Goêteia in History #3
Daimonic Mediation:
From Magical Conjuration to Cosmic Sympathy
III. From Plato to Plotinus
Moving on from Euripides, we find ourselves in the time of Plato. He began his literary work relatively late in age, at a time when Euripides was already deceased. Looking back to the age of Homer, though, Ancient Greece had undergone radical and fundamental transformations: the originally loosely organized tribal kingdoms of the Homeric age evolved into the first independent city-states, the poleis, with clearly defined territories and citizen communities. Some of these cities, like Athens, began to develop democratic structures, while others, like Sparta, established strict oligarchies. Legislation, colonial expansion, and the formation of regional alliances strengthened political coherence, although power remained strongly localized.
In parallel, religious practice underwent a significant transformation: whereas in the Homeric period the worship of gods and ritual acts were flexible and largely organized on a local basis, by Plato’s birth the first state-coordinated cults had emerged. Temples, priesthoods, and public festivals structured religious practice, standardized sacrifices and processions, and formally bound the community together. Thus, organized, collectively anchored religion stood in marked contrast to the improvised, familial, or regional rituals of earlier times.
I mentioned at the outset the three motives that historically colored the descriptions of the goês and their rites in history: the poetic-literary motive, then the socio-political instrumentalization, and finally, the purely mercantile interest in the sale of books that drew on the goêtic theme. In Euripides, the first motive clearly dominates, while the socio-political one is already beginning to come to the fore. By Plato’s time, however, the second had come to dominate the depiction of goêteia: The goês was used to emphasize the boundary between what was socially sanctioned and beneficial, and what was deemed corrupt or socially stigmatized. Goêteia thus became one among many stylistic devices invoked to conjure a sense of the shared and communal — precisely through its sharp delineation.
[…] and begging priests and goêtes go to rich men’s doors and make them believe that they by means of sacrifices and incantations have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods that can expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors, and that if a man wishes to harm an enemy, at slight cost he will be enabled to injure just and unjust alike, since they are masters of spells and enchantments that constrain the gods to serve their end.[1]
Distinct from this is the type which, by means of sorceries and incantations and spells (as they are called), not only convinces those who attempt to cause injury that they really can do so, but convinces also their victims that they certainly are being injured by those who possess the power of bewitchment. In respect of all such matters it is neither easy to perceive what is the real truth, nor, if one does perceive it, is it easy to convince others. And it is futile to approach the souls of men who view one another with dark suspicion if they happen to see images of molded wax at doorways, or at points where three ways meet, or it may be at the tomb of some ancestor, to bid them make light of all such portents, when we ourselves hold no clear opinion concerning them.[2]
The first quotation sketches the art of goêteia along several essential lines of demarcation: it is an art that draws upon the ancestors, the blood-bound dead; it is also an art that softens, seeps through, and ultimately penetrates the seemingly firm moral boundaries of the polis. At the same time, Plato acknowledges that goêteia is more than mere deception or imagination. For it’s in these liminal zones that one may indeed encounter masters of spells and enchantment.
The second quotation elucidates two further aspects: first, the one already mentioned above — the glamour of magical spellwork— here shown in its negative function. Appearance and reality, actual power and the mere semblance of power, cause, and effect — these, even for Plato in the 4th century BCE, resist clear separation. One simply cannot form a definitive judgment about the being and bearing of the goêtes, as he says. Their efficacy — whether winged with real force or imagined in spectral forms — slips in through the open gates of fear among those who neither understand their art nor fail to dread it.
Second, Plato helps us to locate the art of the goêtes within the terrain of the community. Apparently, the shores of the Black Sea of Otherness can be found beneath wax effigies nailed to doors, at triple crossroads, and at the graves of ancestors.
Despite the distortions, omissions, and sheer lack of first-hand goêtic expertise that mark Plato’s description, his writings nonetheless yield crucial hints about aspects of this art that appear to have remained stable for centuries, if not millennia. If we are interested in a modern reconstruction of goêteia, then Plato offers us important signposts: we will need to losen our bound to socially dominated morality and ethics; reversely, we will need to renew and deepen our bond with the dead; and we must be willing to approach an art carried out above all at night, in those threshold-places where the surf of the underworld breaks upon the shores of the living. Finally, our art will condense into the body of the spell — whether inscribed in a wax effigy, a lead tablet, on a sheet of paper, or simply written into the night with the quill of our breath.
We encounter a third passage in Plato that is of central importance to our considerations. It occurs in his famous Symposium, a philosophical dialogue in which various speakers, including Socrates, discuss the nature, significance, and power of love within a drinking party — ranging from physical desire to the highest intellectual form of Beauty.
In this dialogue, Plato has Socrates recount what Diotima of Mantinea, a wise woman, seer, and prophetess, taught him about the workings and nature of the daimones. The figure of Diotima appears only in Plato’s dialogue, and is therefore regarded by many as a literary creation. Plato’s placement of Diotima as a citizen of Mantinea, a city in Arcadia in southern Greece, casts her as an outsider to Athens — someone endowed with a liminal, mystical authority precisely because she exists beyond the boundaries of the Athenian polis.
In the following quotation, we hear the words of Diotima, recounted through Socrates’ memory and preserved by his former student Plato. In a goêtic resonance, this account itself becomes an echo of the dead speaking. From beyond the veil, Diotima instructs us in the art of understanding the daimones as necessary and potent mediators between the realms of humans and gods: skillfully conjuring them, carefully conversing with them, and always respecting them.
Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one. Through it are conveyed all divination and priestcraft concerning sacrifice and ritual and incantations, and all soothsaying and sorcery. God with man does not mingle: but the spiritual is the means of all society and converse of men with gods and of gods with men, whether waking or asleep. Whosoever has skill in these affairs is a spiritual man, to have it in other matters, as in common arts and crafts, is for the mechanical. Many and multifarious are these spirits, and one of them is Love.[3]
Especially the second half of this quote brims with relevance for our exploration: In contrast to the Homeric times, now the gods are considered to no longer mingle directly with humans. Instead, it is through the daimonic or spiritual that, all “communion” (homilia, ὁμιλία) and “discourse” (dialektos, διάλεκτος) between gods and men takes place, whether they are awake or asleep.[4]
The English translations “society” and “converse” correspond to the original Greek terms, homilia and dialektos. Returning to these original words illuminates how intimate, reciprocal, and generative the relationship with the daimonic was in Diotima’s account to Socrates. Daimonic communion and conversation are thus conceived as profoundly participatory, standing in stark contrast both to the mass-oriented cults of later monotheistic religions — where the priest mediates between God and the social body, reducing the individual to a passive component — and to the lurid, transgressive imagery of medieval Sabbath feasts, steeped in taboo and ritual excess.
Instead, Diotima envisions a realm in which communion and exchange coexist in delicate balance. She gestures toward a micro-culture between humans and daimones, one founded equally on a kind of inter-species kinship and familiarity, and on mercantile forms of reciprocity. More explicitly, the goês and the engineer appear as two complementary figures of mastery in craft. The former perfects his art through deliberate daimonic mediation; the latter through intentional physical modification.
This reminds us that the ancient Greeks perceived no essential division between these two modes of influencing the cosmos. Both rested upon dynamis (power), charis (grace), and aretē (effectiveness). Any power — whether derived from engineering or from goêtic intervention — was understood to be imbued with daimonic presence. Where the engineer relied on mechanism, the goês relied on relationship: a finely balanced economy of giving and receiving.
Accordingly, it was taken for granted that engineers possessed a clearer understanding of how their effects came about, whereas — much like politicians and actors — the goês “does not quite know what it is that works through him and for him. The sorcerer and the witch only know that something is at work.”[5]
Changes brought about through social mediation, however, are always more multimodal and context-dependent than those induced by purely technical or mechanical means. This intrinsic impurity of all arts grounded in social agreements and reciprocal arrangements holds true both in the human sphere and in the inter-species domain, where humans and daimones act according to mutual affordances.
In summary, the goêtes — as they appeared to outside observers in Plato’s time — can be described thus: they worked alone, beyond the emerging state cults, in service to deities and daimones whose names sounded foreign at best. They manipulated their relationships with these beings in pursuit of specific aims through highly individualized rites. Treating magic as a craft, they cultivated micro-cultures with both non-human entities and human clients toward particular ends. They accepted a marked degree of impurity in their art, grounded as it was in a shifting web of mutual affordances, and they refined their methods whenever they failed. Preferring immediate results to shared faith, and offering their services for both harm and healing, they stood outside the moral and legal frameworks of the polis, guided instead by a deeply personal and idiosyncratic creed.
Another four hundred years separate Plato from Plutarch (46–120 CE). Again, the Greek society had undergone radical transformation: In the first century CE, Greece had already been a province of the Roman Empire for two hundred years since the Roman victory in the Achaean War. The once-autonomous polis had lost its political independence as local elites assimilated into Roman citizenship and imperial administration. Philosophy and religion had become increasingly cosmopolitan and oriented toward personal ethics and spiritual cultivation rather than civic life. Greek intellectuals such as Plutarch saw themselves as interpreters and preservers of Hellenic wisdom within the wider, universal framework of Roman civilization.
Plutarch, a Platonist, viewed the world as a living, intelligent, divinely animated order. An essential part of the human role in this living organism was to uphold the proper rites, customs, and behaviors towards the divine. Orthopraxy thus was not (only) a matter of social compliance, but of maintaining cosmic order. Straying from the established customary rituals, prayers and annual cycle of divine celebrations, was not merely an intellectual error, but a moral and civic danger that jeopardized both human as well as cosmic order. As such, we find Plutarch in his work De Superstitione (Περὶ Δεισιδαιμονίας) arguing not only against superstition, goêteia and mageia, but especially against the most radical form of moral irresponsibility, which to him was atheism. The latter took root for him in a cosmic blindness, that is, in people’s inability to properly observe divine’s immanence and expression in all matters of the material world. Equally, atheism was also caused by the “overbearing”, “petty”, and easily offending forms of private ecstatic goêtic cults.
Moreover, the atheist has no part in causing superstition, but superstition provides the seed from which atheism springs, and when atheism has taken root, superstition supplies it with a defence, not a true one or a fair one, but one not destitute of some speciousness. For it is not because these people saw in the heavens anything to find fault with, or anything not harmonious or well-ordered in the stars or seasons, or in the revolutions of the moon or in the movements of the sun around the earth, “artisans of day and night,” or in the feeding and growth of living creatures, or in the sowing and harvesting of crops, as the result of which they decided against the idea of a God in the universe; but the ridiculous actions and emotions of superstition, its words and gestures, magic charms and spells, rushing about and beating of drums, impure purifications and dirty sanctifications, barbarous and outlandish penances and mortifications at the shrines — all these give occasion to some to say that it were better there should be no gods at all than gods who accept with pleasure such forms of worship, and are so overbearing, so petty, and so easily offended.[6]
Plutarch, who himself held the highest priestly office at Delphi from 95 CE onward, walked a narrow path: he explicitly advocated the preservation of a cosmos entirely imbued with and animated by the divine. This immanence of the divine was by no means abstract in nature, but personified in the form of demigods and daemons.[7] Yet interaction with these divinely appointed intermediaries and shapers of creation was to follow conservative, established forms, rather than being left to personal cults, which could risk offense and transgression, or worse, destabilization of cosmic balance. Goêteia to him was therefore entirely real in its ontological foundations, yet a religious transgression “rooted in bad theology”.[8]
In the few surviving texts from Plato to Plutarch, the term goêteia remains anchored in its chthonic origins and associations with illicit underworld crafts. From this point onward, however, its meaning gradually broadens into a wider moral context. In the late Hellenistic or early Imperial period — between the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century CE — the term continues to denote harmful or illicit sorcery, yet it increasingly comes to signify a moral vice. Its centre of gravity thus shifts from designating an unlawful magical craft alone, to expressing a more general sinful passion or base emotional affection.
Written testimony of this shift can be found in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Peri Pathōn (On the Passions), attributed to Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes. This text, derived from Aristotelian tradition, presents several lists of moral virtues and vices, each accompanied by definitions and commentary. Within it, the term goêteia appears among the “five delights” — that is, the natural human tendencies to take pleasure in experiences that are, at least in part, morally questionable.
V. The five kinds of delight: asmenismos, terpsis, celesis, epi-chairecacia, goeteia. (1) What is asmenismos? Asmenismos is delight in unexpected goods. (2) Terpsis is delight through sight or through hearing. (3) Celesis is delight through hearing, alluring or delight both from speech and music which is done through deception. (4) Epichairecacia is delight in the misfortunes of others. (5) Goeteia is delight according to deception or through incantation.[9]
Shortly after Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes, we encounter Philostratus’ famously fantastic biography of Apollonius of Tyana.
Right at the outset (Book I.II), Philostratus elucidates the dazzling reputation of this ancient sage, illustrating how the concepts of (chthonic) wisdom, magic, and goêteia were profoundly intertwined by the end of the 2nd century BC. He uses the latter two terms almost synonymously — a leveling of distinctions that has persisted to this day, as we find both magos and goêteia conflated in the English translation as “wizard.”[10]
A final significant seed is sown with the writings of Plotinus, whose lifetime overlapped with that of Philostratus, and whose shared center of activity was Rome.[11] I call it a seed because Plotinus introduces a subtle nuance into the concept of goêteia — or, rather, reasserts an element of its original meaning — which centuries later would serve as the paramount foundation for a radical reinterpretation of magic during the Italian Renaissance.
Plotinus introduces the idea of “the goêteia of Nature”,[12] and thus, presents a vision of the cosmos in which the domains of the engineer and the magician — already distinguished by Plato — begin to converge. Whereas in Plato, these two figures remain masters of their respective arts, yet of fundamentally different kinds, in Plotinus sorcerous efficacy is explained through natural processes, rendering it accessible to the understanding — and the hand — of the engineer.
But how are magical effects [goêteia] explained? By the reigning sympathy of the cosmos, through the existing harmony of the like and the opposition of the unlike, through the colorful abundance of the many powers that nonetheless work together toward the unity of the world-organism. For even if no one else practices magic, much still occurs under magical compulsion; true magic, that is, is “friendship” and “strife” present in the cosmos — such is the supreme sorcerer [goês] and witchmaster. Humans know him well enough and make use of his little herbs and formulas against one another. […] For one is indeed within a unified whole and acts upon a unified whole. For if the magician were outside the cosmos, he could not exert attractive or banishing power through his formulas and incantations; but now, since he does not operate as if from outside, he can attract, because he knows how one element within a living being can be compelled toward another.[13]
The seed Plotinus sowed with his “goêteia of Nature” sprouted thirteen centuries later, becoming the Renaissance foundation for the invention of Natural Magic.
Plotinus uses the term goêteia to denote a natural attraction or enchantment, inherently immanent within the created cosmos. Crucially, he distinguishes it from rational or divine interventions, locating the place of goêteia in the very flesh of the world. According to him, goêteia is an ecological dynamic inherent to all embodied beings, through which they are woven together into many and yet one. Drawing chthonic wisdom from this place could therefore be understood as nothing more than natural wisdom.
However, while introducing us to the “goêteia of Nature”, Plotinus simultaneously eliminates the last echoes of an animistic or enlivened cosmos. Though he acknowledges the “melodic system,” or even the bonds of immanence as “kinship,” he insists that all these mutual influences and affections occur without any intervention of will or consciousness. We are thus already encountering a cosmos on the verge of becoming organically mechanical — made of flesh, resin, leaf, and bark — yet whose language is one of blind mechanical reactions rather than conscious relationality.[14]
For this overview, I wish to avoid engaging with early Christian sources from the second and third centuries — for example, Clement of Alexandria, who mentions goêteia in the same breath as mageia and dismisses both as intercourse with demons, or Origen, who sought to distinguish the theurgical miracles of Christ from pagan (and even Jewish) goêteia. These sources are, by their nature, purely polemical and add nothing substantively new to the discussion.
Rather, by the end of the third century, the concept of goêteia — in all its nuanced richness, which still resonates today — had become fully established: a term evoking the chthonic and daemonic, yet equally natural and ubiquitous; condemned as heretical and morally deeply suspect, and yet inseparably woven into the periphery of medicine, physics, and all other faculties dealing with the wisdom of Nature.
[to be continued]
Footnotes
[1] Plato, Republic 364b-c
[2] Plato, Laws 933a-b
[3] Plato, Symposium 202e–203a; quoted after: Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, translated by Harold N. Fowler, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925.
[4] For the original Greek of Platon Symposium 203a see the free online platform, Perseus Digital Library: http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg011.perseus-grc1:203a
[5] Georg Luck, Witches and Sorcerers in Classical Literature, in: Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 2: Ancient Greece and Rome, London: The Athlone Press, p. 105
[6] Plutarch, De Superstitione (Περὶ Δεισιδαιμονίας), 166C–D; https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_superstitione*.html, accessed November 2025; the actual Greek line in question here transliterates as: “...kai rhēmata kai kinēmata kai goēteiai kai mageiai kai peridromai kai tympanismoi…”, which translates into English as “...and words and movements and incantations (goēteiai) and sorceries (mageiai) and processions and drum-beatings…”.
[7] “But there is a body with complex characteristics which actually parallels the demigods, namely the moon; and when men see that she, by her being consistently in accord with the cycles through which those beings pass,50 is subject to apparent wanings and waxings and transformations, some call her an earth-like star, others a star-like earth,51 and others the domain of Hecatê, who belongs both to the earth and to the heavens. Now if the air that is between the earth and the moon were to be removed and withdrawn, the unity and consociation of the universe would be destroyed, p389 since there would be an empty and unconnected space in the middle; and in just the same way those who refuse to leave us the race of demigods make the relations of gods and men remote and alien by doing away with the 'interpretative and ministering nature,' as Plato has called it.” (Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum
(Περὶ τῶν Ἐκλελοιπότων Χρηστηρίων), 13.1E-F, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_defectu_oraculorum*.html, accessed November 20254)
[8] Kyle A. Fraser, Roman Antiquity: The Imperial Period, in: David J. Collins (ed.),The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West From Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 131
[9] A. Glibert-Thirry (ed.), ΠΕΡΙ ΠΑΘΩΝ, by Pseudo-Andronicus de Rhodes, Edition critique du texte grec et la traduction latine médiévale, Leiden: Brill (1977), p. 232; translation by author
[10] […] while some, because he had interviews with the wizards of Babylon and with the Brahmans of India, and with the nude ascetics of Egypt, put him down as a wizard, and spread the calumny that he was a sage of an illegitimate kind, judging of him ill. For Empedocles and Pythagoras himself and Democritus consorted with wizards and uttered many supernatural truths, yet never stooped to the black art; and Plato went to Egypt and mingled with his own discourses much of what he heard from the prophets and priests there; and though, like a painter, he laid his own colors on to their rough sketches, yet he never passed for a wizard, although envied above all mankind for his wisdom. (Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Epistles of Apollonius and the Treatise of Eusebius, translated by F.C. Conybeare, New York: The Macmillan Co., 1912, p. 7)
[11] Philostratus (c. 170–c. 247 CE) was a sophist and biographer; he composed his works in Greek, primarily in Athens and Rome. Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE), born in Lycia, spent most of his life in Rome, where he founded the Neoplatonic school and wrote in Greek.
[12] Plotinus, Enneads IV.4.44
[13] Rudolf Beutler, Willy Theiler (eds.), Plotins Schriften, Band II a, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1962, p.345; translation by author.
[14] It follows that, for the purposes which have induced this discussion, the stars have no need of memory or of any sense of petitions addressed to them; they give no such voluntary attention to prayers as some have thought: it is sufficient that, in virtue simply of the nature of parts and of parts within a whole, something proceeds from them whether in answer to prayer or without prayer. We have the analogy of many powers — as in some one living organism — which, independently of plan or as the result of applied method, act without any collaboration of the will: one member or function is helped or hurt by another in the mere play of natural forces; and the art of doctor or magic healer will compel some one centre to purvey something of its own power to another centre. Just so the All: it purveys spontaneously, but it purveys also under spell; some entity (acting like the healer) is concerned for a member situated within itself and summons the All which, then, pours in its gift; it gives to its own part by the natural law we have cited since the petitioner is no alien to it. Even though the suppliant be a sinner, the answering need not shock us; sinners draw from the brooks; and the giver does not know of the gift but simply gives—though we must remember that all is one woof and the giving is always consonant with the order of the universe. There is, therefore, no necessity by ineluctable law that one who has helped himself to what lies open to all should receive his deserts then and there. (Plotinus, Enneads IV.4.42)
