Plato

Plato is the one figure in this company whose primary works survive complete and whose historical existence is beyond question, which makes him a useful control for reading everyone else.

His importance for the esoteric tradition rests on a handful of texts read in a particular way. The Timaeus presents the cosmos as a living being with a soul, constructed by a craftsman god on mathematical proportions, with the four elements assigned to four of the five regular solids. The Republic ends with a myth of judgement and rebirth; the Phaedrus and Symposium describe the soul's ascent through beauty; the Phaedo argues its immortality. Taken together they supply almost everything a Western mystical system needs: an ensouled and ordered universe, a soul that predates and outlasts the body, and a graded ascent from appearance to reality.

The refraction matters more than the source. For most of the tradition's history Plato was read through Plotinus and Proclus, whose systems are considerably more hierarchical and more religious than anything in the dialogues, and in the Renaissance he arrived in Latin through Ficino, who translated him alongside the Hermetic writings and presented both as branches of one ancient theology. The result is that a great deal of what is called Platonic in esoteric writing is Neoplatonic, and some of it is neither, the Timaeus does not teach emanation, and Plato has no doctrine of the One.

The tradition of an unwritten teaching reserved for the Academy is real, Aristotle refers to Plato's lectures on the Good, but what it contained is a live scholarly dispute, not a secret doctrine anyone has recovered.

What later esotericism took from Plato was rarely his dialectic and almost always his myths. The Timaeus supplied a craftsman god who shapes the world after an eternal pattern, a world soul, and a mathematics of creation, and for a thousand years of readers who had no other dialogue in Latin, the Timaeus simply was Plato. The myth of Er at the end of the Republic supplied a geography of the afterlife: souls choosing their next lives, the spindle of Necessity, the Sirens singing the planetary scale, and a forgetting drunk on the plain of Lethe.

The Phaedrus supplied the soul's chariot, its wings, and its climb toward the vision of true being. The Symposium supplied the ladder of love, ascending from one beautiful body to beauty itself. Atlantis, told in the Timaeus and left unfinished in the Critias, supplied a drowned world that has never since stopped being rediscovered.

Later Platonists treated these stories as deliberate veils over doctrine, and the reports of unwritten teachings on the One and the indefinite dyad, preserved chiefly through Aristotle, encouraged the conviction that the dialogues concealed more than they said. Whether Plato meant his myths as doctrine, as persuasion for the parts of the soul that argument cannot reach, or as play, is still argued; that they did the work of doctrine in every later esoteric reading of him is not.