Proclus and Astrology in Platonism

In episode 435 Dr. José Manuel Redondo joins the show to discuss the life and work of the 5th century philosopher Proclus, and how he integrated astrology and theurgy with Platonism.

José is an astrologer from Mexico City who wrote a PhD dissertation on Proclus in 2015. We met at an astrology conference in 2010, and have been talking about doing an episode on Proclus for years now.

After last month’s episode on the Lots where I touched on Plato, the Myth of Er, and the concept of the guardian daimon, I thought it would be a great time to expand on some of those points by talking to José about Proclus and expanding the discussion of Platonism to include the Timaeus and other Platonic metaphysics.

During the course of the episode we talk about Proclus and how he used astrology together with theurgy as a tool for working with the gods and invoking them in his daily life, and we ended up touching on a bunch of other topics in the process, including:

Plato’s creation myth called…