Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority
DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION
Series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority
Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E.
Heidi Marx-Wolf
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marx-Wolf, Heidi, author.
Spiritual taxonomies and ritual authority : Platonists, priests, and gnostics in the third century
C.E. / Heidi Marx-Wolf.
pages cm. — (Divinations: rereading late ancient religion)
ISBN 978-0-8122-4789-3 (alk. paper)
1. Neoplatonism—History. 2. Gnosticism—History. 3. Spirits—History of doctrines. 4. Demonology—History. 5. Animal sacrifice—History. 6. Philosophy and religion—History. 7. Spiritual direction—History. I. Title. II. Series: Divinations.
B517.M37 2016
186'.4—dc23 201502973
For Paul and Alexanderthe two best sublunary spirits I know and love
Contents
Chapter 1. How to Feed a Daemon: Third-Century Philosophers on Blood Sacrifice
Chapter 2. Everything in Its Right Place: Spiritual Taxonomy in Third-Century Platonism
Chapter 3. The Missing Link: Third-Century Platonists and “Gnostics” on Daemons and Other Spirits
Chapter 4. High Priests of the Highest God: Third-Century Platonists as Ritual Experts
Abbreviations
| ANRW | Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt |
| ARG | Archiv für Religionsgeschichte |
| GCS | Griechischen christliche Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte |
| HTR | Harvard Theological Review |
| JANER | Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions |
| JBL | Journal of Biblical Literature |
| JECS | Journal of Early Christian Studies |
| JEH | Journal of Ecclesiastic History |
| JHS | Journal of Hellenic Studies |
| JLA | Journal of Late Antiquity |
| JRS | Journal of Roman Studies |
| JTS | Journal of Theological Studies |
| PGM | Papyri Graecae Magicae |
| TAPA | Transactions of the American Philological Association |
Introduction
THIS BOOK IS about a conversation that took place in the late classical world, a conversation about spirits, both good and malign. At times, this conversation was heated, combative even, but at other moments it was surprisingly pacific given the contentious nature of the subject matter and the temperaments and ideological commitments of those involved. This conversation took place across important sectarian boundaries among a group of intellectuals whom we might loosely categorize as late Roman Platonists of one variety or other. Although this group includes a wide array of intellectuals, from writers of certain Nag Hammadi texts to the producers of Greco-Egyptian ritual (or “magical”) handbooks, the central figures are Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and to a lesser extent, Plotinus.
This book explores a moment in the late second and third centuries C.E. when these philosophers began to produce systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in increasingly more hierarchical ways. These “spiritual taxonomies,” as this book calls them, were part of the overall theological and philosophical writings of these thinkers and were projected onto and ordered more “local” or “popular” understandings of spirits, which, although totalizing in