First of all, men of Syracuse, accept laws that you think will not arouse your desires and turn your thoughts toward money-making and wealth. Of the three goods - soul, body, and wealth - your laws must give the highest honor to the excellence of the soul, the second place to that of the body, as subordinate to the excellence of the soul, and the third and lowest rank to wealth, since it serves both body and soul. The sacred tradition that ranks them in this order might rightly be made a positive law among you, since it makes truly happy those who live by it; whereas the doctrine that the rich are the happy ones is a foolish saying of women and children, a miserable doctrine in itself, bringing misery upon all who follow it. Put to trial these words about law and you will see by the event that my advice is sound; experience seems to be the truest test of any matter.

Plato, Letter VIII 355b-c

Therefore, if anyone attacks the land in which they live, they must plan on its behalf and defend it as their mother and nurse and think of the other citizens as their earthborn brothers.

Plato, Republic 414e

In fact, sickness is a lack or excess in the materialized bodies that do not maintain order or measure. Ugliness is matter not conquered by form, and poverty is a lack or privation of that which we need due to the matter to which we are joined, a nature that has neediness.

Plotinus, Enneads 1.8.5

Once we are in a position to display the full wealth of our tradition, many Catholics and other Christians will convert as they realize that so much of what they appreciated in Christianity was in fact pagan, and that there is no need to obfuscate and distort pagan truths with useless Judaic accretions.

"Hear, goddess, who leads the light-bringing day
to mortals, bright-beaming Eos, making
the world red, messenger of the mighty
and noble god Titan. With your risings
you send the dark and swift march of night
down to the underworld. Leader of works,
minister of mortal life, whom the race
of mortal humanity hails. No one
flees your face when it is above, and when
you shake sweet sleep from your eyelids, then each
mortal creature rejoices, all serpents
and each of the species having four legs,
or wings, or dwelling in the teeming sea,
for you provide all working livelihood.
So blessed and holy one, magnify
the sacred light for the initiates."

Orphic Hymn to Eos

"I therefore commend the legislator Zaleucus of Locri, who ordained that he who intended to introduce a new law should do it with a rope around his neck, in order that he might be immediately strangled unless he succeeded in changing the ancient constitution of the state to the very great advantage of the community. But customs which are truly those of the country and which, perhaps, are more ancient than the laws themselves, are, no less than the laws, to be preserved. However, the customs of the present, which are but of yesterday, and which have been everywhere introduced only so very recently, are not to be dignified as the institutes of our ancestors, and perhaps they are not even to be considered as customs at all. Moreover, because custom is an unwritten law, it has as sanction the authority of a very good legislator, namely common consent of all that use it, and perhaps on this account its authority is next to that of justice itself."

Hierocles of Alexandria, On How We Ought to Conduct Ourselves Towards our Country

"[If someone] won't allow that there are forms for things and won't mark off a form for each one, he won't have anywhere to turn his thought, since he doesn't allow that for each thing there is a character that is always the same. In this way he will destroy the power of dialectic entirely."

Plato, Parmenides 135b

"Thought thinks itself by participation in the intelligible; for it becomes intelligible in touching and thinking, so that intellect and the intelligible are the same; for intellect is what is receptive of the intelligible, that is, of reality."

Aristotle, Metaphysics 1072b

"Now if you want to grasp the 'isolated and alone', you will not be thinking."

Plotinus, Enneads 5.3.13

"god: immortal living being, self-sufficient for happiness; eternal being, the cause of the nature of goodness.

soul: that which moves itself; the cause of vital processes in living creatures.

justice: the unanimity of the soul with itself, and the good discipline of the parts of the soul with respect to each other; the state that distributes to each person according to what is deserved; the state on account of which its possessor chooses what appears to him to be just; the state underlying a law-abiding way of life; social equality; the state of obedience to the laws.

piety: justice concerning the gods; the ability to serve the gods voluntarily; the correct conception of the honor due to the gods; knowledge of the honor due to gods.

good: that which is for its own sake.

cheerfulness: joy in doing what a temperate man does.

intuition: the starting point of knowledge."

pseudo-Plato, Definitions

“If these forms of worship were only human customs and received their authority from our cultural habits, one might argue that the cults of the gods were inventions created by our thinking. But in fact the one invoked in sacrifices is a god, and he presides over these sacrifices, and a great number of gods and angels surround him. And every race on earth is allotted a common guardian by this god, and every temple is also allotted a particular guardian.” Iamblichus

"Or have you ever grasped [the Just itself, Beauty, or the Good] with any of your bodily senses? I am speaking of all things such as Bigness, Health, Strength and, in a word, the reality of all other things, that which each of them essentially is. Is what is most true in them contemplated through the body, or is this the position: whoever of us prepares himself best and most accurately to grasp that thing itself which he is investigating will come closest to the knowledge of it? Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach reality, Simmias, if anyone does?"

Plato, Phaedo 65d-66a

People often wonder if there is a Western equivalent to meditation. This is it. This is the core of Platonism: the contemplation of Being, of reality in itself. Academics will write 500 page books about the Forms and somehow miss the most obvious fact: this is a meditation technique. By using our minds to peel open the metaphysical essence of things, we can gaze at pure Reality, pure Being.

Then, achieving holy silence, we move beyond Being.

Just open your eyes and see, for this alone is the eye that sees the great beauty.

Plotinus, Ennead 1.6.9

Let us now therefore, if ever, abandon multiform knowledge, exterminate from ourselves all the variety of life, and in perfect quiet approach near to the cause of all things. For this purpose, let not only opinion and phantasy be at rest, nor the passions alone which impede our anagogic impulse to the first, be at peace; but let the air be still, and the universe itself be still. And let all things extend us with a tranquil power to communion with the ineffable. Let us also, standing there, having transcended the intelligible (if we contain any thing of this kind), and with nearly closed eyes adoring as it were the rising sun, since it is not lawful for any being whatever intently to behold him - let us survey the sun whence the light of the intelligible Gods proceeds, emerging, as the poets say, from the bosom of the ocean; and again, from this divine tranquility descending into intellect, and from intellect, employing the reasonings of the soul, let us relate to ourselves what the natures are from which, in this progression, we shall consider the first God as exempt. And let us as it were celebrate him, not as establishing the earth and the heavens, nor as giving subsistence to souls, and the generations of all animals; for he produced these indeed, but among the last of things; but, prior to these, let us celebrate him as unfolding into light the whole intelligible and intellectual genus of Gods, together with all the supermundane and mundane divinities - as the God of all Gods, the unity of all unities, and beyond the first adyta, - as more ineffable than all silence, and more unknown than all essence, - as holy among the holies, and concealed in the intelligible Gods.

Proclus, Theology of Plato, 2.13

[The soul] loves then to be quiet, having closed its eyes to thoughts that go downward, having become speechless and silent in internal silence. For how else could it attach itself to the most ineffable of all things than by putting to sleep the chatter in it? Let it therefore become one, so that it may see the One, or rather not see the One. For by seeing, the soul will see an intelligible object and not what is beyond intellect, and it will think something that is one, not the One itself. … Thus, my friend, when someone actualises what really is the most divine activity of the soul, and entrusts himself only to the ‘flower of the intellect’ and brings himself to rest not only from the external motions, but also from the internal, he will become a god as far as this is possible for a soul, and will know only in the way the gods know everything in an ineffable manner, each according to their proper one.

Proclus, On Providence 31 & 32

But to refer injustice and crimes committed through lasciviousness and wantonness to fate, leaves us indeed good, but the gods evil and base: unless some one should endeavour to remove this consequence, by replying, that every thing which the world contains, and whatever has a natural subsistence, is good, but that the nature which is badly nourished, or which is of a more imbecile condition, changes the good proceeding from fate into something worse; just as the sun, though it is good itself, becomes noxious to the blear-eyed and feverish.

Sallust, On the Gods and the World Chapter 9

I have been working on a document which will address all of these topics, but as it is extremely labor intensive to produce (I am aiming for a very high standard of research), I can’t give a date when it will be ready. Please be patient. But I am optimistic that it will be helpful to people and to our movement generally.

This poll will help me understand what you think is most important and to know if there are any other important topics I haven’t thought about.

Also, it will be free and published here so that it can be easily shared.