I think I believe in angels
Not Christian ones either, but platonic ones
I have no idea who they would be other than philosophers freed from incarnations
One is Voltaire and another is Hypatia
I’m sure Seneca, Socrates, and Plato are up there too but so far Voltaire and Hypatia for sure
Oh Hierocles of Alexandria is definately an angel.
According to what I’ve read, they exist in the aether underneath the moon. Hekate being associated with the underworld and moon is the torch bearer to those spirits.
You basically call on them in times of need. But I believe you have to do it artfully
My hunch is when you die, your soul slips into the aether and is either reborn or lifted up to that region until the sun supernovas and the cycle begins anew some different space age
Else you are reincarnated based on your karmic debt
Except from Schibli
Posidonius theory of souls from sun to moon (daemons) to earth has been vindicated. Spirit realm is the sublunar aether that reaches down to earth.
Hierocles of Alexandria
Schibli
P 100-104
‘The rational soul and its vehicle’
“When the soul falls from God through its voluntary turning away from intellect and its forgetfulness of the good, the luminous body becomes the means of its descent. Hierocles, imitating Plato, describes the descent as a moulting: the vehicle looses its wings and carries the soul into an earthly body. Yet even in its incarnate state the rational soul is not in direct contact with its earthly residence, since the luminous body intervenes, creating a buffer between it and the mortal body. It is in fact not the rational soul, but the luminous body ‘as a kind of life’s and ‘generative of the life in matter’ that animates the soulless, mortal body. Moreover, in its median position, it receives all sorts of impressions or imaginations that come to us from the sensations experienced by the irrational soul through the earthly body. By taking up these functions the luminous body allows the rational soul to retain its essential immutability, but even so the soul suffers in consequence: it is weighed down and tainted by its affiliation with the mortal body. Therefore for the rational soul to be able to return to its pristine estate in the knowledge of God, it must not only practice the intellectual and moral virtues, but its vehicle must also be purified. Hierocles systematically delineates the required steps in the process of purification. During this lifetime we must purify out rational soul from our irrational substance, which had come to us as a result of the soul’s decline into generation. This purification extends to the luminous body, but the latter, because of its association with the material body, requires in addition a ‘more corporeal’ (like to bring attention here [sic.]) purification; in this connection Hierocles refers to the practices of theurgy. As the luminous vehicle is then delivered from its sympathy for the mortal body and purified of the weight and pollution of matter, it becomes winged again (Seneca art shows him winged, I’m sure Hypatia is up there, [sic.]) and able to bear the soul aloft to it’s original place of felicity in the ether below the moon (become akin to a daemon until the end of the cosmic year? Because I think the soul comes from stars and returns to stars in supernova [Sic.] ). Before we turn to Hierocles’ description of the ethereal realm, we must first establish what is the ultimate fate of the vehicle.
Porphyry taught that the pneumatic body was composed of elements from the planets; it served as the vehicle for the irrational part of the soul which is formed from the irrational powers in the cosmos as the soul descends through the celestial spheres (astrology [sic.]). Consequently, in the return of the soul, both vehicle and irrational soul dissolve again into the cosmos. Iamblichus’ position, on the other hand, is more difficult to determine. Proxlus reports that Iamblichus, in opposition to Porphyry, had stated that both vehicle and irrational element are indestructible, since the vehicle’s existence does not depend upon the heavenly bodies (in which case, coming from movable causes it would also be mutable) but derives from the gods (below demiurge, see Timaeus [sic.]) themselves who order the cosmos and create eternally. This report is in part corroborated by a passage from the De anima, in which Iamblichius asserts that the whole irrational life, though separated from thought, remains and is preserved in the cosmos. In a third text, from De mysteries, ablichus distinguishes gushes between the rational soul that derives from the intelligible and participated in the power of the demiurge, and the irrational soul that comes to us from the circuit of the heavenly bodies and accompanies their revolutions; the former is beyond the cycle of births and is the means by which we ascend to the intelligible gods, with the aid of theurgy, whereas the latter, though not said by Iblichus to be mortal, is subject to inner-cosmic fate. Now it is not very likely, as Proclus’ report by itself might lead us to believe, that Iamblichus ascribed absolute, that is, never-ending, immortality to the irrational soul–we know that it is separate from thought, tied up with the movements of fate within the cosmos (karmic debt [sic.]), and never enters the noetic rea; but he may well have given it a limited period of survival that lasted until the series of the rational soil’s incarnations were complete (cosmic year, eschaton, conflagoration [sic.]) and it no longer required the forces existing within the cosmos. But what of the vehicle itself, which, according to Proclus, originates not from the heavenly bodies but from the hypercosmic, eternally creating gods, and yet, according to the same testimony of Proclus, is tied up with the survival of the irrational soul? The most probable answer derives from the theoretical doctrines of Iamblichus: the vehicle, when it has been purified of everything irrational and material, reaps immortality along with the rational soul in the intelligible realm. Proclus’ solution (following Syrianus) apparently lay in combining the positions of both Porphyry and Iamblichus (find/synthesize an over arching unity to the philosophical problem, scholasticism [sic.]), for he assumed two vehicles (not counting the earthly body) (reminds me of string theories dimensions and diahresis, i.e. split up a problem into two parts [sic.]): the first is immortal, having been created by the demiurge and made up of the ‘highest’ points of the irrational life’; the second, which bears the irrational soul, is woven to the first by the lesser gods (timaeus [sic.]), but both it and the irrational soul are mortal.
In comparison with these formulations, Hierocles’ is simple. The luminous body, created by the demiurge and eternally attached to the rational soul, is immortal. Hierocles thus takes an intermediate place between Iamblichus and Proclus. Like Iamblichus the immortality of the vehicle can only be arrived at by clearing it of its association with the irrational soul, in Hierocles the vehicle, and a direct creation of god and expressly connected with the rational soul, is straightforwardly said to be immortal. Here it can be compared with Proclus’ first vehicle, the product of the demiurge.
As the bearer of the rational soul the luminous body fulfils a necessary function and is therefore allowed to share in the rational soil’s immortality. But the existence of the luminous body is not an unmixed blessing, since it also imposes certaiblikits on the soil’s ascent to god. Speaking of man’s restoration, Hierocles explains:
But since he had a congenital body he requires a place in the order of the stars and seeks, as it were, his position. For a body of this kind the place immediately below the moon (divine correspondence: Hekate underworld connection [sic.]) would be proper; it stands above corruptible bodies, but comes below the heavenly ones, the place the Pythagoreand call the free ether, ‘ether’ because it is an immaterial and eternal body, ‘free’ becaus4 it is free of material affections (ether is Zeus domain, [sic.]).
In this passage Hierocles combines various doctrines and concepts derived from Greel philosophy and literature. Inspired by the Platonic model of the astral origin of the soul and indeed by the generally held belief that souls come from and return to heaven, Hierocles speaks in a loose sense of man’s return to a place ‘in the order of the stars’; he specifies this place, however, as the ethereal realm below the moon and the other heavenly bodies, that is, the stars inhabited by the celestial gods. Here the soul comes to dwell with those beings who have never fallen away, the ethereal daemons. The notion that the soil, once freed from the body, unites with the heavenly ether as a substance akin to the soil’s own composition is frequently found in Greek literature from the fifth century BC onwards and by the Hellenistic age had developed into the image of a sublunar Hades (we found hells origin folks [sic.]). While Hierocles draws on this common tradition, he connects it specifically with the luminous body of the soul, for it is this eternal appendage of the soul, and not the soul itself, that is the ethereal body. Both are immaterial and eternal substances.”
