Opening Exposition of the Chaldean Oracles — Plethon in Plato Scroll…
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Plethon · Thomas Stanley
George Gemistos Plethon (c. 1355–1452) — the last great philosopher of Byzantium, teacher at Mistra, and the man whose lectures at the Council of Florence in 1439 rekindled Plato in the Latin West. Among his works was an edition of the so-called Chaldean, or Magian, Oracles — verse fragments he ascribed to Zoroaster and the Magi — and this brief exposition of their more obscure lines, read throughout in a Platonic key: the soul's descent into and ascent from the body, the paternal Mind, the divine Fire, and the rites that join the soul to God. Given here in Thomas Stanley's English of 1661, the first in our language, with its original spelling kept. Public domain. “Seek thou the way of the Soul, whence or by what Order Having served the body, to the same order from which thou didst flow. Thou mayst rise up againe; joyning action to sacred speech.” The Magi that are followers of …
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