The Chaldean Oracles

by G.R.S. Mead

George Robert Stow Mead (1863-1933) is a key figure in the revival and interpretation of Gnosticism and indeed the entire western esoteric tradition. He joined the Theosophical Society after graduating from Cambridge in 1884, and five years later became the private secretary of the Society's founder, H. P. Blavatsky, editing most of her published works and her magazine 'Lucifer'. He also followed his own lines of research, resulting in books such as 'Plotinus', 'Pistis Sophia' and the present work, each of them scholarly, comprehensive in scope, and eminently readable. Mead shows 'The Chaldean Oracles' to be the remains of a mystery-poem forming part of the inner initiation of a School or Order, and with painstaking scholarship he interprets the fragments into a cohesive pattern.

Genres: Religion, Esoterica

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

George Robert Stowe Mead, who always published under the initialism G.R.S. Mead, was a historian, writer, editor, translator, and an influential member of the Theosophical Society, as well as founder of the Quest Society. His scholarly works dealt mainly with the Hermetic and Gnostic religions of Late Antiquity, and were exhaustive for the time period.

Reviews

[John Cairns · Rating 3 out of 5]

By mistake I bought volume 2. This doesn't much matter since the book consists of comments on obscure oracular utterances. The commentator explains the individual soul-spark is a light spark which is also a life-spark or rather life-flood. he's commenting on 'The Father of men and gods placed Mind in Soul, and Soul in inert Body'. That should give you some idea of the book's contents. I picked this excerpt because when a child I thought of individual generation as two sparks coming together to make the individual flame of life. What else snagged my interest was the comment that the resurrection of the gross physical body was a superstition of the ignorant. Resurrection is wishful thinking, derived from a sense of dispensability in concurrence with a self-importance necessary for life, and possible in the past because heaven could be placed above the mountain tops in a place one was otherwise ignorant of. If you're going to think like that you would think it was the physical body that was resurrected. Augustine, hanging on to the concept, makes it not as it was but of an angelic substance though it all seems rather unnecessary since where's it going? Where is heaven now? Believers elide over such difficulties. Besides, the soul is what gives life. The body dies when it dies. It's dead. Is it revivified? How? It's likened by believers to a seed but it's dead and a seed isn't. They can't have it both ways. Assuming its resurrection, a body is needed by them to put it in.