The soul never thinks without a phantasm.
— Aristotle, De Anima III.7, 431a14
This statement by Aristotle sums up perfectly why theurgical operations fail. The pure part of our soul requires our imagination to communicate…and imagination is fickle.
Unreliability & Human Error in Theurgy
In our bodily incarnation we think and experience everything in linear terms while spirit is the opposite. That is the nature of the world of matter, it is given a strong sense of separation so that the experience of time, space, past, present and future, cause and effect. Having an individual existence and experiencing physical sensation is only possible because of it. Spirits without a bodily vessel exist in a state of timelessness and relatively little separation.
The Limitation of Linear Communication
All of theurgy is, at its core, communication with the divine and this is an immense limitation. Spirit is forced to communicate in linear terms, which is not its natural state. Conversely, the theurgist is forced to think and communicate in the opposite fashion while still holding onto the reasoning faculties. In short, spiritual thought is intuition in its purest form. To reach us it must filter down to a human being and take on a series of forms that the human mind can relate to. In many ways, it mimics our soul’s descent into matter.
Iamblichus and Plotinus are clear that intuitive perception is often unreliable unless all the mental and spiritual faculties are highly purified. Iamblichus warns that many visions are not divine but arise from the irrational soul or even deceptive spirits.
The images which are impressed by the imagination and by opinion… these are phantasmata and not true theophanies.
— De Mysteriis II.4, Clarke et al., p. 104
This concept aligns with modern studies of extrasensory perception (ESP), where highly intuitive individuals can successfully access information in non-ordinary ways, but their results are inconsistent and often distorted by emotional or psychic interference. Iamblichus makes it clear that this was a struggle almost two thousand years ago. Even ancient sages had to distinguish between true noetic perception and misleading images arising from within or from lesser daemonic sources.
Phantasmata and the Appetitive Soul
Phantasmata is defined by Iamblichus as thoughts that arise from Epithylmia or the appetitive part of the soul. These are the thoughts that automatically fill the imagination of everyone, consciously and unconsciously. Our awareness is instinctively focused on taking care of our body and reacting to our surroundings. The mediating imagination is forced to support it to avoid pain and discomfort, and the highest faculty of reason can only watch helplessly while it is silenced and forced into a subordinate role.
The Rational Faculty as Deception (Dianoia)
This makes the lowest part of the soul dominant and cuts the soul off from its source, Nous, contradicting the natural order of the cosmos and our true nature along with it. To perceive the Forms, the theurgist’s point of awareness must break through the deep-rooted influence of Epithylmia and the imaginal faculties of the spirit can begin to see glimpses through the Eye of the Soul.
The appetitive soul is only one obstacle. The spirit or, the imaginal faculties, has the potential to unknowingly generate an infinite number of deceptive illusions. When the rational Logos emanates a thought the imagination receives it, gives it form and it is then perceived by our awareness as a fully developed thought. Whether it is accepted, nurtured and given more attention is a decision informed by our reasoning process or dianoia. Every person has a process of discursive reasoning, or logic, which is used to discern these thoughts. It can also become an insidious deception for the theurgist.
This rational or logical faculty is how we filter our imagination’s control over our actions. It helps us not to act purely on impulse, get too engrossed in our imagination and find some semblance of order in the chaos of sensory input. It operates based on experience, drawing conclusions step-by-step on the basis of “if this is true then that must also be true”. According to the Timaeus (69c–70d) reasoning is a function of the soul that emanates from the head, but it is distinct from divine intellect which sees all at once.
This reasoning faculty is turned into a deception when the appetitive soul struggles harder to regain its sense of dominance. When glimpses of the Forms start to enter the theurgist’s awareness, the appetitive soul reacts like a person whose home is threatened and resists any way it can. If it loses one struggle, it can adapt and refine its tactics of tampering with the imagination, even purposely imitating divine visions or taking the form of malicious daemons.
The cosmology in Timaeus is the same as the Hermetic doctrines; everything that is created has a counterpart in the human soul that partakes of the same nature. The appetitive soul is of the nature of the underworld, the body is of the earth, the imagination of the astral, and the reasoning intellect is of the ethereal fire or light in the heavens. Nous is simultaneously the individual point of awareness and the entire cosmos.
The Passive Nature of the Imaginal Soul
The imaginal part of the soul is of a passive, neutral and reflective nature, like water. It absorbs, reflects and refracts what is presented to it with a potentially infinite variety of forms, much like the Moon. Its role is to mediate and reflect what is above and below, just as the astral spheres funnel divine emanations into matter. The appetitive soul is just as capable of projecting its influences into it as the higher faculties.
The individual awareness or sense of “self” is helpless to control it without undergoing deep self-examination, such as the practices that Plotinus did throughout his life. Incrementally, the self becomes more and more aware of the contents of the soul and by extension the fractal nature of reality. When the self finally realizes and experiences its paradoxical existence as Nous focused into a point within a fractal web, it perceives through the Eye of the Soul.
Human beings have the potential to access a vast amount of knowledge according to the sages. Theoretically speaking, all people can interact with all the invisible forces of nature and seemingly miraculous things can occur. This was the work that Iamblichus devoted his life to. However, the nature of our existence does not allow that to occur easily. It is a journey that Plato says encompasses many lifetimes across vast spans of time.
Why Theurgy Fails
The Failure of the Recipient, Not the Gods
Why do visions, rituals and oracles often fail to achieve the desired outcome, even among the most pious? The effects were often unpredictable, and Porphyry raised the question of why it failed if the gods were perfect. Iamblichus answers:
It is not the cause of the gods if the recipient is unworthy or the ritual is performed imperfectly, or if something external obstructs the realization of the divine intention. In such cases, the theurgic rite fails not because the gods fail, but because the human element is flawed or the proper conditions are not met.
— De Mysteriis I.11, Clarke et al., p. 39
He puts all the responsibility for failure squarely on the people who participated or some external factor in nature that wasn’t accounted for. Proclus also attributed it all to human error.
Every failure of the divine activity in souls must be attributed not to the divine cause but to the recipient, which is unadapted and not in harmony.
— Elements of Theology, Prop. 184, trans. E.R. Dodds)
Proclus repeats this opinion again and says, in effect, that any gifts we do not receive from the gods is because we do not fulfill our responsibilities in some way, whether it is a defect in our own being that we have not overcome or some other mistake, such as mistaking the workings of one’s own imagination as a vision of the soul. Human beings must be aligned with the divine order and that first requires knowing what it is.
Every failure in the energy of divine operations is not to be ascribed to the gods, but to those who are unable to receive their gifts through the defect of their own nature, or from a want of due preparation.
—(Theologia Platonica IV.11, trans. Thomas Taylor
Thus, inconsistency stems from the unstable and impure condition of the human soul. But failures cannot be blamed entirely on this. The Eye of the Soul has an extensive range of perceptions, even when it is awakened partially. It can perceive the divine, the astral spheres and the world of matter.
Developing the Eye of the Soul and the Path to Henosis
Using it to perceive the material world beyond the range of the physical body is the most widely known and practical use of extrasensory perception in modern times, but the philosophers took it further. Theurgists were required to accurately discern information at all levels of existence, and in doing so they could develop the corresponding parts of their own soul.
For example, a prophetic dream in the sphere of Mercury will develop the Mercurial aspects of the astral body. Eventually the theurgist will have done this for all the spheres of the cosmos and awakened all parts of the soul. The ultimate goal was the experience of perceiving all parts of the cosmos, and the self, as a unified whole.
Distinguishing Sensible and Intelligible Vision
Proclus says in his Commentary on the Timaeus (I.225.13) that there are two types of vision the Eye of the Soul is capable of:
The soul has two kinds of sight: one that sees the sensible and one that sees the intelligible. When the intelligible eye is turned inward and purified, it sees the Forms directly.
The sensible refers to things that are created and can be perceived, whether they are composed of matter, energy or spirit. The sensible refers to the things that we encounter and experience in our incarnated existence. Many spiritual beings are sensible because they are perceptible in altered states of consciousness or, more rarely, as a physical disturbance.
The intelligible is the force that has no perceivable form. We know it exists because we can observe some of its effects. For example, gravity is an intelligible force of the world of matter that permeates everything, but it has no substance or form. We can see it at work when things fall but can’t see the mechanism that makes it occur. The sensible aspects of gravity are the feelings of weight or watching something fall. The intelligible aspects are the mathematical laws that govern it that can only be understood through higher faculties.
The spiritual has both sensible and intelligible aspects. The astral spheres are teeming with images, but this is a veil that conceals their true nature and origins in the World of Forms, which can only be perceived by the higher faculties of the soul.
The Eye of the Soul is first trained to accurately perceive things in the world of matter, which is what most people associate extrasensory perception with. It is also used to guide various types of divination. When it has proven reliable for this, it is then directed towards the things which are hidden under the surface.
More and more it begins to perceive things that the imagination could not have comprehended and recognizes glimmers of something beyond. What is beyond is the World of Forms, and all efforts are then directed towards it to experience henosis.
Moving Beyond Unreliability
The overwhelming unreliability and inconsistency of psychic experiences, confirmed by both ancient sages and modern studies of ESP, stem solely from the unstable and impure condition of the human soul. Iamblichus and Proclus assert that any failure in theurgical rites must be attributed to a defect in the recipient’s nature or a want of due preparation.
The core difficulty lies in the imagination: contaminated by the dominant appetitive soul (Epithylmia), it generates deceptive images (phantasmata) that block true, pure noetic perception.
To transcend this inherent human flaw, the theurgist must activate the Eye of the Soul, developing all corresponding parts of the self by accurately discerning information at all levels of existence. This rigorous process is required to distinguish between the created sensible and the formless intelligible. As this capacity strengthens, the groundwork is laid for exploring how discernment becomes dependable—and how ancient insights intersect with modern methods of validation.
Continue to The Eye of the Soul Part 3: Discernment and Modern Validation