The Vehicle of the Soul

The ochēma is the soul's vehicle: a body subtler than flesh, woven of light and pneuma, in which the incorporeal soul rides and through which it touches the corporeal world. The doctrine grows from a seed in the Timaeus, where the Demiurge mounts each soul in a star as in a chariot, and from Aristotle's remark that the soul's instrument is an inborn pneuma analogous to the element of the stars.

The later Platonists made it a precise theory. Descending through the planetary spheres toward birth, the soul gathers accretions about its vehicle, growing heavier and more moist; ascending, it sheds them. Porphyry treated the vehicle as ultimately dissolved, while Iamblichus and Proclus held that its first, luminous form (the augoeides, 'shining one') is everlasting, created with the soul itself. The vehicle is also the seat of phantasia, which is why dreams and visions arrive through it.

Its practical importance is theurgic: rites cannot touch the immaterial soul directly, but they can purify its vehicle, rendering it light-filled and fit to receive the gods — this is the express aim of much of theurgy. The conception flowed onward into the 'astral body' of the Hermetic and esoteric traditions, one of antiquity's most consequential bequests to later Western esotericism.