ABSTRACT
Educated men who collected magical lore or whose philosophical interests extended into the occult are a phenomenon that we have already encountered in the Rome of the Late Republic and Early Empire. Perhaps because the evidence is more plentiful, one gets the impression that persons of this type were increasingly visible. Philosophers whose basic philosophical tenets derived from Plato, but who believed that Plato was the intellectual heir of Pythagoras and who therefore saw themselves as Pythagoreans seem from the second century BC to have had a peculiar fascination with the occult. The type continues to exist: at least three can be named, two of them certainly real persons and the third possibly also. Besides Pythagorean philosophers, there are doctors of a Pythagorean tendency who made the not very difficult transition from medicine to magic. From the late second century AD, it becomes harder to distinguish between philosophy in some of its manifestations and magic. To effect union with the divine and to heighten their perceptual powers Platonist philosophers adopt techniques and rituals that have in fact been borrowed from the repertoire of the magician. The ritualistic and mechanical procedures used by these philosophers for gaining intimacy with the divine are most generally known as theurgy, a term whose meaning was contested by those who thought of themselves as theurgists. In the eyes of many of their contemporaries theurgists were no different from magicians. Serious philosophers who engaged in theurgy certainly neither thought of themselves as magicians nor presented themselves as such. They viewed themselves as adepts in a higher branch of wisdom that went beyond philosophy to attain knowledge of the divine. There were probably others, however, whose motives were not quite so pure who exploited the cachet that theurgy had because of its connections with Platonism. Elements of theurgy come to be incorporated in magical performances. The effect must have been to invest the magician with a new authority. Cross-fertilization, in short, takes place between the more rarefied realms of philosophy and magic.
