Iamblichus, 1500 years ago, explicitly telling us that yes it is possible to reconstruct damaged traditions: "For all these reasons, then, let us call upon the gods as our leaders, entrust both ourselves and our discourse to them, and follow wherever they may lead. We should not be deterred by the fact that this school has long been neglected; that it has been hidden beneath estranged teachings and certain secret symbols; that it has been overshadowed by many false and spurious writings; and that it has been obstructed by many other difficulties of the same kind. The will of the gods is enough for us, and with it one can endure difficulties even more perplexing than these." - Book 1 of On the Pythagorean Life; Literally the first thing he says in the book that he gave his students to read first of all. I highly advise you to save this quote for future use when arguing with those guys who say "but your line of transmission is broken bro, just become a sufi bro"

1. Wash your hands & face 2. Light a candle or fire 3. Invoke the name(s) of the deity you want to make an offering to or read aloud a hymn to the deity - the Orphic hymns are a good option for this 4. Make your offering can be any good drink or food by passing it over the flame

Study is good but there's no need to be an expert before performing a simple rite. I think many potential or new Pagans put it off because they feel that they don't know enough. But as long as you approach the Gods sincerely they will be pleased. Here's an example rite:

Writing will still be an important skill insofar as learning to organize your thoughts and refine them for verbal presentation will be important. There will be many technical fields where neither writing nor anything you could say in a speech will matter, but in the cultivation of the soul, which will be the sole worthwhile object of effort and difficulty in the future, human to human transmission will still matter immensely because of darshana

Sorry, christcucks. It's only a real MAGAcock if it belongs to pagang. Otherwise it's just a sparkling bris

Explosions are something that pretty much never happened before gunpowder, as far as I know. So those who discovered and codified astrology would have had no real referent for it, except maybe wildfires spreading super quickly. And yet explosions can be astrologically delineated through certain Mars-Jupiter contacts. There are certainly aspects of life that have yet to manifest in this world that will nonetheless be divinable by astrology because it is a form of working from first principles. I suspect AI will bring about several of these changes to life.

Sweet mother of God. I've just been informed that the Belfast rioters are abducting migrants out of their flats and loading them into giant slingshots. OSINT telegrams are reporting loud boioioings, thwacks, and nyoooooms all across Northern Ireland. Sources say the Starmer regime is drawing up plans now to ban comically large mallets.

Read Hymn to Magna Mater and Against the Galileans by Emperor Julian and you too can be jacked and dripped out like this New Age Healer

One pretty simplistic take on the "problem of evil", from Nicomachus as paraphrased by Iamblichus: "Nicomachus then gives a striking providential argument. Human beings want gods to exist when they are wronged, but not when they themselves do wrong. Therefore they are wronged so that they may want gods to exist. If the desire for gods to exist is what makes human beings endure, and if they acquire this desire when they suffer wrong, then wrongdoing, though evil in itself, can serve some advantage of nature. Since nature is good, and nature is the same as providence, evils happen to human beings according to providence. He then supports this by recalling Homer’s image of Zeus weighing the fates of the Trojans and Achaeans in golden scales."

Fascinating take from Iamblichus about sense-perception. This is from a passage where he's discussing the Tetrad: "In animals there are four determinate senses, since touch underlies all the senses in common and therefore has no single distinct organ or place in the same way." He seems to posit that touch is a kind of ur-sense. Vision, hearing, and scent, are all just types of touch. Basically, any possible way of perceiving physically. I've never encountered this idea before but it makes sense.

Oh RADIANT LORD OF LIGHT! Destroy utterly the bringers of CHAOS! 🌿🏛🏹🐍🏺🌞 Share this 2nd century BC prayer to Apollo from Berlin Papyrus 6870 to totally own the enemies of order!

IF I was some kind of demon, and my goal was to alienate people from the divine so that I could prey on them or aggrandize myself, here's exactly what I would do: FIRST: I would latch onto whoever was closest to my paltry little corner of the earth. I would tell them exactly what they want to hear, that the real god is right here with them and on their side and that I, too, hate those pompous Egyptians and Babylonians who think they're better than us because their Gods bless them more. SECOND, I'd say THOSE gods are the liars and deceivers, and then every time my little tribe of stooges gets defeated because their hamingja has been weakened by a jealous desert sprite, I would blame them, say they aren't being pious enough, say those *other* gods are the evil masters of a fallen world and I can only help you if you give more, more, more, to me and only me. I would especially sperg out hard about the Egyptian and Babylonian divination and invocation techniques, because they work and are reproducible, and if they're taken seriously enough they disprove what I'd been feeding my stooges. THIRD, in my greatest trick yet, I would abandon my initial victims in favor of their occupiers. I'd tweak my story a little, again steal just enough of the truth to be plausible, and then I'd get my claws into the already decadent Romans. I'd spread like a venereal disease, or maybe like prions, turning children against parents and wives against husbands. I would especially take care to destroy their divination practices and, even more importantly, their ancestor worship, which sustains their hamingja. And it would turn out exactly as well for them as my initial dealings with those poor yehudan bastards did: They'll lose their empire, be occupied by barbarians, they'll even lose their literacy and their mathematic advances. And the whole time while this is happening they'll cleave to me for comfort, trying to figure out how to avert my wrath the way an abused child tries to figure out their alcoholic father. FINALLY, When it seems like half of their empire might survive, I'll infest some schizophrenic pedophile from arabia. With all the loosh I'd harvested from the Romans I'll send this fresh, untouched race against both the Christians and the Persians. I'll subject both Egypt and Babylon to the most humiliating occupation, taunting those Gods who once embarrassed me by actually benefitting their people with knowledge and blessings. For the next thousand years I'll have these buck broken peoples clash with each other over who's the REAL israelite, and my grip on them will only lessen once the Europeans forsake me in favor of the even greater spiritual poverty of atheism. For that is how much of a pathetic fraud of a deity I am, that atheism is a rational alternative. But this is all just hypothetical

So: One of Iamblichus' surviving works is essentially just a rephrasing and expansion on Nicomachus of Gerasa's introduction to arithmetic. It is very inaccessible, and, frankly, it is kind of useless unless you have the original text by Nicomachus at hand plus some preexisting grounding in the quadrivium. I am considering omitting it from the Iamblichus compilation, but I am being nagged at by my completionist side. So I need your guys' thoughts.

Every day, when I wake up, I imagine what it would feel like if I didn't eat breakfast. I rotate the shape of the feeling in my mind, its impeccable geometry and vivid color. I then eat 2 marshmallows. Few.

Of the two Jupiterian signs, Sagittarius can be called Apollonian and Pisces can be called Dionysian. Really, I think Jupiter as a planet can often refer to those offspring of Jupiter who aren't otherwise represented in the signs or primary planets, since Jove himself is the whole wide sky. The most underrated ways to read Jupiter in a chart are as Hercules, where what seems like fantastically bad luck inclines one to great achievement, or as Thor, where his apotropaic nature is emphasized.

I gladly welcome Mormons into the fold as monolatrous pagans. After all, even the most "orthodox" christians are still just a Hellenistic judean mystery school.

Astrology is a religious belief with metaphysical implications for the reality you live in, so if you believe in astrology and recognize its truth, you do need to seriously consider how that impacts your worldview.