Chaldaean Oracles

The Chaldaean Oracles were a collection of revelatory verses purportedly compiled in the second century AD. Along with the Orphic texts, Neoplatonists regarded them as divine words. When the Oracles appear in philosophical works, they lend support to select cosmological, metaphysical or psychological propositions which have already been formulated. According to Neoplatonists, the Chaldaika logia, or Chaldaean Oracles, originated with a certain Julianus, a late second-century AD ex-soldier in the eastern Roman army, and with his son, also named Julianus, who was their author. The father, surnamed 'Chaldaean' and a 'philosopher', may have collected handed-down material which he passed on to his son, a 'theurgist', who was 'divinely inspired' to write new oracles. This origin, some seventy years before Porphyry, by whom they are first mentioned, is by no means certain. However, it may be corroborated by similar material in Numenius, an important Neo-Pythagorean. Numenius flourished at that time in Apamea (Syria), where later Plotinus' theurgic-minded follower Amelius went to teach, as did Iamblichus, who was a major proponent of theurgy and the Oracles. Both Porphyry and Iamblichus had Syrian parentage. Moreover, in a unique fragment preserved by Proclus (Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, 594-5), 'the true theologians' used Syriac terms. Yet the question remains, how much was handed down and how much made up in a culture where Greek and Oriental had mixed since the third century BC and religions had absorbed Platonic ideas.