Theurgy
Despite the complexities of the make-up of the divine cosmos, Iamblichus still had salvation as his final goal. The embodied soul was to return to divinity by performing certain rites, or theurgy, literally, 'divine-working'. Some translate this as "magic", but the modern connotations of the term do not exactly match what Iamblichus had in mind, which is more along the lines of a sacramental religious ritual. Still, these acts did involve some of what would today be perceived as attempts at 'magic'.
Though the embodied souls are dominated by physical necessities, they are still divine and rational. This contains a conflict, being part of an immortal, divine nature, as well as genuinely part of a material, imperfect mortal domain. The personal soul, a kind of 'lost' embodied soul, has lost touch with its deeper, divine nature and has become self-alienated. In this conflict can perhaps be glimpsed Iamblichus' ideas about the origin of evil, though Iamblichus does not comment on this himself.
This was also the area where Iamblichus differed from his former master, Porphyry, who believed mental contemplation alone could bring salvation. Porphyry wrote a letter criticizing Iamblicus' ideas of theurgy, and it is to this letter that On the Egyptian Mysteries was written in response.
Iamblichus' analysis was that the transcendent cannot be grasped with mental contemplation because the transcendent is supra-rational. Theurgy is a series of rituals and operations aimed at recovering the transcendent essence by retracing the divine 'signatures' through the layers of being. Education is important for comprehending the scheme of things as presented by Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras but also by the Chaldaean Oracles. The theurgist works 'like with like': at the material level, with physical symbols and 'magic'; at the higher level, with mental and purely spiritual practices. Starting with correspondences of the divine in matter, the theurgist eventually reaches the level where the soul's inner divinity unites with God.
Clearly, Iamblichus meant for the masses of people to perform rituals that were more physical in nature, while the higher types, who were closest to the divine (and whose numbers were few), could reach the divine realm through contemplation.
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