A philosopher asks how rituals could possibly move the gods. The answer comes back in the voice of an Egyptian priest, and it became the handbook of theurgy.
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Around AD 300 the philosopher Porphyry sent an open letter to an Egyptian priest named Anebo, full of sceptical questions: how can sacrifice, divination and invocation affect beings who are beyond all passion? This book is the reply. Iamblichus writes as Anebo's teacher, a priest called Abamon, and defends ritual as the way the soul really reaches the gods. We are pressing it now. It isn't readable yet, and your support decides how soon it opens.
Iamblichus came from Chalcis in Syria and lived from about 245 to 325. He had studied with Porphyry, the student and editor of Plotinus, and this book is where the two of them part ways. The title everyone uses, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, comes from Marsilio Ficino, who published a Latin paraphrase in 1497. In the Greek manuscripts it is the reply of the teacher Abamon to Porphyry's letter to Anebo.
For a Platonist, the central claim is startling. Thinking, Iamblichus says, does not join the theurgist to the gods, or philosophers would get there by argument. What joins them is the performance of rites beyond understanding and the power of symbols that only the gods know. The word at the centre is theourgia, god-work, set beside theologia, god-talk, and reading word by word you can watch him make the case for ritual in Plato's own vocabulary.
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