Books
Dancing with the Demiurge
By Simon Cox
I first read Gregory Shaw while I was living in China. I was staying at a martial arts school inside the walls of a 15th century Daoist temple on Wudang Mountain. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in classics and was using all my free time there to take myself through the eastern classics reading list for the master’s program at St. John’s College. At a wizened 21 years of age, I felt I had a pretty good handle on the western intellectual tradition, and this youthful sojourn was part of an attempt to branch out into Indian and Chinese thought. Luckily, a bridge had recently been published: Thomas McEvilley’s magisterial The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, and I was using it to extend my knowledge into these foreign lands. McEvilley traces interactions between Greece and India beginning in the classical/Upanishadic era, around the 6th century BCE, when regions of both were shortly drawn into the borders of the Persian Empire. The basic story goes: India influenced the presocratics, seeding the earliest flowering of Greek philosophical thought, and then Greece influenced India during the Hellenistic era, impacting the development of Mahayana Buddhism and, something McEvilley is more tentative about, tantra.1
In the intervening decades, with the rise of Silk Road studies, the global turn in classical studies, and the emergence of Big History framing Eurasian connectivity as a structural feature of human civilization, McEvilley’s once-bold conclusions have become relatively prosaic. What once read like iconoclasm now aligns with a broader scholarly consensus: ancient philosophy was always already global, entangled, dialogical.
McEvilley’s chapter on Iamblichus led me through a series of intermediaries to Gregory Shaw’s 1995 Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, a monograph based on his PhD thesis which he wrote under the historian of Gnosticism Birger Pearson (1934–2025) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shaw was deeply influenced by his tutelage under the French scholar Jean Trouillard (1907–1984) during research travels to Paris in the winter of 1982. Trouillard, whom Shaw characterizes as “kind of a Neoplatonic / Proclean saint” revealed to him “the living architecture of the world imagined by the Neoplatonists,” through which Shaw was “able to find my place in their world.”2
In a hidden way, through a particular resonance, all three—cosmos, mountain, body—were simply different aspects of one thing, enacted through a series of martial movements, right here, right now.
Theurgy and the Soul arrived at just the right moment in my life. It introduced me to a vision of sacred action as demiurgy—the ritual reenactment of cosmic creation, a form of divine participation in the unfolding drama of the universe. This idea, central to Iamblichean theurgy, resonated deeply with what I was practicing through the martial dances I was studying at Wudang Mountain. These forms were saturated with Daoist cosmology, their movements mapped onto local landmarks, gestures echoing classical Chinese myths of celestial unfolding. As I practiced them, I began to see the dances as enacted cosmogonies birthing space and time rather than simply moving through them: engendering the cosmos, the sacred geography of the mountain, and a corresponding occult physiology within the flesh. In a hidden way, through a particular resonance, all three—cosmos, mountain, body—were simply different aspects of one thing, enacted through a series of martial movements, right here, right now.
Shaw’s rendering of Iamblichus extended for me a conceptual bridge. His vision helped me traverse the cultural, mythic, and linguistic distance between my classical training and the Chinese traditions I was newly inhabiting. Encountering Daoist ritual through a Neoplatonic lens didn’t dilute its strangeness. Initially it helped me make these complex theories and praxes legible, intuitive, attuned to the shape of my psyche.
In the midst of my grand synthetic project, a particular footnote in Theurgy and the Soul jumped out at me.
A careful comparison cannot be developed here except to point to the terms and their functions in the respective spiritual practices. “Heat” (tapas/yoga : thermon/theurgy) is awakened by, or directly related to, the “breath” (prana/yoga : pneuma/theurgy). When sufficiently heated, it flows up the “channels” (nadis/yoga : ochetai/theurgy) of the mystical body to divinize the soul. It may be possible also to compare the fiery goddess Hecate, invoked by theurgists, with the goddess Kundalini invoked by yogins, since both were responsible for the salvation or punishment of souls depending on their purity and preparation for the encounter. 3
This terminological comparison between subtle physiologies, theurgical and tantric, inspired me to finally begin studying Sanskrit with an eye toward these particular resonances, looking into the conditions of the possibility of diffusion between Greece and India with regard to tantra and theurgy. I kept running into Persia as this forgotten middle ground in the conversation. I was also surprised by various counterintuitive trivia, like how if you only limit yourself to textual sources, the western theurgical material actually comes centuries before any of the Indic Tantric texts. And the theurgical arts of the Greco-Roman world arise more or less simultaneously with what I viewed as analogous traditions in China.4
Hellenic Tantra by Gregory Shaw
I sat in long anticipation of a further exploration of the topic. Twenty years later, I was thrilled for Shaw’s release of Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus. I had been keeping up with his scholarship in the meantime, a steady stream of highly polished articles treating everything from Plato’s chora as the mother of the cosmos to astrology as a form of divination. I knew Hellenic Tantra wouldn’t confine itself to a simple historical-diffusionist account. Shaw’s scholarship has always transmitted an unmistakable vitality and experiential depth—history and Neoplatonism, for him, are but fingers pointing to the moon of a lived, enacted, sacramental theology. Still, when I first held Hellenic Tantra in my hands, it took several readings to understand what kind of book this really was. For all its trappings—footnotes, citations, and critical scaffolding—it is only cloaked in the form of a scholarly monograph. Disrobed, it is an arrow aimed at the heart of the modern world. This is not a comparative project designed to trace lines of cultural borrowing. It is the culmination of decades of thought, a direct throughline from his Theurgy and the Soul; it is a critique of the metaphysics of our age—physicalism and its attendant reductionisms, which disempower the imagination and blind us to our own capacity for the divine.
Shaw’s Comparative Method
Shaw’s method refuses to reduce comparison to the crude ledger of cultural borrowing, focusing instead on the nondual realities that reverberate into theurgical and tantric worlds through shared practices: incubation, mantric incantation, ritual enactment. At the heart of this trading zone lies the imagination, the phantastikon or imaginatrix, a metaphysical organ of symbolic perception. Shaw presents it as a mirror with two surfaces: one side reflecting the forms of the sensible world, the other opening onto divine realities.5 Our double vision has been dimmed, occluded by centuries of physicalist reductionism, leaving us bereft of our better half:
Our physicalist worldview allows for only a one-way mirror and its monocular vision does not even recognize that we live in a world of imagination. . . . We live in a disenchanted world where there is nothing to see through. For Iamblichus and the later Platonists there was. The art of theurgy had to do with training and strengthening the imagination for this kind of seeing. (63)
This nuanced rendering of the imagination allows for a capacious comparative theology, where tantra and theurgy emerge as attractor states of a shared ontological fabric. What we find in Shaw’s comparative treatment is an approach that does not simply reduce tantra practices to Hellenic models, or vice versa, or dismiss either as primitive superstition. Rather, Shaw envisions both as different modes of participation, different praxiologies in a shared cosmic order. Religious practices across cultures—mantra, for example, and their Hellenic analogues, the asēma onomata—are understood not as human inventions but as divine gifts, variegated expressions of a single, nondual theurgy manifesting through diverse symbolic forms (137).
In this light, ritual symbols are never reduced to arbitrary signification. They are charged interfaces, gateways through which divine presence is made tangible. Imagination, empowered and consecrated, becomes the very site of cosmic descent.
Shaw’s theology of embodied action, developed in his earlier Theurgy and the Soul, reaches its fullest flowering in Hellenic Tantra, where he draws on content from Hindu tantra to flesh out the many historical lacunae in our record of Neoplatonic theurgy. Hellenic Tantra turns primarily to the elevated nondualism of the Kashmiri Śaivite philosopher Abhinavagupta to fill in some of these blanks and to draw out the deeper implications of Iamblichus’s theurgy. Shaw zeroes in on the most radically nondual forms of tantra in order to articulate the metaphysic at the heart of Iamblichus’s project—a metaphysic chronically overlooked by scholars who misread theurgical Neoplatonism through a dualistic, indeed gnostic lens, where incarnation is a curse and acosmic excarnation is the aim of the philosophical soul.
The nondualism of Abhinavagupta illuminates the nondualism of Iamblichus, and Shaw’s framing of both can only really be understood in the context of the nondualism of his early mentor Jean Trouillard, who spent his career fleshing out a rigorous henology, a metaphysic of the One, as a response to the crisis of a Thomistic metaphysics of Being rent asunder by Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. As Shaw sums up Trouillard’s foundation in post-war French Catholic theology at the beginning of the book:
For him, theurgy was divine activity that transcends thought and transforms human existence into an ongoing deification. In one sense, Trouillard’s sacramental perspective put theurgy in the Church, but at the same time, by interpreting the sacraments theurgically, Trouillard placed the Church in the older theological current of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists. Behind this was an agenda he shared with his colleagues: to transform a moribund Christian theology mired in a dogmatic misreading of St. Thomas. . . . Trouillard and his colleagues shifted Christian theology from an ontological to a henological metaphysics. (11)
This metaphysics of the One suffuses Hellenic Tantra and serves as the philosophical backdrop of Shaw’s theology of sacramental action. As he presents it,
The One is no longer conceived as the “highest” entity in a hierarchy of beings. Rather than the highest entity, the One is revealed as the activity that gives rise to all beings and is therefore as much present in the lowest as in the highest orders of reality. This means that contrary to traditional dualist metaphysics where spirit is preferable to matter because it is closer to God, in henological metaphysics the One is as present to matter as to spirit. The natural world, the human body, and all physical existence are manifestations of the One. For Trouillard, this is what allows human life to be sacramental, or as Blondel put it, a “synthesis of God with man.” (12)
This is paralleled in the nondualism of Abhinavagupta who more concretely descends from vaunted reflections on the One into the realm of the body: a deified body elaborated in terms of specific postures (mudra)—physical, mental, and emotional—which embody the divine state. Quoting Abhinavagupta’s Song of Praise: “The accomplished Tantric yogin, whose mind and breath have been dissolved through complete immersion in the innermost object of perception, the supreme goal of yoga—such a yogin then abides with a silenced though open vision, the pupils of the eyes unmoving. Though he is seen to gaze still on the outer world, in truth his vision does not reset on its [apparent] outwardness” (34). Shaw directs us to the “bi-focal mystical vision that involves the simultaneity of outer sensory perception and inner yogic vision” to concretely articulate this nondual view which “put them at odds with the dualists, who ‘closed their eyes’ to the world and escaped from the body” (35).
Comparative Fire: The Philosophical Core
While the parallels begin and ultimately resolve into the immanent transcendence of the One (whether Śiva, Dionysus, or Trouillard’s Henad), Shaw takes us into its variegated manifestations through chapters on divination, the theurgical practice of photagogia (drawing in the light), mantra, the subtle body, and finally, divinization.
But of all the methods outlined, Shaw seems most committed to the subtle body in its immediate relevance to and potential for aiding our understanding of the theurgical world and of what Iamblichus was really up to beyond our inherited dualistic and reductive projections. As he begins the chapter: the subtle body “can show us something new, something foreign to our materialist convictions . . . understanding the subtle body is therefore essential for understanding theurgy. It is the key” (161).
Shaw’s words here drew me back to my time in China, to my readings of his first book where he traces the lineaments of Iamblichus’s world. It was the embodied practices I was personally engaging with in China to which his words spoke so directly. Now, upon further familiarity with Shaw’s oeuvre as it culminates in Hellenic Tantra, I can finally begin to place him in this paradoxically highly mystical / highly embodied tradition of French theology, through Trouillard back to the great theorist of action, Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), whom Shaw read in French during his PhD studies.
Blondel’s magnum opus, L’Action (1893) is a metaphysical reading of human action as perpetually entangled in a dialectic, by nature split open in two directions. As echoed by Shaw’s two-way mirror, for Blondel every action affirms the paltry limits of human agency while simultaneously revealing an infinite yearning that gestures toward a transcendent order he refers to as “the supernatural.” As Blondel puts it, “action is the end of a world, it is at the same time the beginning of a new world.”6
This view reverberates through Shaw’s rendering of the subtle body. Theurgical action becomes a lived invocation of a supernatural order that manifests within direct, embodied human experience. The sacraments, for Blondel, and theurgy, for Shaw, are not superstitions or magical thinking but signs of this very structure—rituals that make explicit the transcendent longing implicit in every human action. Following this throughline in Shaw’s scholarship, I am now going back and reading L’Action as a kind of proto-theurgical text: a vision of embodied life as ever interminably entangled with the beyond.
My experience as a practitioner finding relevance in Shaw’s work is hardly anomalous. He has cultivated a wide and devoted following of practitioners and scholar-practitioners who resonate with his evocations of a direct, embodied, experiential theurgy—one that bypasses the cerebral abstractions of disenchanted scholarship. Against his allied vanguard of theurgists and tantrikas, Shaw casts a chorus of intellectual foils: the Porphyrians, dualists, Sāṃkhyas, and disembodied theorists whose maps fail to account for the heat, breath, and luminosity of lived experience. They form a kind of shadow choir, their voices always present yet ultimately subordinate to the glowing core of Shaw’s tantric Platonism. As the book continues, a subterranean drumbeat comes into earshot. Shaw’s prose incarnates an alternative, one forged in Chaldean fire, ritual, and the embodied descent of the divine.
The subtle body is Shaw’s answer to the question of how we might find a way out of our scholarly limbo, the hall of mirrors that lies at the heart of the ivory tower.
The Subtle Body
Shaw’s critique of the “flatland” of contemporary academia7 takes focus in his chapter on the subtle body, where he begins by addressing the deification of theurgists, which “strikes most scholars as a pious fiction, and the deified state of tantric teachers, even today, is hardly believable to those of us living with a metaphysics of materialism. This is why both tantra and theurgy were initially disparaged as irrational superstitions, and why those who are ‘sympathetic’ to their claims have to explain them away or make them agree with our habitual thinking” (160). The subtle body is Shaw’s answer to the question of how we might find a way out of our scholarly limbo, the hall of mirrors that lies at the heart of the ivory tower.
Here he turns his gaze to an unexpected cast of practitioners, from Marsilio Ficino and Aleister Crowley to Luce Irigaray and Carl Jung, who have articulated practices analogous to those only tantalizingly gestured to by our piecemeal Neoplatonic record: “I am suggesting that we cannot understand the theurgical ochema-pneuma without experiencing/imaging our own, and this will strike most scholars as both impossible (since most do not think a subtle body exists) and foolish. . . . We have been blinded to the vision of theurgical Platonists by our materialism and dualism. Their metaphysics were not mental abstractions but maps of experience” (167). To put a very fine point on this, Shaw quotes the fifth-century theurgist Hierocles of Alexandria: “Philosophy is united with the art of sacred things since this art is concerned with the purification of the luminous body, and if you separate philosophical thinking from this art, you will find that it no longer has the same power” (qtd. on 171).8 This, in Shaw’s diagnosis, is why “philosophers today lack power, and why most intellectuals bore us” (171). Missing the embodied, affective dimension central to Platonism as a lived tradition, we “no longer align our particular breath with the world breath, and we no longer recognize our polarized compulsions as daimones that must be honored and united with demiurgic measures” (171).
And yet, “this lost art is as close as our next breath” (171). It is through the material, theurgical rites that we ritually re-enact the demiurgy, that primordial act of creation, of divine cosmogenesis, through which we rend the fabric of dualistic and intellectual delusion and directly experience the nondual vision Shaw establishes in the early chapters of the book.
Reflecting again on this nondual vision, its two-way mirror epistemology of the imaginal, and on the blondelian dialectic of sacramental action, Shaw furnishes the vision of Iamblichus: “According to Iamblichus, the ‘last things’ (eschata), the detritus of physical reality, is penetrated by the highest. This means that material objects, used rightly, can serve as portals (sunthemata) to the highest reality, and the subtle body is the medium through which we enter these portals and ‘ascend’ to the gods” (182). This brings us to the existentialist core of Shaw’s work, and a theme we can find scattered through all his major characters and influences from Blondel to Abhinavagupta. It is precisely the chaos of our limited, mortal, embodied psychosomatic experience that provides the conditions for the possibility of experiencing the unlimited, immortal holism of henosis: “Taking the shape of the gods is realized through this imaginal and subtle body, and it is important to Imblichus’s nondual vision that this realization occurs while in a physical body, recognizing and honoring all the constraints of that condition” (183).
This is the central message of Hellenic Tantra, and in a proper Platonic paideutic fashion, is delivered by Shaw through the book repeatedly through varying media and messengers, circled back to, circuitously transformed. This, I think, is part of why the book took me multiple readings to really grok. The full outline of Shaw’s recovery of Iamblichus’s original vision, a phrase Shaw repeatedly revisits from the scholar Carlos Steel, is delivered within the first few pages of the introduction, expanded, contracted, and revisited in every chapter, each step of the way with a fugal virtuosity: at varying places inverted, augmented, and retrograde. In a sense, this stylistic holography mirrors the nondualism Shaw finds through Iamblichus, where the One ripples and reverberates down even into the lowliest stone or physical gesture, where there can be no deification without alienation, no unity without multiplicity.
The Demiurgic Dance
By the end of the book, the whole edifice is ablaze—you can warm your hands on the structure fire sparked by Shaw’s volley of flaming arrows, aimed squarely at the cardboard citadel of our desiccated intellectual culture. At this point, the author directs the scholars from the stage and we are left with the oracular hymns of Auden (“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”), Emerson (“This day shall be better than my birthday; then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real”), Ficino (“The heavens in their entirety are within us”), and finally Rilke (“Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,/ And came to us like the ore from a stone’s/ Silence. His mortal heart presses out/ A deathless, inexhaustible wine!”) (qtd. on 219, 234).9
Shaw’s early Theurgy and the Soul provided me with so many conceptual bridges to begin understanding the Daoist alchemical tradition into which I was affectively, if not yet quite intellectually, embedding myself in my early 20’s. I stayed on in China for six years, achieving the kind of cultural and linguistic fluencies that enabled me to leave those bridges behind. Hellenic Tantra arrives now 20 years later (30 years after the publication of Theurgy and the Soul), delivering us this electric comparative henology that provides a framework in which these cultural bridges recede into provincial significance backlit by a sacramental vision of human action, the imagination as an organ of perception, and the cosmos itself as an unfolding liturgy.
Shaw often distinguishes the descriptive prose of philosophical theorists from the evocative prose of the theurgists. When you read Iamblichus you’re not just supposed to learn something. You are supposed to be changed! Revisiting Shaw 20 years after being so impacted by his first book, I feel the same bodily recognition. Hellenic Tantra is not just about something. It is part of a larger rite. It is a demiurgic act.
And what Shaw shows us is that the gods were never far off. The book is a culmination of his thought over these intervening decades, but much more importantly, it is an invitation. If we choose to step into the demiurgic flow of sacramental action we can still take on the shape of the gods. Even now. Especially now.
Notes:
- Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Allworth Press, 2001).
- Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, 2nd ed. (Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014), xx.
- Ibid., 249 n. 12.
- McEvilley points this out, though he is quick to also point out how limited a purely textual frame is, particularly regarding such esoteric concerns (The Shape of Ancient Thought, 592). Regarding the material from China, I am referring to the earliest subtle physiological texts from the Laozi Zhongjing to the Huangtingjing and the Shangqing revelations arising in the exact same time period as theurgical Platonism (2nd–4th cent. CE). See Michael Puett, “Becoming Laozi: Cultivating and Visualizing Spirits in Early-Medieval China,” Asia Major 23, no. 2 (2010): 223–52.
- Gregory Shaw, Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus (Angelico Press, 2024), 62. Subsequent page numbers for this work appear in parentheses within the text; italics are from the original.
- Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 143.
- See Charlie Stang, “The Smoldering Superhuman,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 52, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2024).
- Hierocles, In Carmen aureum 26.24,48 (Shaw’s italics).
- W. H. Auden, in “Memory of Ernst Toller,” Another Time (Faber & Faber, 1940), 111. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (Modern Library, 2000), 292. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Simon and Schuster, 1985), 133. Marsilio Ficino, Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino, ed. Clement Salaman (Inner Traditions, 1996), 167.
Simon Cox has a PhD in religion from Rice University and is author of The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2021). With his wife, Brandi, he co-runs Okanagan Valley Wudang, a kung fu school in Penticton, British Columbia. He is currently a research fellow at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
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