English is not my mother tongue so I apologize if there are mistakes in the text.
Greetings, first I would like to say that the blog really is wonderful, as someone who is just starting on the path I have found it very useful, I think almost all of us agree that the pagan traditions are not oriented towards dogma but towards praxis and personal experiences with the divine, however, the writings of the sages can be of great help to understand the great mysteries, perhaps if Romanism had survived we would have seen something similar to India with numerous schools of theological thought.
I must admit that I am not a scholar of Platonism and neither do I claim to speak for Butler as I have barely read a few loose articles by him, but I think the key to explaining how the Henads and the one can be above intelligence without affecting the unity or simplicity of the one lies in our concept of the one. To understand the one as a particular entity endowed with personality would be a mistake, instead we would have to consider it as a kind of abstraction, being fundamentally an underlying principle, the one would be the principle of uniqueness, individuation and also the good. The Gods would therefore not be aspects of a single God, but the whole would be within each of them following the Pythagorean maxim of Panta-en-pasin, In the same way each God would be within each God but expressing his omnipotence according to his own Hyparxis, his own personality and essence.
It is important to note that the phrase “The One neither is nor is One.” Not coming from Butler but from (Parmenides Plato, 141e), this phrase can perhaps be interpreted to mean that the one is beyond being and likewise is not a singular entity.
Finally, I want to point out that saying that the Gods are only one God using many masks is somewhat problematic (and is also something like monotheism with more steps) mainly because it does not explain how something like a pantheon can exist without reducing the Gods to their mere functions. If we observe for example the ancient Paphos we will see that its citizens did not consider Aphrodite only as the Goddess of love and not only prayed to her for love matters but also prayed to her for health, money, protection, etc. Something similar can be found in the hymns of Greece and Egypt where each God is assigned qualities that usually are not characteristic of them and even omnipotence is attributed to them.
I leave some additional links that I found interesting and that can help to enrich the discussion.
English is not my mother tongue so I apologize if there are mistakes in the text.
Greetings, first I would like to say that the blog really is wonderful, as someone who is just starting on the path I have found it very useful, I think almost all of us agree that the pagan traditions are not oriented towards dogma but towards praxis and personal experiences with the divine, however, the writings of the sages can be of great help to understand the great mysteries, perhaps if Romanism had survived we would have seen something similar to India with numerous schools of theological thought.
I must admit that I am not a scholar of Platonism and neither do I claim to speak for Butler as I have barely read a few loose articles by him, but I think the key to explaining how the Henads and the one can be above intelligence without affecting the unity or simplicity of the one lies in our concept of the one. To understand the one as a particular entity endowed with personality would be a mistake, instead we would have to consider it as a kind of abstraction, being fundamentally an underlying principle, the one would be the principle of uniqueness, individuation and also the good. The Gods would therefore not be aspects of a single God, but the whole would be within each of them following the Pythagorean maxim of Panta-en-pasin, In the same way each God would be within each God but expressing his omnipotence according to his own Hyparxis, his own personality and essence.
It is important to note that the phrase “The One neither is nor is One.” Not coming from Butler but from (Parmenides Plato, 141e), this phrase can perhaps be interpreted to mean that the one is beyond being and likewise is not a singular entity.
Finally, I want to point out that saying that the Gods are only one God using many masks is somewhat problematic (and is also something like monotheism with more steps) mainly because it does not explain how something like a pantheon can exist without reducing the Gods to their mere functions. If we observe for example the ancient Paphos we will see that its citizens did not consider Aphrodite only as the Goddess of love and not only prayed to her for love matters but also prayed to her for health, money, protection, etc. Something similar can be found in the hymns of Greece and Egypt where each God is assigned qualities that usually are not characteristic of them and even omnipotence is attributed to them.
I leave some additional links that I found interesting and that can help to enrich the discussion.
An article by Butler
https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp32-butler-pp3538-version-2.pdf
A couple of articles from a blog I found interesting.
https://willdam20.wordpress.com/principles/
https://willdam20.wordpress.com/lessons-faqs/
An additional article
https://symmetria.substack.com/p/the-one-is-each-god?s=w.
PD: I really enjoyed your book
For the glory of Jove indeed.
Had to read through some of the paragraphs more than once but I think I finally get it.