Anagoge

Anagoge, the 'leading-up', is the Neoplatonic name for the soul's ascent: the upward journey from the scattered world of the senses, through the soul and the Intellect, home at last to the One from which all things flow. It is the return half of the great rhythm of procession and return by which the whole cosmos issues from its source and strives back toward it.

The soul is led up by many means — by dialectic, by the love of beauty, by purification, and, for the later Platonists, by theurgy, the sacred rites that draw it upward where reason alone cannot reach. The whole of philosophy, on this view, is an anagoge: a turning of the soul toward the light.