Well, I'm kind of deliberately fudging things by leaving Ouranous out. Did you see the post I did on the Intelligible Triad? That triad Being-Life-Intellect, which are characteristics of the One in Plotinus's thought, each become individual gods for Proclus. But the triad occurs over and over again-- from the One Itself unfolds the First Intelligible Triad of primordial Being-Life-Intellect. Within Being are Life and Intellect, within Life are Being and Intellect, and within Intellect are Being and Life. So you immediately have an Intelligible Ennead, which looks a lot like the Tree of Life. And from that another Ennead is immediately produced, and the gods of this Ennead are called Intelligible-Intellectual. Ouranous is found here, along with the Heaven as discussed in Plato's Phaedrus. After this comes the Intellectual Heptad, which consists of Saturn-Rhea-Zeus, a triad of Curetes ( whose power is to provide identity to things, and a mysterious, impersonal seventh power called the Separative Monad. It's via the Separative Monad that Saturn separates himself from Ouranous and Zeus from Saturn, and this is what allows the possibility of separate identity to come into being in the universe.
Yeah, it gets complicated.
I think that in Christian terms, the Triad would simply be Father (Being), Life (Holy Spirit), Intellect (Son) recurring again and again at succeeding levels of being. But Proclus's orders of gods also look very much like the Tree of Life, as I said.... and like the 9 Choirs of Angels of Dionysius, who was probably a student of Proclus's.
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Date: 2023-02-27 01:32 am (UTC)Yeah, it gets complicated.
I think that in Christian terms, the Triad would simply be Father (Being), Life (Holy Spirit), Intellect (Son) recurring again and again at succeeding levels of being. But Proclus's orders of gods also look very much like the Tree of Life, as I said.... and like the 9 Choirs of Angels of Dionysius, who was probably a student of Proclus's.