The Seba library treats Theurgic Practice in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Hillman, James, E.R. Dodds, Corbin, Henry).
Active imagination as theurgic divination would work on the gods rather than recognizing their workings in us. We reach too far, missing the daimones that are present every day.
Hillman argues that active imagination becomes theurgic — and thereby corrupted — when it attempts to manipulate divine forces rather than attend to their immanent operations, inverting the proper posture of depth-psychological self-knowledge.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
Theurgic union is attained only by the efficacy of the unspeakable acts performed in the appropriate manner, acts which are beyond all comprehension, and by the potency of the unutterable symbols which are comprehended only by the gods.
Dodds presents the Iamblichean doctrine that theurgic union bypasses intellectual effort entirely, resting instead on ritually enacted, divinely comprehended symbols — a position he reads as the refuge of a despairing late antique intelligentsia.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
theurgy as ‘a power higher than all human wisdom, embracing the blessings of divination, the purifying powers of initiation, and in a word all the operations of divine possession’… more simply as magic applied to a religious purpose and resting on a supposed revelation of a religious character.
Dodds supplies the canonical definition of theurgy from Proclus and offers his own demystifying reduction of it as religious magic, establishing the historiographical baseline from which depth-psychological engagements depart.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
Active imagination becomes popularist superstitious theurgy when we activate the images artificially (drugs), perform it routinely as a ritualism, foster special effects (synchronicities), further divinatory abilities.
Hillman enumerates the specific abuses by which depth-psychological image-work collapses into theurgic superstition, offering a practical taxonomy of the boundary between self-knowledge and self-aggrandizement.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
The hieratic art makes use of the filiation which attaches beings here below to those on high, so bringing it about that the gods come down toward us and illumine us, or rather that we approach them, discovering them in theopties and theophanies capable of uniting our thought to theirs.
Corbin presents the Proclean hieratic science — the theurgic tradition’s most philosophically developed form — as a doctrine of sympathetic correspondence that draws divinity downward through structured ritual attention, providing the positive valuation against which critical uses of the term must be measured.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
the theurgic magic of Proclus and Iamblichus; the spiritual quantum leaps of the Neo-Pythagoreans; and last but most certainly not least, the Gnosis of Basilides, of Valentinus.
Hoeller situates the theurgic magic of Proclus and Iamblichus as one constellation among the defining spiritual achievements of Alexandrian late antiquity, linking it to the broader genealogy of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism that underlies Jungian psychology.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
two further questions suggest themselves in connection with the theurgic, though they cannot be pursued here. First, did it contribute something to the belief… in (talismans) or ‘statuae averruncae’—enchanted images whose presence… had power to avert natural disaster or military defeat?
Dodds traces a potential legacy of theurgic image-animation into medieval talisman belief, extending his account of theurgy’s historical influence beyond the Neoplatonic school into broader Western magical tradition.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
theurgic 295 f., 309 (109)
An index entry locating Dodds’s treatment of theurgic catharsis within his broader typology of purification rites, indicating that theurgy was indexed alongside Orphic, Platonic, and shamanistic forms of catharsis in his comparative framework.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951aside
it is by means of active imagination that Jung joins together again the Hellenistic, Neoplatonic tradition of image-work and the analytical mode of self-knowledge of Sigmund Freud.
Hillman situates active imagination within the Neoplatonic image-work tradition from which theurgy derives, providing the positive theoretical context against which his critical deployment of theurgic practice as a cautionary category is later articulated.
, Healing Fiction, 1983aside