God Making
God making — from the Greek theopoiia, the making or creation of gods — is an Actor Term denoting the cluster of ritual practices by which, according to the Asclepius, the ancient Egyptian priests fashioned animated divine statues capable of performing oracles, working cures, and inflicting punishments. The Asclepius — a Latin translation, probably of the fourth century CE, of an earlier Greek text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — describes in chapters 23–24 how Hermes instructs Asclepius that the Egyptians possessed the art of attracting the souls of daemons and angels into statues constructed from the appropriate materials, thereby creating living, functional divine presences. The passage is remarkable on several counts: it presents the animation of divine images as a distinctively Egyptian achievement rather than a general practice, it identifies the operative ingredients as natural substances (herbs, stones, aromatics, animal products) rather than demonic compacts, and it is placed in the mouth of Hermes Trismegistus himself, lending it the highest possible authority within the Hermetic system. As Wouter Hanegraaff notes in Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2022), the theopoiia passage is one of the clearest points of intersection between the philosophical and technical Hermetica and reveals how deeply the Hermetic tradition as a whole was embedded in Egyptian priestly practice.
Historical Usage
The Asclepius passage on god making reads as follows in Brian P. Copenhaver's translation (Hermetica, Cambridge, 1992, p. 81): "Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is the image of heaven, or, to speak more exactly, in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven have been transferred to Earth below?" Hermes continues by lamenting the coming end of this sacred Egyptian civilization, predicting that "Egypt will be forsaken and the land that was once the seat of religion will be widowed of the gods and left destitute" — the famous lament of Hermes. In the context of this eschatological mourning, Hermes describes the animated statues as the great achievement of a civilization now doomed to perish.
The theological reception of this passage was violently bifurcated. Lactantius (c. 250–325 CE), in his Divinae Institutiones, cited the passage as evidence that even Hermes Trismegistus, a pagan sage, had recognized the approaching triumph of Christianity and the demise of the old gods. Lactantius read Hermes' lament as a prophetic anticipation of Christian world-dominance, and accordingly treated the statue-animation passage as a description of now-superseded pagan idolatry. Augustine of Hippo, by contrast, in City of God VIII.23–26, cited the same passage as evidence that Hermes had openly confessed to demonic practice: the gods that Hermes said the Egyptians had made were not gods at all but daemons, and Hermes himself had admitted this by calling them hominum deorum — gods made by men. Augustine's condemnation ensured that the theopoiia passage remained theologically radioactive throughout the Latin medieval period.
The medieval Latin tradition nonetheless transmitted the Asclepius without suppression, and the passage on animated statues continued to circulate. The twelfth-century Renaissance saw renewed interest in the text: William of Auvergne (c. 1180–1249), in his De universo, discussed the possibility of animating material images through the concentration of celestial virtue, and Albert the Great engaged with related questions in his Speculum astronomiae, distinguishing between legitimate astronomical image-magic and the demonic spirit-invocation that Augustine had condemned. The same ambivalence characterizes later medieval discussions of necromancy and goetic magic.
Marsilio Ficino's treatment of the theopoiia passage in De Vita Coelitus Comparanda (1489) represents the most ambitious Renaissance attempt to rehabilitate the practice within a naturalistic framework. Ficino argued — following his theory of spiritus mundi, the pneumatic world-soul that mediates between celestial intelligences and terrestrial matter — that the Egyptian priests did not invoke daemons but rather concentrated the spiritus of the planets into material vehicles through the selection of appropriate materials and the correct timing of manufacture. On this reading, animated statues were not inhabited by spirits but were rather especially effective concentrators of planetary influence, working by the same principle as talismans and medical remedies. D. P. Walker showed in Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (1958) that this naturalistic reading was difficult to sustain against the explicit language of the Asclepius text, which speaks of the souls of daemons being attracted into the statues — an operation that presupposes personal spiritual agents, not merely impersonal material influences.
Scholarly Significance
The scholarly significance of the theopoiia passage extends far beyond its immediate context. Hanegraaff, in Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination (2022), identifies it as a key exhibit in the argument that the Hermetic tradition cannot be divided cleanly into a respectable philosophical strand and a disreputable magical strand: the philosophical Asclepius is also the text that contains the most explicit endorsement of statue animation, and this is not accidental but reflects the integrated worldview of Egyptian priestly wisdom from which both strands derive.
Garth Fowden, in The Egyptian Hermes (Cambridge, 1986), placed the theopoiia passage within the broader context of Egyptian temple religion, noting that the animation of divine statues was indeed a central feature of Egyptian ritual practice — the daily Opening of the Mouth ceremony performed on temple statues and on mummified bodies was precisely such a rite of animation. Fowden argued that the Hermetic description reflects authentic knowledge of Egyptian priestly practice rather than a purely literary convention.
Anna van den Kerchove, in La voie d'Hermès (Brill, 2012), connected the theopoiia passage to the broader Hermetic concept of the theurgical way of Hermes as a path of ritual purification and divine assimilation, arguing that the animation of divine statues was understood by the Hermetic community as a ritual correlate of the inner work of self-divinization described in the philosophical Hermetica. On this reading, making a god in material form and becoming a god through spiritual ascent are complementary rather than opposed activities within the Hermetic system.
The comparison with Iamblichean theurgy is illuminating here. Iamblichus, in De mysteriis, also discusses the animation of statues as a legitimate theurgical practice, defending it against the objections of Porphyry, who had questioned how divine beings could be compelled to inhabit material objects. Iamblichus's response — that the gods are not compelled but graciously descend into properly prepared vehicles — parallels Ficino's later naturalistic reading, and both may reflect a common tradition of Egyptian priestly apologetics.
Transmission and Variant Forms
The Greek term theopoiia appears in Greek philosophical literature primarily in the sense of poetic creation of the gods (as in Plato's critique of Homer), but in the context of the Asclepius it carries the specifically operative meaning of making a god in the ritual sense. The Latin Asclepius rendering — the statues as hominum deorum — entered medieval Latin theology primarily through Augustine's condemnation, making the passage available to critics rather than practitioners. The related Greek concept of telesma (a ritually completed object) connects the theopoiia tradition to the broader talisman tradition, since the animated statue is in effect a large-scale talisman. In the Arabic tradition, the animation of statues and the construction of artificial spiritual agents (tilasmat) were treated as related practices within the framework of Ghayat al-Hakim, which contains extensive instructions for fashioning figures that attract planetary spirits.
Related Concepts
God making is directly connected to suffumigation, since the Asclepius specifies that herbs and aromatics were among the materials used to attract daemons into statues, exactly as suffumigation was used to attract planetary spirits in the Picatrix tradition. The concept stands in a complex relationship with the notion of talismans, which represent a smaller-scale version of the same operative logic: capturing celestial or spiritual influence in a material object. The broader theological aspiration of which theopoiia is one expression — the desire to establish live contact with divine powers — connects to the ascent practices described in the entries on Ogdoad and Ennead, where the soul seeks divine union not by drawing a god into matter but by itself ascending to the divine realm. The ritual dimensions of both approaches are illuminated by van den Kerchove's analysis of the regeneration described in Corpus Hermeticum XIII.
Literature
Augustine of Hippo. De civitate Dei. Edited by B. Dombart and A. Kalb. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47–48. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955.
Bull, Christian H. The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
Copenhaver, Brian P. (trans.). Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Festugière, André-Jean. La Révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste. 4 vols. Paris: Gabalda, 1944–1954.
Ficino, Marsilio. Three Books on Life. Edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989.
Fowden, Garth. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Iamblichus. De mysteriis. Translated by Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003.
Pingree, David (ed.). Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim. London: Warburg Institute, 1986.
van den Kerchove, Anna. La voie d'Hermès: Pratiques rituelles et traités hermétiques. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London: Warburg Institute, 1958.