Pagan Literature on Revelations
The Greco-Roman world reacted to the offensive of Jewish and Christian prophecy- which was often hostile to pagan gods – by producing revelations in the same style.
The literary production that we know as Hermeticism gathers a number of books
devoted to the science of plants, minerals, animals, man, heavenly bodies, and the
gods. That knowledge was not supposed to be empirical, but rather a revelation by
Hermes Trismegistus or by the supreme god to Hermes himself in the form of a
dialogue between a spiritual and initiatory teacher and a pupil.
Ancient Orphism was also used to present revelations by gods about substances,
stars, and planets or about the gods themselves. These revelations took the form of
Orphic pseudepigrapha, like the Orphic Lapidariumor the Book of Eighty Stones, the
Astronomia, or the Physikathat Suda ascribes to Orpheus.
In the second half of the second centuryad a seminal collection of oracles
was produced by two Chaldeans both named Iulianus, the second of whom was
considered the founder of Theurgy. Their doctrines about the first and supreme
god, his divine manifestations, and Hecate, the intermediate goddess between
god and world, were expounded in the form of inspired utterances in Chaldaean
Oracles, one of the most influential theological holy books in late antique
paganism.
Another means to know the gods was recognized in a new approach to inspired
poets. Plato despised the mythology of ancient poets and his judgment perhaps
contributed to its derogatory treatment by Varro. But in the Pythagorean tradition
there was a stream of allegorical interpretation of mythology, which allowed the
acceptance of it as a high level of knowledge and a confirmation of Pythagorean
doctrines, as in the case of the rape of Helen, which was interpreted not as a decep-
tion of her husband, but as an allegory of the abode of the soul in the moon, for
Helen was construed as Selene. The Neoplatonists (followers of Plato starting from
Plotinus) accepted such a way to rehabilitate the poets as prophets of theological
truths, as one can read in Porphyry’s De antro nympharum. In the verses of Homer
images of a divine reality could be recognized, as in the case of the Homeric Proteus’
transformations, which became the forms of the heavenly king according to one mag-
ical papyrus (PGM4.941 =Homer, Odyssey 4.458). Verses of Virgil were used as a
divinatory device: the sortes Vergilianae(Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Hadrian2;
Alexander Severus 14). We know series of Homeric verses were used in the same
way (PGM7.1–148), or simply to avert a storm (Kotansky 1994: no. 11) or the evil
eye (SGG 1, no. 390).
With the changing modes of legitimizing religious authority and growing
demands on the functions and coherence of “religion,” the central problem was the
foundation of a true, ethical, and logical religion, which could satisfy humankind
better than traditional public religion. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Orphic theo-
logical traditions (or what were supposed to be these) were inquired into for
prophetic books with which to supply this new foundation of Greco-Roman
paganism.
Creating One’s Own Religion 385