Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority. Heidi Marx-Wolf

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       Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority

      DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

      Series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

       Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority

      Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E.

      Heidi Marx-Wolf

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Marx-Wolf, Heidi, author.

      Spiritual taxonomies and ritual authority : Platonists, priests, and gnostics in the third century

      C.E. / Heidi Marx-Wolf.

      pages cm. — (Divinations: rereading late ancient religion)

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4789-3 (alk. paper)

      1. Neoplatonism—History. 2. Gnosticism—History. 3. Spirits—History of doctrines. 4. Demonology—History. 5. Animal sacrifice—History. 6. Philosophy and religion—History. 7. Spiritual direction—History. I. Title. II. Series: Divinations.

      B517.M37 2016

      186'.4—dc23 201502973

       For Paul and Alexanderthe two best sublunary spirits I know and love

       Contents

       List of Abbreviations

       Introduction

       Chapter 1. How to Feed a Daemon: Third-Century Philosophers on Blood Sacrifice

       Chapter 2. Everything in Its Right Place: Spiritual Taxonomy in Third-Century Platonism

       Chapter 3. The Missing Link: Third-Century Platonists and “Gnostics” on Daemons and Other Spirits

       Chapter 4. High Priests of the Highest God: Third-Century Platonists as Ritual Experts

       Conclusion

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       Abbreviations

ANRW	Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt
ARG	Archiv für Religionsgeschichte
GCS	Griechischen christliche Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte
HTR	Harvard Theological Review
JANER	Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions
JBL	Journal of Biblical Literature
JECS	Journal of Early Christian Studies
JEH	Journal of Ecclesiastic History
JHS	Journal of Hellenic Studies
JLA	Journal of Late Antiquity
JRS	Journal of Roman Studies
JTS	Journal of Theological Studies
PGM	Papyri Graecae Magicae
TAPA	Transactions of the American Philological Association

      Introduction

      THIS BOOK IS about a conversation that took place in the late classical world, a conversation about spirits, both good and malign. At times, this conversation was heated, combative even, but at other moments it was surprisingly pacific given the contentious nature of the subject matter and the temperaments and ideological commitments of those involved. This conversation took place across important sectarian boundaries among a group of intellectuals whom we might loosely categorize as late Roman Platonists of one variety or other. Although this group includes a wide array of intellectuals, from writers of certain Nag Hammadi texts to the producers of Greco-Egyptian ritual (or “magical”) handbooks, the central figures are Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and to a lesser extent, Plotinus.

      This book explores a moment in the late second and third centuries C.E. when these philosophers began to produce systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in increasingly more hierarchical ways. These “spiritual taxonomies,” as this book calls them, were part of the overall theological and philosophical writings of these thinkers and were projected onto and ordered more “local” or “popular” understandings of spirits, which, although totalizing in