Platonists and high priests: Daemonology, ritual and social by Marx-Wolf, Heidi,

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Hence, it is no wonder that Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus sought to discredit them using a daemonological lens, a lens which allowed these philosophers to emphasize the failure of these priests to employ a sufficiently pan-imperial, universal perspective for thinking about matters both theological and ritual. The first step that these intellectuals take in constructing their daemonological discourses is to valence various orders of spiritual beings in moral terms. They do so in the course of their reflections on traditional animal sacrifice.

Ausgewahlte Koptische Zaubertexte (Bruxelles: Edition de la Fondation egyptologique reine Elisabeth, 1930). , Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). He also includes alchemical works, herbaria, oracles, Gnostica and Hermetica in his wish list. 24 In Smith's article, "Here, There, and Anywhere," in Prayer, Magic and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, ed. Scott B. Noegel, Joel Thomas Walker, and Brannon M. sought to gain access to, or avoidance of, culturally imagined divine power by culturally patterned means" (21-22).

37 As a result, these philosophers held that deisidaimonia, fear of the gods, was an irrational and impious attitude. but the assumption that the different hierarchical scales [intellectual and ethical] match one another: that superior beings are superior with regard to morality as well as intellect, power and beauty. : "Before the Greek philosophers, no one in Greek culture (or possibly in the ancient Mediterranean as a whole) had been so bold as to assume that beings of superior status were by definition also morally superior.