Plotinus

An Egyptian-born Greek who taught in Rome from 244 and did not begin writing until he was nearly fifty. He held that all things flow from a source beyond being and beyond name — the One — through Intellect and Soul into the visible world, and that a life's work is to turn back along that road. He almost never spoke of himself, and by his student's account would not sit for a portrait, on the grounds that the body was already an image and a picture of it would be an image of an image.

The headwater of the whole channel. The Tree's emanation scheme is not like his — it is downstream of it, by a route this pack can name station by station.