Plutarch’s Theory of Cosmological Powers in the “De Iside et Osiride”

The Platonic section of the De Iside (chapters 45–64) offers a complex account of Plutarch’s theory of cosmological principles. In this paper I shall supplement conventional interpretations and set out to demonstrate that: Osiris is the whole of the “positive” and ordering powers operating within the actual (that is, post-creational) world; Typhon is not the pre-cosmic soul, but the negative and destructive powers at work within it; Isis is not mere matter or the world soul, but the world soul as the material “battlefield” for opposite powers in the world; the object of Plutarch’s analysis is not the pre-cosmic world, but the post-creational stage. Finally, I shall explain the logic of Plutarch’s account, which fits with the literary genre he develops in this text.