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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell
back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational,
though more hopeless, school of Porphyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with
all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions--a dislike
intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common
herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common herd--
did not believe a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat
unphilosophical. From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying to crush
Plotinus by magic arts, had his weapons so completely turned against
himself, that all his limbs were contracted. From him we learn that
Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of Isis his familiar spirit, a
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