If you have a passing awareness of the Neoplatonists, you probably know that they were very concerned with religion, that there was a lot of oriental influence on their philosophy, and that they were syncretists. None of this is exactly wrong - especially not the first -, but what does "oriental influence" mean, beyond the fact that Neoplatonist philosophers came from across the (Eastern) Mediterranean, be it Egypt, Arabia, Syria, or Asia Minor? What did they syncretize, and how, exactly?
The best author to look at in reply to these questions is Damascius. He was, as his name suggests, a Syrian from Damascus, and seems to have spoken Aramaic and Greek (but likely no other languages). He studied in Alexandria and Athens - the two centres of classical learning at the time -, and found his philosophical and (so to speak) spiritual master in Isidore of Alexandria, a student of the great Proclus. With Isidore, he travelled from Alexandria through Arabia and Syria to Aphrodisias in Southwest Anatolia. As a result, he was one of the most knowledgeable people about contemporaneous pagan practices; due to his wide reading - and his curiosity -, he was also unusually well-informed about "barbarian" religion as it had been practiced in prior centuries. In the usage of the time, he knew something about many different "theologies" (a term intermediate between mythology and theology in the modern sense), and he had learned from the writings of Proclus and Asclepiades (brother to Proclus' student Heraiscus) that a philosopher must seek to understand the coherence of these theologies with each other and with Platonic metaphysics.
In this first post about "Damascius on the Gods", I want to look only at his Philosophical History, a dazzling account of the philosophers of Damascius' time and the recent past (and so much more!), which has a great deal of information about local religious practices, with comparatively little philosophical commentary.
My quotes are a free mixture of original translations and the English of Polymnia Athanassiadi's edition; where I have deviated from her, it was usually to represent the original more literally.
Fragment 3. Osiris and Isis
3A: "The Egyptians used to worship (esebon) most among the gods Osiris and Isis, believing the former to be the creator of all things (hapanta dêmiourgein), ordering matter through forms and numbers; the latter to water and nurture his creation (dêmiourgian) through the innumerable channels of everflowing life."
"Used to worship" must refer to the period when pagans were the majority, since Isis and Osiris were still worshipped by the remaining pagans.
"Osiris" as "creator of all things" may owe more to Plutarch of Chaeronea's On Isis and Osiris than to indigenous tradition, but of course Damascius' Egyptian contemporaries could also read Plutarch.
"Isis" as "watering and nurturing" is more classically Egyptian; but "channels of Life" is the terminology of the Chaldaean Oracles. (Did these speak about Isis or is Damascius applying Chaldaean doctrine to a new context?)
3B: "Some say that he [Osiris] is Dionysus; others that he is another. He was torn in pieces by the daemon Typhon; this was a cause of great sorrow to the Egyptains, and his dismemberment is everlastingly remembered."
What Damascius tells us here aligns with Greek usage - Osiris could appear as a separate theonym in Greek (and keep in mind that few non-Greek divine names ever became normalized in standard, i.e. transregional, Ancient Greek!), but he could also be called Dionysus. He does not give an interpretation of the myth of Osiris here, but from fragment 4C, it looks like he understood it in much the same way as that of the dismemberment of Dionysus (as discussed in the first commentary on the Phaedo), i.e. as describing the division of Soul into multiplicity. But this does not mean that he necessarily conflated Osiris and Dionysus.
Fragment 13. Isidore's appearance
In describing the bodily appearance of his master, Damascius says that his face was square, "a sacred type of Hermes Logios". There are multiple reasons for associating the square with Hermes, and the point here may be that Isidore belongs to the chain or series of Hermes, but also simply that his appearance was appropriate to a person engaged in Hermaic pursuits and in learning and teaching logoi. Similarly, the "charm of Aphrodite" and "wisdom of Athena" of Isidore's eyes mean great charm, exemplary wisdom; but they also show something of the "divine emanation dwelling within" his soul.
Fragment 18. The three (or four) ways of life, according to Isidore
In this fragment, we learn that Isidore associated the three parts or types of the soul with three ways of life, "each of which contains all three elements while receiving its overall shape from the dominant one, which also gives it its name." (This is an idea Damascius applies to many other areas as well.) The life dominated by reason is the "life of Kronos", "the golden race or the people akin to the gods, celebrated in the guise of myth by poets seated on the tripod of the Muse." The last phrase means "inspired by the Muse", and the point here is that Hesiod's account of the first humankind created by the gods is to be understood metaphorically as referring to the philosophers of all generations. "Emotion influences the second, which [...] fights for the first prizes and for glory, and which we continually hear talked about by history." The third are entirely ruled by appetite, "wallowing in swinishness of a slave". Christianity, if I understand the last sentence of the fragment correctly, has created people who are morally inferior even to the third "generation". What is relevant to our present purpose is that Kronos is seen as a god linked to intellectual pursuits, and that Damascius uses a very emphatic metaphor for calling poets inspired by the Muses.
Fragment 19. The body
In line with the Dionysian myth, body is here called a "Giant- or Titan-like" (gigantôdes ê titanikon) prison. Damascius need not be conflating the myths of the Giants and Titans, but is certainly referring them to the same realm (which he calls "Typhonian" elsewhere).
Fragment 34D. The status of philosophers
Isidore
"worshipped as divine Pythagoras and Plato [considering them] to be among those winged souls who dwell in the supra-celestial regions, in the plain of Truth, in the meadow of divine forms. After Plato he particularly devoted himself to Iamblichus and his friends and adepts, the best of whom he claimed was his own fellow-citizen Syrianus [of Alexandria], the teacher of Proclus."
The point here is not necessarily that Isidore literally worshipped any philosophers (although it is plausible enough that he did do so), but that he esteemed them and considered them to have an exalted ontological status. What is surprising in an Iamblichean context is that Pythagoras and Plato are said to be unembodied. Would this make them a kind of lower gods who descended to earth rather than human souls that ascended? After all, Iamblichean Neoplatonism generally considered human souls to be perennially tied to some kind of body, although philosophical and theurgical perfection could allow it to descend to the highest reaches of the cosmos.
Fragment 41. Two ritual experts in 4th-century Alexandria
"Epiphanius and Euprepius were both of Alexandrian descent and were experts in the mystical rites established among the Alexandrians, Eurprepius presiding over the so-called Persian mysteries and Epiphanius over those related to Osiris - and not merely those, but also the mysteries of the god celebrated (hymnoumenou) as Aion. Though I can disclose who he is, I will not write it down on this occasion."
As the rest of the fragment tells us, these two men were not born into paganism, but converted. This is an important example of the vitality of specific pagan traditions even as paganism as a whole was in steep decline. It also tells us that the "Persian" mysteries (without a doubt those of Mithras, a tradition that formed in the early Roman period), those of Osiris (related with those attended by Herodotus about a millenium earlier), and those of Aion (a Hellenistic god of Egypt, especially of Alexandria) were maintained as separate traditions; I will defer my explanation of why this is significant to a later fragment, in which Damascius reveals who Aion is.
Fragment 42. Olympus, defender of the Serapeum
42A: "Olympus, brother of Generosa, who came to Alexandria from Cilicia in order to worship Sarapis."
This shows an important feature of polytheism in the Roman empire: the fame of popular gods could spread wide, so that Sarapis worship had probably had a centuries-long continuous history in the pagan community in which Olympus grew up. Yet they were still tied to specific places and peoples - especially so perhaps for Sarapis, whose great temple in Alexandria was considered a marvel.
42F: "Thus he became a teacher in religious matters (hierodidaskalos) to the Alexandrians at the time when their society was already being swept away by the torrent. He used to gather together those around him and teach them the rules of divine worship, the ancient traditions and the happiness which attends on them - that great and wonderful happiness sent by the gods to those who faithfully observe them."
42H: "Olympus was so filled with the god (plêrês tou theou) that he prophesied to his disciples that Sarapis would abandon the temple; and this came to pass."
In the late third century and throughout the fourth, it seems that the precarity of pagan communities and the increasing relevance of pagan identity as a social marker seems to have made it much easier for (elite) pagans to take up important positions in ritual traditions to which they had no ancestral connection.
Fragment 46B. Theosebius casts out a demon
"But as the daimonion could not be persuaded by gentle words to leave the woman, Theosebius forced him out by an oath/exorcism, though he understood nothing of magic nor had he ever studied theurgy. He exorcised him by invoking the rays of Helios and the god of the Jews; and the demon was driven away shouting that he feared the gods, but also felt awe towards him [Theosebius]."
The Greek Magical Papyri show that Jewish magic, including appeals to Iaho (=YHWH), angels and Jesus (perceived as Jewish by pagan magicians, anyway), was especially influential on the part of pagan magic that concerned itself with casting out or keeping away d(a)emons, while Helios was popular in any type of spell. One did not need to study magical texts to be aware of this. That Theosebius specifically invoked the rays of Helios is more unusual, but they had long played a role in Egyptian religion.
Fragment 52. The rising and the setting Sun
"Divination by clouds, which was not known to the Ancients even by hearsay, was discovered by a woman called Anthusa [...] from Aegae in Cilicia [...] Concerned about her husband, who had been invested with some military office and sent with others to the Sicilian War, she prayed to the rising sun for foresight into the future in her dreams. Then her father, appearing in a dream, exhorted her to pray to the setting sun as well, and as she prayed there formed out of a clear sky a cloud around the sun which eventually grew and took the shape of a man."
The details of this omen are not relevant here. I can only note that the distinction of rising sun and setting Sun as different gods, or states (?) of the same god, was common in Egypt, and was to some extent popularized from this source throughout the Empire. But there might be something else going on here - who can say. All I can say is that this woman certainly spoke Greek, and was calling the sun Helios.
Fragment 53. Sothis
53A: "The Egyptian theologians say (Aigyptioi ... theologousin) that Sothis is Isis, whereas the Greeks refer the same star to Sirius, whom they represent as the do who accompanies Orion in his hunting, or rather they show him negraved in the sky in this form."
The point here is not that the Greeks refer Sothis to Sirius rather than Isis, but that they call the star Sirius rather than Sothis (which latter the Egyptians say is Isis). The name Sothis for the star, and its ascription to Isis, was very old, and as an astronomical term, it was presumably still the common usage in Egypt at this time.
Fragment 57A. Babia
In explaining the word "babion", a term of endearment for a young child, Damascius writes:
"The Syrians, and especially those living in Damascus, call babies and even older children 'babia', after Babia, a goddess venerated by them."
This goddess of children (?) is otherwise unknown, but there is hardly a better authority for Damascene paganism than Damascius.
Fragment 63A. A statue of Aphrodite
"The author says he saw a statue of Aphrodite dedicated by Herodes the sophist. Upon seeing it, I fell into a sweat through the influence of divine terror and astonishment and my soul was filled with such joy that iI was quite unable to to back home. I went away several times only to return to that sight again. The sculptor has blended into it so much beauty - nothing sweet or sensual, but something dignified and virile: clad in armour and as if just returning from a victory, with an expression of joy."
Fragment 72. Asclepiades
72C: "As for Asclepiades, who had been educated mainly in Egyptian literature, he had a more accurate knowledge of his native theology [than his brother Heraiscus], having investigated its principles and methods and having enquired closely into the absolute infinity of its extreme limits. One can clearly see this from the hymns that he composed to the Egyptian gods and from the treatise that he set out to write on the agreement of all theologies."
What exactly agreement (sumphônia) meant in Asclepiades, we are not in a position to evaluate, but hymns to Egyptian gods probably used Egyptian theonyms, and attributes and descriptions drawn from indigenous traditions (both in Coptic and in Greek, in written and oral form).
72F: "He says that Asclepiades ascended Mount Lebanon in the area of Heliopolis in Syria and saw many of the so-called baitylia or baityloi, about which he realtes a multitude of monstrous stories worthy of an impious tongue. He says that some time later he himself and Isidore also saw them."
This is the voice of the Christian Photius, one of the sources for our fragments; a later fragment describes Damascius' own experience of these cult objects.
Fragment 74C. Suchus
This fragment says that the souchos, a type of crocodile, "is just". Suchus is not the ordinary Eyptian word for crocodile, but the name of a crocodile-shaped deity of the Fayyum, also known as the crocodile god or as one of the crocodile gods, as they are called in Greek inscriptions.
Fragment 76. Heraiscus
76A: "And Heraiscus had become a Bacchus, as the dream prophesied to him."
This means "had become a true initiate" (of philosophy or of the gods), not that Heraiscus participated in Dionysian mysteries.
76E: "Heraiscus had the natural gift of distinguishing between animate and inanimate sacred statues. He had but to look at one of them and immediately hsi heart was afflicted by divine frenzy while both his body nad soul leapt up as if possessed by the god. But if he was not moved in such a way, the statue was inanimate and devoid of divine inspiration. It was in this way that he recognised that the ineffable statue of Aion was possessed by the god who was worshipped by the Alexandrians, being at the same time Osiris and Adonis as a result of a truly mystical act of union. [...]
[W]hen he died, as Aslepiades prepared to render him the honours customary to the priests and in particular to wrap his body in the garments of Osiris, mystic signs bathed in light appeared everywhere on the sheets and around them divine visions which clearly revealed the gods with whom his soul now shared its abode.
But his first birth too was sacred and mystical. It is said that he was delivered of his mother into the light with a finger on his mouth enjoining silence, in the same way that Horus and before him Helios were born according to Egyptian legend. And as his finger was attached to his lips an operation was needed; his lip nevertheless bore throughout his life the scar of the incision, showing the mark of his mystical birth."
Greek and Roman writers generally did not know that Harpocrates - the child god with a finger on his mouth - was (literally) "Horus the child". Plutarch of Chaeronea had treated Harpocrates as distinct from Horus. Nor is the story associating Helios with the same gesture known from any Greco-Roman sources, as far as I know. All this shows the continuity of the Alexandrian Egyptians in Damascius' time with earlier tradition, as does the association of mummy wrappings, Osiris, and joining the gods. Traditionally, mummification (with the attendant rituals) actually allowed the deceased to become Osiris in the afterlife, and the Greek Magical Papyri also attest to the late currency of ideas along those lines.
Heraiscus' interpretation of Aion, a god who had no distinct place either in Greek or in Egyptian myth, but who was important in the ritual landscape of Alexandrian paganism, is probably original to him. It shows, I think, the way in which syncretism is not reduction of difference, but primarily the creation of a framework for making difference legible. On Heraiscus' account, there is a real difference between (animate) statues of Osiris, Adonis, and Aion, but this threefold difference is anchored in only two gods, who were generally known and did not require further "anchoring". The word translated "act of union" by Athanassiadi is theokrasia, 'god-mixing' or 'mixture of gods', but rather than leading to a conceptual blurring, it allowed greater precision and more distinctions.
Fragment 79C. Aramaic names of Kronos
"The Phoenicians give to Kronos the names El, Bel, and Bolathes."
El was a shared Syro-Phoenician god, and the equivalent of Kronos in terms of the succession myths told by Hesiod and multiple Ancient Near Eastern sources. The equivalence was also established usage, as parallel sources (most notably Philo of Byblos) show. Bel is another Syro-Phoenician deity, really named Ba'l or Baal (sometimes, especially in Greek, confused or conflated with the Babylonian Bel); he was typically translated Saturn/Kronos in Carthage, a Phoenician colony, but in Syria, it is far more common to see him translated as Zeus, or even called "Zeus Belus". Bolathes is obscure, but "Bol-" seems to almost certainly be a dialectal form of Baal. Damascius is probably only reporting that Aramaic/Greek-bilingual pagans translated these different theonyms into Greek as Kronos. The many centuries of pervasive Hellenization that Syria had undergone made this more than an accidental feature; it probably informed patterns of worship at the local level signficantly.
Fragment 87A. In Phrygia
"At Hierapolis in Phrygia there was a sanctuary of Apollo and below the temple there was an underground passage which emitted deathly fumes. [...]
[G]oing to sleep at Hierapolis at that time I had a dream in which I was Attis and, at the instigation of the Mother of the Gods, I celebrated the feast of the so-called Hilaria, which signified my salvation from death."
Phrygia had long been Hellenized, so the worship of Apollo in a Phrygian city, while it may have had roots in Anatolian culture, likely would not have had too much to distinguish it from Apolloniac cult in Greece itself. More important is that there was still a functioning pagan sanctuary in Phrygian Hierapolis - and something of a place of pilgrimage, it seems.
That Damascius dreamed of Attis and the Mother of the Gods, also known as the Phrygian Mother*, is fitting to the locale: somewhat like Sarapis and Alexandria, this goddess was known throughout the empire, but remained associated with Asia Minor in general, and Phrygia in particular. Hilaria is the Latin name for the day of rejoicing following the day when the Mother's priests castrated themselves. The latter was a reenactment of the (self-)punishment of Attis for offending the goddess, and the Hilaria represent their reconciliation. "Salvation from death" probably means that Damascius attributed his recovery from an illness to the Mother of the Gods.
(*There also seem to have been indigenous Greek cults to a goddess called Meter, but in this case the Anatolian Meter is meant.)
Fragment 89A. Directions of Asclepius
"The Athenian Asclepius (ho Athênêsin Asklêpios) prescribed through an oracle the same cure to Plutarch of Athens and Domninus the Syrian. The latter frequently spat blood [...] whereas I do not know the nature of the former's illness. The cure for them both was to stuff themselves with pork. But Plutarch could not stand such a treatment, even though it did not go against his native customs; waking up and leaning on one elbow on his pallet he gixd his gaze upon the statue of Asclepius (since he happened to be sleeping in the vestibule of the temple) and said: 'Master, what would you have prescribed for a Jew suffering from this disease? Surely you would not have ordered him also to fill himself with pork!' And Asclepius gave voice most melodiously from his statue and prescribed a different cure for the disease.
But Domninus was persuaded by the dream to go against the traditional Syrian custom and, unheedful of the example of Plutarch, ate the meat and continued to do so. It is even said that if he failed to taste pork for one day, the affliction returned with renewed violence until he had filled his stomach."
From this story we learn that incubation oracles - sleeping in a deity's sanctuary to receive dreams from them - were still a feature of pagan Athenian life around 400 CE (as they were of Christian life in the Byzantine period). As the opening words of the fragment show, dream divination of this type were very strongly local: it is the Asclepius at Athens who sent them dreams, not Asclepius wo sent them dreams at Athens.
Fragment 96A. Dike
"As he [Asclepiodotus?] lay in bed, he suddenly chanced to see Justice. She was a radiant maiden, well-girdled, wearing a short quince-yellow tunic decorated with purple bands; her hair was bound with a ribbon, she wore no cloak and was looking sternly and with knitted brow not at him but towards the entrance."
Entitites like Justice were seen as gods, not as personifications of abstracts, by the later Neoplatonists; lowercase justice was overseen by the goddess.
Fragment 97A. Marinus of Nablus
"Marinus, the successor of Proclus, originated from Neapolis (=modern Nablus) in Palestine, a city founded near the so-called Mount Argarizos (=Gerizim), where there is a most sacred temple of Zeus the Most High (Dios Hypsistou), to whom Abramus the ancestor of the ancient Jews was consecrated, as Marinus himself used to say. Born a Samaritan, Marinus renounced their creed (doxan), which is anway a deviation from Abramus' religion, and embraced Hellenism."A lot is going on in this fragment, but I want to focus on one detail: why is it "the god of the Jews" in fragment 46B, but Zeus Hypsistus here? Apart from the fact that Damascius is dependent on two different sources - Theosebius and Marinus -, I also think that the contexts are very different. In magic, it was seen as a curious fact that invocations of the god of the Jews were especially
efficacious, so his specificity was exactly the point. But in other contexts, this was unsatisfactory to a Hellenic litteratus, and the question of who this god was would naturally come up. The answer that he is Zeus Hypsistus does not entirely give up his specificity, either, since "Hypsistus" (sometimes simply as theos hypsistos, highest god), a translation of Hebrew ʿElyōn, was a peculiar epithet used by pagans for the Jewish-Samaritan god throughout the Roman period (I'm not certain about before).
Fragment 105A. The city of Athena
This fragment calls Athena "the patron of our city (=Athens)" (hê Polias).
Fragment 111. Chiron the centaur
Here, Damascius gives an interpretation of Chiron's dual nature: he "stood on the dividing line" between the rule of Kronos (the philosophical life) and that of Zeus (the life of glory-seekers).
Fragment 112. Typhonian Pamprepius
Here Zeus-like (Diios) and Kronian (Kronios) are more closely aligned, when Sarapio's Zeus-like and Kronian life is contrasted with the Typhonian Pamprepius of Panopolis - a pagan power-seeker whose adventurism much increased Christian hostility to pagans.
Fragment 134D. Theandrites
"Here [Isidore] came to know Theandrites, the masculine (arrênôpon) god who inspires in one's soul the taste for a virile life."
Theandrites, a god of the Hawran whose Arabic name (I think) is unknown, and who had been Hellenized as Theandr(i)os before Late Antiquity, had been the addressee of a lost hymn of Proclus.
Fragment 136A. Dusares
"The Nabataeans call Dionysus Dusares, as Isidore reports."
The Nabataeans, who cultivated a bilingual or trilingual Arabic-Aramaic-Greek culture during the period of the Nabataean kingdom, seem to have established conventional equivalences between native and Greek theonyms (much like the Romans); Dusares is one of the few whose name is the same in Arabic/Aramaic and Greek. The identification with Dionysus here could reflect local usage, or it could be an outsider's look (perhaps owing something to Herodotus' pronouncement that the Arabs worship only Aphrodite and Dionysus; but in Herodotus' case, this meant the Arabian god Orotalt, probably the same as the well-attested god Rudha). Greeks also sometimes saw Ares in Dusares, for obvious reasons.
(Fragment 136B concerns the Arab - rather than Theban - Lycurgus and his struggle with Dionysus; I refer the reader to the footnotes in Athanassiadi's translation, as the relation of this story to cultic realities is complicated and somewhat speculative.)
Fragment 138. The baetyl of Gennaios
"I saw the baetyl moving in the air, now hiding itself in the clothes of its guardian, now held in his hands. The name of the guardian of the baetyl was Eusebius, who said that at some point he had suddenly had a strange urge to wander away from the town of Emesa in the middle of the night almost as far as the mountain on which is built an ancient temple of Athena; he came with great haste to the foot of the mountain and sat down to rest as one does after a long journey. He then suddenly saw a ball of fire leaping down from above and a huge lion standing beside it, which instantly vanished. He ran up to the ball as the fire was dying down and understood that this was indeed the baetyl; picking it up, he asked it which god possessed it, and the baetyl answered that it belonged to Gennaios. The Heliopolitans honour Gennaios in the temple of Zeus in the shape of a lion. He took it home that same night [...] Eusebius was not the master of the baetyl's movement, as is the case with others, but he begged and prayed and the baetyl listened to his incantations [...] For my part I thought that the baetyl was divine, while Isidore found it rather daemonic; he said that it was moved by a daemon, not one of those who are harmful or too material, nor yet one of those who have achieved immateriality and are altogether pure. Each baetyl is ascribed to a specific god, to Kronos, to Zeus, to Helios, and to others."
See 72F for the first mentions of baetyls. The word literally means "house of a god" or "house of El"; in the Hebrew Bible, where El is a name of YHWH, there is an important story where Jacob anoints a stone and then calls the place (!) Bethel (Genesis 28). Augustine's commentary on this passage distinguishes this from idolatry by saying that the stone is called a "house of God", not (an image of) God himself. In Phoenicia, on the other hand, Bethel or Baitylos was also seen as a god in his own right (as attested by Philo of Byblos). But the typical situation throughout Arabia, Syria and Palestine seems to have been that described in the last sentence, with baetyls being essentially a type of aniconic divine image (Greek agalma, "idol"), often (but not always) an unhewn stone.
The temple at Heliopolis or Baalbek was still known as a former temple of Zeus well into the Islamic period - the Harranian philosopher Thābit ibn Qurrah identified and honored it as such in the 9th century. The Lion in question is not one of the famous Heliopolitan "triad" called Jupiter, Venus and Mercury by the Romans. (On the difficulties of deciding which Semitic gods these "really" were, see Andreas J. M. Kropp, "Jupiter, Venus and Mercury of Heliopolis (Baalbek). The Images of the 'Triad' and Its Alleged Syncretisms", in: Syria 87 (2010), 229-264.) Rather, this Gennaios is the equivalent of Aramaic gny', cognative with Arabic jinn; "Etymologists agree that the term is not the proper name of a deity, as is often thought, but a qualifier or epithet meaning 'divine (being)'." (Kropp, 236). Of course, in this case, at least as Damascius understood it, Gennaios really is the proper name of a deity (or, on Isidore's account, perhaps rather the name of a daemon belonging to some other deity; but even he might have thought Eusebius' baetyl was possessed by a daemon beloning to the chain of a god Gennaios.)
Fragment 142. The Phoenician Asclepius
142B: "The Asclepius of Berytus is neither Greek nor Egyptian but a certain local (epichôrios) Phoenician [god]. Sadycus had children who are translated as the Dioscuri and the Cabeiri; after them the eighth child was Esmunus (Esmounos), whom they translate (as) Asclepius. Being an extremely beautiful young man, ravishing to the eye, he was loved, according to the myth, by the Phoenician goddess Astronoe, the Mother of the Gods. He was hunting, as was his custom, in these glens when he saw the goddess chasing after him; as she continued her pursuit and was about to catch him, he fell into a state of frenzy and cut off his own organs of procreation with an axe. Devastated by grief at this misfortune, the goddess summoned Paean and, reviving the youth with her life-giving warmth, she made him a god, called by the Phoenicians Esmunus after the warmth of life. Others however interpret the name Esmunus as 'eighth' because he was the eighth son of Sadycus."
142C: "I reported all this to Isidore who always paid to sacred myths an attention that was wise and divinely inspired."
Damascius (or his source) takes it as a given that the Greek and the Egyptian Asclepius (=Imhotep or Imouthês) are distinct, and so they largely were (in terms of myth, iconography, and cult). That the Phoenician theonym Eshmun was commonly translated into Greek as Asclepius is confirmed by much earlier sources. Philo of Byblos, writing in the 2nd century CE, confirms that Asclepius (for whom he gives no Phoenician name) was regarded as the son of Sydyc by the inhabitants of Berytus (=Beirut). The difference in name, Sadycus vs. Sydyc, makes it highly unlikely that Damascius used this text, even if "Sadycus had children who are translated as the Dioscuri and the Cabeiri" is very close to Philo's "from Sydyc descended the Dioscuri, or Cabiri, or Corybantes, or Samothraces". I think that this must be the local translation convention of Phoenicians bilingual in Greek and Aramaic, which one could well expect to be stable over centuries (as it was at Rome).
Philo also does not mention Astronoe/the Mother of the Gods or Paean (although he does mention Apollo) in any of the extant fragments, even though the account of the gods is preserved quite fully. In addition, Damascius' account strongly suggests that he received this information locally and orally ("in these glens"; and it seems very likely that what he reports to Isidore [fr. 142C] is just this myth).
The identity of Astronoe is problematic. Is she Astarte, as some have suggested? But this was a well-known name, enshrined as good Greek through Herodotus' mention of her. Astronoe is even better Greek, I suppose, being composed of the words for "star" and "intellect". If we do accept that Astronoe represents older Astarte (for whatever reason), a plausible explanation emerges. In previous centuries, the prototype of the narrative of the goddess who loves a mortal man who is wounded/dies was that of Astarte and Tammuz, or in Greek, of Aphrodite and Adonis. But the story in Damascius seems to be a reworking of this story - in which the mortal man dies - on the model of the Phrygian story of Attis, in which the mortal man castrates himself, so that Esmunus is, as it were, revived without having been killed. This could explain the shift in translation from Aphrodite to the Mother of the Gods. But perhaps we should simply, like Damascius, take it as (the Hellenized version of) an unknown Phoenician name.
Conclusions
I want to frame the conclusions from this first look at Iamblichus in terms of legibility. The great gods of Greek myth were known to every imaginable reader of Damascius' work, but barbarian gods (or minor Greek gods) were more opaque. How could people relate these to what they knew, unless they had grown up with them and were familiar with stories and rituals relating to them?
In Damascius, we find someone who is clearly interested in the barbarian names of gods, and does not compulsively reduce them to Greek gods. Nevertheless, he is at home with Greek culture, and there are only one or two passages (fragments 57A and perhaps 79C) where he is drawing on his own knowledge of indigenous Syrian gods.
Egyptian gods.
Egypt, like Rome, is a unique case, but almost for the opposite reason. At Rome, the Latin and Greek names were largely seen as wholly equivalent, as mere translations, and as a result, Zeus is written in Greek letters if he is ever named in Latin texts, and Greek texts which mention Roman gods by their Latin names (which is utterly rare and almost only happens when the name itself is being discussed), it is always in Latin declesion (e.g. Liberoum for Liberum, rather than the slight Hellenization Liberon). The Egyptian gods, on the other hand, were known by (Hellenized versions of) their native names, not only in the Greek spoken in Egypt, but throughout the Roman empire. Isis, Osiris and Sarapis were as familiar as the gods of Homer, and many others (Anubis, Thoth, Harpocrates, etc.) were widely known and worshipped. Texts from Egypt, including the Greek Magical Papyri, show that some equivalences, like that of Hermes and Thoth or Phre (Ra) and Helios, were very popular, but even these were not complete conflations, and they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
In his discussions of Isis, Osiris, Aion and Horus, Damascius conforms to this picture. Isis requires no glossation, Osiris receives one but its validity is left open; Helios (in 76E) is given a Greek name following Egyptian practice, and only Aion is seen as in need of an explanation (which is not a reductionist one, however, and given by a native rather than invented by Damascius.)
Arabia.
Damascius tells us about two Arabian gods - one, Theandrites ("God-man-ites"), he regards as a patron of masculine virtue: the name explains the god. The other, Dusares, is treated simply as the Nabataean name of Dionysus. Too little of the context is extant to explain why.
Syria and Phoenicia.
Damascius knows the Syrian goddess Babia from his own hometown of Damascus - he probably doesn't gloss her name because she was given no gloss in his household either? -, and he knows that El, Bel and Bolathes are translated as Kronos both in Syria and (at least in the case of El) in Phoenicia. In Berytus, it seems likely that Bel was rather translated as Zeus (as in Philo of Byblos), but on the other hand the "Zeus Belus" of Greek literary sources is also something of an imposition of Herodotus' account of an unrelated but similarly-named Babylonian god on the realities of Syrian cult. It may be that locally, the equivalence with Kronos was actually more widespread. With Gennaios, whom Eusebius apparently introduced to Isidore and Damascius without giving a Greek equivalent, Damascius does not look for one.
Finally, in Berytus, which seems to have preserved both its Phoenician traditions and traditional Greek equivalencies, Damascius reports these very neutrally. Esmunus and the other children of Sadycus (for whom, like Philo of Byblos, he gives no Greek counterpart) are "translated as" Asclepius and as the Dioscuri or Cabri, respectively. Astronoe is "Astronoe, a Phoenician goddess, Mother of the Gods" - an equivalence that he could have chosen to express in much more theologically rigid language. With Esmunus himself, he makes it clear that he is not the same Asclepius as the Greek and the Egyptian one.
Palestine.
See on 97A.
Phrygia.
The Apollo of Phrygian Hierapolis is a local Apollo in almost exactly the way that the Asclepius of Athens is local to his sanctuary. The Phrygian Mother, like Sarapis, is local yet universal; that Damascius uses the Latin word "Hilaria" shows that his Meter is really a pan-Roman goddess, not a provincial or in any way exotic one.
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