Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E.The people of the late ancient Mediterranean world thought about and encountered gods, angels, demons, heroes, and other spirits on a regular basis. These figures were diverse, ambiguous, and unclassified and were not ascribed any clear or stable moral valence. Whether or not they were helpful or harmful under specific circumstances determined if and what virtues were attributed to them. That all changed in the third century C.E., when a handful of Platonist philosophers—Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus—began to produce competing systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in moral and ontological terms. |
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... social capital, and wrest these from other contemporary cultural entrepre- neurs and experts. Generally speaking, taxonomic discourses about spirits are seldom purely academic exercises undertaken by intellectual elites who distinguish ...
... social upper hand with two main groups, priestly experts such as those associated with the Greek magical papyri, and so- called Gnostics.7 Members of both of these groups were also involved in identifying and order- ing the realm of ...
... social boundaries. Although this study doesn't address this point directly, it is important to note that the taxonomic discourses produced in the third century failed to eradicate the local sense of the realm of spirits, and people ...
... social and sexual roles , and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible peo- ple , places , and activities . " 24 Other scholars have focused on more particular facets of late ancient de- monology . Gregory ...
... social or educational mi- lieu was the primary category that these Platonists used to identify them- selves. It proves that Porphyry and Origen's participation in a common Greek paideia, in particular the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus ...
Contents
| 1 | |
| 13 | |
Spiritual Taxonomy in ThirdCentury Platonism | 38 |
ThirdCentury Platonists and Gnostics on Daemons and Other Spirits | 71 |
ThirdCentury Platonists as Ritual Experts | 100 |
Conclusion | 126 |
Notes | 133 |
Bibliography | 179 |
Index | 193 |
Acknowledgments | 199 |