A Neoplatonist Prayer

"Begin thy work, first having prayed the Gods

To accomplish it."

- The Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans

I was delighted to be signposted to this beautiful and inspirational prayer a couple of years ago by an American colleague and ex-member of Charles Fielding’s Dallas Group. Despite having explored the Western Esoteric Tradition and much of Neo-Platonism through a 27-year period, this great piece had passed me by until a time when I needed an extra boost and some encouragement on the Path. I come back to it for meditation, prayer and general sustenance from time to time. I hope you enjoy it.

“I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my mind in this work that I have undertaken—to kindle in me a shining light of truth and enlarge my understanding for the genuine science of being; to open the gates of my soul to receive the inspired guidance of Plato; and, in anchoring my thought in the full splendour of reality, to hold me back from too much conceit of wisdom and from the paths of error by keeping me in intellectual converse with those realities from which alone the eye of the soul is refreshed and nourished.

I ask from the intelligible gods fullness of wisdom, from the intellectual gods the power to rise aloft, from the super-celestial gods guiding the universe an activity free and unconcerned with material inquiries, from the gods to whom the cosmos is assigned a winged life, from the angelic choruses a true revelation of the divine, from the good daemons an abundant filling of divine inspiration, and from the heroes a generous, solemn, and lofty disposition. So may all the orders of divine beings help to prepare me fully to share in this most illuminating and mystical vision that Plato reveals to us. So may all the higher powers be propitious to us and be ready with their gifts to illuminate us with the light that comes from them and leads us upwards.”

-          From the start of Proclus’ commentary on Plato's Parmenides