The Late Antique synthesis
Plotinus
Plotinus was a metaphysician, not a ceremonial magician. His One, Intellect, Soul and material cosmos gave later esoteric thought its language of emanation and return.
- Dates
- 204/205 – 270
- Dating
- documented dates
- Born
- Roman Egypt
- Died
- Campania, Italy
The life
He studied under Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, joined an imperial expedition eastward apparently hoping to encounter Persian and Indian philosophy, and eventually established himself as a teacher in Rome.
Place in the tradition
His account of emanation, spiritual hierarchy and mystical return shaped Pagan, Christian, Jewish and Islamic metaphysics, and remains a major pattern beneath later esoteric cosmologies.
a note on the record
History and later legend
He was not a magician in the later ceremonial sense, and reading him as one misrepresents both him and what came after.
the written record
Principal works
-
written c. 253–270; arranged and published by Porphyry c. 301
Enneads
Plotinus wrote separate treatises rather than a book called The Enneads. Porphyry arranged fifty-four of them into six groups of nine.