Plato Roundtable with Ike Baker and PD Newman PT1

To help them, help us unpack a little bit here. We've got two great, amazing and brilliant guests with us today, P. D. Newman and the Ike Baker. And this time it's going to be heavy. We're talking about Plato's writings, the hidden layers inside of them, the big ideas like the forms the soul of the nature of reality, and why texts like The Republic and the Tamaea still matter today as we're trying to understand the spiritual and the symbolic foundations

of Western world as we know it. Plato isn't just ancient history. He's still in the room with us today. His fingerprints are all over everything religion, philosophy, initiation systems, and the way people think about truth itself. So today we're going back into the cave and hopefully coming back out with a little more light. Pd Ike, welcome back to the old cult rejects, and I myself do not

forget am Brandon Lee of Megas in the media. After this, head over sbscribe like and share the same thing you do with everybody else on this panel. We're going deep and I'm sending it over to the head cardinal himself, the nick the occult reject himself. Head it over.

this morning we covered the Naghamadi text. We covered, uh, the.

I cover. But if you want to check out all my Miss laney SLINKs, you can go to my link tree which is link tree r M A r X. And I will say that over the last couple of years, I've pretty extensively been really digging into play though, and I'm just completing laws right now, and so it's, uh, it's been quite the journey going through all this information and I'm really interested to see kind of you know, where this whole conversation goes on, just platonic, you know, philosophy,

the governmental processes, the various gods and goddesses and temples and it's just uh yeah, some really uh stuff that I really enjoy and I appreciate you having me on.

most people will know me as Golden Down magician. That's kind of my background.

forgetting the fourth one. But so it started really early for me, and I didn't have any kind of academic filter that was that was trying to you know, fit me into this little nice, uh you know, rationally square box that uh that academia was trying to filter our perception of of the Platonic dialogues through for a really long time. So these always came across as mystical texts to me and I actually bonded for the first time.

I had PD on my podcast to cut a number of years ago, and just and I think we might have used exactly these words in the podcast. What he was putting down I was picking up because this, immediately to me was a kindred spirit. PD is one of the finest, finest Platonists I've ever met my entire life. And uh, he's an incredible author and his book Theogy

Theory in practice, it just blew the doors off. And you know what it's saying something when you get an author who writes relatively short treatise, if you've seen literature on Platonism and theory, she's like, you know, and but more information, more valuable information, and more heart in that in that thin volume than than arguably probably the last

forty books I read on Platonism. So of course I jumped at the opportunity to uh to bring them on this show today, and so thanks for being here man.

most visible system was the golden dullstem. I spent a lot of time in the Golden Dull system, got into too Crowley for a little while, especially because of his validation of the use of enthegens within a magical context, which was the first validation I had seen of what I was experiencing in my own path. But what got me into Platonism and what led to the writing of theogy, Believe it or not, I read this book by Augus

uzda Venis. He passed away in twenty ten, probably probably the most brilliant author I've ever read, next to somebody like Peter Kingsley, and that book absolutely set me on fire. And I didn't know that Algus had passed away. I didn't know who this man was, and and I had

no intentions of writing a book on theorgy. But one night I'm dead asleep, and I have an encounter with what I can only call Ustavinni's ghost comes to me in my sleep and gives me this book fully formed, uh, the entire organization of it, the the structure of it, each chapter, the themes. And I woke up two three in the morning with this fully formed book in my head, and and I thought, how the fuck does that happen? Where does you know? Where did that come from? But

I didn't do anything about it. And successively, for roughly ninety days, he would startle me awake about the same time, two or three in the morning and make me write. And every book I wrote before that book, you know, you can probably confirm this. It takes about a year, you know, to research and write a book. This book happened in ninety days. I wrote it in an absolute fever and a half trance state in the middle of the night, being prodded by this ornery Lithuanian fucking ghost.

So I say that because I don't take full credit for that book. I also, I am not trying to say it's a channeled work, but it came about in a very strange way and was by far the oddest night the days of my entire career as a writer. So strange stuff the muse.

Plato was reading. And that's especially true if someone like Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Pedocles, Heraclitis, you know, all of these early pre Socratic voices, he addresses them and their ideas, even if he's not clear about it, even if he's not saying, you know, we're commenting on or building on what came in the past. In a big way, he gives his reader the benefit of the doubt that they already know

this stuff. And at the time they probably did, you know, within the academy, they certainly would have been familiar with those those texts. But yeah, everything and and it's especially true of early Christianity, of Orthodox Christianity, and it's true of heterodox Christianity a gnosticism. But when you see the emergence of Christianity proper in the Orthodox Church and figures like Saint Dionysius, the Areopagite Gregory of Nissa, Saint Anthonasius.

It's a Maximus the Confessor. Especially, it's impossible two make sense of what they're saying without recourse to Plato. Like IX said, without that, without a filter in there that you're you can say, oh, you know this, this is Plato just recast for for a different type of audience. And what's really different about that audience and Platonism the one the monad is transcendent a lot like the Father in Christianity right, and in Judaism, the fathers is separate

from his creation. Christianity drawing from not necessarily Plato, but certainly the Neoplatonists realized the gap that creates because there is a philosophical need to maintain God's eminence within the creation. And the Neoplatonists solve this problem by what they call suntha, Mata, and sumbola, which are tokens and symbols, but tokens are so you can think about them similar to how the

Golden Dawn has correspondences. When you look at the Tree of life, each sephera, each netteva, they each have a string of correspondences, but and a lot of approaches to that. It becomes a psychological mnemonic where you'll see practitioners saying things like, well, if I surround myself with things that are red, you know, and increments of five and iron, that I'm propelling my consciousness into Gibera, because all of these are psychological mnemonics that entrance me to think about Mars,

to think about Gibura. But what's different about the way the Neoplatonists think about these tokens are that they don't represent the gods. They are the gods and fractal microcosmic form. So when you interact with with iron, you are interacting with Mars only simply the way Mars manifests on this plane. So Christianity takes this and transfers all of that into the figure of Christ. Christ becomes the imminence of God within this creation. But that couldn't have happened without Plato.

I like to say that Christ was born and crucified in a Platonic cosmos, in particularly a Hellenistic cosmos. Then the best example of that is in the Creed, where it says that Christ descends to Hades right to release the saints. Well, that means he descended to a Greek underworld right. So in the same motion, it confirms the Greek cosmo conception, but it also overturns it in that for the first time people can get out of Hades and into Heaven, which for them would have been Mount Olympus,

where men don't go men are allowed there. But Christ confirms it and overturns it. So no Plato, no.

which is a definition of terms. People will use terms generically according to their own sort of you know, referencing themselves and what they know. That's kind of like if you say, hey, can you get me a band aid out of the cabinet. What you're talking about is a bandage. Band aid is a brand, but you're using that term generically without even thinking about it, And people do that with Christianity. I am in terms of my faith, my outlook on the world. I would say that I'm someone

a little bit more pre Nicene, uh contemplative Christian. Also, you know, I practice the and and administer the seven Sacraments. I'm even though I'm not Orthodox, technically, I'm Orthoprats. So I'll practice those rituals according to the Roman writer the Coptic right. And then I'll say, look, but my my metaphysic hell, even my theology is Platonic. You know, the early Church. I mean you look a look at the reading,

any reading. Augustine's the obvious one. But if you look at even like the Desert Fathers, they're using and it's this is true of the Hermetica as well. We like to for for what I believe is like reasons of political correctness in the modern day. We like to attribute the Hermetic texts specifically to the Egyptians. But in reality, there's there's no Hermetic text that predates the Platonic Dialogues.

And not only it's written in Greek and Coptic. Coptic is mostly Greek in terms of the alphabet, and they're using discrete Platonic terms in context, words like c he right, soul, nous, higher, consciousness logos, these kinds of thing using those those platonic terms in us in that specific platonic context. It's the same thing in the writings of the Desert Fathers when they talk about I mean Evagius of Pontus, who is the great you know, taxonomist of of of of early

Christian demonology. He talks about the soul having three parts. Okay, that comes we first see that in the Fato. The platonic dialog is the tripartite nature of the soul, and he's talking about how he came out here in the desert so he could he could raise his consciousness up out of the appetitive, which is the lowest part, and into the rational, the logisticon.

You know, let's put this thing in a glass case and put a little light on it, like but but interpreting it from almost almost from a position within the tradition, you know. So so so it's almost like we have a new Neoplatonism here. That's that's working, and that's what the old commentators were doing, you know. And and somebody mentioned that they felt ignorant by reading Plato, and I mean even the early neoplatonists talk about that, you know,

they you know, so it's it's it's quite interesting. But I would say that, uh to to sort of piggyback on what PD said about Parmenides and Heraclitis. There was so so pre Socratic philosophy in the main, in the main, right, I'm gonna break with with this generalization to show you the exceptions, but in the main was not really that

interested in uh A sophisticated theology. They were very very they were they were they were early early sort of protophysicists, natural philosophers, and that would have been what was going on in the Egyptian temple complexes, right, because the gods were forces of nature, and each particularly particular you know, hieratic station or cultists, was dedicated not only to working with the God but understanding its functions in nature. Okay, so then this this stuff gets taught to the Greeks.

We know that we don't have to go over that is well established that they went there to learn this shit, and they came back wizards. But a lot of guys were more interested in ethics, more interested in you know, are things relative and the heraclitis and things like this. Not parmenit. He's protagorists, things like that, and Plato addresses

these in turn. Throughout his dialogues. He's constantly trying to or what I think, he's orienting those old, those pre Socratic philosophies in the light of the Socratic movement, which is but he's to PD's point, he's not being so heavy handed about it, right, because at the end of most of the Platonic dialogues, we're like, okay, we just spent forty five pages, and we're really we don't know where we are anymore, you know's there's not like they don't.

He never wraps a bow on it. He's the eternal cliffhanger. But there is an exception. There's an exception, and those exceptions that the way that I see them through my research is Pherisides, the ancient orphic mythographer who was, according to Diogenes Laertius, was the teacher of Pythagoras, we all know,

the great metaphysician and number mystic, and then Parmenides. And Parmenides I believe it is said that at one point he was a Pythagorean, and he left that cult specifically for a new teacher who taught him the art of silence and and uh and PD talks some about that

in his in his book. So what you get in Plato really is a focus on metaphysic uh, an ethical imperative two to using the mind to reach metaphysical heights uh, not necessarily just epistemological, but to get above that discursive weather, the way a plane has to get above the clouds in a storm. So to me, Plato is a continuation of those ancient pre Socratic metaphysicians, right. And you see that in in something like the curriculum curriculum of your Iamblicus.

The twelve Platonic dialogues that that were you know, in the the the late academy. They were requisite before practicing theogy. There are two dialogues, and I believe that they're termed this according to either Olympiadorus of the of Alexandria or the anonymous Prologomna. And Denny could probably tell me which one is which.

you have Parmenides right there. Not only that, but if if you go debt back to the epistemological test trad of the cradlest the Theotitis, the sofas and the statesman, Socrates says, Parmenides taught me the dialectic when I was a kid. And then in the Parmenides that final you know, series finale of the ambliking curriculum. It's it's the retelling of the story between Parmenides, his student Zeno, and the

young Socrates. As a matter of fact, in the epistemological tetrad Socrates hands the mic over to somebody who we call the Eleatic stranger Sinon, the the Eleatic foreigner, who then asks questions of a younger person named Socrates who's not Socrates. So there's a lot of this coding and a lot of this layering in there to point who he who the the forebears of this tradition really are.

And then of course the Timeus. You know, whether you believe it's misattributed to Timeus of low career or not, it's an anakronick sort of attribution, whether you believe in the historicity or not, it is so clearly Pythagorean. So at least you know as far as what we know about about the cult. So yeah, all of that stuff ends up becoming one way or the other, particularly And this is the point I tried to make, and I'll

end here. The point I tried to make in writing my first book, A Formless Fire, was to show the trajectory of how we got how we it is we come to custodianship of these capital m mysteries, and it is through the initiatory societies that took place, you know, obviously in the in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they were going based off of they were not necessarily just doing money, magic and go at a conjuration. They

were interested in theorgy. The Golden Dawn specifically states in in in a series of documents called the Flying Roles, which are foundational to the Inner Order. You've come here to do theorgy. Whether you realize they or not, theorgy is is the purpose of this. And then sprinkled throughout their rituals, which you really gotta you really got to listen to understand her two things, the Christian New Testament really the Gospels and Neoplatonic literature. There are sayings from

Proclus and the Neophyight ritual. So it's it's very very uh, it's that is to me, that is the real tradition.

the Divine Liturgy is it really is something special. That being said, there are so many heretical bones in my body that I mean, I can't just say I'm an Orthodox Christian because so much of the lens through which I view the ongoings of the liturgical cycle is colored by people like Origin and Clement of Alexandria, and while they are incredibly important figures, the Church is kind of whitewash them. Let's get them out of here. They're not saints,

we don't recognize them. And I had there was this I forget his name. He's a theologian Orthodox theologian, but he was describing the role that Origin played in the early Church, and he basically said, he says that, you know, we've got the Church fathers and they're playing soccer, and they're enjoying playing soccer, and Origin enters the picture, runs on the field, he says, I'm going to play, but he picks up the ball and runs off with it

and in the process creates football instead of soccer. And so the church fathers get pissed and kick him off the team. Then once he's out of the picture, they all continue playing football.

tradition that is more sacrificial. I guess I wonder what you guys would think about that.

no evil. There is privation of the good. But what privation of the good is a tendency to act in a way as though non being were real. But as Parmenides tells us, non being by definition cannot be. So it's it's it's a tendency to act in a way that is self defeating because it's impossible. It's a it's a it's a physical lie. Right, demons are demonized damons, and that's it's important to keep in mind. And when we get to someone like Iamblicus, he's very clear about

the necessity of sacrifice. He's Syrian and fully immersed in the Syrian religious tradition. He he espouses the traditional Hellenistic picture where everyone sacrifices at the temple, and it's through this act of sacrifice because these animals are tokens of the gods. And just like Ike said, they get this from the Egyptians. They Le's goes to Egypt. You know, Plato goes to Egypt, but th Agris goes to Egypt.

When an Egyptian looked out on the Nile and saw an ibis, they didn't think, oh, that bird is sacred to thought or to Uti. They said, there's to Huti. You know, it's a very different worldview and it demands a lot of us because all of the sudden, right, everything we do is sacred. The secular does not exist. Right, So when they take an animal, they're taking the God and sacrificing it. And within the Greek tradition, the sacrifice

is not complete until you partake of it. So unlike with the Jewish tradition where they would burn the entire animal and leave it on the altar to legitimize the sacrifice and Hellenistic tradition, you have to partake of it. And that's the origin of this theophagi of consuming the god to become the god. Once you consume it, you're possessed by it. And you know, ever since William Bladdie wrote The psyop that is the Exorcist, we've got this

bad idea in America of possession. That possession is bad, but possession in the Greek tradition, especially in Neoplatonism, that's the highest grace we can be of it. You know, it demands that we completely reorientate our view of this. And what was the second thing you said? After sacrifice Jesus.

do not have to be circumcised to be Christians. That in itself completely disrupts any continuity between Judaism and Christianity, so much so that, you know, so of someone like Valentinis, I think it is perfectly his his his desire to remove the Old Testament altogether is warranted because that's not what they're practicing anymore. That's all I got.

does that in the underworld. Believe it or not. They got to they got, of course, they have to incorporate they got of violence to push back in the annihilation. Then later in the second intermediate period, you start seeing the coffin text still a little bit more democratic about it, and say, okay, well, you know, if you guys can pay us, then you'll have souls too, and you can afford for us to carve this ship on the inside

of your tomb. Now, then you get the Hebrew Covenant, which you know obviously says over and it's itself admittedly refers to a chosen people, a chosen people. You get the New Testament. Somebody who comes out of this chosen people and says, immortality is for fucking everyone everyone, right, okay, you must but this is what it is. That's how you become god. It's the reason for theophagia. In my opinion, what he does is what what Jesus does at the

Last Supper is a baptism of the old gods. He takes them down from a place right the only sys It's very difficult to understand. Why is it difficult to understand? He's very similar to Christ, similar similar, you know, theophagic sort of thing with the wine and things like this. He's difficult. It's because that's a difficult thing for us

to understand about ourselves. How is it that one one with with with one glass or two glasses, I can be sitting there and me and PD can be you know, just having this incredible time full of joy and a brilliance. And then and then on another night, I can have the same amount of alcohol and uh, you know, be be vomiting or throwing falling down the stairs. Yeah, becoming the main ad versus the uh, the the the exalted,

you know, god of wine. It is a very difficult thing there in the ancient world where they were still really really wrestling by the strict bonds of their mortality. So when Christ comes he addresses this stuff. He talks about the Mosaic Law, and you'll find in the Gospels he says, he'll make a pronouncement to his to his disciples. So say, you have heard it said A B and C, and A B and C is some variant of the

Mosaic law. And then he'll go on to say, but verily, truly, I say unto you x y and Z, and x y and Z will directly contradict A, B and C. And so there's this defense in orthodox Christianity to say, well, yeah, but he says, I didn't come to break the law. Yes, that's right. He says I came not to break but and the typical translation is to fulfill the law. Now what does that do?

Immortality is for everyone. Now, there's some stuff where he talks about if you choose the path of separateness, if you choose that, then you will go to a place where there is much pain in the gnashing of teeth, but is insane. He says, you're gonna go somewhere, You're you're not gonna die and be in the ground, and it's over. Immortality is for every soul. It's just where how do you want to spend it? Based on what you do here? And that is extremely platonic. That's all.

You get that all the way in the Fato, the afterlife myth in the Fader, you get in the myth of er fuck you if you go to the Osiria and an abidhost right now and you go through the procession way. I was there in October and I took pictures. On the right hand side is the Duot. Okay, this is written like four thousand years ago on that wall. Okay. On the left side are the Book of Gates in the Amduat. The book m Duad means what is in

the duot? What is in the afterlife? Okay? At the highest it's it's kind of like this this vertical triptych. At the highest point near the ceiling, they're the blessed dead, and there they get to participate with with Raw and his solar bark, and they pull him very gratefully through the through the the night of the underworld. They get to participate in that. In the middle are people who live decent lives, and they go to the kind of like the field of reeds and they live what life

was like here kind of uh. And then on the bottom of the wall, bottom of the wall, near the floor, there are people who are hung upside down with their arms tied behind their back, and they are the only figures on either wall that are completely painted red for burning for pain. For So, this idea that Hell is Christian, or specifically judo Christian is bullshit, very convenient bullshit. But this stuff is way, way, way, way, way predates that stuff.

So there's he's coming to talk about. Here's the way out. Here is the way. I'm gonna leave it on this. If anybody wants to understand a little bit more of this through maybe like a Christian cabalistic lens Renaissance cabalism. Look at the work of Johannis Ruyklin, particularly de Verbo

Mirifico the Wonder Working Word. He shows how the old dispensation was the tetragrammaton, the four lettered name of God, and how the new dispensation is the pentagrammaton with the insertion of the shin of spirit in the middle of that old name Yahweh becoming Aeshue. It's a little anachronistic because we don't have Jesus's name written anywhere in Hebrew. It's in Greek and it's Jezus. But I think that the idea is really relevant and very important, and I

don't think any of this. Whether whether you believe it happened or not, it doesn't matter to me. The true truth is what matters to me, not the not the historical truth, but the capital T truth underlying that thing is what's important to me. And I think whether you believe Christ existed or now are symbolic, you could not have Christianity. Those ideas come to the to the fullest without Platonism. It all starts with Plato. You know, at least in the historical record, there may very well may

have been people before him. We don't know about them, and they didn't they didn't leave anything.

to Pythagorianism to the you know, Socrates and his dialectic in getting it into the Platonic dialogues and Plato himself, because Plato talks about what metempsychosis is and the trends migration of the soul and how important that is too.

Understanding what even immortality is and why the Platonic forms are so important in Plato's dialogues to begin with, because when we're understanding that the orphic mysteries are a mythic mystery of you know, Orpheus trying to bring his love Aridise up from the cave, up from Hades, up from the underworld, and he doesn't have enough faith to not look back as she disappears, and then he pines on

into existence of his arrows forever. And then from there we move forth to Pythagoreanism, where we get the ideas of the mathematic and the harmony of the spheres, and so we're taking it from the mythic into the more pre scientific understanding of how to build up a mystery school and how to bring people in too, understanding that divine spheres and the geometries, which then Plato, which in your classes you brief very well described, has taken Pythagorea

in his understanding of the harmony of the spheres and put it into his very work in a very uh in a very coded way. And from there we understand that Socrates is trying to now retrain the mind from the mythic into the dialectic and teach people how to philosophize, which is why we don't ever get anything wrapped up

into a tight bow. And then through there we can understand what is the transmigration of the soul, what does it mean to be immortal, and how do we take what we're trying to then talk about with the crustos, with our golden dawn with our magical practices, and what field gea is, what is the divine working of trying to have that anagogic experience of bringing ourselves up into the heavens or the forms or into the divine or as Amblicus want us to do, is bring the vine

down into this world so we can have an embodied experience, because I think that's what Socrates is truly trying to talk about in Plato's Plato's works, especially the Republic, especially the Phadrus, where he is actually Socrates's god is Apollo, and if we want to map that to the Tree of Life, we can map Apollo to Tipereth, which then is bringing us back to Christ where from Cather down you get Socrates speaking from his Apollonian way of trying

to truly break things down in that well organized, symphonic style of style of speech. And then that reincarnation that we're talking about with the metim psychosis and the transmigration of the soul, is that ascent into the forms, and that forms is every time we die and are reborn, that metim psychosis, that cyclical nature of the soul trying

to reach its highest state of the philosopher King. You know, I think that's really telling of what is our path as magicians and what are we truly trying to do here, which is trying to reach that divine state and reach that spark that's within us and get rid of that

leaden soul, that alchemizing of our soul. And what he's doing every time, especially in the Republic, every person he talks to, you know, Plato's brothers, you know, which is Glaucon and Thetitis or whoever the guy with the teen name and everybody else is taking a certain position as Socrates is like, No, this is how we're going to start philosophizing here, and we're going to start laying out the direct understanding of what is justice and how do

we live a just life? And to live that just life is trying to understand how to transcend our current state is which is what I believe PD and Ike is talking about here, is how do we live that path of the Cristos or the Apollonian or how do we truly understand how to philosophize, how do we live the magical life, which is that are unifying ourselves with the forms or you know, walking out of the cave.

And so that's kind of like I want to take us back into Plato itself, because I think that's really important to lay the foundations of what is the Western esoteric tradition. It is nothing without Plato, and Christianity is nothing without Plato, because Christianity is laying itself the foundation of Aristotelianism and what Thomas Aquinas did. So without Plato,

you don't have Aristotle, you don't have the mind. You know, Aristotle was known as the mind of the academy, and so you get the mind and the light, right, the mind being Aristotle and the light being Plato, and you put that together, and Christianity would be nothing. And what exists today without the very foundation in the bedrock of the Western philosophical tradition.

a metaphysical purpose, a purpose purpose behind it. So so I think that really Platonism, it was, was an early early form of Christianity attempting to be like what, I'll put it this way, forget, forget the label what Christianity actually was when it was first happening. Okay, that's that's it in the world, the christ event. Let's just call it that. Platonism was for me, that trying to be

born into the world. And what do you have. You see a guy named Socrates who's running around telling everybody, uh to walk away from the wisdom of the world, walk away from worldly wisdom. What happened? They killed him for it? Well, actually they gave him a choice, same way christ had kind of had a choice. They said, you can either leave, you can be exiled, or you you you die, And he said, you know, fuck, you

kill me. And it's that willing that willingness to go to his to his death for the right reasons is ultimately where we are all headed, if we are if we are doing theogic initiatory magic. I want to hear from from PD though, what do you think.

we get into the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. But the picture of the soul in the earliest literature, in Homer, you know, the soul is like an echo, like a dim shade, a reflection of what we are a a living being.

into Mongolians, Tibetans, Siberian Shamans. But somehow this idea of the soul not as a shade of the self, but as the very locust of one's emotional and intellectual life enters the picture, and seemingly out of nowhere we get figures like Hermontomous Epiminites, Aristaeus, these figures that long before somebody like Robert Monroe comes along and talks about out of body experiences, we've got these these three poet philosophers, leaving their body, lying as though dead, much like we

see with Parmenides and how his teacher taught him, like Ike said, stillness heskia, which is actually where we get the term for hesi chasm and orthodoxy, their ritual practice of monks not laid persons, but lying is though dead, and their souls leaving their body. But they're traveling horizontally at this point. They're traveling around the place where they already live, so they're going to other cities and reporting

what they see back. It isn't until we get to someone like Parmenides where all of the sudden we get vertical soul travel, where he's going down into the underworld, meeting with the goddess there and acquiring laws. But it's a very gradual transition of this idea of soul movement, you know. But by the time Plato enters the picture. This is one reason I think in the Parmenides why he says, you know, if we're going to do this,

we have to kill father Parmenides. And what does he mean by that, Well, his program is essentially reorientating soul flight and saying just like Christ did when he overturned the Greek cosmo conception. He's saying, Hades is right here, We're in it. He allegorizes the underworld and says, we

are at the bottom of the chain of being. There's no further down you can go, which means soul flight reorientates, and now we go up, we ascend and we get to unite with the gods, you know, And all of this is what this gradual development of what the soul is looks like and does feeds into Christianity and changes it. And when Christ says, like at the Last Supper, like Ike was talking about a moment ago, when he says this, dude, in remembrance of me, the word he uses for remembrance

is a conjugation of an amnesis. And any educated spectator that would have heard him say that would have immediately thought, oh, he's talking about Plato. He's saying that what we're about to do is going to make us remember the divine origins, the divine nature of our soul. He's talking about our soul, you know. So that's what first came to my mind.

if I would anymore. But it's such a fascinating conversation, this level of remembrance because Christianity itself, I do think, And I can actually blame my schooling for this, because I studied Platonism and I have a degree in philosophy, and so I'm more my brain structures it slightly different than maybe yourself, I like, because of you were raised differently. But it's such a fascinating conversation how it moves itself forward, and so what do you think about that?

talking about the external police, it's talking about the internal police. Yeah,

of course that's a huge part of it. But what he basically says, you know, if you listen to it, if you read it, he basically he kind of basically puts it in a way where it's like, look, the best, the best of all possible situations is an agrarian sort of small thing, tribal thing almost, And then they kind of push him for like, okay, well what about about war, And it's like, okay, if you want to go that route, well, now here's this kind of like eugenics hellscape that he

just lays out. It's like there is no there is anything that human beings do. Anything that we're going to do will inevitably or really indelibly be imprinted with our highest potentials and also our lows. And I think one of the things that you find a lot in Platonism in particular was a railing against worldly institutions.

about how he he goes. He basically gives us right there the scheme of like why he's always talking about politics and putting in an ethical imperative on being wise, right, because he basically says, if you are not wise and you're in charge of governing people, you do a lot of harm. Okay, So there's an ethical imperative tied to philosophy. And he talks about how he don't forget he lived this was a golden age, agreed, but he lived during

the time of the forty tyrants. Okay, that was like Gestapo shit, they're pulling people out of their house at night and they're disappearing. And meantime, some of those people were his relatives. So he says in his second letter, he's like, or a Seventh Letter, I was poised for a life in politics, and I walked away. I said, I'm going into philosophy. And then, you know, for anybody that's interested in really getting getting inside his his history,

I would recommend reading the Seventh Letter as well. But I think that's that's really what we're talking about here. When you look at like any organization is capable of atrocities, but it's usually the smaller and at the beginning period it's very very I would say that's when it's probably most pure. But at the end of the day, like nothing's really ever at its beginning period, we're all evolving out of something else. And I think I could go on about the neoplatonic stuff, but I feel like I'm

beating a dead horse. So maybe maybe I hear from PD.

taught only within the academy. And we really get the best picture of that from the seventh the seventh Letter, and it lines up a lot with the Parmenides, because you know Plato, there's so much emphasis placed on the forms, but even in the Parmenides he allows himself to doubt the existence of the forms. But what comes in place of that isn't really spelled out until the seventh Letter, and it's what is referred to as the principles, and

that it's a lot like with Empedocles. Empedocles has his four roots, which are the source of our elements in the West. Now, in modern magical traditions, it's often juxtaposed against the planets. The planets are up there, the elements are down here. For Empedocles, that wasn't the case. His roots are are very similar to Plato's forms. He identifies them with gods. Fire is Zeus, and water is Persephone,

Hera is air. So they're not the elements as the building blocks of the world in kind of the way the atomists might have thought about it, even though they weren't thinking in terms of elements. But in addition to these four ruling roots, you have two factors, love and strife, that are constantly pushing and pulling the world apart. When love rules, everything comes together and we what we get is something like the Parmiti parmid Parmenidean one. Right, there's

no there's no space. With these everything is is one changes. But when strife rules, we enter a picture more akin too Heraclitis's cosmos, where everything is changed, everything is kind

of being pushed apart and expelling each other. Well, with the seventh letter we get the first peak at these unwritten doctrines, which are essentially Pythagorean his his Paris and a perion, which is is limit and limitlessness, limit being kin to the mona, the one, the Parmenidean idea, and then limitlessness being what has been called the indefinite diad. I think is what Aristotle calls it and his testimonial the the indefinite diad, which is the source of all multiplicity.

And so what we're really looking at is similar to to Olympiodorus's reading of the story of of segraeis of Dionysius when he's he's ripped apart by the Titans. Zegraeis reperence paros limit, He's one, the one, you know, but the Titans, who Olympiodorus says, because of the t and Titan the t i, which which means in Greek something specific, something separate. So so separateness rips the one apart and dismembers the one. And now we get the the indefinite

diad that creates complete multiplicity in the world. And I don't want to go far off into that because it's it's a deep, deep weight. But but to Ike's point, yes, that that alone is enough to make the seventh letter more valid than the rest of them.

particularly in in in Pythagoreanism. And we can liken these two like the path of return in the path of separateness, which have to do On the one hand, the path of separateness is selfishness, right, because we're conly identifying with self rather than all the the and the one, right.

And then another one is sacrifice, which which we're constantly working for the one, and so we're we're I don't know how like technical I should get, but this idea that Proclus talks about, this reversion of of of all cycles revert upon themselves, and that's what the Pythagorean question is kind of trying to answer, is like, in this reversion, you know, do we do we stop and revert towards the one or do we see it because we all see it and then keep going the direction we were

going in further further out until we're eventually pulled down to the furthest nature and then has to come back up. And what's really interesting, and I'll end on this is I guess this is like cool trivia, but you know, I'm in good company here. I like etymology. You have monas or or write the monad or end the one.

They're different, but really monas in this in this case is uh the one, the monad the whole unity and the second thing, Yeah, you get the das or dad diad, which is separateness and an eternal tension or not eternal but unresolved tension, right, the indefinite tension. The root of that word dia is the root of the Latin word diavolos for devil.

traditions for today and everything like that. And I think it's really important to know that Plato and all these characters that we're talking about war initiates of the illusion mystery schools as well as other mystery schools of that time, right Plato is you know, Pythagorean at that same time as well, And these mystery schools are bringing upon the allegories and myths of right Persephone going into again what the underworld as we keep hitting on and being stuck

there because she ate of the pomegranate fruit, and then you know, we're trying to express and understand these lesser and greater mysteries of how the cyclical nature, the cyclical

cycles of nature are moving just like this. It's that internal understanding of the allegory of the tripartite soul, and how these cyclical natures of our own soul are you know, you know, transmigrating from one time to the next, and then they move on through the mystery schools of the ages, that golden thread that spreads itself to the many myriads of individuals, even on this panel, as we practice our own magical traditions.

uses is it for that? But but the originy is particularly working in that dimension, which gives us the initiatory schools like the Golden Dawn orm Soul is all claiming to do that. So I think it's important, it's interesting to talk about. But I think PDA has a very unique perspective, specifically because of his work with the you just work with so many different sort of I guess what we could call them, like shamanic cultures where there's a descent and an ascent, or you've said to me

before in private conversation, the descent is the ascent. But I've heard you also talk about what it is that you're interested in as models of ascent. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that in terms of Platonism or how would you how would you define models of ascent?

bodies in Hinduism and yoga. We're so familiar with the septinary chakra system, but there are so many chakra systems depending on who you're learning from there. Some have ten, some have eight, some have three, you know, and so when we compare these pictures of the soul and the cosmos in which these traditions tell us these souls exist. Who's right?

not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is with each of these traditions, we we we meet them on their own terms, and this is this is what this is how phenomenology works, how we move between emic and etic perspectives of a thing. We have to take it at its own word and say, okay, uh, let's let's fly this plane right now and see where you can get. So when I'm when I say i'm I'm fascinated by models of assent, what I'm I'm really saying is not how are they similar, but how are they different? And

why is it that they all work? Once we suspend disbelief and apply magical fuel of of belief to the practice, then all of the sudden again the soul becomes the mercurial thing Young said it was. It can it can be anything, and it's really our imagination. And I don't mean like Fantasia, and I mean I mean the ochema, the soul vehicle, which is in Neoplatonism, the seat of

our imagination. When when when you look at somebody like Young or Henry Corbon and they're talking about active imagination, they're getting that term from the neoplatonists because there's a passive imagination, which is the daydreaming faculty. But then there's an active imagination which comes about through purification of the soul. And this speaks to what I was say in a

moment ago about about how we define things. When we see the word initiation in a text that's been translated from the Greek, what they're usually translating is teleta telotate

does initiation means the beginning of a thing? Telltate is its telos, the completion, the perfection of it, so that what we're really talking about initiation is more akin to Catharsis, to the initial purification of the soul that's necessary for it to you know, to borrow from a Buddhist term, to become that clean mirror of the dharma that will literally reflect whatever world we can conceive, because at the in the final analysis, we're not creatures like we think

we are. You know, when when we say when we say we we can unite with a God, we're not saying we can hug them. We're saying that we can remember that we are them choosing to participate in this kind of an experience and for whatever reason we can s I think it probably has a lot to do with the existential boredom that arises from being the one thing. You know, we don't know who or what we are

until someone shows us to ourselves. So imagine being the one there's no no environment, you're not in a room, there's not a second, and you could say, well, God's all knowing, it says in the Bible He's omniscient. But this great theologian Orthodox elogian, John Scotus or Eugena, he says, what the fuck are you talking about God doesn't know anything. Knowledge implies duality. There has to be a knower, a known,

and the knowledge between them. He's like, I'm not saying God's stupid, but whatever knowledge is, it's the province of man. So how do you, as the one, acquire self knowledge except to sacrifice yourself, dismember yourself.

get out in space, there's no up or down. You've got to be on a planet to have an up or down. You know, it's it's useful while we're here doing this thing. We're doing but the ascent is the the acent is the decent when when when we go up, it's really because the gods come down, but no motion has taken place. It's this right here is the this holy meeting ground between one thing, not two things. If that makes sense.

things like this. So one thing that I'm I'm I'm I'm always interested in in understanding is you know Proclus calls I think it's his commentary on Euclid, I think, but I'm pretty sure he calls Plato a mysticgog, very different than of philosophy. He calls him a mysticgog like a hiero fat somebody who reveals the mysteries. Do you think it was just this.

Do you or do you think they were do you think that they were putting things in there that were, you know, stretched a little way, a little ways away from what we see when we look at the Platonic dialogues, you know, because basically what I'm trying to ask is, do you see evidence for the neoplatonic worldviews of somebody like Iamlichus Proclus Platinus in the actual Platonic dialogues or did they just kind of do you think that they just put bells and whistles on a Christmas tree, you know,

so to speak, to put adorning it with these things that weren't necessarily organically there. I'm just curious because I've never we've never talked about that.

because we don't know what Plato thought. Plato. Plato put all all of these different perspectives in the mouths of other people, you know. And that's the beauty of the dialogue is that it allows dialectic to emerge through the interaction of these oppositional perspectives. But as far as what Plato himself thought, we don't have a fucking clue what Plato thought, you know. All we can do is read

the dialogues. And that's why I say it's not up to us to determine whether the Neoplatonists readings are valid, because we're doing the same thing. We're walking away with our best perception of what they're saying, and we ourselves push these texts to their limit, even if we try to limit them and say that stuff's not in there, because we can't know that. We can't know what Plato's saying himself.

And and he's claiming lineage from before the time of the Temple priest back to Maki's deck in order to you know, avert and go back to the original forms of ascended you know, thinking, I don't know.

and if they have, what's their actual date. And if we can determine their actual date, does that tell us anything about where some of these ideas.

prior to that. He demonstrates it argues very very well that if it did exist, it was rewritten after the encounter with Plato. Plato's work after their encounter with Hellenism, which explains why we get something like a mercaba. You know, a soul, the sole chariot that has no precedent other than the okeema, which means chariot. And it's this sole vehicle, right, so lots of problems there, if you know.