Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority
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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. In Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority , Heidi Marx-Wolf recounts how these Platonist philosophers organized the spirit world into hierarchies, or «spiritual taxonomies,» positioning themselves as the high priests of the highest gods in the process. By establishing themselves as experts on sacred, ritual, and doctrinal matters, they were able to fortify their authority, prestige, and reputation. The Platonists were not alone in this enterprise, and it brought them into competition with rivals to their new authority: priests of traditional polytheistic religions and gnostics. Members of these rival groups were also involved in identifying and ordering the realm of spirits and in providing the ritual means for dealing with that realm. Using her lens of spiritual taxonomy to look at these various groups in tandem, Marx-Wolf demonstrates that Platonist philosophers, Christian and non-Christian priests, and gnostics were more interconnected socially, educationally, and intellectually than previously recognized.
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Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority
Series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger
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Still, one might ask why Porphyry would adopt this view of blood sacrifice, given that it reflects in an almost wholesale manner the Christian consensus on this point. If, however, one considers some of Porphyry’s influences, and takes account of ideas in broader circulation in an educated, Greek-speaking, philosophically oriented milieu, this is a consistent and logical position for him to take because of a specific set of associations he makes between blood and embodiment.
For Porphyry, blood was a humor associated with the basest form of human existence, namely the appetitive part of the human soul. In this view, he follows both Plato and Galen.65 In the Galenic anthropology, which mirrors the tripartite Platonic one outlined in the Republic66 and the Timaeus,67 humans ingest food, which the body turns into blood in the liver. This substance is associated with that part of the human being that concerns itself with nourishment and reproduction. As the body continues to refine this substance, it rises until it reaches the heart, where it becomes a kind of enlivening force associated with what Plato calls the spirited part of the soul, that part that experiences passions of various kinds. Finally, this substance rises to the brain, where it is further distilled into what Galen calls psychic pneuma, which circulates in the “ventricles of the brain and throughout the nervous system.”68 For Galen, this tripartite physiological system helped to link the body and soul. It also served to explain how and why “changes in the body could alter one’s mental balance and behavior and vice versa.”69 A number of Porphyry’s works indicate that this model informs his ideas about blood and its connection with embodiment and the appetitive part of the human soul. The connection between body and soul based on the tripartite physiology may help to explain why, for Porphyry, the kind of food one ingests is important, as it directly affects one’s mental state.
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