“Any person… has been naturally prepared by the heavens for some kind of decent life and work. So anyone who wants help from the heavens should start by taking that work in and living that way, and then, since the heavens favour their own projects, …should keep doing this diligently. Nature has made you more for this work than anything else—the thing that you do, discuss, desire, devise, dream and mimic from your early years. Trying it more often, finishing it more easily, you have your best success at it, enjoying it more than anything else and not wanting to stop doing it. This, of course, is what the heavens …produced you for.”
(Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.23
“…those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.”
(Plotinus, Ennead IV.3.11)
“Whenever …we think we have a fix on reality, we will find when we look again that the image, concept, or formulation we proudly hold up is an empty mask whose living daimon has already slipped away. The nature of the daimon tells us …that reality is better represented by concrete, personified images than abstract and impersonal concepts. If we want to catch them, we cannot use plodding logic or precise rationality; we have to use our own quickest, most highly coloured, shape shifting faculty: imagination”
(Patrick Harpur, Seeing Things: The Daimonic Nature of Reality)
