Valentin Tomberg On the four kinds of Paganism

An Excerpt from Tomberg's "Meditations on the Tarot"

“There still remains one last question for us: Were all of the pagan gods always demons —collectively engendered egregores? Is paganism in general simply a cult of demons?

Before answering this question,  one has to distinguish between  the “paganism" of the  philosophers and initiates into the  mysteries, symbolic and  mythological "paganism",  naturalistic “paganism" and,  lastly, demoniacal "paganism".

In other words, one has to distinguish firstly between the "paganism" of Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, etc., and the  "paganism" of Homer and Hesiod.  Then one must distinguish  between the latter and the totality of cults of the sun, moon, stars, fire, air, water and earth. And,  lastly, one has to distinguish between the latter and the totality of cults of "divinities" engendered by perverse collective imagination  and will—the cults of egregores,  pure and simple.

It  would  be an error and a grave   injustice to consider the four  "paganisms" as the same thing, e.g. to see a priest of Moloch sacrificing human beings as a  representative of the same cause  as Plato. It would be a similar error  to see the same "light" in the  funeral-pyres of the Inquisition  and the lighted lamps of the  Resurrection festival — or even to see Mahatma Gandhi and a thug,  a strangler for the  glory  of  the  goddess Kali, as representatives  of the same cause, namely that of  Hindu “paganism".

With this distinction made, one can say that the "pagan" initiates and philosophers knew of the unique God — the creator and supreme Good of the world. The  Bhagavad-Gita, the books of Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Plutarch, Plotinus and many other  ancient sources prove this beyond  any shadow of a doubt. The  difference between the religion of  the so-called “pagan" initiates  and philosophers and that of  Moses is simply the fact that the  latter made monotheism a popular religion, whilst the former  reserved it for the elite, for the  spiritual aristocracy— although they were often fairly numerous.

With respect to the cult of the  "gods" and the iconolatry that this cult entailed, the “pagan" initiates  and philosophers saw in it the  practice of theurgy,  i.e.  that  of intercourse with entities of the celestial hierarchies either by raising themselves to them, or by  rendering possible their descent  and presence on earth  —in the sanctuaries or temples or  elsewhere. Hermes Trismegistus  and Iamblichus treat this subject   with sufficient clarity. Thus Iamblichus says:

* They (i.e. the Egyptians) also  establish a pure intellect above  the world, and one impartial intellect in the whole world, and another which  is distributed  into  all the spheres. And these things they do not survey by mere  reason alone, but through the  sacerdotal theurgy, they announce that they are able to ascend to more elevated and universal  essences, and to those that are  established above Fate, viz.  to  God and the Demiurgus; neither employing matter, nor assuming any other thing besides, except  the observation of a suitable time. This deific and anagogic path  Hermes, indeed, narrated.  .  . (De mysteriis viii, 4-5). Again.  .  .such Gods as are truly divinities, are  alone the givers of good; alone associate with good men, and  with those that are purified by  the  sacerdotal art, and from these amputate all vice, and every passion. When these, also, impart their light, that which is evil, and  at the same time demoniacal,  vanishes from before more  excellent natures, in the same manner as darkness when light is present; nor is it able to disturb theurgists in the smallest degree, who receive from this light every virtue, obtain worthy manners,  become orderly and elegant in their actions,  ate  liberated  from   passions, and purified from every disorderly motion, and from  atheistical and unholy conduct  (De  mysteriis   iii,    31).   (Iamblichus, De mysteriis;  trsl.  T.  Tayler, Iamblichus on the   Mysteries of the Egyptians,   Chaldeans and Assyrians,  London, 1968, pp. 199, 306)

These are the principal traits of  the theurgy of the "paganism" of  the initiates and philosophers.   You can also find important details in Plutarch's De hide et Osiride  77, in Plotinus' Enneads  iv,  3,11,  in  Hermes Trismegistus' Asclepius 25-24, 37 and in  Proclus' De sacrificio et magia ( =  The  Hieratic  Art). It goes without saying that the "paganism" of the initiates and sages, when not degenerated, had nothing to do  with the cult of collectively engendered demons.

The “paganism" of the poets —symbolic and mythological paganism —was,  in so far as it  was not  a symbolic version of the  wisdom and magic (theurgy) of the mysteries, a universal humanism. Its “gods" were, truth  to tell, human personages — heroes and heroines, divinised or poerised, who were prototypes of the development of the human  personality, i.e. planetary and  zodiacal  types. Thus Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Diana, Apollo,  etc., were not at all  demons, but leading prototypes of the development of the human personality who, in their turn,  corresponded to cosmic —planetary and zodiacal —principles.

Concerning the third form of  "paganism"—"naturalistic paganism"—it  was "cosmolatry", i.e.  it  did  not  go  beyond  the  limits of Nature —like natural science today. It was, therefore, "neutral" from the point of view both of the true spiritual world  and of  the demons. It accepted the latter as a  fact with which it had to come to terms. But in bowing before Nature it did not  engender  demons,  because this would be contrary to Nature —for  the generation of demons presupposes a perverse will and imagination.

There remains, lastly, the fourth  form of “paganism"— that of the  worship of collectively engendered demons. This form of paganism, which is due to the degeneration of the other three forms —and above all of "naturalistic paganism"—is the only form of  paganism where demons were engendered, worshipped and  obeyed, and which led to the  whole of paganism being  renamed unjustly and calumniously as the "demoniacal religion".  The Church fathers, who—with a few exceptions — treated  it as such, had in truth to do  above all with degenerate paganism and, consequently,  were right in seeing in  the popular pagan cult of their time either the cult of demons or the fables of poets. But those amongst them such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Augustine, and  Synesius, who had knowledge of  the paganism of the initiates and philosophers (which was the pure essence of paganism as such), spoke of what “all men possess as  a healthy anticipation of the moral  doctrine". As Origen expressed it:

There is.  . . nothing amazing about it if the same God has implanted in the souls of all men  the truths which He taught through the prophets and the  Saviour. (Origen, Contra Celsum  i.  4;  trsl.  H.  Chadwick,  Cambridge, 1953,  pp.  8-9)

This is something quite different from paganism as the worship of  demons.

With respect to Christian Hermeticism, it cannot see  otherwise than that as the coming of Jesus Christ was an event of universal significance, it had its universal prepararion,  i.e.  that  just as the prophets of Israel until John the Baptist prepared the  coming of Jesus Christ in the  flesh, so did the initiates,sages  and righteous men of the whole  world prepare the world  for  his  Word and his Spirit. The  incarnated Logos was awaited everywhere wherever one suffered, died, believed, hoped, loved.  .  .The Jews prepared for  the Incarnation; the pagans  prepared themselves to recognise the Logos. Thus Christianity had its precursors everywhere — the "choir" of precursors included not  only the prophets of Israel, but  also the initiates and sages of paganism.”

- Valentin Tomberg, "Meditations on the Tarot", Letter  XV: "The Devil"

• NFTU Note

Four kinds of Paganisms according to Tomberg:

1. Philosophical/Initiatic Paganism = The Esoteric meaning of True Paganism (Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and etc.)

2. Symbolical/Mythological Paganism = The Exoteric form of True Paganism (seen in Homer and the Poets of Antiquity)

3. Naturalistic Paganism = The Exoteric form of False Paganism (seen in the Epicureans for example)

4. Demoniacal Paganism = The Esoteric form of False Paganism (seen in Baal worship in antiquity and in forms like Sabbateanism/Frankism and Thelema in Modernity)