Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus

In Hellenic Tantra, Gregory Shaw provides a religious history that reveals overlooked aspects of Late Antique Iamblichan theurgy by comparing it to Tantra. In doing so, he illuminates how both traditions were nondual, esoteric, and embodied. Furthermore, he demonstrates how practitioners of both traditions employed various techniques such as chanting, recitation of divine names, and imaginative prayer to embody their gods and obtain deification. In short, Shaw shows how the ultimate goal of both theurgy and Tantra was for the practitioner to become “a God in human form” (xv).Shaw begins by acknowledging the “enigma” of theurgy and argues that theurgy was a tantric strain of Western philosophy that understood the divine to be present within the material world (xi). Iamblichus, a third-century CE Platonic philosopher in Syria, advocated for theurgic rituals, which included blood sacrifice, the invocation of gods and daimons, divinatory techniques, recitation of nonsense words, and purifying the subtle body, that is, the soul’s spiritual body. Shaw contends that Iamblichus understood Platonism through a nondual perspective: He did not believe that the material world, such as the body, was separate from the divine. Thus, our bodies, and matter in general, were considered by Iamblichus to be an essential part of experiencing the gods. Iamblichus’s perspective challenged other Platonic philosophers of his time, such as Plotinus and Porphyry, who argued for a dualistic Platonism that reified divisions between this world and the celestial realm, between matter and spirit, and between the soul and body. While Plotinus and Porphyry attempted to discipline the body through abstinence and detachment from the material world, Iamblichus focused on using the body, materials, and physical expressions to reach the divine present on earth.Shaw explains that the dualistic Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry historically overshadowed the nondual Platonism of Iamblichus and argues that later Christian Platonists, like the early church fathers, embraced the dualistic strand of Platonism that laid the foundation for future Western theology and philosophy. Shaw asserts that modern Western scholars have inherited this dualistic framework despite no longer professing a Christian creed. This led nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars like E. R. Dodds to view theurgy as deviant, magical, and oriental rather than as Platonic. While scholars have pushed back against Dodds in recent decades, Shaw argues that modern scholars still maintain a dualistic perspective that hinders our understanding of theurgy. Dualism, Shaw explains, manifests in a materialist perspective that affirms the absence of divinity in the cosmos and our embodied lives—and this bias is present throughout academia. Shaw proposes that our underlying epistemological commitment to a materialist framework has clouded our ability to understand the purpose of theurgy as a ritual embodiment of the gods.Similarly to how scholars of Platonism have struggled to understand theurgy, early scholars of Hinduism also failed to understand Tantra. Shaw explains how Tantra emerged as a religious movement within Hinduism, around the seventh century, but the word “Tantra” itself appears in the Vedas as early as 1500–1000 BCE. While inclusive of many traditions, Tantra is characterized by the practitioner’s inclusion of practices normally taboo within Hinduism, such as forbidden sexual practices and the sacrifice and consumption of meat. This led many scholars to similarly categorize Tantra as deviant, magical, and primitive. Shaw argues that modern scholars of Tantra have come to understand the underlying nondual cosmology that frames Tantric practice. Like theurgy, Tantra is nondual and maintains the sacredness of the material world, the importance of the body, and the acceptance of all forms and facets of life as emanations from the divine. To clarify our understanding of theurgy, Shaw invokes Tantra so that it “can serve as a useful heuristic exercise to reimagine Iamblichan theurgy and give us a glimpse into the nondual reality of both of these traditions” (3). Furthermore, by comparing Iamblichan theurgic Platonism to Tantra, a practice associated with the body, blood, death, and sex, Shaw allows us to challenge our notions of disembodied Greek rationality and “deepen our self-understanding,” which “allows us to glimpse a richer more embodied spirituality that was once part of our Western tradition” (5).Shaw divides his book into eleven chapters (and two codas), each exploring a theme present in both theurgy and Tantra. Shaw’s thematic explorations build upon each other so that each progressive chapter focuses more intently on the embodied ritual elements of these traditions. He explores various visual meditations such as those on light and divination techniques. Most noticeably, he explores the theurgic practice of mantike, a form of theurgical divination during which a god possesses a practitioner and utters prophecy through them; Shaw then compares mantike to a similar practice in Tantra known as avesa. His layering of embodied ritual practices on top of previously discussed philosophical concepts creates a crescendo leading to his final chapters on the subtle body, explaining how practitioners purified their spiritual body for theurgic and Tantric deification. Shaw sweeps the readers up in the current and brings them to the ultimate transcendent truth of these traditions: that humans can become gods in mortal form. Shaw’s book is not only a practice of comparative religion but also an embodied methodological masterpiece in which he brings to life the phenomenology of the religious experiences he describes within his framing of their constituent practices.In chapters 1 through 3, he compares fundamental philosophical ideas underpinning theurgy and Tantra, such as nondualism, the human as a microcosm of the cosmos, and the immediacy of the divine. In chapter 4, he examines the tension between theurgists and the imperial church due to theurgists’ continued invocation of and sacrifice to daimons. As the book progresses, he demonstrates how these underlying beliefs shaped practitioners’ engagement in ritual techniques to foster connection and communion with the gods. These techniques include theophanic imagination, meditative visual practices in which the practitioner empties the mind to allow for the divine to enter (chapter 5); divination (chapter 6); photagogia, which was the induction of light through prayer (chapter 7); the recitation of mantras and divine names (chapter 9); and, finally, the purification of the subtle body and divine possession and embodiment (chapters 10 and 11). Furthermore, Shaw illuminates the interconnectedness of these practices. For example, in chapter 5 he elucidates how practitioners believed that the gods would communicate to individuals through their imagination. In chapter 8, he returns to the locus of imagination to discuss the process of photagogia, in which a god could possess a practitioner’s imagination and illuminate the practitioner’s soul in preparation for full possession experienced as an ecstatic state. Individuals could identify which spirit or god was present in the possession by observing the gestures of the possessed. Shaw describes how Iamblichus broke the spell of another medium channeling a spectator who appeared as Apollo but was just the ghost of a dead gladiator, thus illustrating the importance of interpretation in theurgic divination.Shaw’s work will be valuable in undergraduate and graduate courses on late antique religion and methods. His careful understanding of the philosophy underlying theurgy and its embodied elements could lead to a productive discussion with various late antique texts, such as the Greek Magical Papyri (a collection of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian rituals compiled in the fourth and fifth centuries). Furthermore, I would recommend this work for a methodological course as an example of how to properly conduct comparative religious research. Shaw does not fall into common traps of comparative work by conflating either of the two traditions or by attempting to establish any tenuous historical connection between them. Rather, by comparing the two he reveals how nondual practices offer alternative perspectives to the fundamental questions and issues of the human condition less explored within respective mainstream traditions.Moreover, Shaw explains complicated metaphysics in a relatable format without reverting to jargon. Shaw’s ability to simplify complex philosophical theory into digestible chapters is one of the book’s best features. When Shaw does have to use specific terminology, such as photagogia, he explains it through reference to Iamblichus’s primary texts and through colloquial understandings of “visionary experience” (116). Shaw’s comfort in allowing specific philosophical terms to carry a wider conversational breadth enables a free-flowing discourse that remains attentive to the historical context and opens avenues of further comparative work between other nondual, transcendent visionary traditions.Shaw’s Hellenic Tantra can inspire undergraduate students in a course on religious studies and scholars of philosophy, magic, and religion. For students, this book is an excellent introduction to two religious traditions and an example of comparative methodology. For scholars, Shaw leaves plenty to contemplate about the nature of the study of religion and the role that preconceived epistemological convictions play even in attempts at even-handed scholarship. Finally, to readers of Preternature, he helps us continue to challenge normative understandings of religion and philosophy and beckons us to contemplate the esoteric and embodied traditions once marginalized in academic scholarship.