and insufficiently spiritual. Instead, he posits the efficacy of specific rituals in effecting the soul’s immortality, though they are done in material reality. The ritual is theurgy and the systasis is the primary example.

The Vehicle of the Soul

IN SO DOING, Iamblichus follows Porphyry in positing an entity known as the vehicle of the soul or the spirit-cart (ochema-pneuma), which partakes of both matter and soul without being essentially part of one or the other.82 In the Timaeus (41e 1-2), Plato says that “the demiurge distributed each [soul] to each [star], and having mounted them [i.e., human souls] as if on a vehicle (ochema), he [i.e., the demiurge] showed them the nature of the universe.” For the Neoplatonist the ochema or vehicle is not the star nor made of the star itself but the vehicle in which the star can subsist. It is the meeting ground of the spiritual and material. So once a star is situated in its own vehicle it may travel downward to become a human soul in our sublunar world of generation. Conversely, theurgy only has power over the vehicle, not the soul itself, but it has power to help the soul’s reascension to the astral, immortal level because it can affect the soul’s vehicle.

In this latter Neoplatonist philosophy, a star and a soul are two parts of an identical essence but in two different states of being. Further, each soul in some way has its own equivalent guardian star which governs its role on earth and in turn can reveal its earthly fortunes. The connection is made a unity on death. A knowledgeable person can therefore predict the future through pronoia (pre-knowledge or prophecy).

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