Platonists and High Priests: Daemonology, Ritual and Social Order in the Third Century CE. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009 - 500 pages In the third century, Platonist philosophers such as Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus were engaged in creating systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in increasingly more hierarchical ways. All of these philosophers also made claims to ritual expertise and called themselves high priests of the highest god. My argument is that they did so, in part, to garner cultural and social capital in the forms of prestige and authority, and may have even done so in order to caste themselves in the role of advisors to local and imperial leaders. The daemonological discourses they constructed as part of their overall respective theological and philosophical projects were projected onto and ordered a more "local" daemonological perspective which, although totalizing in its own right, was less concerned with hierarchy and precise distinctions between different kinds of spirits. |
