Note 15 — INTRODUCTION.

Proclus begins the sixth book of the following work with observing that he has celebrated in the preceding book the hebdomadic æon of the intellectual Gods. The æones therefore, though the cause of them exists in the intelligible, properly belong to the intellectual order; and the Demiurgus or artificer of the universe subsists at the extremity of that order. But the demiurgus according to Orpheus, prior to the fabrication of the world absorbed in himself Phanes the exemplar of the universe. Hence he became full of ideas of which the forms in the sensible universe are the images. And as all intellectual natures are in each, it is evident that things which are seen were generated from the invisible æones, conformably to the assertion of Paul.