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Updated: June 20, 2025
"Watch!" says Sol Invictus; "I have sent my man to him." It was Julian, "the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind"; I thank thee, Gregory of Nazianzus, for teaching me that word! and the one that came to him there in Cappadocia was Maximus of Smyrna, Iamblichus' disciple. His story has been told and re-told; I expect you know it fairly well.
For the student of the Lesser Mysteries prayer should be of the kinds grouped under Class B, and he should endeavour to rise to the pure meditation and worship of the last class, eschewing altogether the lower kinds. For him the teaching of Iamblichus on this subject is useful.
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fireplace, and examined the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the works of those writers whom we may class together under the title of mystics, Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, too, were there, by writers less renowned, on astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, etc.
From all the potentates and kings, save Amyntas and Archelaus, he took all the lands that they had received from Antony. Philopator son of Tarcondimotus, Lycomedes ruler in a portion of Cappadocian Pontus, and Alexander the brother of Iamblichus he even removed from their principalities.
Sopater further alleged that Initiation established a kinship of the soul with the divine Nature, and in the exoteric Hymn to Demeter covert references are made to the holy child, Iacchus, and to his death and resurrection, as dealt with in the Mysteries. From Iamblichus, the great theurgist of the third and fourth centuries A.D., much may be learned as to the object of the Mysteries.
Inspired by Lord Lytton, and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus and Plotinus. These are really but disappointing writers. It soon became evident enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions, that the philosopher's stone was beyond the reach of the amateur.
Iamblichus tells us that Pythagoras taught "the love of all to all." "To live is not to live for one's self alone, let us help one another," said the Greek dramatist Menander; and the Roman dramatist Terence, following him, brought down the applause of the whole theatre by the saying, "I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me."
In fact all these things are of world-wide diffusion, and I know no part of the world, savage or civilised, where such events do not happen, according to the evidence. In no instance, as far as I am informed, did anything extraordinary occur in connection with Home which cannot be paralleled in the accounts of Egyptian mediums in Iamblichus.
Eckhart is followed, in the fourteenth century, by John Tauler, and Nicolas of Basel, "the Friend of God in the Oberland." From these sprang up the Society of the Friends of God, true mystics and followers of the old tradition. Mead remarks that Thomas Aquinas, Tauler, and Eckhart followed the Pseudo-Dionysius, who followed Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, who in turn followed Plato and Pythagoras. So linked together are the followers of the Wisdom in all ages. It was probably a "Friend" who was the author of Die Deutsche Theologie, a book of mystical devotion, which had the curious fortune of being approved by Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the Augustinian Order, who recommended it to Luther, and by Luther himself, who published it A.D. 1516, as a book which should rank immediately after the Bible and the writings of S. Augustine of Hippo. Another "Friend" was Ruysbroeck, to whose influence with Groot was due the founding of the Brethren of the Common Lot or Common Life a Society that must remain ever memorable, as it numbered among its members that prince of mystics, Thomas
By perception we obtain a glimpse of ideas, by dialectics we penetrate them; by a final hypostasis, which is ecstasy, we can sometimes unite ourselves directly to God and live in Him. THE PUPILS OF PLOTINUS. Plotinus had as pupils and successors, amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus.
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