Quoted from De Mysteriis, VIII, 6
You claim, then, that the majority of the Egyptians make what is in our power depend upon the movement of the stars. The true situation in this regard must be explained to you in some length, on the basis of Hermetic concepts. For as these writings tell us, the human being has two souls: one derives from the primary intelligible, partaking also of the power of the demiurge, while the other is contributed to us from the circuit of the heavenly bodies, and into this there slips the soul that sees god.
This being the case, the soul which descends to us from the (celestial) realms accomodates itself to the circuits of those realms, but that which is present to us in an intelligble mode from the intelligible transcends the cycle of generation, and it is in virtue of it that we may attain to emancipation from fate and ascend to the intelligible gods. That part of theurgy that is involved with ascend to the ungenerated achieves its end through such a level of life as this.
Translation: E. C. Clarke, J. M. Dillon, J. P. Hershbell, Iamblichus, On The Mysteries, 2003, 319, 321.
Marsilio Ficino’s preface to his Latin translation ofOn the Mysteries of the Egyptians in the manuscriptFlorence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Strozzi 97, fol. 1r,written in 1491 for Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici,later Pope Leo X.
