Iamblichus

A Syrian Platonist who broke with Porphyry over a single question: can contemplation alone raise the soul? He said no — the soul has descended too far to think its way home. The gods seeded matter, names and rites with tokens of themselves, and acting rightly with those tokens does what the intellect cannot. He called it theurgy, "divine work."

He drew the line this entire app stands on, seventeen hundred years early: the rite works because the divine already reached down, so the practitioner participates in a descent freely offered. Magic attempts to compel. Participation versus coercion — Tehiru's whole boundary, in a letter to a sceptical friend.