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Chapter 1

How to Feed a Daemon: Third-Century Philosophers on Blood Sacrifice

[The theologians] reasonably guarded against feasts on flesh, so that they should not be disturbed by alien souls, violent and impure, drawn towards their kind, and should not be obstructed in their solitary approach to God by the presence of disruptive daemones.

ALTHOUGH THIS STATEMENT might well have been made by any Christian writer from the period under consideration in this book, it comes, instead, from Porphyry of Tyre. His work On Abstinence from Killing Animals contains one of the most comprehensive and sustained arguments for the polluting nature of blood sacrifices and for why anyone wanting to attain communion with the highest god should avoid them entirely. We start with Porphyry’s demonization of blood sacrifice because it is one of the most obvious places where we find late Roman intellectuals attempting to create taxonomies of spirits, mapping ontological differences onto moral ones. Porphyry’s stance on this matter often strikes readers as strange and unlikely, given his defense of so many other practices pertaining to traditional ancient polytheism. However, this chapter will argue that, when put into dialogue with his more general views on the nature of matter, blood, spirit, and divinity, Porphyry’s interpretation of animal sacrifice is consistent with his broader philosophical emphases and goals.

Unlikely Bedfellows: Porphyry in Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel

One point of entry to this late Platonic conversation on evil spirits is Eusebius of Caesarea’s Preparation for the Gospel.¹ In this work, Eusebius was occupied with the task of constructing a distinct Christian identity out of two lineages—the Jews, on the one hand, and the Greeks and Egyptians, on the other.² In order to distinguish Christians from Greeks, Eusebius spent much of his time demonstrating that the oracles and miracles of traditional Mediterranean cult were not merely frauds, although he points to a number of Greek authorities who say as much (for instance, Lucian of Samosata and Oenomaus); rather they were the work of evil daemons. Eusebius is far from the first Christian to make this identification between traditional deities and malign spirits. In the second and third centuries, one of the most interesting rhetorical moves developed by Christian apologists, philosophers, and polemicists was to demonize the traditional Greek and Roman gods, repeatedly associating these gods with evil spirits. It is difficult to determine when this strategy first developed, but we find it consistently used in the works of writers such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen to name but a few.³ So when Eusebius chose his sources for the construction of his own demonological conspiracy his options were numerous. But Eusebius chose none of these obvious authorities. Rather he made an unlikely but potent choice—he used the works of Porphyry to make most of his key points on this issue. This is the same Porphyry whom Eusebius identified as Christianity’s most rabid critic; the Porphyry who, according to Eusebius, attacked Origen on account of his form of biblical exegesis and who wrote many books against the Christians.⁴ What is even more remarkable is that Eusebius finds so much of use in Porphyry. Indeed, Eusebius has little need to quote anyone else. For Porphyry, at certain junctures in his philosophical writing, had reason to comment on the nature, location, and work of evil daemons in the cosmos, and in particular, on their association with animal sacrifices.

Although Eusebius cites Porphyry to make his own argument associating evil daemons with the rites of traditional Mediterranean polytheism, he also accuses Porphyry of being inconsistent in his views on blood sacrifice. Eusebius presents Porphyry as confused or self-contradictory by contrasting what the Platonist says in two different places, one suggesting that sacrifices are acceptable only to evil daemons, and the other detailing the sacrifices that should be made to all the gods.⁵ In On Abstinence, Porphyry clearly comes out on the side of those who held that blood sacrifices were improper offerings to good daemons and gods and were, instead, the preferred victuals of evil spirits. But in one excerpt from On Philosophy from Oracles included in the Preparation, Porphyry cites certain divine instructions from a lengthy oracle describing which animals ought to be offered to various deities.⁶ Eusebius appears not to have preserved any of Porphyry’s commentary on this oracle, which raises the question of whether Porphyry was in fact confused on the matter of sacrifice, or whether he was doing something else in his interpretation of the oracle in question, something that Eusebius may have found inconvenient to relate. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Porphyry was probably presenting the oracles he had carefully collected as sacred texts in order to interpret them in a figural way. And in the case of the oracle on sacrifice, he did so to “interpret away” the literal blood sacrifice he so vehemently opposed elsewhere.⁷

Blood and Daemons in Porphyry’s On Abstinence

In On Abstinence, Porphyry pursues a wide range of strategies in order to convince his wayward friend, the Roman politician Firmus Castricius, that his recent lapse into carnivorous habits is unhealthy and one with all kinds of dire moral and soteriological consequences for those who wish to live a philosophical life and assimilate themselves to divinity.⁸ He highlights the way eating meat rivets the soul more closely to the body, and to its desires and pleasures, than does a vegetarian diet.⁹ He also argues that killing animals deprives rational beings of their souls.¹⁰ As Gillian Clark points out, the title itself, Peri apokhes empsukhon, already accords animals the status of ensouled beings.¹¹ Porphyry also crafts arguments in response to objections he might expect from philosophical contemporaries such as Stoics and Epicureans. But most importantly, he must answer to the key religious objection that a central part of traditional ritual involves the slaughter of animals. After all, even priests and other ritual experts who occasionally abstained from meat ultimately did so in preparation for festivals and their bloody sacrifices. In response to this objection, Porphyry offers his most dramatic argument for why the philosopher should not eat meat. In Book 2, Porphyry reveals a grand conspiracy behind the carnivorous diet, a conspiracy in which humans, greedy for the meat their bodies desire, and evil daemons, likewise rapacious for blood and smoke, are both complicit.

Although it is likely that the popularity of blood sacrifices on a large scale (hecatombs of cattle, for instance) was already on the wane in Porphyry’s day, and that there was a general aversion among late ancient intellectuals to eating meat, Porphyry’s reinterpretation of the ancient practice that traditionally accompanied key venerations of the gods involved a rather extraordinary reappraisal of ancient ritual.¹² Animal sacrifice was traditionally a key component of city festivals. These communal celebrations, which involved meals of sacrificial meat, were times when the proper relations between humans and gods were affirmed. They were also occasions when human hopes for security, health, well-being, and success were acknowledged and when the society’s communal identity and the individual’s place within the group were made visible and affirmed.

Porphyry introduces his “conspiracy theory” by presenting a genealogy of sacrifices, which he takes from Theophrastus, a genealogy explaining how a primordial sacrificial order became corrupted over time.¹³ Theophrastus is an interesting choice, because he generally seems to have argued for more philosophical or “rational” approaches to thinking about and venerating the gods.¹⁴ In Inventing Superstition, Dale Martin situates Theophrastus among a number of classical Greek writers, including Plato, Aristotle, and the writer of the Hippocratic work On the Sacred Disease, who all contributed to the development whereby normative expressions of the fear of the gods were transformed into “superstition” or irrational and excessive fear of the gods.¹⁵ On the issue of sacrifice, Martin notes that although Theophrastus “did not critique sacrifice in general,” his work On Piety did include a “substantial critique of blood sacrifice.”¹⁶ Martin also notes that Theophrastus was generally concerned about excessive expressions of piety, illustrating this point using the Peripatetic’s sketch of the “Superstitious Man” (Deisidaimōn), which paints this character as an irrational and shameful sort of man.¹⁷ Martin further argues that Theophrastus took his cues from Aristotle’s ethics of the mean in order to determine the nature of proper, that is, proportional, piety.¹⁸

According to the genealogy of sacrifice Porphyry adopts from Theophrastus, long before his time “the most learned of all peoples, living in the most holy of lands which was founded by the Nile, began with Hestia to sacrifice first fruits to the gods of heaven.”¹⁹ These were foraged items such as leaves and roots. Then these early worshippers began to sacrifice cultivated goods, crops of various legumes and grains. At the point when humans began to sacrifice animals, Porphyry’s story takes a dark turn. First he describes the way in which, during times of famine or some other kind of misfortune, humans killed each other.²⁰ This displeased the gods, and they created a fitting penalty. Some of the offenders were turned into atheists, people who were deluded about divinity such that they thought the gods were bad. The rest were consigned by the gods to the category of “bad sacrificers,” namely those who participate in unlawful offerings.²¹ In other words, animal sacrifices represent the human evil of homicide and the delusion that was engendered by the gods as punishment, namely the thought that such offerings are characteristic of proper worship. But if the highest gods don’t desire the sacrifice of animals, then who does?

Porphyry explains that most people live with a confused conception of whom they worship when they offer such sacrifices. This confusion is coupled with a general misunderstanding that the class of daemons is undifferentiated and will harm humans if neglected and help them if propitiated.²² According to Porphyry, this view confuses two different kinds of spirits. Good daemons are souls that, “having issued from the universal soul, administer large parts of the regions below the moon, resting on their pneuma but controlling it by reason.”²³ Their opposite are those souls who are controlled by their pneuma and are carried away by anger and appetite associated with it.²⁴ He continues: “It is they who rejoice in the ‘drink-offerings and smoking meat’ on which their pneumatic part (τὸ πνευματικὸν καὶ σωματικὸν) grows fat, for it lives on vapors and exhalations in a complex fashion and from complex sources and it draws power from the smoke that arises from blood and flesh (ταῖς ἐκ τῶν αἱμάτων καὶ σαρκῶν κνίσαις).”²⁵

The word pneuma (“breath” or “spirit”) had a wide variety of meanings in antiquity.²⁶ In the context of Porphyry’s discussion, it refers to “an intermediary between the incorporeal soul and the material world.”²⁷ According to Gillian Clark, in the Timean tradition, this pneuma, or ochēma (ὄχημα: “vehicle” or “chariot”), ²⁸ is acquired by emanating or descending souls in the celestial realm and “is envisaged as air or fire,” but this vehicle “becomes thicker and heavier as it descends through the ‘regions below the moon,’ where damp air, water and earth predominate.”²⁹ The kinds of air or fire that make up this vehicle are not strictly commensurate with these elements as they are found in their sublunary form, but they are all elemental matter of one sort or another.³⁰

Porphyry locates all daemons in the sublunary region, whether good or evil. Their pneuma, although of a more celestial substance than ordinary air and fire, because it mediates between soul and matter and binds the former to the latter in some way, gives rise to passions and desires. The difference between good and evil daemons, then, seems to arise from the degree to which these souls identify with this pneumatic vessel and its attendant passions. In the case of malign spirits, they have become entangled in or riveted to this material aspect.

Good daemons, on the other hand, “do everything for the benefit of those they rule, whether they are in charge of certain animals, or crops which have been assigned to them, or of what happens for the sake of these—showers of rain, moderate winds, fine weather, and the other things which work with them, and the balance of seasons within the year.”³¹ These good daemons are also in charge of “skills, and of all kinds of education in the liberal arts, or of medicine and physical training and other such things.”³² In other words, they work with matter and mediate between the corporeal and incorporeal in ways that maintain the proper order and well-being of those creatures, plants, animals, and humans who inhabit the sublunary sphere and whose souls are bound to material bodies in a more complex and complete way.³³ They also serve as “transmitters” (ὁι πορθμεύοντες) or messengers between gods and humans.³⁴ Evil daemons, on the other hand, no longer minister to their subjects, but to their own desire to feed their pneumatic vessel. They do so by means of moist vapor and blood.

Christian Precedents and Parallels for the Association of Evil Daemons and Blood Sacrifice

This idea that animal sacrifices actually propitiate evil daemons and are not appropriate offerings for true divinity is prefigured in earlier Christian writings. Origen, in Contra Celsum, writes that these spirits occupy images and temples either because they have been invoked by certain magical spells or because they have taken over the place through their own efforts in order to “greedily partake of the portions of the sacrifices and seek for illicit pleasure.”³⁵ In his Exhortation to Martyrdom, Origen notes that if demons are to remain in the lower parts of the sublunary realm, in the “thick atmosphere of earth,” they need to feed on the blood, smoke, and incense of sacrifices, presumably because it keeps their “bodies” sufficiently damp and heavy to remain here.³⁶ As mentioned earlier, these ideas had a long history in Christian apologetic by the time Origen began to write on the topic. In what follows, we will see the ways in which Porphyry’s ideas reflect those of both Origen and his predecessors.

In certain fragments Andrew Smith classifies as belonging to the work On Philosophy from Oracles, namely those preserved in Preparation for the Gospel (Smith 314–15), Porphyry further elaborates the reasons why handling and ingestion of meat were more universally problematic. His discussion begins very generally by emphasizing the ubiquity of malign spirits. He embarks in this manner in order to highlight the constant danger these spirits pose to the unsuspecting and nonvigilant. This view accords well with ideas about the ubiquity of evil, or at least capricious, spirits in more general currency in late antique society. For instance, Porphyry claims that every house is full of evil daemons. So too are human bodies, and this possession takes place, predictably, through the ingestion of meat. He writes: “For when we are eating, they approach and sit near the body, and the purifications [rituals associated with meals] are because of this, not because of the gods, so that those ones [the evil daemons] might depart. But they especially delight in blood and impurities and they take enjoyment of these entering into those who use them.”³⁷

Minucius Felix comes very close to this sort of explanation for demonic possession in his Octavius.³⁸ There he writes that these evil daemons seek to gorge themselves “on the reek of altars and the sacrifice of beasts.”³⁹ Indeed, they go to great lengths to be propitiated in this way: “being subtle spirits, they secretly creep into our bodies, contriving diseases, terrifying our minds, and wrenching our limbs.”⁴⁰ Minucius Felix calls their disturbed victims “soothsayers … though they are in no temple.”⁴¹ On receiving what they desire, namely the fumes and blood of sacrifices, the evil spirits affect a cure by leaving their victims.⁴²

Porphyry also held these beings accountable for human illness and plague.⁴³ Significantly, the idea that evil daemons are responsible for disease runs counter to the contentions of Plotinus, Porphyry’s teacher. In Enneads 2.9.14, Plotinus critiques those members of his circle whom Porphyry called “Gnostics” for believing that diseases are caused by daemons.⁴⁴ Plotinus contrasts this “invasion” model of the origin of disease with the medical one, in which disease is the result of excess, deficiency, strain, or decay. Plotinus mocks the “Gnostic” view by inquiring as to how various cures work on these spirits. He asks, “Does the [daemon] starve, and does the drug make it waste away, and does it sometimes come out all at once or stay inside?”⁴⁵ The view that Plotinus mocks seems to be the one Porphyry adopted, namely that evil daemons do enter the body through ingestion and linger there, causing various ailments and digestive complaints. It is also a view represented in many Christian authors. As Dale Martin points out in The Corinthian Body, Christian communities, such as the one in Corinth, had a number of different disease aetiologies they could draw on to explain human suffering, pollution, and illness. He argues that the tensions in the Corinthian community over whether or not one could eat food sacrificed to idols was the result of a misunderstanding between elite and nonelite members of the group over the causes of disease. The model Martin associates with elite members of the Corinthian community reflects the understanding that the human being is hierarchically ordered in a way that reflects cosmic order, and that health is a function of maintaining proper balance. The model he associates with lower-class Christians at Corinth is based on an understanding that the body is permeable and vulnerable, and that its boundaries are in need of protection from pollution, which causes disease and suffering. This pollution was primarily understood to be spiritual. In other words, the body could be possessed by other spirits.⁴⁶

In another fragment from On Philosophy from Oracles, Porphyry suggests something similar, namely that the body is permeable to evil daemons who affect it by inciting the human being to partake even more enthusiastically of gustatory pleasures. The presence of these spirits is manifest in terms of the consequences of this indulgence in the form of grunting and breaking wind. Porphyry writes:

For universally, the vehemence of the desire towards anything, and the impulse of the lust of the spirit, is intensified from no other cause than their [the evil daemons’] presence; and they also force men to fall into inarticulate noises and flatulence by sharing the same enjoyment with them. For where there is a drawing in of much breath, either because the stomach has been inflated by indulgence, or because eagerness from the intensity of pleasure breathes out much and draws in much of the outer air, let this be clear proof to you of the presence of such spirits there.⁴⁷

In other words, evil daemons both cause and benefit from human gluttony and desire for pleasure, possibly even sexual pleasure.⁴⁸ And they incite human beings to participate in these more enthusiastically. At the same time, they may physically enter the body in such moments through the breath. Indeed, ingestion and incorporation of one body into another, either through eating or through copulation, is a risky business, one fraught with the dangers of pollution and alteration. Here Porphyry has signaled that danger by positing the presence of wicked daemons as participants in such human acts. These ideas mirror his position in On Abstinence, where he tells us that human alimentary and sacrificial action feeds the pneumatic vessels of these spirits. They also reflect ideas found in earlier and contemporary Christian texts.

Although Porphyry differed from Plotinus, we find parallel ideas in Christian writings. I am not making an argument that Porphyry read any of the works I discuss in what follows, but that he was certainly aware of what Christians were saying about evil daemons, given his connections to and criticism of Origen and other Christian writers and exegetes. Porphyry himself relates in his Life of Plotinus that Origen wrote a work entitled On the Daemons. He also tells us that he spent time studying with Origen. Until very recently, many scholars have assumed that this could not be the Christian Origen, but the careful work of scholars such as Thomas Böhm, Pier Beatrice, and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser has convinced many to the contrary.⁴⁹

The Christian work that comes closest to Porphyry’s assertion that evil daemons enter into the bodies of human beings to enjoy food and sex is the Pseudo-Clementine Homily 9. Although this anonymous work is usually dated to the fourth century, scholars contend that it is based on earlier material that would have been contemporary with or earlier than Porphyry’s works.⁵⁰ In the Homily, the author explains why evil daemons come to inhabit the bodies of the intemperate: “Being spirits, and having desires after meats and drinks and sexual pleasures, but not being able to partake of these by reason of their being spirits, and wanting organs fitted for their enjoyment, they enter into the bodies of men in order that, getting organs to minister to them, they may obtain the things that they wish.”⁵¹ The main difference between this homily and Porphyry’s views seems to be that in the former, evil daemons need to borrow a human body in order to partake of the pleasures they seek, whereas in Porphyry their pneumatic vessel serves as the means by which they can enjoy smoke and blood. Despite this difference, the parallels are striking.

The parallels between Porphyry and contemporary Christian writers regarding the nature and effects of evil daemons do not end there. In On Abstinence, Porphyry accuses these spirits of being the cause of almost every form of natural and human evil.⁵² According to him, they are responsible for plagues, as noted earlier, crop failures, and earthquakes. Furthermore, they incite humans to lust and longing for wealth and power, all of which lead to civil conflicts and wars.⁵³ And they do all of this by deceiving ordinary people into thinking that they are gods, and also that “the same [behavior] applies to the greatest gods, to the extent that even the best god is made liable to these accusations.”⁵⁴

In general, then, Porphyry and many Christians shared the view that evil daemons can and do inhabit the human body and cause disease. And he agreed with them more generally that those traditional rituals requiring the slaughter of animals were part of a grand conspiracy on the part of these spirits to get what they desired and even needed to thrive—the blood and smoke of sacrifices. In this way, they deceived the unwitting about the nature of true divinity. Finally, both Porphyry and his Christian counterparts believed that participation in these sorts of practices was ultimately polluting and could lead to demonic possession. Indeed, the issues of purity and pollution are central in both cases.⁵⁵

Origen’s Concerning Daemons as a Possible Source for Porphyry

Modern readers may find themselves surprised by the close agreement between Christian writers and Porphyry on these matters, and by Porphyry’s demonization of animal sacrifice. But this is only surprising if one assumes that religious identity was the primary category that determined the views third-century intellectuals adopted and developed. As mentioned in the Introduction, the assumption of conflict and strict boundary maintenance between groups with different religious identities in antiquity has been challenged in the case of early Jewish-Christian relations. It has also been overturned in the case of Christian philosophers and “Hellenes” or Greco-Roman intellectuals. Work by Elizabeth DePalma Digeser has done much to contribute to the rethinking of religious identity in the third century in particular.⁵⁶

In the first three chapters of her recent book, A Threat to Public Piety, Digeser carefully outlines the many connections between thinkers such as Origen, Plotinus, and Porphyry, by combing through what we know about their lives, their education, and how they fit into the important and contested lineage of the elusive Alexandrian teacher Ammonius Saccas.⁵⁷ By convincingly dismantling the “two Origen hypothesis”—the view that there must have been two students of Ammonius Saccas named Origen, one a Christian, the other a “pagan”—Digeser demonstrates that Porphyry knew Origen well and spent time with him as a student. ⁵⁸

Hence, Porphyry’s views on evil daemons are less surprising when one begins to consider the likely connections between these third-century Platonists on either side of the very permeable Christian/non-Christian divide. It is not unlikely, for instance, that Porphyry derived some of his thinking about spirits from Origen. Indeed, Proclus, in his Commentary on the Timaeus, tells us as much.⁵⁹ Porphyry himself informs his readers that he was familiar with the contents of Origen’s library and was able to identify his teacher’s main philosophical influences.⁶⁰ Furthermore, both Porphyry and Longinus tell us that Origen wrote a work called Concerning Daemons (περὶ τῶν δαιμόνων).⁶¹ A number of modern authors have argued for Porphyry’s dependence on Origen for his views on evil daemons, but most of these have subscribed to the two Origen hypothesis. Hans Lewy, who believed that Origen, the author of the work on daemons, was not the same person as the Christian Origen,⁶² devoted his “Excursus XI” in Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy to establishing that Porphyry’s “long description of demonology” in On Abstinence, a discourse Porphyry attributes to “some Platonists” (τῶν Πλατωνιχῶν τινες), was, in reality, based on Origen’s work Concerning Daemons.⁶³ This opinion is not limited to supporters of the two Origen hypothesis. Beatrice, who identifies the two Origens as one and the same person, agrees with Lewy about the likelihood that Porphyry’s demonology was based on this treatise.⁶⁴ This work, as we will see in the next chapter, is not solely devoted to a discussion of evil daemons. Rather, it lays out a more complex hierarchy of spirits in the sublunary realm, both good and evil. But, as we will also see, Porphyry adopted many of Origen’s ideas about these good daemons as well.

We should not underestimate the significance of Porphyry’s likely adoption of some of Origen’s theories on evil daemons, especially given the fact that they directly contravene those of his most beloved teacher, Plotinus. Porphyry must have been absolutely convinced of the association of evil daemons with the blood and smoke of animal sacrifices. He must have been thoroughly persuaded that participating in these rites and ingesting meat were polluting practices, and highly compromising for those pursuing a philosophical path in hopes of union with spirits of a higher order. In light of Origen’s emphasis on the importance of ascetic practice to the life of the good Christian philosopher, and his belief in the ultimate transformability of the body itself, and, finally, his thorough allegorizing away of Jewish sacrifices in his Homilies on Leviticus, it is likely that he made a very strong argument for abstention in this regard.

Porphyry and Ancient Medical and Biological Thinking on Blood and Pneuma

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.

In On the Cave of the Nymphs, a longish allegorical interpretation of ten lines from Homer’s Odyssey,⁷⁰ Porphyry interprets the cave as a symbol of the descent and re-ascent of the soul into and out of the body. In his interpretation he ties the mistiness of the cave to blood. And he furthermore associates both blood and moisture with desire, pleasure, reproduction, and bodily existence. He writes that “right here in this world the spirit becomes damp or saturated, as a function of its sexual desire, and the soul drags a damp vapor along with it from its descent toward γένεσις.”⁷¹ According to Porphyry, this descent into genesis is accompanied by a certain kind of pleasure for the soul. As a parallel, Porphyry cites other celestial souls, which are, according to the Stoics, nourished by terrestrial vapors: “The sun was nourished by the vapors rising from the sea, the moon by the waters of spring and rivers, and the stars by vapors rising from the earth.”⁷² In this way, “There is a compulsion for souls, whether they are embodied or disembodied but still dragging along some corporeal material—and most of all for those souls that are just about to be bound to blood and moist bodies—to descend to moisture and, once they have been moistened, to become embodied.”⁷³ In other words, for Porphyry, all souls that have descended into the celestial and sublunar regions are associated with some kind of body made up of varying proportions of fire, air, water, and earth. And the bond between their soul and body, that is, their pneumatic vessel, is nourished by moisture.

Porphyry also uses these elemental principles to explain how certain divinatory practices work by using the souls of the dead. These souls are “attracted by pouring out” the moist substances of “blood and bile.”⁷⁴ Additionally, he explains the physical appearance of these ghosts and shades by employing elemental theory and the various characteristics associated with water (namely moistness and coldness). He thereby connects these elements and their characteristics with the humors of the human body (in this case, blood and bile). He writes: “souls in love with the body drag along with them a damp spirit that condenses like a cloud—for moisture in the air when condensed becomes cloud—and when the spirit in them condenses they become visible because of the excess of moisture. From souls of this sort come the apparitions that sometimes confront people, tinting and manifesting their spirits according to their fantasies.”⁷⁵ Those among them who are “body-loving” take on this moisture and become visible. So just as the sun is nourished by the seas’ exhalations, the souls of the dead are, for a time, drawn to and nourished by spilled blood and bile. In On the Cave of the Nymphs, Porphyry does not explicitly mention evil daemons. But as discussed earlier, the same principles apply in the fall of good daemons into vice and a baser form of existence. According to Porphyry, the only difference between good and evil daemons is that the latter are spirits that have identified with their “pneumatic” part and seek to feed it excessively.

A similar sort of reasoning about the association of blood, materiality, and the realm of generation governs a number of things Porphyry says in On the Styx.⁷⁶ Fragment 377F is particularly apropos in this regard. On the Styx, like On the Cave of the Nymphs, takes its departure from certain Homeric verses, in particular, things the poet said about Hades and its various rivers.⁷⁷ The work exists in fragmentary form, and what remains draws on numerous authorities for its main arguments, from pre-Socratic philosophers such as Empedocles to historians such as Herodotus to the second-century Edessan Christian philosopher Bardaisan, whose accounts of certain Brahmanic water rites Porphyry finds particularly fruitful.

In Fragment 377F, Porphyry creates a map of the afterlife in which he situates various kinds of souls, both human and daemonic. He divides human souls into “buried” and “unburied,” by which he seems to mean those who have been released from the body and those whose souls are still attached to their corporeality in some way. In Homer, the buried and unburied are taken literally. In Porphyry’s case, the “unburied,” those who have not been allowed to cross the river and enter the gates of Hades proper, participate in the memory of the actions of their lives.⁷⁸ This happens to those souls who failed to live justly or to work toward their release from embodiment. The memories they continue to experience serve as punishment and may also have a remedial effect. Porphyry writes, “For they receive appearances (phantasias) of all the terrifying things they have done in life and are punished.”⁷⁹ Their earthly misdeeds are avenged in this manner.⁸⁰ But the just, the ones who have sufficiently freed themselves from the bonds of corporeal existence and its attendant desires, passions, and pollutions, are able to pass inside the gates of Hades. There they blissfully forget their life on earth and are known to one another only “by the particular way of thinking which they have obtained in Hades,” and no longer as humans. In other words, they are no longer identifiable by their earthly deeds or by their appearance, which manifests itself in shade-like form for those still dwelling on the other side of the river.⁸¹ Rather, their manner of reflection serves to identify and distinguish them.

As in On the Cave of the Nymphs, blood is the substance that calls forth these spirits from their forgetful state in the context of necromantic ritual. Porphyry writes: “Nor would they speak about human things to those humans still living, unless they receive a vapor of blood and thereby think human things, which those outside also think though they do not drink of the blood, since they have the condition of the knowledge that occurs in the souls of mortals from drinking blood.”⁸² Indeed, if they did not drink blood in this way, the souls of the blessed would remain in their state of happy forgetfulness about “human affairs” and would not prophesy to living beings about their fates.

Porphyry associates blood with the remembrance of human life because it is the substance that most clearly represents embodied existence at its basest level, the level of nutrition and reproduction. He explicitly connects what he takes to be Homer’s meaning with medical ideas about blood, attributing to the poet the opinion that “for humans the thinking about mortal things is in their blood.”⁸³ Porphyry further harmonizes the position he attributes to Homer with one he finds in Empedocles, the pre-Socratic who most focused on medicine and the body. He quotes Empedocles as saying, “Nourished in the waves of blood opposite the semen, thought there begins especially to circulate in humans, for blood around the heart in humans is the thought.”⁸⁴ In other words, when blood reaches the heart, an organ that is naturally fiery, the humor is heated to create a vapor that gives rise to thoughts related to “mortal things”—things pertaining to embodied existence, or thoughts that are connected with passions and images.⁸⁵ This sort of thinking, relying as it does on sense perception and images, is related to the faculty of phantasia.

Hence, Porphyry draws on specific associations between blood and corporeal existence that he finds in currency in the Greek learning of his day, associations that make his adoption of a predominantly Christian view of blood sacrifice plausible. In fact, it is more than likely that Christian ideas would also have been shaped, to some degree, by the same intellectual currents. For instance, Origen frequently drew on medical ideas in his theological and philosophical works.⁸⁶ Placing Porphyry’s works within this larger context—namely the Greek intellectual heritage shared by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers, as well as the educational milieu to which both Origen and Porphyry belonged—helps explain why Porphyry, to all appearances a staunch defender of Greek religion, especially against its detractors, the Christians, would have excised from religious practice a whole set of rituals considered for centuries to be absolutely vital to the well-being of states, communities, families, and individuals.

The allegorizing mode of Porphyry’s philosophical reasoning in On the Cave of the Nymphs and On the Styx also presents modern readers with a viable solution to the apparent contradiction in Porphyry’s stance on the association of evil daemons and sacrifice Eusebius accuses him of in the Preparation for the Gospel. As mentioned earlier, when Porphyry cites the Apollonian oracle on sacrifice, he is likely doing so in order to deal in figural terms with the literal sacrifices the oracle lists. Each of the sacrifices enumerated in the oracle may have been the subject of a figural interpretation that posited a hidden meaning and explicated it. Porphyry himself says that this oracle contains “an orderly classification of the gods.”⁸⁷ One finds Origen doing something very similar with regard to Hebrew sacrifice in his Homilies on Leviticus. In some of these sermons, he carefully and systematically interprets away the need for the literal slaughter of animals for the expiation of sins in ancient Hebrew cult and instead gives them a new allegorical and explicitly Christian meaning.⁸⁸

Hence, both Porphyry and Origen share in a similar culture that makes Porphyry’s adoption of a seemingly Christian position on blood sacrifice plausible, a fact that is obscured by Eusebius’s polemics but also by the assumption of many modern scholars that the positions philosophers tended to take on issues both theological and ritualistic were determined first and foremost by religious identity. The implicit corollary to this problematic approach is that religious identity in the third century was itself clearly articulated, fixed, and static. This assumption has been vigorously challenged in the case of Christian identity for at least the first four centuries C.E. But scholars sometimes treat traditional Mediterranean polytheism as a static monolith, when in fact “Hellenic” or traditional Greco-Roman identity was itself very much in flux and under construction, especially among the non-Christian Platonists under discussion in the current study, as we will see.

By focusing on key points of conceptual parallelism and evidence for dialogic exchange between people such as Porphyry and Origen, this study does not deny that Christians and non-Christians were at odds with each other at certain crucial junctures both in texts and in the world. However, part of the aim of this chapter is to challenge the conflict model, which tends to view this period in terms of predominantly hostile interactions between Christians and so-called pagans, a model that focuses on difference and assumes fixed and static religious identities and group boundaries.⁸⁹ Highlighting moments of shared understanding across religious boundaries, as well as the flexibility and permeability of these boundaries themselves, serves to call the conflict model into question as an appropriate lens through which to view third-century exchanges among intellectuals such as Origen and Porphyry. The rejection of this model, however, does not mean that important points of disagreement are ignored or even deemphasized. Rather, it frequently allows scholars to relocate these points of difference in a more representative and illuminating fashion.

Ritual, Theurgy, and the Status of Matter in Porphyry and Iamblichus

There is one related issue on which Porphyry did differ from Christian writers. That is in his prognosis concerning the chances of the ordinary person for avoiding the pollution associated with evil daemons. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Porphyry held the view that participation in animal sacrifice and the consumption of meat were polluting activities. Given that the vast majority of people at the time would not have shared Porphyry’s views on the matter, from his perspective relatively few people lived a life free from demonic influence and pollution. Yet he appears to have been relatively unconcerned about the fate of these people, and focused specifically on the best conduct for those seeking to live a philosophical life. Although Porphyry’s position is most starkly opposed to Origen’s in this regard, the latter expressing a more universal concern for the spiritual well-being of all ensouled creatures, it would be a mistake to suppose that Christians were the real target of Porphyry’s argument in On Abstinence.⁹⁰ He himself indicates that he contends with other philosophers.⁹¹ In particular, Porphyry was involved in an ongoing debate with his fellow Platonist and former student, Iamblichus, a debate that, at the very least, seems to have been carried on in a number of their works, from Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo and On Abstinence to Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries.⁹² In fact, Iamblichus wrote his On the Mysteries in response to Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo, and scholars generally agree that the letter was somehow aimed at Iamblichus.⁹³

In particular, Porphyry disagreed with Iamblichus about the role of ritual, and specifically blood sacrifice, in the reunion of the philosopher’s soul with the divine. In spite of the fact that Iamblichus thought ritual and theurgy to be more important than Porphyry did, Porphyry’s idea of the philosophical life had a clear behavioral dimension and focus. His emphasis on a vegetarian diet and the proper order of appropriate sacrifices to the gods is evidence of such a focus. Furthermore, Porphyry did not discount the importance of ritual for ordinary people. Iamblichus, at times, presents Porphyry as holding the view that philosophers can merely think their way to unity with the god, but it is not unlike Iamblichus to highlight his differences with Porphyry in the starkest terms possible. This has often led scholars to assume that Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo was a kind of attack on Iamblichus. It is difficult to gauge the tone of Porphyry’s missive, because it exists only in fragments embedded in the work of his opponent. But it may very well be that Porphyry was genuinely hoping to query Iamblichus concerning a series of questions about which Porphyry had not entirely determined his own position. Ritual was not unimportant to Porphyry, as we will see in subsequent chapters. And Iamblichus is likely simplifying and overstating Porphyry’s view for effect. But what is certain is that Iamblichus set more store by rituals and their efficacy for uniting the soul with divinity than did Porphyry.

Indeed, Iamblichus’s response to Porphyry’s letter involved a thoroughgoing defense of ritual. He used the term “theurgy” to represent his theorization of sacrifice, emphasizing the importance of theurgy, above theology and philosophy.⁹⁴ The term “theurgy” (θεουργία), meaning “god work,” originated with second-century Platonists who used it to refer to the “deifying power of Chaldean rituals.”⁹⁵ Porphyry seems to have been the first person to use this term after the Chaldaean Oracles, and Porphyry and Iamblichus were actively defining it in the course of discussing it.⁹⁶ Iamblichus’s definition of theurgy was comprehensive and all-encompassing. He argued that the traditional rituals of ancient polytheisms were established and given to human souls by the gods and that these cult practices exemplified divine principles that provided for the deification of the human soul.⁹⁷ The human soul, according to Iamblichus, was the lowest of divine beings (ἔσκατος κόσμος) and the one most entangled with matter. Hence, it needed to be freed from the body to realize its true nature.⁹⁸ Theurgy was, in part, the ritual process of loosening the bonds between the human soul and matter. But Iamblichus also held the view that there were ritual actions appropriate to every stage of the soul’s re-ascent.⁹⁹ Furthermore, as Gregory Shaw has noted, one of Iamblichus’s primary concerns was to redress the distorted vision of the soul’s participation in embodiment depicted in the works of Plotinus and Porphyry, a depiction that their successor felt effaced the vision of embodiment of the Timaeus tradition and exported the “demonic” from within the soul out into the cosmos.¹⁰⁰ According to Iamblichus, the Plotinian/Porphyrian vision denied the soul’s participation in the demiurgic project of creating the material cosmos. This demiurgic work was mirrored in the work of the theurge, both being forms of “god work.”¹⁰¹ Everyone who practiced religion in the proper way and participated in god-ordained rituals practiced theurgy and could attain some measure of communion with the higher gods.

It is not surprising that we find a variety of viewpoints concerning embodiment among followers of Plato. As Dominic O’Meara points out, these philosophers had to contend with an apparent contradiction within the writings of Plato regarding how and why the soul comes to be embodied. According to O’Meara, the Timaeus suggests that the soul “had a constructive mission in the world to vivify, organize, and perfect it.”¹⁰² The Phaedrus, on the other hand, relates the story of the winged soul, which, “due to some moral failure,” has “fallen from the heavenly retinue of the gods and was plunged into a life of misery in the body.”¹⁰³ Plotinus resolved this contradiction by positing that the soul “always retained in part its presence in the intelligible world from which it came.”¹⁰⁴ Hence, for Plotinus, the soul does not fully descend into matter. Iamblichus, however, supported a view of the soul as fully descended. He resolved the same contradiction by positing different orders of souls. He divides souls between those “that are in close contemplative union with true intelligible being and are companions (sunapadoi) and akin to the gods, and those souls who, already before the descent to the material world, are morally corrupt.”¹⁰⁵ The former can “preserve their freedom and purity from the body,” and as a result they can “purify, perfect, and ‘save’ the material world.”¹⁰⁶ The latter descend for “moral improvement and punishment.”¹⁰⁷ For Iamblichus, it was the role of those souls descending for the benefit of others, that is, true theurgists, to know how to lead others along the right path to moral correction and salvation.

Given this soteriological aspect of Iamblichus’s theurgic program, it is not surprising that his criticisms of Porphyry’s questions and philosophical views are often pointed. He frequently represents his former teacher as naïve and confused. But there was a great deal at stake for both participants in this debate. As already noted, Porphyry was concerned that philosophers avoid demonic pollution, and he considered participation in animal sacrifice to be an impediment to the salvation of the philosopher’s soul. Iamblichus, on the other hand, was more generally concerned about the salvation of all souls and the role cultic practices played in the soteriological process. The question of the nature of evil daemons and their association with blood served as a flash point in the disagreement between the two Platonists.

Iamblichus and Porphyry on Evil Daemons and Blood Sacrifice

Throughout significant portions of On the Mysteries, Iamblichus chides Porphyry for the latter’s apparent failure to understand the nature of daemons, both good and evil, as well as that of other kinds of spiritual beings. In Book 1, Iamblichus presents Porphyry as baffled about whether gods and daemons have bodies and precisely how they relate to their corporeality.¹⁰⁸ But the main bone of contention between the two on the matter of daemons arises in Book 5. There, Iamblichus takes issue with Porphyry’s assertion that some spirits “are ensnared by the vapors of, in particular, blood sacrifices.”¹⁰⁹ Iamblichus places this statement about evil daemons beside Porphyry’s other assertions about the way in which terrestrial vapors nourish heavenly bodies, in order to critique Porphyry’s view that deities, and specifically daemons, somehow depend on humans for nourishment. Iamblichus writes:

For it is surely not the case that the creator has set before all living creatures on sea and land copious and readily available sustenance, but for those beings superior to us has contrived a deficiency of this. He would not surely, have provided for all other living things, naturally and from their own resources, an abundance of the daily necessities of life, while to daemons he gave a source of nourishment which was adventitious and dependent on the contributions of us mortals, and thus, it would seem, if we through laziness or some other pretext were to neglect such contributions, the bodies of daemons would suffer deprivation, and would experience disequilibrium and disorder.¹¹⁰

Here Iamblichus appears to misunderstand Porphyry; whether willfully or not, we cannot be certain.¹¹¹ As mentioned earlier, Porphyry held the view that the pneumatic vessel associated with celestial and sublunary spirits is nourished by vapors, but he in no way makes the well-being of the deities and daemons themselves dependent on these vapors or on sacrifices. Evil daemons, in identifying with their material aspect, seek to feed that aspect through blood and smoky vapors. However, this is a perversion of the proper relationship between soul and pneumatic vessel; this is indeed “disequilibrium and disorder.” The details of Iamblichus’s and Porphyry’s respective views on the vehicle of the soul are not of primary importance here, but Iamblichus casts the debate in these terms, taking issue with Porphyry’s interpretation of blood sacrifice as polluting and demonic.

Iamblichus himself does not have much to say on the nature of evil daemons and other maleficent spirits. He is generally far less preoccupied with their existence and nature, and unlike Porphyry, he does not have a speech about how they related to good daemons. He also attributes less responsibility to them for cosmic evil than does Porphyry. In general, Iamblichus engages with questions about evil in the context of discussing proper and improper ritual. Evil arises when a soul attempts to put certain portions of the universe into contact with other parts in such a way that it violates cosmic harmony. In other words, when one uses the natural sympatheia and philia built into the fabric of the cosmos improperly, phantoms, delusions, false images, and distorted epiphanies can arise. And in the context, in particular, of faulty “theurgic” or divinatory practices of this sort, evil daemons, those who have identified with the realm of generation, are able to deceive human beings and direct them to unjust ends. By this, Iamblichus means those ends that disrupt cosmic harmony, supplanting divine philia with the illusion of divine contact, ends that perpetuate the disunity that is part of the realm of generation.

For instance, in Book 3, Iamblichus responds to Porphyry’s assertion that there are some who, by standing on “magical characters,” are “filled with spiritual influence.”¹¹² Iamblichus counters that when these amateur ritualists seek to employ such dubious divinatory techniques for questionable ends, all kinds of things can go awry. Instead of calling forth the presence of the gods, Iamblichus argues, such practices “produce a certain motion of the soul contrary to the gods,” and draw from them “an indistinct and phantom-like appearance which sometimes, because of the feebleness of its power, is likely to be disturbed by evil daemonic influences.”¹¹³ In such instances, the gods, given their generous nature, are inclined to respond out of friendship. But because they have been invoked or petitioned in the wrong fashion, they respond commensurately with a sort of second-rate epiphany. Thus, improper divinatory techniques, faulty theurgy we might say, put the ritualist at risk of falling prey to these spirits. This is the extent to which Iamblichus engages with questions about evil daemons and their cosmic effects and activities. And it is telling that his focus is on proper ritual, the main bone of contention with Porphyry.

To return, then, to the main point, contrary to Porphyry’s view that blood sacrifices propitiate and feed evil spirits, Iamblichus asserts that all sacrifices are divinely ordained.¹¹⁴ And these ordained practices work in such a way as to affirm and strengthen the bonds of philia and sympatheia established by gods, heroes, daemons and other good spirits with human souls. When humans perform divine rites, they activate relationships already built into the fabric and order of the cosmos. According to Iamblichus, each cosmic level has its appropriate set of rituals.¹¹⁵ In the case of blood sacrifices, these rites do not propitiate evil daemons, rather they are the “perfect sacrifice” for those “material gods” (ὁι ὑλάιοι) who “embrace matter within themselves and impose order on it.”¹¹⁶ Iamblichus writes, “And so, in sacrifices, dead bodies deprived of life, the slaughter of animals and the consumption of their bodies, and every sort of change and destruction, and in general processes of dissolution are suitable to those gods who preside over matter.”¹¹⁷

These animal sacrifices help and heal the worshipper who is constrained by the body and suffers accordingly. They also aid in the release of the soul from its attachment to the body. Indeed, Iamblichus argues that human beings are frequently involved with gods and good daemons who watch over the body, “purifying it from long-standing impurities or freeing it from disease and filling it with health, or cutting away from it what is heavy or sluggish.”¹¹⁸

Iamblichus uses fire to explain how sacrifices symbolize the way in which these spirits help human souls to become free: “The offering of sacrifice by means of fire is actually such as to consume and annihilate matter, assimilate it to itself rather than assimilating itself to matter, and elevating it towards the divine and heavenly and immaterial fire.”¹¹⁹ The burning of matter pleases the gods and daemons because it symbolizes the procedures by which souls are liberated from the bonds of generation and become more like the gods.¹²⁰ One sacrifices and burns animals, their flesh and blood, in order to become free from flesh and body. Instead of being a polluting practice, animal sacrifice was a purifying one.

Given the transformative nature of sacrifice, Iamblichus insists that the order in which sacrifices are to be performed could be neither altered nor circumvented. Even the individual dedicating his or her life to philosophical pursuits and theological speculation, if he or she wished to be healed of the suffering associated with embodiment and generation, must perform the proper sacrifices in the correct order and manner.¹²¹ This position runs counter to the one Iamblichus presents as Porphyry’s, namely that one can think one’s way out of the bonds of nature, regardless of one’s ritual participation. Porphyry was of the opinion that the philosopher did not need theurgy or ritual practices involving matter, but could reach God by virtue of the intellect. Iamblichus, however, denied that philosophers could escape such practices in this way.

Sacrifice and Soteriology: Porphyry and Iamblichus on the Via Universalis

Porphyry’s position raised another concern for Iamblichus. Although he fully recognized that not all human beings could become completely purified or free from the grip of matter and return to the soul’s source, and although he reserved this end for the true philosopher, Iamblichus did not wish to consign ordinary people to a polluted existence, laboring under the delusion that the sacrifices they performed benefited them, when in fact the sacrifices contributed to their spiritual demise. He writes: “So if one does not grant some such mode of worship to cities and peoples not freed from the fated processes of generation and from a society dependent on the body, one will continue to fail of both types of good, both the immaterial and the material; for they are not capable of receiving the former, and for the latter they are not making the right offering.”¹²² In other words, Iamblichus objected to what he understood to be Porphyry’s denial of universal salvation, a path of participation in the gifts of the gods common to both ordinary people and philosophers or theurgists.

Augustine has been a source of confusion when it comes to Porphyry’s soteriology. In his City of God, Augustine claimed that Porphyry was searching for a universal way, a way to salvation for all souls, not just the souls of a few elite philosophers.¹²³ On Augustine’s account, Porphyry failed in his endeavor because he could not overcome his pride and accept that Christianity constituted the answer to his search. It is impossible to determine whether Porphyry ever earnestly sought to find some via universalis. But it is obvious from On Abstinence that he felt that the salvific regimen he proposed to Firmus Castricianus was one that very few people could attain.¹²⁴ Hence, Porphyry was making an argument for a form of ritual purity that he openly recognized could be achieved by only a small elite group of specially trained, spiritually devout philosophers. By upbraiding his friend for incontinence where animal food was concerned, he was not prescribing a way of life for everyone. Rather, he highlighted precisely what set him and his peers apart from the ordinary person, namely, his theological knowledge and his ascetic purity.

Despite the fact that Iamblichus expressed a more general concern about the spiritual well-being of people other than members of the philosophical elite and his own theurgic caste, he was equally invested in establishing his own authority as one who could lead others on the path to salvation, as we shall see in Chapter 4. However, elaborating the universal scope of his soteriological message was precisely the way in which he sought to do this. In this way, Iamblichus placed his own theological and theurgical expertise in a larger context than did Porphyry. He saw himself as providing a means for the salvation of more than just the philosopher. This salvation may have been only partial or truncated. But at the very least, he set the average practitioner of traditional religion on the path to salvation through the latter’s participation in rituals that honored different orders of good spirits. Furthermore, the theurgist or priestly philosopher was the one who could broker this salvation effectively for others. So although both Porphyry and Iamblichus admitted that few souls could become completely purified and freed from embodiment, Iamblichus saw purification as a process in which all souls could participate. He disagreed with the idea that most souls were constrained to live a polluted existence, a pollution that afflicted them not only because they were prone to enjoy a good meal and participate enthusiastically in carnal pleasure now and then, but, even more tragically, because they worshipped what they believed were gods, with harmful sacrifices.

Although Iamblichus sought to remedy some of the difficult implications of Porphyry’s views on popular religion, and although he sought to put all participants in traditional ritual on the path to purification, he still maintained with Porphyry that it was not possible for everyone to be a philosopher and to achieve complete release from corporeality and generation. One aspect of Christianity that was so offensive to many intellectual elites in the late ancient world was the view that all believers were like philosophers, not only saved and purified, but also in possession of true wisdom.¹²⁵ This was, for those living the philosophical life, an impossibility and an affront. Without rigorous ascetic training and intense contemplation, there was no way that the ordinary person could be on a par with a Plotinus or a Sosipatra. What was equally offensive to some Hellenes was the way in which many average, everyday Christians did take up ascetic practices, and at times, with embarrassing zeal. For Porphyry, the idea that the average person who enjoyed sex or food was at risk of becoming possessed was not troubling in the same way it was for Origen. Because Porphyry followed the Platonic belief in the reincarnation of souls, the average human being who had regular congress with evil daemons in this life, and who lived in a state of pollution, was not eternally doomed as he or she might be in some Christian schemes of things. Rather, although the soul of such an individual might descend into Hades at the end of this life, being too moist and heavy to rise above the earth and ascend to the supralunary sphere, it might well have a chance in the next life to live a relatively unpolluted existence. This soul could dry out, so to speak, through ascetic and contemplative practices.¹²⁶ It could be strengthened and purified. Furthermore, most Platonists believed that the world was eternal and objected to the Christian view that God would act in the cosmos in a historical way.¹²⁷ Origen was one of the most innovative of early Christian writers in creating a linear, historical narrative for the soul’s descent and eventual salvation, one that fundamentally undercut the cyclicality of the Platonic framework. Hence, although Origen and Porphyry shared similar views regarding the polluting effects of blood sacrifices, Origen, like most other Christian thinkers, believed that this demonic pollution should and could be avoided by everyone. The principal means for doing so was to avoid participating in traditional cult.

On the other hand, although Porphyry and Iamblichus believed that ordinary people who participated in polluting practices or those who failed to live as philosophers and theurgists had multiple opportunities to get it right, so to speak, they disagreed violently about the place of ritual in the salvation of human souls.

Conclusion

This chapter has reviewed the positions of a number of third-century Platonists on the ontological status of evil daemons, a first step in exploring their more comprehensive spiritual taxonomies. It has demonstrated that it would be difficult to predict the precise positions of thinkers such as Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus based solely on what we might assume are their religious or ideological affiliations. Reflection on daemons and other spirits in the late ancient cosmic hierarchy results in strange bedfellows, as we have seen. For instance, Porphyry is more akin to Origen and other Christian apologists in his genealogical account of evil daemons and in his estimation of the cosmic damage and destruction wrought by these creatures. Further instances of this phenomenon emerge when we explore the more global taxonomic discourses of these philosophers, their comprehensive efforts to locate and fix spirits in universal taxonomies. These totalizing discourses are the subject of the next chapter.