Where to turn to for guidance? How can I live my best life? Where can I learn more about the Gods?

There are many works in our tradition which will help you as you seek answers to those questions, but below is a list of some of the best texts for living a life of daily devotion to the ancient Gods. Additionally, these texts are suitable for beginners.

1. Pythagorean
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
The Similitudes of Demophilus
The Pythagoric Sentences of Demophilus
Pythagoric Ethical Sentences from Stobaeus
Pythagoric Sentences from the Protreptics of Iamblichus
The Golden Sentences of Democrates
The Life of Pythagoras
2. The Orphic Hymns
3. The Homeric Hymns
4. The Handbook of Epictetus
5. On the Gods and the World

Below is a reconstruction of the Orphic Theogony, but with Roman deity names in place of the original Greek ones.

https://nistsocietytheroma.substack.com/p/the-orphic-theogony

Today is the anniversary of the death of Thomas Taylor (1758 – 1835), the English platonist who was the first to translate the complete works of Plato and Aristotle into English, as well as many other important works of our tradition. We all owe much to Taylor. Please say a prayer in his memory.

"For those under [Pythagoras'] guidance, according to his instruction, acted as follows: they made their morning walks alone and in such places where there was suitable calmness and stillness, and where there were temples and sacred groves and anything else that gladdened the heart. For they thought it necessary not to meet anyone until they set their own soul in order and were composed in their intellect; and such quietness is agreeable to the composure of the intellect. For to be shoved together in crowds immediately on arising they considered disturbing."

Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 96

"Moral excellence is destroyed by defect and excess. ... For one can see this at once in the case of gymnastic exercises. If they are overdone, the strength is destroyed, while if they are deficient, it is so also. And the same is the case with food and drink. For if too much is taken health is destroyed, and also if too little, but by the right proportion strength and health are preserved. The same is the case with temperance and courage and the rest of the excellences. For if you make a man too fearless, so as not even to fear the gods, he is not brave but mad, but if you make him afraid of everything, he is a coward. To be brave, then, a man must not either fear everything or nothing. The same things, then, both increase and destroy excellence."

Aristotle, Magna Moralia 1185b1

"[By having children], we shall be cooperating with the ardent wishes and fervent prayers of those who begot us. They were solicitous about our birth from the first, thereby looking for an extended succession of themselves, that they should leave behind them children of children, therefore paying attention to our marriage, procreation and nurture. Hence, by marrying and begetting children we shall be, as it were, fulfilling a part of their prayers; while, acting contrarily, we shall be destroying the object of their deliberate choice. Moreover, it would seem that everyone who voluntarily, and without some prohibiting circumstance avoids marriage and the procreation of children, accuses his parents of madness, as having engaged in wedlock without the right conception of things. ... We must remember that we beget children not only for our own sake but, as we have already stated, for our parents'; but further also for the sake of our friends and kindred. ... For this reason, then, will a man who is a lover of his kindred and associates earnestly desire to marry and beget children. Our country also loudly calls upon us to do so. For after all we do not beget children so much for ourselves as for our country, procuring a race that may follow us, and supplying the community with successors to ourselves. Hence the priest should realize that to the city he owes priests; the ruler, that he owes rulers; the orator, that he owes orators; and in short, the citizen, that he owes citizens."

Hierocles, Ethical Fragments: On Marriage

Just shut your eyes, and change your way of looking, and wake up.

Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.8

"Now, do such leisured circumstances leave them no pressing work to do, no genuinely appropriate occupation? Must each of them get plumper every day of his life, like a fatted beast? No: we maintain that's not the right and proper thing to do. A man who lives like that won't be able to escape the fate he deserves; and the fate of an idle fattened beast that takes life easy is usually to be torn to pieces by some other animal - one of the skinny kind, who've been emaciated by a life of daring and endurance."

Plato, Laws 807a

"In such a mighty contest, sedition and discord, you will see one according law and assertion in all the earth, that there is one God, the king and father of all things, and many gods, sons of God, ruling together with him."

Maximus Tyrius, Dissertation 1

"[Pythagoras] said that human beings should make libations three times, and that Apollo gave oracles from the tripod because the triad is the first number by nature; to sacrifice something to Aphrodite on the sixth day because this is the first number to share in the whole nature of number, and when divided in every way, yields the same product from the numbers subtracted as from those that remain."

Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 152 [emphasis mine]

"The Pythagoreans, as we learn from the extracts from Nicomachus, denominated the hexad [i.e., 6], the 'form of form, the only number adapted to the soul, the distinct union of the parts of the universe, the fabricator of the soul, and the producing cause of the vital habit. Hence also, it is harmony, the perfection of parts, and is more properly Venus herself.' ... With respect to its being denominated Venus herself, we learn from Martianus Capella lib. 7, that it was thus called, 'because it may be shown that it is the source of harmony. For 6 to 12, says he, forms the symphony diapason; 6 to 9 the symphony diapente; and 6 to 8 the symphony diatessaron; whence it is said to be Venus the mother of harmony.'"

Thomas Taylor, The Theoretic Arithmetic Book 3 Chapter VIII [emphasis mine]

"'The heptad [i.e. 7] is called Minerva, because similar to what is said of the goddess in fables, it is a certain virgin and unmarried; being neither begotten from a mother, which is the even number, nor by a father which is the odd number; except, that as Minerva was produced from the summit of the father of all things, so the heptad proceeds from the monad which is the head or summit of number. And it is as it were a certain virile Minerva.'"

Thomas Taylor, The Theoretic Arithmetic Book 3 Chapter IX

"Why wonder that men can comprehend heaven, when heaven exists in their very beings and each one is in a smaller likeness the image of God himself?"

Marcus Manilius, Astronomica 4.893-896

"...One ought then to sing the praises of the intelligible gods, and then above all of these, of the great king [i.e., the One] of that world whose greatness is revealed most especially in the multiplicity of the gods. For what those who understand god's power do is not to reduce divinity to a single god but to show that divinity is as profuse as god himself shows it to be when he, while remaining who he is, creates all the numerous gods who depend on him and derive their existence from him and through him."

Plotinus, Enneads 2.9.9.34-39 [emphasis mine]

“There is, then, no moral error in anything of this sort for a human being, but only the occasion for morally perfect acting. The focus is not on being exempt from moral error, but on being god.” Plotinus, Enneads 1.2.6

"Sin should be abstained from, not through fear, but for the sake of the becoming." The Golden Sentences of Democrates 7

Many people suffer because they have a burdensome and guilty concept of sin. This concept does not exist in our tradition.

Rather, the conception is, basically, health versus sickness.

"Virtue seems, then, to be a kind of health, fine condition, and well-being of the soul, while vice is disease, shameful condition, and weakness." Plato, Republic 444e

To be good is to be a healthy, flourishing human being whose actions flow out of good health, and to be evil is to be a sick human being whose actions flow out of sickness.

If you want to be healthy, this often entails ridding yourself of illness, but focusing on sickness is itself a sickness. It is spiritual hypochondria. The focus should be health and what it means to be healthy. Our tools for dealing with spiritual sickness are exactly like the procedures and medicines of a doctor - nothing more.

Therefore, strive to become like the sources of health: the Gods, and ultimately The Good itself.

What this requires, in part, is for you to set your soul in order; that is, to properly balance the different parts of your soul:

1. Intuition and Reason : King
2. Will : Military
3. Appetites, desires, etc. : Peasantry

Having achieved this balance, you will imitate Jupiter, King of the Gods, whose mind forms and orders the universe.

You are not cut off from the divine, hopelessly in need of salvation. No, there is divinity within you: "the race of man is divine" (Golden Verses 63). All you need to do is remember your divine lineage.

"Just shut your eyes, and change your way of looking, and wake up. Everyone has this ability but few use it. Go into yourself and look. If you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then be like a sculptor who, making a statue that is supposed to be beautiful, removes a part here and polishes a part there so that he makes the latter smooth and the former just right until he has given the statue a beautiful face. ... Just open your eyes and see, for this alone is the eye that sees the great beauty." Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.8-9

"For the association of a father with his sons bears the form of monarchy, since the father cares for his children; and this is why Homer calls Zeus 'father'; it is the ideal of monarchy to be paternal rule."

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1160b25

The months and their associated Gods, according to some ancient Roman sources.

Charlotte R. Long, The Gods of the Months in Ancient Art p. 3

"It is clear, then, that the world would be a living thing and possessed of intellect; for in wishing to make it best, it follows that God endowed it with both a soul and an intellect, for the ensouled product in general is superior to the soulless, and the intelligent to that which lacks intelligence."

Alcinous, The Handbook of Platonism 14.4