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One idea I've picked up from this thread and its predecessor that I quite like is that the afterlife is spending eternity in the immediate presence of God, and whether that's heaven or hell depends entirely on the individual.
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Jul 20, 2017 14:44
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Personally, I have a person extremely close to me, who has lost their faith and turned pretty bitter towards religiosity within few years. They're so close to me that due to their hostility I can't begin to preach to them to not alienate myself from them. I do feel sort of anguish and it's only really alleviated by two things: I can't know how things will go in the end and God is nevertheless good. I do know I'll be praying for them until the end of my life though.
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Jul 20, 2017 15:39
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I'm actually following a rather freestyle interpretation of Purgatory not as something that God does to us, but as something we kinda do to ourself. Part of that understanding is the idea that 'Sin' is anything that removes us mentally from Divinity and makes us forget that we are actually part & mirrors of the Creator (irrespective of religion). People who spend most of their lives following material as well as mental obsessions and ignored their souls' needs get a really rude awakening when they die - not because God will punish them, but because they have spent most of their lives denying the most important parts of themselves. So to sum it up: they did all they could to bury their connection to the creator AND at the same time, the material things, people or situations they were clinging to are no longer there.  Postmortem mental breakdown time! So some people might get 'stuck' in cycles of terror / denial / self pity and have a really lovely time (yet still going  ) - which an all-loving God hates to see, but we have our free will, so the Creator and his angel dudes patiently wait until these people stop throwing themselves against the same metaphorical wall again and again  and are opening themselves to Divine companionship. Then it's time for healing and all the other amazing stuff.It might be a bit esoteric, but I really like this interpretation because it emphazises unfailing Divine love & forgiveness as well as our own free will. Also regarding the pity one could feel for other people possibly on the way to 'Purgatory' - I'm going full Origen with Apocatastasis and I see this ordeal as a learning experience a soul goes through - what pleasure can be greater than to 'rediscover' God and even finding out They were never really removed from us and loved us all the time  SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 16:05
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HEY GAIL posted:as far as i know, all these people are Orthodox. There are also religious people who pray for demons, but if you believe in the supernatural at all I'd recommend NOT doing this unless you're at a very high level of practice. pidan posted:a dude from my mum's village knew a dude in purgatory. It was a burning man who lit his way home from the pub until the villager told him "may God repay you for this" which is how people said thank you back in those days. Then the burning dude stopped burning and went to heaven. SavageGentleman posted:Part of that understanding is the idea that 'Sin' is anything that removes us mentally from Divinity and makes us forget that we are actually part & mirrors of the Creator (irrespective of religion). But what you're describing isn't far from how Dorotheos of Gaza--and more recently, Archimandrite Sophrony--described hell. If we spend our lives feeding our passions, then once we die, the soul will still be addicted to them. And without the body, the soul will have no way to satisfy them. At least, this is what souls are said to experience before the Last Judgment. Technically, as I understand it, hell now and Hell then are two different things. It's only after the Judgment that Hell is considered to become permanent. --- Personally, my view is that on Judgment Day, we'll look at Christ, at Goodness and Love personified, and know exactly how we did or didn't measure up. And then we have all eternity to deal with that. Keromaru5 fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 17:26
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Keromaru5 posted:Aren't all Orthodox encouraged to pray for the dead regardless? I've read plenty of accounts by monastics, saints, and pious laypeople who were all certain they'd rescued a loved one from hell after death. And IIRC, one of the kneeling prayers in Pentecost prayers even has a petition specifically for those currently in hell. (And of course, without a direct revelation, we have no way to know who specfically is there.) Yeah prayers for the dead are encouraged for the Orthodox, same for Catholics. What HEY GAL was referring to is that it's not a Catholic practice to pray specifically for souls currently in hell, only an Orthodox one. But from a historical perspective, prayers for the souls in hell were actually fairly common, even in the west. In fact there were a number of Irish and Welsh saints who were venerated because they were really good at jailbreaking hell. At some point (probably around the 8th century) the doctrine of eternal conscious torment became so strong in the west that such a thing was no longer considered a possibility, though.
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Jul 20, 2017 18:11
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credburn posted:Hey, I have wanted to ask this question ever since I was a teenager, but every time I asked it I either asked it to the wrong people (teenager Christians) or at the wrong time (funeral) or to other wrong people (atheists whose only response is "because Christians are evil and crazy") so, uh, here goes again! I want to also say that, I really don't know how to make this question not sound condescending, which probably didn't help when I was younger and trying to ask it without tact or experience in asking potentially touchy questions. Catholics are forbidden from presuming the damnation of another soul or the salvation of our own, so our answer is that we don't know for sure that anybody is in hell: this was expounded most famously and controversially by my homie Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?, and I'm basically totally on board with him in this. You should also check out C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, which imagines how heaven, purgatory, and hell might all be the same place.
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Jul 20, 2017 18:11
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The Phlegmatist posted:Yeah prayers for the dead are encouraged for the Orthodox, same for Catholics. What HEY GAL was referring to is that it's not a Catholic practice to pray specifically for souls currently in hell, only an Orthodox one.
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Jul 20, 2017 18:22
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The Phlegmatist posted:Yeah prayers for the dead are encouraged for the Orthodox, same for Catholics. What HEY GAL was referring to is that it's not a Catholic practice to pray specifically for souls currently in hell, only an Orthodox one. *EDIT* - I now love the phrase "jailbreaking hell," by the way. Keromaru5 fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 18:22
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HEY GAIL posted:yeah i remember a catholic story from the 900s involving mary getting someone out of hell, and that eventually got folded into the developing idea of purgatory There's also the point that since time is essentially meaningless in eternity you can pray for something that's already happened
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Jul 20, 2017 18:24
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Oh yeah, today's St. Maria of Paris's feast day. St. Maria, pray for us!
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Jul 20, 2017 20:11
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HEY GAIL posted:yeah i remember a catholic story from the 900s involving mary getting someone out of hell, and that eventually got folded into the developing idea of purgatory Was it from England? 'cause they were super into Marian devotion at the time A Marian prayer from the 9th century book of Cerne that might seem strangely familiar to Catholics posted:Sancta maria gloriosa dei genetrix et semper uirgo
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Jul 20, 2017 22:29
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credburn posted:Hey, I have wanted to ask this question ever since I was a teenager, but every time I asked it I either asked it to the wrong people (teenager Christians) or at the wrong time (funeral) or to other wrong people (atheists whose only response is "because Christians are evil and crazy") so, uh, here goes again! I want to also say that, I really don't know how to make this question not sound condescending, which probably didn't help when I was younger and trying to ask it without tact or experience in asking potentially touchy questions. Excellent questions. They bring up many responses in me, so I will break them down into chunks. On speculative cosmology The first thing I'd say is that it's very difficult (or impossible) to define how the afterlife is, but it's still instructive to consider (and pray about) what the afterlife is like. I suggest this distinction because it's very easy to be on the outside of a religion (not just Christianity) and conclude all their believers must be crazy because the cosmology of their sacred texts don't make any sense anymore. The cosmology of Moses and John the Revelator had to make sense to them and the audience of their time. The sacred texts don't change, but people's understanding of the physical and metaphysical cosmos changes all the time. And it doesn't change randomly, either. It changes in response to the information that our observational instruments provide and the actions of those in authority. Alan Watts talks about this in terms of sophisticated versus unsophisticated believers. The sophisticated believer is one who understands that myths are metaphors of reality. The unsophisticated believer thinks the myth is reality. Let me just say that while Alan Watts may have a point, I personally do not think sophistication makes anyone a better believer or a better student of Jesus. On what Hell and the Final Judgment are like If you ask two Christian neighbors living in the same town and era what happens when they die, you will get at least two distinct answers. If you ask two Christians from different nations who live in different eras, you're going to get even more divergent answers. They come to their divergent responses even as the scriptures remain the same. I have never once seen had a personal vision of the afterlife that I thought was God-breathed, so I don't have any better response than "I don't know," followed by, "But I can tell you how the sacred stories in Christian scriptures talk about it." The interpretation changes all the time. We have the pop culture view of the afterlife as a place you instantly teleport to with your body and consciousness more or less in tact. Someone either lets you through a golden gate or pulls a lever sending you down to a pit-realm full of flames. Either way, you're going to be there forever. Jehovah's Witnesses have a very different interpretation. They think no one is in Heaven or Hell right now. The final judgment will only happen once Jesus chronologically returns to Earth. And Hell, the Lake of Fire, behaves like a literal pit of flames. Things that get thrown in the fire don't stay hot and uncomfortable forever. No, they get burned up, same as the things we throw into a dumpster fire do now: their potential energies get released as thermal energy for the rest of the universe; their matter is reduced to ash. I don't mention the JW interpretation as an example because I like their regimental evangelical style. I include it because, despite their outside-the-mainstream status, I don't see any contradiction between their answer and what exists in our common scriptures. And that's about the best we can do before we're all before the Final Judgment ourselves. On what people deserve The answer you got from your mother's friend bothers me. It's easy to shrug your shoulders and say other people get what they deserve. But will she protest if the Lord of Mercy, the Lamb of God should find her unsuitable for eternal life? What good is it if her answer made you respect her more, but did nothing for your respect for everything that's been made and for your neighbor? Jesus said dead vines are only good for the fire, because in the world of eternal life that is to come, all trees will bear fruit. But no one is a dead vine, they can only act like dead vines. Strip away the lifeless to make room for the bountiful. Pluck out what offends the universe and replace it with things that are pleasing. We will accomplish all these things through love, because God is love, and our salvation is in love and through love. Whatever a believer believes or does that is not in keeping with love ought to be turned into fuel for something else.
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Jul 21, 2017 00:09
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Caufman posted:
I was a little confused looking at the Catechism, to see that this isn't the common understanding - the JWs here seem closer to some of the Fathers than the Catholics. The idea being that even the damned are raised in incorruptible bodies - which sucks for them, because they can burn forever and not be consumed. But it's necessary because souls in themselves don't feel pain - that is a property of the flesh, so nobody is eligible for hell until the Last Judgment. When and why did this change? Just generally swept under the rug with the Resurrection of the Flesh more generally?
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Jul 21, 2017 01:38
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The latest episode of the Areopagus podcast is really good, I'm recommending it to the thread. Lots of geeking out on reformation history, time, calendars and stuff like that. I'm only halfway through it myself but I'm finding it compelling enough to tell the thread about it now than wait.
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Jul 21, 2017 02:24
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Numerical Anxiety posted:When and why did this change? Just generally swept under the rug with the Resurrection of the Flesh more generally? Generally speaking, I don't know much about the history of Christianity or its thought outside of what's in the Bible, because learning about it is like watching a family (my family) devolve into traumatic, catastrophic arguments for generations. It makes me so sad sometimes I just want to run into the bathroom and cry, cry, cry.
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Jul 21, 2017 03:29
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I like Caufman's detailed dissection of the question. Puts into words something about why afterlife is tough to talk about - it's not always apparent, what perspective the person asking is interested in.
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Jul 21, 2017 06:05
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Well, this thread (?) has taught me that hell is an eternity of separation from God/love, which is a lot easier to understand when a) you know that depression is a thing b) you may be experiencing something like that yourself. Am I on fire? No. Am I suffering? Yes. You could bring it up to the the "interpretation is modernized" thing, tho.
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Jul 21, 2017 06:06
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Caufman posted:Generally speaking, I don't know much about the history of Christianity or its thought outside of what's in the Bible, because learning about it is like watching a family (my family) devolve into traumatic, catastrophic arguments for generations. It makes me so sad sometimes I just want to run into the bathroom and cry, cry, cry. True, but is there an academic field older than a few decades that one couldn't say the same about? (And sure, the claims of, say literature might be ostensibly less grandiose than those of theology, but it ain't like there's a shortage of professors who comport themselves as if they spoke from the throne of God.)
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Jul 21, 2017 06:26
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Numerical Anxiety posted:I was a little confused looking at the Catechism, to see that this isn't the common understanding - the JWs here seem closer to some of the Fathers than the Catholics. The idea being that even the damned are raised in incorruptible bodies - which sucks for them, because they can burn forever and not be consumed. But it's necessary because souls in themselves don't feel pain - that is a property of the flesh, so nobody is eligible for hell until the Last Judgment. That was one of the questions that frustrated the Scholastics, actually. How could fallen angels, who don't have corporeal form, be tormented by a material hellfire? But by asking that question, they were really getting at the fact that it doesn't make sense that human beings could be subjected to the pains of hell without a bodily resurrection. And the answer, as always, was "God makes it so, mysteriously." Which sucks and is a bad answer but thaaaat's Thomism!
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Jul 21, 2017 07:17
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The Phlegmatist posted:That was one of the questions that frustrated the Scholastics, actually. How could fallen angels, who don't have corporeal form, be tormented by a material hellfire? But by asking that question, they were really getting at the fact that it doesn't make sense that human beings could be subjected to the pains of hell without a bodily resurrection. Wait, so do we actually believe that whole fallen angel thing? I could never get a straight answer out of anybody. Some say it's not in the bible, some Englishman made it up. But then "St Michael toppling the devil" is pretty common in Christian iconography (to be fair, so is Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, which is also not in the bible).  I know some people have this whole thing about angels, but then it's not in the creed and I don't remember seeing it in the Catechism.
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Jul 21, 2017 07:30
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Yeah, it's been pretty consistent that demons = fallen angels since the early church fathers. Mainly because it's not like God would create demons by His own choosing, so it must have been by their own free will that angelic figures would choose to rebel against God. Obviously not every angel chose to rebel (Michael, Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel etc. are still fine) Scripturally no, it's not in there. The early church view on this was heavily influenced by the contents of the Book of Enoch, which was one of those things that didn't make it into the canon (aside from the Church of Ethiopia) but everybody read it. Interestingly the angel in Enoch most associated with actually-literally-becoming-Satan was Azazel. Identifying Lucifer with Satan seems to have been mostly an invention of Dante.
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Jul 21, 2017 07:56
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if we only believed in scripture we'd be protestants and that's boring edit: Phlegmatist, "Lucifer, son of the morning, how you have fallen" is in the bible though? edit 2: there's a saint Lucifer too. Kickass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Jul 21, 2017 |
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Jul 21, 2017 08:40
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if u read Declare demons are both fallen angels and Lovecraftian horrors
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Jul 21, 2017 08:41
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HEY GAIL posted:edit: Phlegmatist, "Lucifer, son of the morning, how you have fallen" is in the bible though? The KJV translators got confused about helel in the Masoretic Text and just used lucifer from the Vulgate, treating it like a proper name. In Isaiah, tt was definitely an epithet for the king of Babylon and had nothing to do with Satan. It was basically like "King of Babylon, you thought you were really cool and awesome but you tried to elevate yourself above God and now God's comin' for ya, enjoy your imminent death." It's easy to see how that gets rolled into the Lucifer mythos, but Isaiah pre-dates that by a long period of time. That goes back to the LXX translating helel into heosphoros because actually they kinda got confused with it too. They basically tried to figure out what helel meant, which is literally something like "shiny one," and went with something they knew was really shiny -- the morning star, which was Venus at dawn. And Jerome translated that into lucifer since that was the Latin name for the morning star. Heosphoros was later used in 2nd Peter and Revelation to describe Jesus, although of course the KJV translators decided to actually use "morning star" there and not Lucifer.
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Jul 21, 2017 09:44
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it might have originally referred to the king of babylon, but it's been interpreted to also be about the devil since long before dante, read the wikipedia article
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Jul 21, 2017 10:32
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HEY GAIL posted:if we only believed in scripture we'd be protestants and that's Imagine being an American evangelical vacationing in Sardinia when you suddenly come across a church dedicated to St Lucifer, all your latent fears and prejudices towards Catholicism would seem to have been true all along   St Lucifer's, Cagliari
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Jul 21, 2017 11:11
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pidan posted:Wait, so do we actually believe that whole fallen angel thing? St. Michael toppling the devil isn't entirely absent from scripture though. There's an odd reference to it in Jude 1:9: "But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.”" I'm not sure that the wider frame in which that takes place is attested, but one can be pretty confident, I think, that the devil doesn't have Moses' body?
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Jul 21, 2017 18:00
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Numerical Anxiety posted:St. Michael toppling the devil isn't entirely absent from scripture though. There's an odd reference to it in Jude 1:9: Are there any different translations of that point? Also, the Muslim view of Angels (as essentially mechanistic beings without free will) made a bit of sense to me, but are there any churches that hold a similar view?
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Jul 21, 2017 20:00
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HEY GAIL posted:it might have originally referred to the king of babylon, but it's been interpreted to also be about the devil since long before dante, read the wikipedia article It's interpreted to be about the devil but I haven't seen any Patristic sources that explicitly make the Lucifer = Satan connection. I assume Dante got it from somewhere but I don't know where, exactly. There's a pretty good case to be made that the author of Revelation connected Azazel from Enoch with Satan, though. In Enoch, Azazel rebels against God by teaching mankind how to create weapons and...cosmetics. God gets mad, Raphael comes down and kicks Azazel's rear end and then binds him with a chain in the desert somewhere to await his punishment at the end of time, which is being thrown into a lake of fire. That's a pretty close parallel with Satan's fate in Revelation. The idea that Satan is the chief of fallen angels is fairly well-ingrained when you look at Patristic sources. An explicit connection with Lucifer, not so much. Josef bugman posted:Also, the Muslim view of Angels (as essentially mechanistic beings without free will) made a bit of sense to me, but are there any churches that hold a similar view? Not really, that's more a feature of Islam and Rabbinic Judaism. Although in Christianity it's not like angels have libertarian free will; they're connected to the beatific vision and exist outside of time, so the fallen angels knew exactly what the consequences would be when they rebelled and did it anyway, meaning the ones who did not rebel are not going to rebel at all. So it's not like angels will suddenly "turn evil" or something. Or to put it another way, the idea of free will gets pretty weird for beings that know the future.
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Jul 21, 2017 21:13
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The Phlegmatist posted:It's interpreted to be about the devil but I haven't seen any Patristic sources that explicitly make the Lucifer = Satan connection. I assume Dante got it from somewhere but I don't know where, exactly. It's a stretch of an allegory that has proven remarkably robust - where else could it be, but from Origen? On First Principles, 1.5 posted:Again, we are taught as follows by the prophet Isaiah regarding another opposing power. The prophet says, How is Lucifer, who used to arise in the morning, fallen from heaven! He who assailed all nations is broken and beaten to the ground. You indeed said in your heart, I shall ascend into heaven; above the stars of heaven shall I place my throne; I shall sit upon a lofty mountain, above the lofty mountains which are towards the north; I shall ascend above the clouds; I shall be like the Most High. Now shall you be brought down to the lower world, and to the foundations of the earth. They who see you shall be amazed at you, and shall say, This is the man who harassed the whole earth, who moved kings, who made the whole world a desert, who destroyed cities, and did not unloose those who were in chains. All the kings of the nations have slept in honour, every one in his own house; but you shall be cast forth on the mountains, accursed with the many dead who have been pierced through with swords, and have descended to the lower world. As a garment cloned with blood, and stained, will not be clean; neither shall you be clean, because you have destroyed my land and slain my people: you shall not remain for ever, most wicked seed. Prepare your sons for death on account of the sins of your father, lest they rise again and inherit the earth, and fill the earth with wars. And I shall rise against them, says the Lord of hosts, and I shall cause their name to perish, and their remains, and their seed. Most evidently by these words is he shown to have fallen from heaven, who formerly was Lucifer, and who used to arise in the morning. For if, as some think, he was a nature of darkness, how is Lucifer said to have existed before? Or how could he arise in the morning, who had in himself nothing of the light? Nay, even the Saviour Himself teaches us, saying of the devil, Behold, I see Satan fallen from heaven like lightning. For at one time he was light. Moreover our Lord, who is the truth, compared the power of His own glorious advent to lightning, in the words, For as the lightning shines from the height of heaven even to its height again, so will the coming of the Son of man be. And notwithstanding He compares him to lightning, and says that he fell from heaven, that He might show by this that he had been at one time in heaven, and had had a place among the saints, and had enjoyed a share in that light in which all the saints participate, by which they are made angels of light, and by which the apostles are termed by the Lord the light of the world. In this manner, then, did that being once exist as light before he went astray, and fell to this place, and had his glory turned into dust, which is peculiarly the mark of the wicked, as the prophet also says; whence, too, he was called the prince of this world, i.e., of an earthly habitation: for he exercised power over those who were obedient to his wickedness, since the whole of this world— for I term this place of earth, world— lies in the wicked one, and in this apostate. That he is an apostate, i.e., a fugitive, even the Lord in the book of Job says, You will take with a hook the apostate dragon, i.e., a fugitive. Now it is certain that by the dragon is understood the devil himself. If then they are called opposing powers, and are said to have been once without stain, while spotless purity exists in the essential being of none save the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but is an accidental quality in every created thing; and since that which is accidental may also fall away, and since those opposite powers once were spotless, and were once among those which still remain unstained, it is evident from all this that no one is pure either by essence or nature, and that no one was by nature polluted. And the consequence of this is, that it lies within ourselves and in our own actions to possess either happiness or holiness; or by sloth and negligence to fall from happiness into wickedness and ruin, to such a degree that, through too great proficiency, so to speak, in wickedness (if a man be guilty of so great neglect), he may descend even to that state in which he will be changed into what is called an opposing power.
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Jul 21, 2017 21:24
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Huh, that's interesting. Looks like Ambrosiaster (4th cen.) identified Lucifer with Satan as well. So I guess it is pretty old.
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Jul 22, 2017 04:14
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The Phlegmatist posted:Huh, that's interesting. the devil is in the details
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Jul 22, 2017 05:58
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The Phlegmatist posted:That was one of the questions that frustrated the Scholastics, actually. How could fallen angels, who don't have corporeal form, be tormented by a material hellfire? But by asking that question, they were really getting at the fact that it doesn't make sense that human beings could be subjected to the pains of hell without a bodily resurrection. Ahem. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5097.htm Supp Q97 a6 posted:Accordingly it is clear that the fire of hell is of the same species as the fire we have, so far as the nature of fire is concerned. But whether that fire subsists in its proper matter, or if it subsists in a strange matter, what that matter may be, we know not. And in this way it may differ specifically from the fire we have, considered materially. It has, however, certain properties differing from our fire, for instance that it needs no kindling, nor is kept alive by fuel. But the differences do not argue a difference of species as regards the nature of the fire. Mind you, this is the supplement, so it really is some student's notes from early lectures of Aquinas. Another argument I've heard is that the fallen angels (spirits) are humiliated by being subject to material fire.
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Jul 22, 2017 16:47
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Worthleast posted:Another argument I've heard is that the fallen angels (spirits) are humiliated by being subject to material fire. I can't help but laugh at this idea, like making someone used to haute couture wear a sack.
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Jul 22, 2017 17:25
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The exact material composition of hellfire, for Scholastics, was indeed speculative. So that student of Aquinas wasn't wrong. Although speculation of that sort was condemned at the University of Paris in the Condemnation of 1277, because they were worried that such speculation would lead students into error or, even worse, Constantinople.Worthleast posted:Another argument I've heard is that the fallen angels (spirits) are humiliated by being subject to material fire. Yeah, that's actually a part of Thomism too. St. Thomas Aquinas posted:We must not suppose that incorporeal subsistent spirits, -- as the devil, and the souls of the lost before the resurrection, -- can suffer from fire any disintegration of their physical being, or other change, such as our perishable bodies suffer from fire. For incorporeal substances have not a corporeal nature, to be changed by corporeal things. Nor are they susceptible of sensible forms except intellectually; and such intellectual impression is not penal, but rather perfective and pleasurable. Nor can it be said that they suffer affliction from corporeal fire by reason of a certain contrariety, as their bodies shall suffer after the resurrection: for incorporeal subsistent spirits have no organs of sense nor the use of sensory powers. Such spirits shall suffer then from corporeal fire by a sort of constriction (alligatio). For spirits can be tied to bodies, either as their form, as the soul is tied to the human body to give it life; or without being the body's form, as magicians by diabolic power tie spirits to images.Much more by divine power may spirits under damnation be tied to corporeal fire; and this is an affliction to them to know that they are tied to the meanest creatures for punishment. Which is, I suppose, sort of an ironic punishment since you wind up in hell by inordinate focus on the pleasures of the body, and are humiliated there by being immediately constricted to a body with which you will feel only pain.
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Jul 22, 2017 18:24
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"magicians by diabolic power tie spirits to images" Fascinating stuff. Would this be referring to the sort of theurgy described by Iamblichus?
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Jul 23, 2017 02:18
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Iamblichus would have been basically unknown in the Latin West during the Middle Ages, so there's probably no direct line to be drawn.
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Jul 23, 2017 03:07
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CountFosco posted:"magicians by diabolic power tie spirits to images" Wow, crazy stuff!http://www.esotericarchives.com/oracle/iambl_th.htm Drawing divine presence into statues is apparently part of the everyday reponsibilities of ancient polytheistic priests. I guess I will keep that in mind next time I visit the British museum. Fun fact: the text also explains that every angel, god or daemon you summon during an initiaion ceremony will be forced to show you his sign/seal if you ask for it - so you know it's actually them and not an astral hobo impersonating them. "can you show me your ID badge, officer?" *edit: the same page also contains esoteric illustration, love this one: 
SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 23, 2017 |
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Jul 23, 2017 22:13
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I had never heard of Iamblichus until I heard about him through the history of philosophy without any gaps podcast. Which is excellent.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:20
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SavageGentleman posted:*edit: the same page also contains esoteric illustration, love this one: Hahaha I love how cross the wizard chap is there. When you are QUITE done pissing about 
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Jul 24, 2017 00:33
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