To recognize how fundamental polytheism is to Plato’s metaphysics, one need only reflect on the Timaeus, in which the cosmos itself comes to be from one God beholding another God. One must let go of the notion that the significance of this lies in these being some particular Gods; approaching the text in this way is a monotheistic hangover, and a deafness to metaphysics, but it’s curable. Metaphysics is all about forms, and it has…

There is a text by Iamblichus, one of the great thinkers of late antiquity, known as ‘On the Mysteries’ (De mysteriis), which has much to recommend it to contemporary polytheists of whatever tradition. It itself sits astride several traditions. It is a series of questions and answers between two Syrians, Porphyry and Iamblichus, both of whom are also, however, steeped in Hellenic culture and especially in Platonic thought, and in addition, Iamblichus writes in the…

Just as polytheism is the theology of relation,1 by that very fact it must be the theology of positive divine production. That which the Gods generate must have its reality and its relative autonomy, indeed, its own causal efficacy, or else Their act of production has been impotent. That which the Gods make, They release into genuine being. In itself, this already means that our own human intelligence and our autonomous ethical judgment must operate…

Plato’s conception of justice is another point at which we can see the fundamentally polytheistic nature of his thought.1 What is justice, for Plato? Without much effort, of course, we could say that it is the state of participating in the form Justice; but why do Platonists answer a question in this unhelpful fashion? In fact, this answer’s value is precautionary. In the Phaedo (100d), Socrates explains that the safest answer to a question such…

‘Like is known by like’ is an ancient and widely applied axiom in Hellenic thought,1 and some similar axiom probably can be found in many other traditions of thought—albeit we must always remember that being widely held is no index of truth. Rather, axioms must be assessed by the value of the system(s) that can be generated from them. In some sense, to say that like is known by like is the same as to…

According to the Platonists, the procession or emergence of being begins with a distinction within a deity, any deity, between Their existence (hyparxis) and Their power(s) (dynamis/dynameis), that which Damascius characterizes as “the very first of all distinctions and which is all but absorbed in indeterminacy, so that the second seems to be the power of the first, a power coagulated in existence,” (De principiis I 118.11-14 Combès-Westerink). The term here translated as ‘coagulated’ is…