(1) Hence that of which you are dubious is not true, “ that all things are bound with the indissoluble bonds of Necessity ,” which we call Fate. For the soul has a proper principle of circumduction to the intelligible, and of a separation from generated natures; and also of a contact with real being, and that which is divine. “ Nor must we ascribe fate to the Gods, whom we worship in temples and statues, as the dissolvers of fate. ” For the Gods, indeed, dissolve fate; but the last natures which proceed from them, and are complicated with the generation of the world and with body, give completion to fate. Hence we very properly worship the Gods with all possible sanctity, and the observance of all religious rites, in order that they may liberate us from the evils impending from fate, as they alone rule over necessity through intellectual persuasion. But neither are all things comprehended in the nature of fate, but there is another principle of the soul, which is superior to all nature and generation, and through which we are capable of being united to the Gods, of transcending the mundane order, and of participating eternal life, and the energy of the supercelestial Gods. Through this principle, therefore, we are able to liberate ourselves from fate. For when the more excellent parts of us energize, and the soul is elevated to natures better than itself, then it is entirely separated from things which detain it in generation, departs from subordinate natures, exchanges the present for another life, and gives itself to another order of things, entirely abandoning the former order with which it was connected.

(5) "Thus they give commandment to their servitors, that they may deposit it into the bodies of the antitype. And following this fashion the servitors of the rulers bring the power and the soul and the counterfeiting spirit, bring them down to the world, and pour [them] out into the world of the rulers of the midst. The rulers of the midst look after the counterfeiting spirit; and also the destiny, whose name is Moira, leadeth the man until it hath him slain through the death appointed unto him, which the rulers of the great Fate have bound to the soul. And the servitors of the sphere bind the soul and the power and the counterfeiting spirit and the destiny. And they portion them all and make them into two portions and seek after the man and also after the woman in the world to whom they have given signs, in order that they may send them into them. And they give one portion to the man and one portion to the woman in a victual of the world or in a breath of the air or in water or in a kind which they drink. "All this I will tell unto you and the species of every soul and the type, how they enter into the bodies, whether of men or of birds or of cattle or of wild beasts or of reptiles or of all the other species in the world. I will tell you their type, in what type they enter into men; I will tell it you at the expansion of the universe. "Now, therefore, when the servitors of the rulers cast the one portion into the woman and the other into the man in the fashion which I

(9) This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit: the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain- and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars' ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.

What, after all this, remains to stand for the "We"?

The "We" is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled- the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body- for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It- unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.

For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul: and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system.

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. In their efficacy upon the All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it; and they act only upon what is partial; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star's will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.

But all follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It- we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe- or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul to the other, its Kin . All that is graceless is admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it; "the rest," we read, "is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine."

(12) The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.

Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt.

For the container of the total of things must be a self-sufficing entity and remain so: in its periods it is wrought out to purpose under its Reason-Principles which are perdurably valid; by these periods it reverts unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined life-duration, to its established character; it is leading the things of this realm to be of one voice and plan with the Supreme. And thus the kosmic content is carried forward to its purpose, everything in its co-ordinate place, under one only Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and return of souls and to every purpose of the system.

We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered scheme of the kosmos; they are not independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with kosmic circuit- to the extent that their fortunes, their life experiences, their choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars- and out of this concordance rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by which all is described is the best witness to this truth.

Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way:

The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression of the Supreme, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens, sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of the lower realm, one phase maintaining the unvarying march the other adopting itself to times and season.

The depth of the descent, also, will differ- sometimes lower, sometimes less low- and this even in its entry into any given Kind: all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the body of man or animal.

(2) It is acknowledged then by all men, that the oracle in Colophon gives its answers through the medium of water. For there is a fountain in a subterranean dwelling from which the prophetess drinks; and on certain established nights, after many sacred rites have been previously performed, and she has drank of the fountain, she delivers oracles, but is not visible to those that are present. That this water, therefore, is prophetic, is from hence manifest. But how it becomes so, this, according to the proverb, is not for every man to know. For it appears as if a certain prophetic spirit pervaded through the water. This is not, however, in reality the case. For a divine nature does not pervade through its participants in this manner, according to interval and division, but comprehends as it were externally, and illuminates the fountain, and fills it from itself with a prophetic power. For the inspiration which the water affords is not the whole of that which proceeds from a divine power, but the water itself only prepares us, and purifies our luciform spirit, so that we may be able to receive the divinity; while, in the mean time, there is a presence of divinity prior to this, and illuminating from on high.

(10) "Our way of speaking"- for myths, if they are to serve their purpose, must necessarily import time-distinctions into their subject and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but differ in rank and faculty; they will relate the births of the unbegotten and discriminate where all is one substance; the truth is conveyed in the only manner possible, it is left to our good sense to bring all together again.

On this principle we have, here, Soul dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas- the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely- Soul which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. The splendours contained in Soul are thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among the existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they have their Being in that vital blessedness. And Love- "born at the banquet of the gods"- has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards the Good; as long as Soul has been, Love has been.

Still this Love is of mixed quality. On the one hand there is in it the lack which keeps it craving: on the other, it is not entirely destitute; the deficient seeks more of what it has, and certainly nothing absolutely void of good would ever go seeking the good.

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. Its Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy; and this Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor: the very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination; there is a lack of shape and of Reason in that which must aspire towards the Good, and the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth of materiality. A thing aspiring towards the Good is an Ideal-principle only when the striving will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the presentment of Matter to the incoming power.

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul; for Love lacks its Good but, from its very birth, strives towards It.

(1) What then, is it not possible for a man to liberate himself [from fate] through the Gods that revolve in the heavens, and to consider the same as the leaders of fate, and yet as those that bind our lives with indissoluble bonds? Perhaps nothing prevents this from being the case. For if the Gods comprehend in themselves many essences and powers, there are also in them other immense differences and contrarieties. Moreover, this also may be said, that in each of the Gods, though such as are visible, there are certain intelligible principles through which a liberation to souls from mundane generation is effected. But if some one leaves only two genera of Gods, viz. the mundane and supermundane, the liberation to souls will be effected through the supermundane Gods. These things, therefore, are more accurately discussed in our treatise Concerning the Gods , in which it is shown who are the anagogic Gods, and according to what kind of powers they are so; how they liberate from fate, and through what sacred regressions; and what the order is of mundane nature, and how the most perfect intellectual energy rules over this.

(2) But in what is now asserted by you, the soul is said to be a concause of the divine commixture; and it is evident, this being admitted, that the soul becomes of an equal dignity with the Gods, that it gives a certain part to them and receives a part from them, and that it also affords a measure to natures more excellent than itself, and is itself bounded by them. That likewise follows which is asserted by some, and is most dire, that the Gods precedaneously subsisting in the order of elements, are inherent in their effects, and there will be a certain thing produced in time, and from a mixture according to time, which will contain the Gods in itself. What, likewise, is this comingled form of subsistence? For if it is both [soul and divine inspiration externally derived], it will not be one thing consisting of two, but a certain composite, and a coacervation from two things. But if it is as something different from both, eternal natures will be mutable, and divine natures will in no respect differ from physical substances in generation. And as it is absurd to admit that an eternal nature is produced through generation, it is still more absurd to suppose that any thing which consists of eternal natures can be dissolved. Neither, therefore, is this opinion concerning divination by any means reasonable; and besides this, it is also paradoxical, whether it is considered as one supposition or as two.

(1) On this subject, however, there is also the following division. Of divine essences and powers some have [a genesiurgic] soul and nature subject and ministrant to their fabrications, whenever they wish to use them. But others are entirely separate from soul and nature, I mean from a divine, and not only from a mundane and genesiurgic soul and nature. And others are the media between these, and afford to the extremes a communion with each other, either according to an exuberant participation of greater good, or according to an unimpeded reception of less good, or according to a concord which binds together both the extremes. When, therefore, we worship the Gods who reign over soul and nature, it is not foreign to these to offer to them physical powers, and bodies which are governed by nature. For all the works of nature are subservient to them, and contribute to their government. But when we undertake to honour those Gods who are essentially uniform, then it is requisite to venerate them with liberated honours. Hence, intellectual gifts are adapted to these, and things which pertain to an incorporeal life, together with the fruits of virtue and wisdom, and whatever perfect and total goods of the soul there may be. Moreover, to the Gods who subsist as media, and who are the leaders of goods of a middle nature, sometimes twofold gifts will be adapted, and sometimes such as have a communication with both these; or such as are separated from inferiors, and pertain to more elevated natures; or, in short, such as in one of the modes give completion to the medium.

(1) You say, therefore, “ that according to many of the Egyptians, that which is in our power depends on the motion of the stars .” What the truth, however, is respecting this, it is necessary to unfold to you from the Hermaic conceptions. For man, as these writings say, has two souls. And one, indeed, is derived from the first intelligible, and participates of the power of the Demiurgus; but the other is imparted from the circulation of the celestial bodies, to which the soul that sees God returns. These things, therefore, thus subsisting, the soul that descends to us from the worlds follows the periods of the worlds; but that which is intelligibly present from the intelligible, transcends the genesiurgic motion, and through this a liberation from fate, and the ascent to the intelligible Gods, are affected. Such theurgy, likewise, as leads to an unbegotten nature is perfected conformably to a life of this kind.

(1) [Asclepius] What part of the economy, Thrice-greatest one, does the Heimarmenē, or Fate, then occupy? For do not the celestial Gods rule over generals ; the terrene occupy particulars?

[Trismegistus] That which we call Heimarmenē, Asclepius, is the necessity of all things that are born, bound ever to themselves with interlinked enchainments. This, then, is either the effector of all things, or it is highest God, or what is made the second God by God Himself,—or else the discipline of all things both in heaven and on earth, established by the laws of the Divine.

(6) What, then, is the achieved Sage?

One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul.

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit as cooperator in the life: the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle which therefore is itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity.

But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual Principle as possessing for presiding spirit the Prior to the Intellectual Principle: how then does it come about that he was not, from the very beginning, all that he now is?

The failure is due to the disturbance caused by birth- though, before all reasoning, there exists the instinctive movement reaching out towards its own.

On instinct which the Sage finally rectifies in every respect?

Not in every respect: the Soul is so constituted that its life-history and its general tendency will answer not merely to its own nature but also to the conditions among which it acts.

The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a Soul to the Underworld ceases to be its guardian- except when the Soul resumes the former state of life.

But, meanwhile, what happens to it?

From the passage which tells how it presents the Soul to judgement we gather that after the death it resumes the form it had before the birth, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the Souls in their punishment during the period of their renewed life- a time not so much of living as of expiation.

But the Souls that enter into brute bodies, are they controlled by some thing less than this presiding Spirit? No: theirs is still a Spirit, but an evil or a foolish one.

And the Souls that attain to the highest?

Of these higher Souls some live in the world of Sense, some above it: and those in the world of Sense inhabit the Sun or another of the planetary bodies; the others occupy the fixed Sphere holding the place they have merited through having lived here the superior life of reason.

We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual Kosmos they also contain a subordination of various forms like that of the Kosmic Soul. The world Soul is distributed so as to produce the fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded powers: so with our Souls; they must have their provinces according to their different powers, parallel to those of the World Soul: each must give out its own special act; released, each will inhabit there a star consonant with the temperament and faculty in act within and constituting the principle of the life; and this star or the next highest power will stand to them as God or more exactly as tutelary spirit.

But here some further precision is needed.

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed: when living things- animal or vegetal- produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent presence the life principle in plants for instance- in other cases it withdraws after imparting its virtue- for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is produced from one organism.

A power corresponding to this in the All must reach down and co-operate in the life of our world- in fact the very same power.

If the Soul returns to this Sphere it finds itself under the same Spirit or a new, according to the life it is to live. With this Spirit it embarks in the skiff of the universe: the "spindle of Necessity" then takes control and appoints the seat for the voyage, the seat of the lot in life.

The Universal circuit is like a breeze, and the voyager, still or stirring, is carried forward by it. He has a hundred varied experiences, fresh sights, changing circumstances, all sorts of events. The vessel itself furnishes incident, tossing as it drives on. And the voyager also acts of himself in virtue of that individuality which he retains because he is on the vessel in his own person and character. Under identical circumstances individuals answer very differently in their movements and acts: hence it comes about that, be the occurrences and conditions of life similar or dissimilar, the result may differ from man to man, as on the other hand a similar result may be produced by dissimilar conditions: this (personal answer to incident) it is that constitutes destiny.

(4) So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed are thus far in the one place with their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far.

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.

It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of the Soul.

But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the shackles and soars- when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of essential being. Souls that take this way have place in both spheres, living of necessity the life there and the life here by turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more continuously with the divine Intellect, the lower dominant where character or circumstances are less favourable.

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as "parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity experience birth.

Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood as when he tells of God speaking and delivering orations; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into being by generation and creation: stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are eternal.

(8) And from the same Cause of all, are the higher and lower intellectual essences of the godlike angels; and those of the souls; and the natures of the whole Cosmos; all things whatsoever said to be either in others, or by reflection. Yea, even the all holy and most honoured Powers veritably being, and established, as it were, in the vestibule of the superessential Triad, are from It, and in It; and have the being and the godlike being; and after them, as regards Angels, the subordinate, subordinately, and the remotest, most remotely, but as regards ourselves, supermundanely. And the souls, and all the other beings, according to the same rule, have their being, and their well-being; and are, and are well; by having from the Pre-existing their being and their well-being. And in It are both being and well-being; and from It, beginning; and in It, guarded; and to It, terminated. And the prerogatives of being he distributes to the superior beings, which the Oracles call even eternal. But being itself never at any time fails all existing beings. And even self-existent being is from the Pre-existent, and of Him is being, and He is not of being;--and in Him is being, and He is not in being; and being possesses Him, and not He possesses being; and He is both age and beginning, and measure of being; being essentiating Source, and Middle and End, of pre-essence, and being and age and all things. And for this reason, by the Oracles, the veritably Pre-existing is represented under many forms, according to every conception of beings, and the "Was" and the "Is," and the "Will be," and the "Became," and the "Becomes," and the "Will become," are properly sung respecting Him. For all these, to those who think worthily of God, signify by every conception His being superessentially, and Cause in every way of things existing. For He is not this, but not that; nor is He in some way, but not in some other; but He is all things, as Cause of all, and containing and pre-holding in Himself all governments, all controls, of all existing things. And He is above all, as superessentially super-being before all. Wherefore, also, all things are predicated of Him and together, and He is none of them all; of every shape, of every kind, without form, without beauty, anticipating in Himself, beginnings and middles, and ends of things existing, irresistibly and preeminently; and shedding forth without flaw, (the light of) being to all, as beseems a One and super-united Cause. For, if our sun, at the same time that he is one and sheds a uniform light, renews the essences and qualities of sensible creatures, although they are many and various, and nourishes and guards, and perfects and distinguishes, and unites, and fosters, and makes to be productive, and increases, and transforms, and establishes, and makes to grow, and awakens, and gives life to all; and each of the whole, in a manner appropriate to itself, participates in the same and one sun; and the one sun anticipated in himself, uniformly, the causes of the many participants; much more with regard to the Cause of it and of all things, ought we to concede that It first presides over, as beseems One superessential Oneness, all the exemplars, of things existing; since He produces even essences, as beseems the egression from essence. But, we affirm that the exemplars are the methods in God, giving essence to things that be, and pre-existing uniformly, which theology calls predeterminations, and Divine and good wills, which define and produce things existing; according to which (predeterminations) the Superessential both predetermined and brought into existence everything that exists.

(2) Hence, if this is rightly asserted by us, the prophetic power of the Gods is not partibly comprehended by any place, or partible human body, nor by the soul, which is detained in one certain species of divisible natures; but being separate and indivisible, it is wholly every where present with the natures which are capable of receiving it. It likewise externally illuminates and fills all things, pervades through all the elements, comprehends earth and air, fire and water, and leaves nothing destitute of itself, neither animals nor any of the productions of nature, but imparts from itself a certain portion of foreknowledge, to some things in a greater, and to others in a less, degree. Moreover, existing itself prior to all things, by its own separate nature, it becomes sufficient to fill all things, so far as each is able to partake of it.

(10) In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing.

We ascend from air, light, sun- or, moon and light and sun- in detail, to these things as constituting a total- though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it. That suite we take to be the very last effect that has penetrated to its furthest reach.

Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate itself receives its share of the general light, something of the nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in the small. For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of soul's own Real-Being.

We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies- toys, things of no great worth- and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world the entire shape comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. In that world the soul has elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose.

Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul has a double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within outwards towards the new production.

In soulless entities, the outgo remains dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own likeness whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has this tendency to bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and an action towards the outer. It has thus the function of giving life to all that does not live by prior right, and the life it gives is commensurate with its own; that is to say, living in reason, it communicates reason to the body- an image of the reason within itself, just as the life given to the body is an image of Real-Being- and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of which it contains the Reason-Forms.

The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and of all else: and hence it is that the kosmos contains all.

(11) I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to descend into the created.

The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that sphere- let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos- and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises- as far as, through soul, anything can- from the lower to the highest.

Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not remote: there is, no doubt, the aloofness of difference and of mingled natures as against the unmingled; but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial position, and in unity itself there may still be distinction.

These Beings are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being.

(1) Moreover, that which purifies souls is perfect in the Gods; but in archangels it is anagogic. Angels alone dissolve the bond of generation. Dæmons draw souls down into nature; but heroes lead them to a providential attention to sensible works. Archons either deliver to them the government of mundane concerns, or the inspection of material natures. And souls, when they become apparent, tend in a certain respect to generation. Farther still, consider this, also, that you should attribute everything which is pure and stable in the visible image to the more excellent genera. Hence, you should ascribe to the Gods that which in the image is transcendently splendid, and which is firmly established in itself. That which is splendid, but is established as in another thing, you should give to archangels; but that which remains in another to angels. To all these, therefore, you should oppose, that which is rashly borne along, is unestablished, and filled with foreign natures, the whole of which is adapted to inferior orders.

(2) But the soul which verges downward draws along with it the signs of bonds and punishments, is heavy with material spirits, is detained by the anomalous tumults of matter, and exhibits before itself, genesiurgic presiding dæmons. And, in short, all these genera exhibit their proper orders; viz. the aerial genera exhibit aerial fire; the terrestrial a terrestrial and blacker fire; and the celestial a more splendid fire. But in these three boundaries all the genera are distributed according to a triple order of beginning, middle, and end. And the Gods, indeed, exhibit the supreme and most pure causes of this triple order. But the genera of angels depend on those of archangels. The genera of dæmons appear to be subservient to those of angels; and in a similar manner to these, the genera of heroes are ministrant. They are not, however, subservient to angels in the same way as dæmons. Again, the genera of archons, whether they preside over the world or over matter, exhibit the order which is adapted to them. But all the genera of souls present themselves to the view as the last of more excellent natures. Hence, also, they exhibit places in conjunction with themselves; souls of the first rank primary, but those of the second rank secondary, places, and the rest conformably to their arrangement, in each of these three genera.

(1) Concerning another kind of divination, also, you say as follows: “ Others who are conscious what they are doing in other respects, are divinely inspired according to the phantastic part, some indeed receiving darkness for a cooperator, others certain potions, but others in cantations and compositions. And some energize according to the imagination through water, others in a wall, others in the open air, and others in the light of the sun, or some other celestial body. ” The whole, however, of this kind of divination of which you now speak, since it is multiform, may be comprehended in one power, which may be called the eduction of light. But this illuminates with divine light the etherial and luciform vehicle with which the soul is surrounded, from which divine visions occupy our phantastic power, these visions being excited by the will of the Gods. For the whole life of the soul and all the powers that are in it, being in subjection to the Gods, are moved in such a way as the Gods, the leaders of the soul, please.