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Updated: May 20, 2025
From time to time a little sputter of rain pattered up against the window-pane. I sat until near midnight, glancing over the fragment on immortality by Iamblichus, the Alexandrian platonist, of whom the Emperor Julian said that he was posterior to Plato in time but not in genius. At last, shutting up my book, I opened my door and took a last look at the dreary fell and still more dreary sky.
Atlantis, that ancient land of Meropis mentioned by the historian Theopompus; Plato's Atlantis; the continent whose very existence has been denied by such philosophers and scientists as Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d'Anville, Malte-Brun, and Humboldt, who entered its disappearance in the ledger of myths and folk tales; the country whose reality has nevertheless been accepted by such other thinkers as Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus, Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d'Avezac; I had this land right under my eyes, furnishing its own unimpeachable evidence of the catastrophe that had overtaken it!
Even Inquisitors have differed in opinion. Iamblichus next tackles the difficult question of imposition and personation by spirits. This is the result of some error or blunder in the ceremony of evocation. A bad or low spirit may thus enter, disguised as a demon or god, and may utter deceitful words.
Iamblichus entirely rejects all Porphyry's psychological theories of hallucinations, of the demon or 'genius' as 'subliminal self, and asserts the actual, objective, sensible action of spirits, divine or daemonic. What effect Iamblichus produced on the inquiring Porphyry is uncertain.
Some of the symbols used are explained by Iamblichus, who bids Porphyry remove from his thought the image of the thing symbolised and reach its intellectual meaning. Thus "mire" meant everything that was bodily and material; the "God sitting above the lotus" signified that God transcended both the mire and the intellect, symbolised by the lotus, and was established in Himself, being seated.
We have from Greece and Rome but few literary examples of 'Psychical Research, few collections of books on 'Bogles' as Scott called them. We possess Palaephatus, the life of Apollonius of Tyana, jests in Lucian, argument and exposition from Pliny, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plutarch, hints from Plato, Plautus, Lucretius, from St. Augustine and other fathers.
Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential deity from whom he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary deities to emanate, ranging from those purely immaterial to those inherent in matter.
'They have been known to be lifted up into the air. . . . The subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire. . . . The more ignorant and mentally imbecile a youth may be, the more freely will the divine power be made manifest. Joseph was ignorant, and 'enfeebled by vigil and fasts, so Joseph was 'insensible of the application of fire, and 'was lifted up into the air'. Yet the cardinals, surgeons, and other witnesses were not thinking of the pagan Iamblichus when they attested the accomplishments of the saint.
His perplexed letter to Anebo, with the reply attributed to Iamblichus, reveal Porphyry wandering puzzled among mediums, floating lights, odd noises, queer dubious 'physical phenomena. He did not begin with accurate experiments as to the existence of rare, and apparently supernormal human faculties, and he seems to have attained no conclusion except that 'spirits' are 'deceitful.
I want Plotinus, and Porphyry, and Iamblichus, and Syrirnus, and Maximus Tyrius, and Proclus, and Hierocles, and Sallustius, and Damascius." Mr. Grey stared at his son, and laughed.
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