In Part II of our discussion with P.D. Newman, Danny moves from “tripping with the ghosts” into Newman’s more explicit theurgical thesis: the ancient ascent traditions are not a hazy metaphor, but a disciplined technology of katabasis and anabasis—descent and return, ascent and return—whose structure changes decisively from the pre-Socratics to Plato and then to later Neoplatonism. Newman tracks the arc from early “soul flight” (horizontal and often underworld-oriented) through Plato’s radical reorientation—we are already in Hades if matter is “below,” so the flight becomes necessarily upward—into the Neoplatonic repetition of ascent/return as a lifelong practice aimed at union with the divine and then re-entry into embodied life. Along the way, the episode leans into the syncretic continuities that modern polemics obscure: the Greek cosmic grammar still shapes early Christianity (Christ’s descent into Hades; the “mansion” as Olympus), and the Theotokos inherits and transforms older goddess-imagery rather than simply replacing it.
The second movement gets concrete about technique, risk, and discernment. Newman insists on a sharp difference between divine mania and pathological madness (by their fruits you shall know them) and describes inspiration as a genuinely destabilizing force that can look clinically “unhealthy” while nonetheless issuing in beauty and order. That opens into the episode’s most provocative thread: pharmaka and the ancient practice of “mixed wine” as an altered-state technology, not (primarily) water dilution. Newman surveys the under-acknowledged evidence for psychoactive additives and entheogenic craft from Homeric ritual and symposium culture to late-antique alchemy and the Greek Magical Papyri, culminating in the “flying ointment” problem: psychoactive oils applied to eyes/skin, breathwork, and the recurring motif of bird-transformation as a ritual language of ascent (Apuleius, Egyptian Ba/akh, and beyond). The episode closes by returning to the crater/chalice as the sacred vessel par excellence, Hecate as (source of) psyche, the cosmos as temple, and “homo adorans” as our true form, so that theurgy becomes, finally, a transformation of perception: learning to see that there is no secular remainder, only the world as a living rite in which we are already participating.
