Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [470]
55. In Schaefer, Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literature.
56. M. Cohen, Shiur Komah; Elior, Hekhaloth Zutartey. For the complete bibliography, see Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot, pp. 567-69.
57. The ten volume compendium known in English as The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. by Kittel, has scarcely a dozen references to Ezekiel 1, although it is a crucial passage informing the christology of the New Testament, as Gilles Quispel has so cogently pointed out. See Quispel, “Hermetism and the New Testament.”
58. See Saul Lieberman, “Metatron, the Meaning of His Name and His Functions,” Appendix in Gruenwald’s Apocalyptic and Merkabah Mysticism, pp. 235-41, esp. 237-39. Pace Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God.”
59. See Morray-Jones, A Transparent Illusion; and Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
60. L’Orange, Apotheosis in Ancient Portraiture.
61. Morray-Jones, A Transparent Illusion.
62. Virtually every scholar of these documents has offered a different entiology for “descenders” into the chariot. No crucial text has suggested itself to settle the issue. See Morray-Jones, A Transparent Illusion; and Davila, Descenders in the Chariot.
63. See A. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven.
64. Michael Swartz suggests that they are students who need divine help memorizing Torah from evidence in the Sar Torah sections of the documents. This is as good a guess as anyone has been able to make. It is also true that the texts become very popular in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance with a group of Jewish mystics in Southern France known as the Hasidei Ashkenaz.
65. Lesses, Ritual Practices to Gain Power, pp. 279-367.
66. See ch. 5.
67. Griffiths, Apuleius of Madauros, p. 89.
68. See A. Segal, “Hellenistic Magic.”
69. See Burkert, Law and Science, pp. 366ff.; Gottschalk, Heraclides of Pontus, 98ff; Ulansey, Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, p. 86.
70. Love was a mysterious and magical power and hence even the implication of sexual congress might have been helpful in understanding the power which magicians had over their angelic helpers.
71. See the fine article by Ciraolo, “Supernatural Assistants.”
72. The so-called Mithras Liturgy is one of the most controversial texts coming to us from antiquity. It can be isolated from lines 475-834 of the Paris Magical Papyrus, probably a third century Egyptian magician’s grimoire, which was discovered early enough in this century to have impressed Karl Jung to the extent that it stimulated him to formulate the doctrine of the collective unconscious. Albrecht Dieterich suggested that it was a liturgy from the Mysteries of Mithras, a religion that was extremely popular in the Roman legions but has left us scarcely any literary remains. Others have felt that this is just a magical procedure. To me the value of this discussion rests with the scholarly uncertainty about just what magic is. In fact, magic itself becomes a kind of religion in late Antiquity. See A. Segal, “Hellenistic Magic.”
73. This text is the very able translation of M. Meyer, quoted from his work, The Ancient Mysteries, pp. 213-21.
74. Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes.
75. Copenhaver, Hermetica, p. 6.
76. S. Johnston, Hekate Soteira, p. 88; Restless Dead.
77. For Porphyry and Julian’s attitudes towards Christians, see Meredith, “Porphyry and Julian Against the Christians.”
78. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness.
79. Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism, pp. 88-89.
80. Ibid.; and “Self-Knowledge and Subjectivity;” also see O’Meara, Plotinus: Introduction to the Enneads; Miles, Plotinus on Body and Beauty.
81. My thanks to two of my students, Lock Reynolds of Williams College