Iamblichus: On the Mysteries

The text opens by describing Hermes, the God presiding over language, as common to all priests, to whom ancestors dedicated their writings. The speaker states that the epistle sent to his disciple Anebo he conceives as written to himself, and undertakes to answer its inquiries, noting that Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus, and Eudoxus received instruction from sacred scribes. He invites the addressee to regard the respondent as the same person, or as an Egyptian prophet, or to attend only to what is said. He proposes to divide the genera of problems and identify their sources—Chaldeans, Egyptian prophets, philosophers, and common conceptions—promising to deliver the dogmas of the Assyrians and to answer theological questions theologically, theurgic theurgically, and philosophical philosophically, according to the pillars of Hermes known to Plato and Pythagoras. Addressing the claim "it must be granted that there are Gods," he objects that innate knowledge of the Gods is coexistent with essence, prior to reason, and that contact with divinity is not knowledge; the same holds for dæmons, heroes, and undefiled souls. On the inquiry into the peculiarities distinguishing the more excellent genera, he distinguishes types of peculiarity, faults the inquiry for treating only energies rather than essence, power, and energy, and rejects the added notions of active and passive motions, accidents, and division according to nature. He then expounds the good beyond essence and the good according to essence as the peculiarity of the Gods; souls possess only participation. He places two media, heroes and dæmons, between Gods and souls, describing their connective functions. Considering the extremes further—one supreme and perfect, the other deficient—he identifies Intellect as leader and king, and soul as participating a partible intellect.

The text rejects the claim that the divine genera are distinguished by arrangement with different bodies (Gods to etherial, dæmons to aerial, souls to terrene), arguing the divine genera are free, rule bodies externally, receive nothing from bodies, and that such a view wrongly makes bodies superior to the divine. Governors give essential distinction to their allotments without being assimilated to them; inferior natures are produced in superior ones, celestial circulations in the etherial soul, souls of worlds in intellect, order proceeding from primary to secondary beings. It holds that discussing this false corporeal division is idle, since incorporeal essence cannot be circumscribed by place; the Gods are everywhere, and denying this would subvert sacred institutions and theurgic communion, leaving priests unable to learn from the Gods. Addressing the inquiry about invoking terrestrial and subterranean Gods, the text denies the premise that Gods dwell in heaven alone, explaining divine allotment: a divine nature illuminates its regions externally, like the sun's rays, its light impartibly present to all participants. Participants partake etherially, aerially, or aquatically. It then rejects dividing the genera into passive and impassive, showing even the liberated soul suffers nothing, and thus dæmons and heroes are impassive. Asked why sacred operations treat them as passive, it attributes this to ignorance of sacerdotal mysticism, listing arcane causes, symbols, images, honor, and purifications. Regarding particulars: erected phalli signify prolific power, consecrated in spring; obscene language indicates matter's privation of good; passions moderately called forth become purified, as in comedy and tragedy—remedies named by Heraclitus. Invocations render worshippers pure rather than drawing down the Gods; divine names are anagogic. The anger of the Gods is our abandonment of their care; pacification restores it. Oblation of victims invokes Gods and dæmons as expellers of evil and saviors. The necessities of the Gods are proper to their nature, mingled with beneficent will, uncompelled and impassive.

The text addresses a division of Gods from dæmons. The interlocutor is said to hold that the Gods are pure intellects and dæmons are psychical essences participating of intellect; the speaker calls such opinions confused. Having noted the claim that pure intellects are inflexible, the interlocutor doubts whether prayer is proper; the speaker maintains prayer should be offered to none but these, arguing the divine part in humans is excited in prayer and united to perfection. Objections that incorporeal natures cannot hear, and that supplications are foreign to intellect, are answered: the Gods contain the energies of invocations, and human consciousness of nothingness prompts supplication. The division separating Gods from dæmons by corporeal and incorporeal is examined; the interlocutor asks how sun, moon, and visible heavens can be Gods if Gods are incorporeal. The speaker replies celestial bodies are contained in divine lives, are most allied to incorporeal essence, and are all Gods. The inquiry why some Gods are beneficent, others malefic (drawn from predictors of nativities) is rejected: all Gods are good, and evil arises from material participation, illustrated by Saturn's constipative and Mars's motive effluxes, and by a diseased body blaming the sun. The speaker explains what conjoins bodied and incorporeal Gods through intelligible paradigms and the union of all Gods. The distinction of dæmons from visible and invisible Gods is drawn: dæmons are ministrant, partible, inseparable from their government. The passive/impassive division is rejected. Section II defines how dæmons, heroes, and souls differ in essence, power, and energy: dæmons are effective of mundane natures, heroes vital and rational leaders of souls, and souls proceed to the end of divine orders, sometimes elevated to the angelic order.

The text answers an inquiry into how the presence of a God, angel, archangel, dæmon, archon, or soul may be recognized. It states that appearances accord with the essences, powers, and energies of each. It then proceeds through a series of distinguishing features in order. First, the uniformity or variety of the phasmata, ranking Gods, archangels, angels, dæmons, archons (mundane and material), heroes, and souls. Next it treats their light (salutary, terrible, mild, dreadful, noxious), then the immutability or mutability of their form, then order and quiet versus perturbation and disorder. It describes the beauty proper to each, then the acuteness and rapidity of their energies, then the magnitude of the epiphanies—Gods concealing heaven, sun, and moon. It defines the self-apparent images and their clarity, then the light of these images, then their fire and its stability or motion. It states what each does to souls: Gods purify, angels dissolve the bond of generation, dæmons draw souls down, heroes lead to providential attention, archons deliver mundane or material government. It instructs that pure and stable qualities be attributed to more excellent genera, and treats their commixture with matter and how matter is consumed. It enumerates the gifts of each manifestation—Gods imparting health, virtue, purity—and the order and attendants surrounding each. It describes the tenuity of their light, likening men before divine fire to fish drawn from water into air. Finally it treats the dispositions produced in the soul of those invoking, and the truth and power imparted by each order, concluding that the inquiry has received a fit reply.

Responding to the interlocutor, the text denies that boastful speech and phantasms are common to Gods, dæmons, and superior genera. A God, angel, and good dæmon instruct men truthfully; truth coexists with the Gods as light with the sun. Deception of "speaking boastingly" occurs when error enters the theurgic art and inferior powers assume the forms of venerable orders; the priest must confute these. Principal natures proclaim truth of themselves and exhibit a self-visible fire; heat cannot refrigerate, light cannot darken. Phantasms are like mirror-forms, participating falsehood; the Gods reveal true images, not phantasms as in water or mirrors, for these bring neither indication nor utility. The interlocutor's claim confounds the genera. The text affirms that ignorance and deception are impiety, but adds that mental conception does not conjoin theurgists with the Gods; ineffable works and symbols known only to the Gods impart union, the synthemata operating by themselves. Union requires knowledge yet is not identical with it. Turning to divination, the text states foreknowledge is not generated but divine, unbegotten, eternal, imparted by the Gods. On dreams, it distinguishes human dreams (sometimes true, sometimes false) from god-sent (theopemptoi) dreams, describing voices, an invisible spirit, and bright light. The wise say the soul has a twofold life, liberated in sleep. Examples: healing at the temple of Esculapius; Alexander's army preserved through Bacchus; the city Aphutis saved by a dream sent to Lysander by Jupiter Ammon. On enthusiasm, the inspired are unconscious, unburned by fire, transfixed by spits, cut, passing through fire like the priest in Castabalis. Many species of possession exist; one drawing down a divinity sees a spirit and fire descending, while those without such spectacles remain in darkness.

The text states that knowing these things alone does not make one perfect in divine science; one must also know what enthusiasm is. It denies enthusiasm is a motion of dianoia with daemoniac inspiration, or simply ecstasy, holding it a reelevation caused by the Gods, with divine possession preceding mental alienation. It reviews and rejects hypotheses locating divination in the soul, bodily temperaments (melancholic, heat, cold, moisture), or both, assigning its causes to illuminations from the Gods. Addressing the interlocutor's remark about those energizing on hearing cymbals or drums—the Corybantically inspired, those possessed by Sabazius, and those inspired by the mother of the Gods—the text calls musical explanations foreign to enthusiasm, and says the soul was an auditor of divine harmony before entering body. It corrects the interlocutor: those inspired by the mother of the Gods are precedaneously women, not males (Metrizantes); it mentions the Nymphs and Pan. On oracles, the interlocutor names three: the priest of Clarius in Colophon who drinks water, those prophesying at Delphi seated at a cavern, and the prophetesses in Branchidae who imbibe vapour. The text describes each, attributing the prophetic power to divinity illuminating externally, separate and indivisible. Regarding those who become enthusiastic "standing on characters," the text condemns this as deceptive, attracting depraved spirits, and says such men neglect the telesiurgic theory and err. Concerning inspiration through the phantastic part—using darkness, potions, incantations, water, walls, air, sunlight—it names this the "eduction of light," calling it primordial and worthy of the Gods. On divination through human art via viscera, birds, and stars, it says the Gods produce signs through nature or genesiurgic daemons, quoting Heraclitus—"neither speaking nor concealing, but signifying"—and notes viscera found without a heart and birds destroying themselves.

The text responds to an inquiry concerning the mode of divination. It notes that the correspondent represents diviners as obtaining foreknowledge through Gods or dæmons, and doubts whether divinity is subservient to men who divine from meal. The text corrects this, holding that divine energy is not drawn down but has separate precedency, imparts good to all things, and produces all modes of divination impartibly. It states that divine power extends even to inanimate things—pebbles, rods, wood, stones, corn, wheat—imparting soul and reason to them, as divinity makes a stupid man speak wisely. Divination is called ruling and primordial. The text then takes up whether a God, angel, or dæmon is present in divinations, answering that Gods lead perfect operations, angels media, and dæmons the last. Divinity is superior to necessity and not drawn through invocation. God is all things; the text laughs at the claim that divinity is spontaneously present through generation. A second proposed cause—that the soul says and imagines these things as passions—is rejected, since the soul is darkened by body (called the river of Negligence, water of Oblivion); theurgic energy comes from the Gods alone. A third proposal, a mixed hypostasis of soul and divine inspiration, is rejected as divinity is unmingled. The claim that soul or matter from animals generates dæmons is rejected as making dæmons corruptible. Regarding knowledge of the future in sleep, the text holds divination is externally derived from the Gods. It refutes passion as cause, noting fumigations, invocations, and the aptness of simple and young persons show external inspiration. Finally it divides ecstasy into two species, distinguishing divine mania from disease, intoxication, and enchantment, declining further discussion.

The text notes contrary opinions ascribing divination's truth to enchanters (mere appearances) or to those incited by passion or disease. It argues that divinatory truth is neither fortuitous nor the sensory truth shared by animals, but is established in energy with invariable sameness, connascent with the essence of things; it is distinguished from natural prescience, such as animals foreperceiving earthquakes or rain through sympathy, and from the conjectural arts of piloting or medicine. Divine providence, by contrast, holds stable foreknowledge. Nature, art, and universal sympathy show only a "divulsed vestige" of divine prediction. Divination is a divine work, not ingrafted by nature; there is no natural seed of it in us, and one must contend against those who say it originates from us. The text notes that "you" cite invokers using stones, herbs, sacred bonds, and opened places—signs that inspiration accedes externally. Addressing the "artificers of efficacious images," the speaker argues images are man-made phantasms from matter, distinct from demiurgic fabrication; makers use only the last celestial effluxions, artificially not theurgically. Idols are mingled from contrary qualities and dissolve faster than mirror-images once fumigations disperse. Powers in matter are not dæmons; "you" admit no God or dæmon is drawn down by idols. Against assigning divination to a fraudulent genus of dæmons, the speaker relates what he heard from the prophets of the Chaldeans: true Gods give only good and associate with the purified, while flagitious men attract depraved spirits. Theurgic divination is undefiled and truly divine. Section IV opens: asked how invoked superior beings are commanded as inferiors, the speaker divides the invoked powers—Gods imparting good, middle genera guarding judgment, and irrational one-power dæmons (like Charonean spiracles). The priest bears a twofold character, invoking as man and commanding through divine symbols.

The text resolves doubts about invoking superior natures, removing the notion that evocations and mandates address Gods as if they were men; divine fire shines forth voluntarily, self-invoked, and divine works are accomplished through sameness, union, and consent rather than contrariety. Addressing why the Gods require the worshipper to be just yet do not refuse unjust acts, the speaker says human and divine definitions of justice differ: the Gods know the soul's former lives and inflict punishment for prior offences. The multitude similarly doubts providence when some suffer undeservedly. Granting for argument that unjust things occur in invocations, the Gods are not their cause, since the good produce good; other causes must be sought, chiefly evil dæmons who assume the appearance of Gods. Corporeal parts of the universe possess power, and evils to parts are salutary to wholes. Invocators employing physical powers receive an involuntary gift which they themselves pervert to base ends; men's audacity, not the Gods, causes what seems base. On impure venereal connexions, the universe is one animal, and art excites its spontaneous attraction beyond what is fit, transferring order into disorder; such apparatus proceeds from human art, not divine necessity. Stones, herbs, and evil dæmons also have power in generation. Section V treats sacrifices. Against the objection that prophecy-interpreters should abstain from animals lest vapours pollute the Gods, the text argues the Gods and celestial bodies cannot be defiled by terrestrial exhalations, which rise scarcely five stadia. A greater inquiry follows: sacrifices are not for honour, thanks, or first-fruits, but possess efficacious power. Their efficacy is not explained by physical sympathy, numbers (sixty in the crocodile), animals (dog, cynocephalus, weasel), colours, or members like a cock's heart; these are concauses suspended from precedaneous causes.

The text assigns the efficacy of sacrifices to friendship, familiarity, and habitude binding fabricators to things fabricated; taking an animal or plant that preserves its maker's will moves the demiurgic cause. Many causes—dæmoniacal, divine, and one most ancient leading cause—are moved together by a perfect sacrifice, while an imperfect one proceeds only partway. The text admits that some offer to good dæmons or mundane powers, but holds the leading cause conjoined to demiurgic powers, imparting utility to cities, nations, houses, and individuals with unenvying, impassive will. It refutes the opinion that Gods are allured by vapours from animal sacrifices: dæmons' bodies are immutable, luciform, and unindigent; the air already abounds in exhalations; and if humans nourished dæmons they would be their causes, which is impossible. Fire consumes and assimilates matter to itself, elevating offerings and worshippers to divine fire and rendering them impassive. The text then connects the sacred law of sacrifices to the order of Gods, distinguishing material from immaterial Gods, beginning worship from the material. It describes humanity's twofold condition—soul out of body, and bound in the testaceous body—requiring twofold sacrifices; citing Heraclitus that pure sacrifice rarely befits one man. Corporeal rites serve bodily needs; Gods exempt from generation grant nothing for mortal wants. Men are divided into those under nature and Fate, a few raised by supernatural intellect, and media between; divine essences are likewise divided. From the world and its four elements follows worship of similars to similars. Piety must not be partial: powers precede the Gods' descent in procession, and omitting one honour subverts the whole, like a burst chord. The summit recurs to the principal God, but only late and for few.

The text describes how modes of sanctity purify, perfect, and render things familiar to superior natures, and how sacred operations impart the benefits of sacrifice. It affirms that a pure, divine matter exists, generated by the demiurgus as a receptacle for the Gods, and that the theurgic art combines stones, herbs, animals, and aromatics into pure receptacles suited to each God. It discusses sacrifice according to the Gods' distribution over places, noting some things preserve communion by remaining entire (as certain Egyptian animals and man), others by consecration. Divinity leads worship, with presiding Gods, angels, and dæmons over sacrifices. The text then treats prayer, naming three species: the collective (leading to contact and knowledge), the bond of concordant communion, and the seal of ineffable union; it yields three fruits—illumination, communion of operation, plenitude of divine fire—and joins with sacrifice toward conjunction with the Demiurgus. Section VI answers why the inspector must not touch a dead body though rites use dead bodies: consecrated bodies may be touched, human bodies not; dæmons receive no defilement. It explains divination through sacred animals such as hawks as ascribed to dæmons through the animal's soul, distinguishing it from true divination. It addresses doubts involving "violent threats"—threatening to burst the heavens, unfold Isis's secrets, stop Baris, scatter Osiris's members to Typhon—directed at partible dæmons, not the Gods; Chaldeans use no threats, Egyptians do. Section VII unfolds Egyptian theology through symbols: "mire" as the material, the God sitting above the lotus, sailing in a ship as the sun governing the world, changing form each hour by the zodiac. It explains the efficacy of non-significant and Barbaric names as significant to the Gods.

Responding to an objection that a hearer looks only to meaning regardless of words, the text argues names are suspended from the nature of things, so sacred nations' language is preferred; translation loses power, and Barbarous names have emphasis and conciseness. Since the Egyptians were first allotted participation of the Gods, the Gods rejoice in Egyptian rites. Ancient prayers must be preserved unchanged; the Greeks are studious of novelty, the Barbarians stable. Section VIII takes up the interlocutor's questions about what the Egyptians hold the first cause to be. The text explains why many opinions circulate, citing Seleucus and Manetho on Hermes' books. It describes one God prior to beings, the self-sufficient God, then the demiurgic intellect called Amon, Ptha (which the Greeks take for Vulcan), and Osiris; four male and four female powers assigned to the sun, nature to the moon. God produced matter. It distinguishes the books of Hermes from Chæremon's writings, denies the Egyptians make all things physical, and notes Bitys, prophet of King Ammon, found this path in the adyta of Saïs. Man has two souls; the soul can be liberated from fate through theurgy. The claim, from Homer, that the Gods are flexible is called unholy. Section IX treats the peculiar dæmon. The theory is twofold, theurgic and artificial. The text criticizes the interlocutor for restricting inquiry to the lord of the geniture, defends the mathematical science as true despite Chæremon's objections, and states the dæmon is distributed from the whole world, presiding over soul and body until, through sacerdotal theurgy, a God becomes guardian. One dæmon governs all parts; evil dæmons have no ruling allotment.

The text addresses an interlocutor who, abandoning particulars, passes to philosophy's opinion, subverting the hypothesis of the peculiar dæmon by calling it a part of the soul. It rejects treating the dæmon as divided or as two or three dæmons, insisting each person has one presiding dæmon, invoked through one God who is lord of dæmons. Divine invocations are not to be assimilated to human ones. Section X then treats felicity, answering the interlocutor's objections, doubts, and questions. It denies any latent way to felicity apart from the Gods, dismisses looking to human opinions, and rejects the phantastic power as maker of images. It distinguishes natural or conjectural prediction—as in animals foreknowing earthquakes, or physicians foreknowing fevers—from divine divination conjoined with the Gods, which imparts divine life and boniform foreknowledge. The Gods conceal or reveal the future for the soul's benefit. The intelligible man, formerly united to the Gods, entered another soul and became fettered by fate; liberation comes through knowledge of the Gods. The theurgic gift purifies, unites the soul with the Demiurgus and demiurgic powers—this being the Egyptian sacerdotal elevation. Bitys unfolded two kinds of good from the Hermaic books; theurgists consult about the soul's salvation, not trifles, and are not deceived by a fraudulent dæmon.

The text concludes its answers concerning divination and theurgy, and the speaker beseeches the Gods to grant an immutable guard of true conceptions, eternal truth, and fuller participation of conceptions of the Gods. A section of Additional Notes follows. A note on "Anebo" reports that Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus and Treatise on Abstinence from Animals, was familiar with an Egyptian priest, whom Gale conjectures is the addressee, and cites Apuleius's Zaclas as prophet and priest. A note on Hermes distinguishes two Egyptian Hermes, calls the first the source of invention and son of Maia, and cites Proclus on Hermes as guardian of gymnastic, music, and disciplines. A note on the pillars of Hermes cites Ammianus Marcellinus that they were hidden before the deluge near Thebes and interpreted by the second Hermes. A note discusses three orders of good, citing Plato and the Elean stranger in the Sophista. A note on daemons quotes Olympiodorus on a middle genus with six kinds and a Chaldean Oracle. A note on divine allotment quotes Proclus's Timaeus commentary on celestial and sublunary allotments, immutable natures, illuminations, and Iamblichus's doubt about Minerva's allotment of Athens then Saïs, resolved by unchanged allotments. A note on the art of divine works names it theurgy, links Pythagoras, Proclus, Psellus, and Zoroaster, then quotes Proclus's Dissertation on Theurgy: priests discerned sympathy among things, citing heliotropes, the sunflower, heated paper, the lotus, sun-stone, lunar stone, helioselenus, solar animals such as lions and cocks, the cock feared by the lion, solar angels, mingled substances and odours, and single materials like thistle, laurel, coral, diamond, jasper, the mole's heart for divination, and sulphur and marine water for purification.

The ancient priests, by sympathy and antipathy, collected or expelled virtues, purifying with sulphur and bitumen and sprinkling marine water; sulphur purifies by odour, marine water by its fiery portion. In worship they offered animals, first received dæmoniacal powers, then proceeded to the powers of the Gods by instruction and by interpreting symbols, and finally entered communion with the Gods. A note reports that the Emperor Julian alludes to this theurgical art in his Arguments against the Christians, preserved by Cyril, giving the Greek and a translation: inspiration is rare, has ceased among the Hebrews and Egyptians, oracles yield to time, and Jupiter gave sacred arts. Further notes cite Plotinus and Proclus, including a river-image analogy showing the soul impassive though it thinks it suffers, and Proclus's Parmenides commentary on the union of the Gods as unities, "all in all," with the trees-rooted-in-earth image, and Proposition 131 on every God's superplenary self-beginning energy. An extract from Hermeas's Scholia on the Phædrus treats enthusiasm and Plato's four manias—musical, telestic, prophetic, amatory. It locates enthusiasm proper in the "one" of the soul above intellect, distinguishes lesser enthusiasms (Phidias, Homer, Mars/anger, desire), and names the Gods, soul/symbols, inspiration, and good as the four causes. It discusses why the soul is not always inspired, the telestic art's reach and souls' allotments above the moon, and how statues receive prophetic power through the telestic art. It surveys the four manias' order and mutual need, citing Orpheus as possessed by all, son of Calliope, addressing Musæus, with the Muses, Bacchus, Apollo, and Love presiding. It describes the soul's descent and its ascent through musical, telestic, Apolloniacal, and amatory manias, then their external effects: verse, preservation of life, and prophetic contraction of time.

The text states that mania causes an irreprehensible life, that prophetic mania elevates the soul's powers to the one, and that amatory mania leads youths from sensible to intelligible beauty. It reports that these manias surpass temperate energies, yet a mania coordinate with temperance exists, citing Asclepius in medicine and Hercules in practical life. Hermeas is quoted commenting on Plato's mania from the Muses, contrasting the poetry of Chærilus and Callimachus with that of Homer and Pindar, and Plato is quoted that the uninspired poet becomes imperfect. A note argues no Roman poets possessed true enthusiasm; Virgil's Æneid invocation ("Musa, mihi causa memora"; "Arma, virumque cano") is called partial, compared to Wolsey's "ego et meus rex," and his fourth Eclogue ("Sicelides Musæ") and Caligula standing between Castor and Pollux (per Suetonius) illustrate arrogance. Successive page-keyed notes follow: the attentive power (το προσεκτικον), per Iamblichus and Aristotle, is one indivisible power. The body as river of Lethe is discussed via Proclus, Empedocles, and the Chaldean oracles. Plotinus is quoted on three classes of men. Simplicius is quoted on matter as mire. Iamblichus's complaint of Greek innovation is linked to Julian's treatise against the Christians (quoted in Greek). Two Hermetic principles are correlated with Plato's one and being; the Gods Eneph and Eicton are identified with Saturn and Phanes. The Hermetic books' authenticity is defended against Warburton. The decans (thirty-six parts) are explained, with a Gale extract from Hermes (Greek and translation) describing them as guardians. Homer's "the Gods are flexible" (Iliad ix.493) is interpreted. Proclus is quoted on dæmons presiding over body parts, and on the soul's salvation and Orphic mysteries of Bacchus and Proserpine.

Cathartic virtue alone is called the salvation of souls, since it cuts off and obliterates material natures and the passions adhering from generation, separates the soul and leads it to intellect, and causes it to leave its vehicles on earth. Souls in descending receive aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial vehicles from the elements before entering this gross bulk, since they could not proceed into the body from immaterial spirits without a medium. "THE END," followed by printer's imprint. Numbered notes follow. The first states that a triad proceeds from a monad in every order: the intelligible triad from the ineffable principle; Phanes as monad producing the intelligible-and-intellectual triad; the intellectual triad Saturn, Rhea, and Jupiter; Jupiter (the Demiurgus) as monad of the supermundane triad; Apollo producing a triad of liberated Gods; and the liberated order's extremity as monad of mundane Gods, in conformity with Chaldean theology, citing an oracle and referring the reader to the translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato. Subsequent notes list philosophical works, give Greek passages, and quote Stillingfleet on the distinction between honours given to Gods and heroes, citing Pythagoras, Herodotus, Isocrates, the inscription on Regilla, Epicteta, and Valerius. Further notes cite Damascius on the Egyptians' thrice-unknown darkness, Homer's Iliad, and note passages Gale omitted that the annotator supplies from Iamblichus.

An anonymous Greek testimony prefixed to the manuscript Gale published is quoted and translated: Proclus, in his Commentary on the Enneads of Plotinus, states that the divine Iamblichus answers Porphyry's prefixed Epistle under the assumed name of the Egyptian Abammon, the diction and conceptions confirming Proclus's judgment; the note adds that a passage in Proclus's Commentaries on the Timæus, escaping Gale, corroborates this. A sequence of numbered notes follows. Several propose textual emendations to the Greek and correct Gale's translations, including at note 23 and note 32. Note 24 cites Damascius on difference and knowledge; note 25 describes undefiled souls subsisting between essential heroes and descending souls, called terrestrial heroes in the Pythagoric Golden Verses. Note 30 states passions moderately gratified are vanquished without violence, faulting Gale's oil-on-fire simile. Note 39 describes the nature of the one as all-receptive and all-productive; note 40 says the Gods are essentialized in the one. Note 48 states divine dreams occur not in sleep. Note 51 recounts from Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras how Pythagoras quelled a Tauromenian lad's rage by changing a piper's Phrygian song to a spondaic one, how Empedocles saved his host Anchilus by singing Homer to his lyre, and the Pythagoric practices of exartysis, synarmoga, and epaphe, adding Proclus, Ptolemy, Plato, and Aristotle. Note 53 unfolds the Corybantes and Curetes via Proclus. Note 56 cites Servius and Euripides on Bacchic purification. Note 57 quotes Plato's Phædrus on mania and Hermias on ancient divine indignation, with examples of an oak-cutter and a matricide freed by the telestic art. Note 58 describes Rhea as a vivific Goddess. Remaining notes reference oracles and further emendations.

The text opens with a note citing Proclus's Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato, stating that in the mysteries an imperfect dæmon assumes the appearance of a more perfect one and draws down unpurified souls; in the Eleusinian mysteries terrene dæmons appear before the invoked God, and the Chaldean oracles forbid beholding them until the body is purified. It quotes Proclus's Platonic Theology on mystics meeting multiform genera before receiving divine illumination, and criticizes Warburton for mistranslating Proclus, while noting Warburton concedes the mysteries were instituted pure. Note 67 cites Damascius (via Photius) on a sacred woman who poured pure water into a glass cup and foresaw future events. Note 68 quotes Psellus on light spread under divine substances, seized by natures like Socrates and Plotinus. Note 69 references sources on the vehicle of the phantastic power. Note 70 glosses discursive reason. Note 71 cites Proclus on Socrates in the Phædrus and alliance to the dæmoniacal genus. Note 72 notes Heraclitus quoted by Plutarch. Note 73 emends a reading. Note 74 cites Herodian and Strabo on divination through viscera. Note 75 lists auspices lacking heart or liver before the deaths of Cæsar, Marius, Pertinax, and Marcellus's defeat. Note 76 cites Gale, the Scholiast on Nicander, Dinon, Metrodorus, and Herodotus on divination from tamarisk rods and laurel leaves. Note 77 corrects Gale's mistranslation. Note 78 explains God producing all things with cooperating divine powers, defending Iamblichus against Gale. Note 79 cites Proclus that we approach divinity, not it us. Notes 80–83 dispute Gale on the soul's descent, oblivion, and hypostatic union, citing Porphyry, Philolaus, Proclus, and Psellus. Note 84 cites Hippocrates, Galen, and Roger Bacon on astronomy/astrology in medicine. Note 85 begins citing Proclus.

This span consists of numbered notes (85–107). A note explains that there are three orders of dæmons, the first more intellectual, the second more rational, the third—of which Iamblichus now speaks—various, irrational, and material. Note 86 locates Charonea in Asia Minor by the Meander and describes foul-smelling spiracles, citing Pliny on Puteoli, Amsanctus in the Samnite country, and Cicero's De Divinatione. Note 87 states irrational spirits, as contributing to wholes, are more excellent yet inferior through being irrational. Notes 88–92 cite Plotinus on providence, Gale's translation, Proclus on Evil, and Ennead iv, quoting Plotinus on the universe as one animal. Note 93 identifies the art as magic, giving a Greek passage from Psellus, On Dæmons, on goeteia and its terrestrial dæmons, images, statues, and magic as the last part of sacerdotal science, with an Apuleius passage on magical incantation. Note 94 quotes Iamblichus (apud Stobaeus) and Porphyry on souls and bodies. Notes 95–96 cite Porphyry On Abstinence and Proclus on celestial bodies. Note 97 gives the number sixty in the crocodile per Aristotle. Note 98 records Gale's identification of Isis with the moon and the dog, which the annotator disputes, arguing Isis is a lunar satellite, citing Proclus and Macrobius. Notes 99–100 cite Horapollo on the cynocephalus and Gale and Plutarch on the μυγαλη. Note 101 gives Plutarch's defence of Egyptian animal worship (ox, ichneumon, asp, weasel, beetle, crocodile, ibis) and Pythagorean number-names. Notes 102–107 give textual emendations, arithmetic on 36, and remarks on the cock sacred to Apollo per Olympiodorus and Proclus.

A note observes, citing Ficinus on Plotinus, that fire enkindled by mortals resembles the heavens, participates of incorporeal light, moves perpetually, divides without being divided, and flies back to celestial fire when its fuel is consumed; the vehicle is described as luciform, of pure vivific fire (108). Note 109 cites Proclus on the Timæus concerning the telestic art obliterating stains of generation through divine fire, quotes a Chaldean oracle on the mortal approaching fire gaining light, and cites Hercules as an example of telestic purification. Note 110 proposes a textual emendation. Note 111 identifies the media as the orders called archai (rulers) and apolutoi (liberated). Note 112 cites Proclus on the First Alcibiades regarding daemons around each God and terrestrial daemons in the mysteries. Note 113 cites Simplicius on Epictetus comparing divine works to letters in a sentence. Note 114 cites Servius on the Æneid concerning invoking all divinities, king Œneus neglecting Diana who sent a boar, and Proclus on divine anger. Note 115 identifies Plotinus. Notes 116–117 give emendations and cite Proclus and Damascius on matter. Notes 118–121 give textual notes on apples of gold and reading adyton, identifying Phanes. Note 122 cites Martianus Capella and Porphyry on the sun's ship. Notes 123–124 concern names, citing Alexander Trallianus. Note 125 quotes Proclus on the divine name of the world. Notes 126–127 reference translations. Note 128 discusses Egyptian antiquity, citing Lucian and an oracle of Apollo. Notes 129–137 cite Proclus, Porphyry, Suidas, Gale's conjectures on Kneph, and Proclus citing Iamblichus on Hermes producing matter from essentiality.

This span consists of numbered editorial notes (138–163) followed by a publisher's catalogue. An opening note cites De Abstinentia describing a writer as a lover of truth conversant with Stoic philosophy, with the Greek. Note 138 identifies the ninth king of the twenty-sixth Saitan dynasty. Note 139 cites Plato's Timæus, where Critias describes the Delta, the Saitical province, the city Saïs, King Amasis, and the divinity Neith/Athena, remarking that Gale omitted this. Note 140 quotes two Chaldean oracles Proclus cites about a "transmitting name" leaping into worlds. Notes 141, 148–150, 155–156, 159–161 propose textual emendations to Greek readings. Note 142 states Gale mistook Iamblichus's meaning regarding τα κρειττονα. Notes 143–144 gloss calculating nativities and joint risings/settings. Note 145 discusses star observations spanning 300,000 years, citing Proclus, Cicero (370,000), and Diodorus Siculus (473,000). Note 146 cites Hephestion and Porphyry on the lord of the geniture. Note 147 describes the Egyptian dæmon received at birth. Note 162 states the German editor absurdly substituted πυκτικῃ, implying Hercules a pugilist. Notes 157–158 cite the Odyssey and Iliad; 163 cites Olympiodorus. The catalogue then lists works published by Bertram Dobell, including poetry and a life of James Thomson, with review excerpts, ending with transcriber's notes.