Customer Reviews

On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well, not quite. But this edition of Thomas Taylor's translation of Iamblichus' apologia for the pagan cult is affordable and highly accessible, and a necessary read for anyone who wants to find out the essence of ancient religion. For Iamblichus, the sacred is not about thinking, and the divine is not a matter of opinion, but a reality to be performed in cultic theurgy. You only "know" God by doing, by entering into the symbol and being transformed by it. For those who just want to know the basics, this is a good deal, with few footnotes and recourse to scholarly language. Specialists, however, might want to search for another edition. But I would buy this one too in any event.

I bought this book for the Thomas Taylor translation. He has a keen sense of what the ancients meant and gets to the heart of theurgy, together with his many notes throughout and at the end of the book. The translation itself is a facsimile of the 1895 edition of Taylor's work. The publisher (Sema Institute) did not include pages 344 and 345. The 1895 edition's copyright has expired and is in the public domain, so the missing pages can be read from Archive.org.
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I didn't really care for the rather New Age, neo-pagan foreword and a section inserted towards the end of the book, written by Muata Ashby. For a much more scholarly and lengthy introduction to Iamblichus, see the translation by Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell: Iamblichus: De Mysteriis (Writings from the Greco-Roman World, V. 4.)

This really deserves five stars, but had to knock one off for these issues.

This is a book that is of inestimable import. Yes it is a good book, well written, well translated and extremely well organized but more importantly it is one of the only surviving sources of Pagan religious practice and theology left to us. The picture Iamblichus paints of the ancient practice of Theurgy is a vivid and technical one, a picture made all the more vivid by the questions posed to him by Porphyry which in and of themselves aid us in understanding the beliefs of the Pagan world and the various views of the people of late antiquity. This was a book recommended by Emperor Julian as a basis for his planned church of "Hellenismos" which was for good or ill never brought to the light of day. It is a book to be respected and a book that is more than just a good read. It is to my knowledge the only surviving text on the religious landscape of the ancient world to survive that is written by a priest of the mysteries about the mysteries themselves.