Practical Theurgy -pt 6
Agalma: The Divine Image
My loves,
I hope you have all been keeping yourselves sane and centered as real philosophers, turning your minds towards the Nous and the Eternal, the Undying and the Unborn while the world around us has been getting batshit cuckoo crazier with each news cycle.
Wars, attempts at limiting our rights and freedoms, corruption, mismanagement of resources and polities, everywhere we look, the corrupt incompetence of mediocre men and their submissive serfs remind us that democracy requires more than legal arguments. It requires a citizenry of men and women; engaged, educated, brave and ready to cast their votes meaningfully and not reflexively like stones pelted by a mob led here and there by demagogues as if they were oxen dragged by the nose.
Unfortunately, when the citizenry has replaced its inner cultivation and the love for the “commons” (our communal spaces and polities) with mindless consumption and perpetual, idiotic (self-centered) agitation, such things come to pass where we look at our world around us in disbelief.
The question “How the fuck did we even get here?” becomes an embodied experience, rather than a rhetorical or theoretical question.
This is where we are my loves, because we have forsaken the most fundamental thing that the ancients tried to instill in us; the very thing that keeps it all functioning properly: Paideia (lit: upbringing)
For those of you who feel this inner imbalance, this inner irritation from the cycles of the world and the digitally force-fed anxiety of our world, I wrote a book—a book that is meant to get your system back on track, to teach you again the way the ancients thought, the basics that gave it all meaning, form, structure and purpose. You will find that book available for purchase here.
I want you to read it carefully and allow it to lead you to your very own Inner Examiner. To the Council of your own Logos where you are no longer a mere leaf in the wind of the world’s weather but a structured, purposeful, and sovereign nous. Teach its structure to your children, pass the book to your friends, present it as a gift to loved ones, and anyone you think will benefit.
All change, positive or negative, starts always with the individual. It comes from one point, from the moment the Psyche downloads from the Nous an idea, an archetype, an event, a form, a structure, and processes it, sets it in motion, and materializes it within Physis. Divert your mind towards the ideas and ideals as formulated by the Hellenic Path and see how quickly and meaningfully the world inside you and all around you transforms!
Start chipping away at the crude stone of your being and give birth to the statue that can be produced from it. Eternal, beautiful, mirroring as much as it is possible in Matter what sits Perfect and Still in Nous.
Speaking of statues, I think this is the perfect time to move on in our series to the next item on our Practical Theurgy course. It is time to talk about the statue, the very center of our praxis and the most prominent feature of any altar.
The Image at the Center
In the previous article, we spent a great deal of time discussing boundaries, altars, orientation, sacred geography, and the creation of sacred space. We followed the development of the sanctuary from grove to temenos, from temenos to altar, and from altar to microcosm. By the end of that journey, however, we found ourselves standing before an object so familiar that it often escapes examination altogether.
The image.
Almost every ancient sanctuary eventually possessed one, every temple, every precinct in a city, every crossroad, and entrance.
Even the homes of ordinary people contained small sacred figures, reliefs, and household shrines.
That same tendency persisted all through to Greek and Roman Christianity, with entire wars being fought over the role of icons in worship. The marble was merely replaced by wood, and the deities and guardian spirits with the faces of the Virgin, the saints of the Church, and the ubiquitous Dionysian Jesus.
The point is that the image still occupies a central and prominent space in our lives, and all attempts to stamp it out have failed. Even in traditions that want to remain uniconic, such as Judaism or Islam, there is always some physical focal point, a representation of their understanding of the divine, such as calligraphy, a holy book, a crucifix, snippets of scripture, and so on.
Even modern practitioners assembling altars in largely self-made and self-practiced modalities often discover themselves asking the same practical question that confronted worshippers thousands of years ago:
“This is my altar, but what should I put there?”
The answer is, with some variation, ubiquitously, some form of divine image. Be it a statue, a relief, an icon, a painted representation, a sacred symbol.
Yet the moment the “Image” appears, a more difficult question follows.
What exactly is it?
The modern world tends to assume that this question has already been answered. We imagine that we know what a statue is because statues surround us. They stand in parks, museums, government buildings, cemeteries, and public squares. They commemorate historical figures, military victories, political ideals, and cultural achievements. They are objects of craftsmanship, decoration, memory, or artistic expression.
When we encounter an image of Athena or Apollo, we therefore tend to interpret it through the same framework. We assume that the statue is simply a visual, almost photographic representation of a god in the same way that a statue of Socrates represents Socrates or a statue of Lincoln represents Lincoln.
Yet if this interpretation were sufficient, a great deal of ancient religious behavior would become extremely difficult to explain.
Why were some images washed, clothed, and carried in procession?
Why were offerings presented before them?
Why were certain images regarded with extraordinary reverence while others remained little more than decorative objects?
Why did philosophers who were perfectly capable of distinguishing stone from divinity continue defending the use of sacred images?
And perhaps most importantly, why did later theurgists devote so much attention to them?
The answer is that the ancient understanding of sacred images was considerably more sophisticated than either modern critics or modern enthusiasts often realize.
On the one hand, the image was not merely decoration but, on the other hand, it was also not simply the god it depicted.
Ancient religion occupied a position between those extremes, and understanding that position requires us to abandon many assumptions inherited from both modern secularism and modern spirituality because the sacred image was neither a piece of religious furniture nor a magical container for a divine being.
It served another function altogether.
To understand that function, we must begin with a word in the Greek language that has always been used up to the use of Christian icons when speaking about sacred images, and that word is: agalma.
Agalma is most often translated simply as “statue,” but this translation conceals far more than it reveals.
And like many important Greek religious terms, the deeper one examines it, the more surprising its implications become. In this article, we are going to be diving into what an agalma is and why it is so important in theurgy. This article is for paying subscribers past this point, so please consider subscribing in order to get the full benefit of this series. Questions and suggestions are always welcome. Let’s get into it.
