Dr. Gregory Shaw is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, Massachusetts. He is also the author of Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus, as well as many scholarly articles.
Reading Iamblichus's On The Mysteries alongside Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul is a transformative experience, and we consider Gregory Shaw one of the greatest living proponents of Neoplatonism and transcendental philosophy. His focus on Iamblichus and embodied philosophy is particularly valuable for students of phenomenology, magick, and the Western esoteric tradition. He was kind enough to grace us with an interview.
What are you reading now?
-- Algis Uzdavinys, Hermes Trismegistus
-- Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica
-- Peter Kingsley, An Introduction to the Hermetica: Approaching Ancient Esoteric Tradition
-- Lily Walker, The Magical Worldview: An Introduction to Astro-Theurgy
-- Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic
-- Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity
Do you have any mentors, gurus, or teachers?
My first guru, my root guru, as she would have put it, was Erma Pounds. I met her in the early 1970s in Tempe, Arizona where she met weekly with a group of students in the back of a bookstore named The Tibetan House. She was a master of Theosophical teachings, of Blavatsky particularly, and was a Tibetan Buddhist devoted to the 17th Karmapa. Her teachings for me were raw and existential, more transformative than informative. I was present when the great lama visited Erma’s home in 1984 after visiting the Hopis.
I had a wonderful teacher at Arizona State University, Robert Rein'l. He loved to speak about Shankara’s “one without a second.” He was an inspired speaker.
At UC Santa Barbara, I had many important teachers. My most important was Birger A. Pearson, a no-nonsense scholar of Gnosticism and ancient Mediterranean religions. He became the director of my Ph.D. thesis.
On the other end of the spectrum was Raimundo Panikkar, a visionary and brilliant presence who was profoundly charismatic and warm. I took several classes with Panikkar.
I should also mention Richard Hecht, the professor and passionate lecturer who initially urged me to write on Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries and respond to the critique of theurgy by E. R. Dodds.
Jean Trouillard was a French priest who was an expert on Neoplatonism and whose work I read assiduously and then asked if I could visit him in Paris. He graciously agreed, and I met with him periodically in his small studio apartment in Paris to discuss theurgy, Maurice Blondel, Proclus, Iamblichus, and all things Neoplatonic.
While in Paris I was also warmly received by Henri Saffrey, a Dominican priest and translator of Proclus’s Platonic Theology. It was Saffrey who emphasized to me that there was no such thing as “Neoplatonism”; rather, there were and are many Neoplatonisms. Good lesson.
I consider Polymnia Athanassiadi, an eminent scholar of late antiquity and of Neoplatonism, an inspiration and a mentor.
Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen, has been a supportive mentor to me for many years. His conferences in the Center for Theory and Research have been inspirational; his unpretentious skill at coordinating these meetings is remarkable.
Peter Kingsley has probably been the most influential thinker, scholar, and mystic I have read. He is one of a kind. Deep, brilliant, uncompromising, courageous, and very funny.
Ellen Tadd, a psychic, whom I invited to my class on Dreams and the Sacred. She was a wonderful speaker and a powerful presence. She was authentic, honest, and a genuine teacher.
Stonehill College… I taught at Stonehill for 35 years. It is a Roman Catholic college, run by the CSC (Congregatio Sancta Cruce). The underlying ethos of the place was that they BELIEVE there is some kind of invisible reality that they are in contact with. In sum, they are (or used to be) out of sync with the materialist ethos of our time. And living in that mindset allowed my soul to relax and to more freely dream myself into the Neoplatonic world, far more than if I had been at a secular college where theology or God-thinking is discouraged or even forbidden. I was able to feed my hunger for animism by living in one of the last reservoirs of animism acceptable in our culture.
What does your own spiritual practice or routine look like? Are there certain practices that you follow?
Earlier in my life, I was an obsessive meditator, four hours a day virtually every day. I lived in a semi-trance state. Then I came into my body and the world. I think I retained the depth as a hidden reservoir. I was no longer in a walking trance. I was here.
The practice that allows me to enter a deep state now is writing. Writing is my spiritual practice. I discover things I didn’t know through writing. I can enter a state of “being written” more than myself writing (Jeff Kripal describes this quite well). It is a transformative practice and gives me pleasure, deep focus, and is energizing.
I follow a rigorous physical exercise regimen of swimming intervals at least five days a week. I used to compete in Masters swimming and was very successful, setting 32 world records, so I know the routine of increasing my heart rate, working on my stroke, pace, pushing the intensity, and I find that this exercise is good for my appetite, my mood, and helps me sleep well.
I sometimes do sitting meditation practice when I want to center and reflect on a new reading. I will, at these times, sometimes smoke a little weed to shift my mental orientation and enter new ways of seeing. It can energize my thinking, but I do it rarely, in small amounts, and with caution because of my sensitivity.
What is Theurgy, and how can it be practiced?
This is the question for me, for sure. My way of understanding theurgy is that it is the way that we are able to enter into activities that shift us from individual awareness into universal awareness. Like a surfer who catches gigantic waves, we as individuals can learn how to catch profound spiritual waves and ride them into the world.
The term itself, theourgia, comes from the Greek theion + ergon (divine + action). It is a description of what happens in theurgy. The divine acts through us. It is not so much our acting but the divine acting through us. I initially discovered this before I knew about theurgy as a concept in Neoplatonism. I was living in Arizona and would go out to the desert, south of Phoenix, and sit all day, meditate, and then chant certain Tibetan mantras. Once, as I was chanting a mantra, I experienced the sounds themselves having autonomy. They were chanting me. I entered their audible current and found myself being chanted into the landscape. I became the landscape. My “body” had extended itself into all that I could see. Later when I read Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries and his description of prayer and reciting the names of the Gods, I realized that he described what I experienced in the desert. That was my portal into understanding theurgy. It is not what “we” do but how we become receptive to powers that become embodied through us. Theurgy is an art of receptivity. As Emerson put it on his tombstone, “The passive master lent his hand to the Vast Soul that o’er him planned.” He knew. This “passivity’ is acutely attentive. My years and many hours of meditation prepared me for this kind of passivity.
Theurgy can be practiced by anyone who performs a ritual in which they become receptive to something greater, and they enter this activity. They feel their individual breath moves in conjunction with the universal breath. This can be done through many disciplines: religious rituals, artistic expression, quiet prayer, reading, dance, singing, virtually any activity that invites us into a divine-like body and activity.
Do you have a framework for knowledge/epistemology? How do we determine what is True?
I think I carry an epistemological framework without thinking about it explicitly. How do we know what we know? I pay attention to my object of focus and try to determine the parameters of what I am aware of. If I can understand the context of the issue involved, I can ascertain what it means. In a way my approach is very practical. Epistemology, as a branch of philosophy is not something I have made my area of expertise, and I am sure someone who has would have a very different answer. What I determine to be “true” is always contextual. I am wary of being overly confident of knowing the Truth with a capital T. There are some things I hold as essential, but those are less determined by epistemology per se and more by my general awareness of my place in life, more by feeling than conceptual analysis.
How can the desire for a personal relationship with God be reconciled with an apophatic metaphysic?
Ha! Trick question! I have not been highly motivated in gaining a “personal” relationship with God. As soon as I began to THINK, I wasn’t entirely sure who my “I” was, let alone who God was. I realized how all of my thinking and ideas, including ideas about God, were shaped by my environment and psychology. Apophaticism was laced into everything I knew, and it still is. That being said, there have been times in my life when I have felt profoundly touched, even obliterated, by an Infinite Presence to which I am intimately connected. I am reluctant to call it “God” because the term is used with associations I might not identify with. My God is more intimately present in my life than I am, more inside me than my blood, more ruthless than any warrior, more beautiful than any lover. Is that God? Perhaps. Do I realize that all these images of God are iconic projections from my finitude upon the Infinite? Yes, but I do not hold them to be less valuable for that. They are the only way the Infinite can touch me.
What significance do the Platonic Solids have in your opinion? They seem to be a topic everyone recognizes, but no one knows much about.
The Platonists were Pythagoreans, and that includes Plato. Pythagoras encouraged his disciples to enter states of profound depth that could not be discursively described. So, how do we share these experiences? What framework might help contain them? I don’t know this definitively, but I think that the visualization and contemplation of the Platonic solids were exercises that were practiced by these Platonists to help contain these more than discursive experiences, to carve out an energetic space developed through the practice of understanding of how these solids interacted with one another and how these intimate relations allowed them to feel an unspoken kind of intimacy in all their relations. I also believe these geometric visualizations had corresponding musical expressions and that the Quadrivium and Trivium were far more than conceptual accomplishments but were, rather, ways of building our subtle imaginal bodies in which we experience deification or ways our finitude becomes Infinite. The problem is that when these topics are explained, it is usually assumed to be abstract INFORMATION that only insiders could know or care about, as if they were intellectual secrets. I think that obscures what they were really for. I think they were triggers for phenomenological shifts in our awareness, and without that phenomenological aspect, the information has little power. The Platonic solids interacted with one another and could be visualized to allow us to enter those interactions.
How does the spindle of necessity in the Myth of Er fit into the Neoplatonic cosmology?
The spindle of Necessity is described as part of Er’s near-death experience recounted at the end of Plato’s Republic. Like the perfect harmony and geometric procession of the planets and stars described in the Timaeus, the circling of the heavens and the siren songs in the Spindle of Necessity are yet another captivating Platonic image for the Universal Life in which we find ourselves. It is an image, an icon of the larger order in which we live.
In the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, Henads, daimons, and everything in between are described as ontologically real entities. Should 2025 readers of Neoplatonism take a Jungian approach to these and view them merely as symbols or archetypes of abstract forms or essences, or should we entertain the idea that there is a metaphysical hierarchy that contains myriad beings and intelligences?
Yes, for sure they are real. But to say this is to speak in an animist cosmos, not the dead cosmos of the contemporary world. I think this is the central problem of our culture and why we are so aimless, depressed, and lack a deep sense of meaning or value. Our ruling worldview is materialism. We have drained nature, the sun, the moon, stars, and animals—even ourselves—of a living Soul. This is what the Platonists had, and most of Western culture lived up to the “scientific” age.
We effectively have erased the World Soul from our world, and the only people who sense it now are artists, poets, and madmen. One cannot speak of a bird revealing what you ought to do today, or an astrological constellation. Such beliefs are ridiculed by “science” as “animism.” Science, or scientism, is the religion of our time, and it is rigid about punishing heretics. So, we are afraid of speaking of daimons or gods, let alone of “becoming gods,” because it would show that one is uneducated or, as the British put it, daft. So, when most academics write about gods, daimons, etc., it is almost always at “arm’s length,” writing about these things as a historical curiosity. Oh, how interesting…. but NO ONE dares to believe any of it. We only engage it as a rational and historical exercise. Lest anyone forget…. the Gods are dead, right?
One way that some sensitive people try to engage the material is through psychology and specifically Jungian psychology. Now, Jung was definitely a madman, but he veiled it with his “scientific” language. Thus, he gave a kind of quasi-reality to the world of animism. He is right that objects we encounter in dreams or in nature are symbols, revealing a reality that is hidden to us. He helps to carve out a little animist space in our materialist structure, but Jungians tend to clutter it up with their psycho-jargon and presumption of making “progress” in some Jungian schema. They try to make it “scientific.”
I like Jung but prefer trying to engage the Neoplatonists directly and daring to speak of their Gods and Daimons as REAL, and to invite myself and others to FEEL that there is a hierarchy of invisible realities. But we need to start with baby steps, perhaps acknowledging the presence of spirits in our flowers, our gardens or in the wild animals. Animism, that rejected worldview, is precisely what we need to recover.
I think those of us who think this way would benefit from living in communities that support these ways of imagination.