Incubi, Succubi & The Platonic Eros of the Daemons

The Real Meaning of the Erotic Connection Between Humans and Gods

author: High Priest Zevios Metathronos

Plato, Symposium 202e:

Ἑρμηνεῦον καὶ διαπορθμεῦον θεοῖς τὰ παρ᾽ ἀνθρώπων καὶ ἀνθρώποις τὰ παρὰ θεῶν, τῶν μὲν τὰς δεήσεις καὶ θυσίας, τῶν δὲ τὰς ἐπιτάξεις τε καὶ ἀμοιβὰς τῶν θυσιῶν, ἐν μέσῳ δὲ ὂν ἀμφοτέρων συμπληροῖ, ὥστε τὸ πᾶν αὐτὸ αὑτῷ συνδεδέσθαι.¹

"Interpreting and conveying to the Gods what comes from humans, and to humans what comes from the Gods: from humans their entreaties and sacrifices, from the Gods their commands and rewards for sacrifice. Being in the middle of both, it fills the gap, so that the whole is bound together as one."

This is what Plato said about daemons. Read it carefully. There is nothing sexual in it. There is nothing carnal, nothing predatory, nothing remotely resembling a nocturnal visitation by a female entity who drains semen from sleeping men to breed demon children. Plato's daimon is an intermediary: a spiritual being that carries prayers upward and divine ordinances downward, binding the cosmos into unity. The word he used for its function was eros, and the word meant attraction toward the divine, the soul's longing for wisdom, beauty, and the Good. It did not mean copulation with a spirit.

The entire concept of the "incubus" and "succubus" as sexual demons does not exist in the Ancient World. It is not Greek. It is not Egyptian. It is not Mesopotamian in its developed form. It is a medieval Christian fabrication, built on a deliberate mistranslation of Plato, filtered through rabbinic sexual hysteria, weaponized by Church theologians who needed sexuality itself to be demonic, and eventually adopted by occultists, Left Hand Path practitioners, and internet pornographers who found the mythology commercially and psychologically useful.

This page traces the complete genealogy of the lie, from Plato's text to Aquinas's semen-collecting demons, from the Talmud's Lilith to the modern "succubus meditation" videos on YouTube. Every link in the chain is documented. Every claim is sourced. And the real meaning of the "erotic" connection between humans and daemons, as understood in Zevism and in the genuine Platonic tradition, is restored at the end.

I. The Ancient World: No Sexual Demons

Let this be stated without qualification: neither Ancient Greece nor Ancient Egypt produced the concept of a daemon or spirit whose primary function was to have sexual intercourse with human beings.

Greece had daemons. The word δαίμων appears in Homer, Hesiod, Plato, and the entire philosophical tradition. In Homer, a daimon is a divine power, sometimes synonymous with θεός (god), sometimes a vaguer numinous influence that shapes events. In Hesiod's Works and Days, the daimones are the spirits of the Golden Race, elevated after death to serve as guardians of mortals and watchers over justice and injustice. Their function is protective and juridical, not sexual.

Hesiod, Works and Days 121–123:

τοὶ μὲν δαίμονές εἰσι Διὸς μεγάλου διὰ βουλάς, ἐσθλοί, ἐπιχθόνιοι, φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.²

"These are daimones by the will of great Zeus: noble, upon the earth, guardians of mortal humans."

Guardians. Not seducers. Not nocturnal visitors. Not collectors of semen. Hesiod's daimones watch over human affairs, observe justice, and distribute wealth. Their relationship with mortals is one of oversight and protection. There is nothing carnal in any line Hesiod wrote about them.

Egypt had its own spiritual taxonomy. The Egyptians recognized netjeru (gods), akhu (blessed spirits of the dead), mutu (dangerous spirits of the unquiet dead), and various entities that could cause illness or misfortune. The Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead contain extensive catalogues of entities the soul might encounter in the Duat. None of them are described as sexually predatory in the manner of the later incubus or succubus. Egyptian demonology, as documented by Kasia Szpakowska (Behind Closed Eyes: Dreams and Nightmares in Ancient Egypt, 2003) and Robert Ritner (The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 1993), includes entities that cause nightmares, illness, and infertility, but the sexual demon as a class of being is absent from the Egyptian corpus.

The Mesopotamian tradition does include the lilitu and ardat lili, female spirits associated with wind and desolation, and these are distant ancestors of the later Jewish Lilith. But the Mesopotamian lilitu is a storm spirit, a bringer of disease, a haunter of desert places. She is not primarily a sexual entity. The sexual dimension was added later, in rabbinic Judaism, for reasons we will examine.

The point is categorical: the Ancient World produced no systematic concept of a spiritual being whose purpose was to copulate with humans. Individual myths contain divine-human sexual encounters (Zeus and mortals, Aphrodite and Anchises), but these are theogamies, unions between gods and humans, not demonic predation. The god arrives in glory. The union produces heroes (Heracles, Aeneas). The framing is sacred, not horrific. No ancient Greek would have recognized the concept of a "sex demon" as described by Thomas Aquinas.

II. Plato's Daimon: What Eros Actually Means

The critical text is Plato's Symposium, specifically the speech of Diotima (201d–212c), which Socrates reports as the source of his understanding of Eros. Diotima teaches that Eros is not a god but a daimon, a "great spirit" (δαίμων μέγας) that occupies the space between gods and mortals.

Plato, Symposium 202d–e:

Τί οὖν, ἔφην, ὦ Διοτίμα; Δαίμων μέγας, ὦ Σώκρατες· καὶ γὰρ πᾶν τὸ δαιμόνιον μεταξύ ἐστι θεοῦ τε καὶ θνητοῦ.³

"What then is he, Diotima? A great daimon, Socrates. For everything daimonic is between god and mortal."

Diotima's teaching is precise. The daimon occupies the metaxy, the "between." Its function is hermeneutic: it interprets and conveys. Upward, it carries human prayers and sacrifices to the gods. Downward, it brings divine commands and rewards to humans. It is, in Plato's language, what makes the cosmos a unified whole rather than two disconnected realms.

The eros of this daimon is not sexual desire. It is the soul's longing for what it lacks: beauty, wisdom, goodness, immortality. Diotima's famous "ladder of love" (210a–211d) describes a progressive ascent from the love of a single beautiful body, to the love of beautiful souls, to the love of beautiful knowledge, and finally to the vision of Beauty itself, the Form that exists eternally and is never born or destroyed. The entire trajectory moves away from the physical and toward the noetic. The sexual starting point is not the destination. It is the first rung on a ladder that leads to philosophical contemplation.

Eros in Plato is cognate with Hermes. Both are intermediaries. Both move between realms. Both facilitate communication between the divine and the human. The word ἔρως itself, in its Platonic usage, denotes attraction, longing, desire for completion. It is the force that draws the soul upward. It is emphatically not a euphemism for sexual intercourse with a spirit.

This distinction is essential because it is precisely here that the mistranslation occurs. When later Christian writers encountered Plato's daimon and its "erotic" function, they had already decided that (a) all pagan daimones were fallen angels, and (b) all erotic desire was sinful unless confined to procreative marriage. The combination of these two premises produced the incubus: a fallen angel driven by sexual desire toward human victims. This entity has no ancestor in Plato. It is a Christian invention projected backward onto a text that says the opposite of what they claim.

III. The Christian Corruption: How Daemons Became Sex Demons

The transformation required three steps, each performed by a different generation of Christian theologians.

Step One: All Daimones Are Fallen Angels. This move was made in the earliest Christian centuries. The Septuagint had already translated certain Hebrew terms with δαιμόνιον, giving the word a negative charge it had never carried in classical Greek. The Church Fathers completed the inversion. Justin Martyr (First Apology, ca. 155 CE) declared that the Greek gods were demons who had deceived humanity. Tertullian (Apology, ca. 197 CE) insisted that all pagan oracles were the work of fallen angels. Augustine (City of God VIII.14–22, ca. 413–426 CE) systematized the position: all pagan daimones, including Plato's intermediary spirits, were in fact demons, evil spirits who had rebelled against the Christian God and now worked to deceive and corrupt human beings.

The classical Greek daimon, which Plato had explicitly defined as an intermediary between gods and mortals performing a cosmically necessary function, was recast as a predatory fallen angel. This is not translation. It is theological hijacking.

Step Two: Sexuality Is Evil Unless Sacramentally Licensed. Christianity developed, from its earliest period, a systematic hostility toward sexuality that has no parallel in the Greek or Egyptian religious traditions. Paul's grudging concession that "it is better to marry than to burn" (1 Corinthians 7:9) established the framework: sexual desire is a fire, a danger, a thing to be contained. Augustine's doctrine of original sin tied human sexuality to the Fall: concupiscence, the disordered desire of the flesh, was the means by which Adam's sin was transmitted to every subsequent generation. The sexual act itself became the vehicle of damnation.

In this theological environment, any phenomenon that produced sexual arousal outside of marital intercourse had to be demonic. Nocturnal emissions, erotic dreams, unexplained arousal, sexual fantasies: all of these ordinary physiological events required a demonic explanation, because the theology could not permit them to be natural.

Step Three: If Sexuality Is Demonic, Demons Must Be Sexual. The logic is circular but inevitable. If sexuality is the domain of evil, and demons are the agents of evil, then demons must operate through sexuality. The incubus and succubus are the logical products of this reasoning. They exist because the theology requires them to exist. They fill a necessary role in a system that has declared war on human sexuality and needs an enemy to blame.

Augustine addressed the question directly in City of God XV.23, where he discussed Genesis 6:1–4 (the "sons of God" taking the "daughters of men") and conceded that certain "sylvans and fauns, commonly called incubi" were reported to have molested women. Thomas Aquinas formalized the mechanism in the Summa Theologica (I, Q.51, A.3), arguing that demons could assume bodies, collect semen from men (as succubi), and deposit it in women (as incubi), thereby facilitating conception without possessing biological generative power of their own.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, Q.51, A.3:

"If sometimes children are born from intercourse with demons, this is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but through the seed taken from some man for this purpose; seeing that the same demon who acts as a succubus for a man becomes an incubus for a woman."⁴

Read this carefully. A 13th century theologian, widely regarded as the greatest intellect of medieval Christendom, devoted serious scholarly attention to the question of how demons transport semen between human beings. This is what happens when a theological system declares sexuality to be fundamentally evil: its best minds spend their energy constructing elaborate mechanisms for demonic semen logistics.

The entire edifice rests on nothing. There is no ancient source for any of it. Plato's daimon does not collect semen. Hesiod's guardians do not visit women at night. Homer's divine beings do not prey on sleeping men. The incubus and succubus are medieval inventions, produced by a religion that hated sexuality and needed to blame its own arousal on something external.

IV. The Rabbinic Root: Lilith, Sexual Repression, and Insanity

Christianity did not invent the sexual demon alone. It had a partner: rabbinic Judaism, which produced Lilith.

The only biblical reference to Lilith is Isaiah 34:14, where the word לילית appears in a list of creatures inhabiting a desolated wilderness. The Septuagint translates it as ὀνοκένταυρος (a creature of the wild); other translations render it as "screech owl" or "night creature." There is no sexual content in the Isaiah passage whatsoever. Lilith, in the Hebrew Bible, is a desert animal or an atmospheric spirit. She is not a seductress, not a collector of semen, not a succubus.

The Babylonian Talmud changed this. The key passage is Shabbat 151b:

BT Shabbat 151b:

"Rabbi Hanina said: It is forbidden to sleep alone in a house, for whoever sleeps alone in a house, Lilith seizes him."⁵

Here is the moment when a desert spirit from Isaiah becomes a nocturnal sexual predator. The Talmud does not explain how or why this transformation occurred. But the logic is clear enough: the rabbis needed an explanation for nocturnal emissions that did not implicate the dreamer in sin. If a man emits semen in his sleep, it cannot be his fault (for that would imply sexual sin on the part of a pious scholar). Therefore a demon must have caused it. The demon must be female, because the emission is sexual. The demon must be beautiful, because the dream is arousing. The demon must be evil, because sexuality outside of procreative marriage is evil.

Lilith is a projection of rabbinic sexual anxiety onto a mythological screen. She does not exist in any text before the rabbis needed her to exist. Her function is to externalize arousal: "It was not I who desired. Lilith visited me. I am blameless."

The Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah (compiled ca. 13th century CE), amplified Lilith into a cosmic principle of female evil:

Zohar 19b:

"She roams at night, and goes all about the world and makes sport with men and causes them to emit seed. In every place where a man sleeps alone in a house, she visits him and grabs him and attaches herself to him and has her desire from him, and bears from him."⁶

This passage is presented as mystical wisdom. It is in fact the documented fantasy of sexually repressed men, written in an era when rabbinic scholars were forbidden to look at women, forbidden to touch women outside of marriage, forbidden to experience sexual arousal without guilt, and yet biologically incapable of stopping nocturnal emissions. The Lilith mythology is the theological byproduct of celibate men who could not reconcile their physiology with their theology and chose to blame a female demon rather than admit that human bodies function as human bodies function.

V. Rabbah Bar Bar Hana and the Talmudic Fantasy World

The Talmudic treatment of demons and supernatural beings reaches its most revealing expression in the aggadot (tales) of Rabbah bar bar Hana, recorded in Baba Batra 73a–74a. These tales, sometimes called the adventures of "the Jewish Sinbad," describe encounters with giant frogs as large as fortresses, fish so enormous that sixty cities could eat from a single specimen, and birds whose ankles reached the floor of the ocean. Among the creatures encountered is "Hormiz bar Lilitha," the son of Lilith herself, described as a being encountered on the sea journeys.

The Talmud records that Rabbah's contemporaries were not impressed. Baba Batra 74a preserves the reaction: "Every Abba is an ass and every bar bar Hana is a fool." Even within the rabbinic world, these tales were recognized as fantastical to the point of absurdity. Later commentators (the Vilna Gaon, Rav Kook, Maharsha) insisted they were allegories, but the plain reading is clear enough: these are tall tales produced by a scholarly class that had lost contact with the physical world and compensated with increasingly elaborate supernatural mythologies.

The broader pattern is significant. The same Talmudic culture that produced Lilith the succubus also produced stories about mermaid-like sea creatures, demonic offspring, and scholars who encountered supernatural beings on their travels. This is the cultural soil from which the "sex demon" grew: a world of extreme sexual repression, limited contact with the natural sciences, near-total male scholarly dominance over religious discourse, and a theological need to externalize every uncomfortable bodily function onto demonic agents.

When this material merged with Christian demonology in the medieval period, the result was explosive. Christian theologians who already believed that all pagan spirits were fallen angels now had Jewish sources confirming that female demons attacked men sexually. The two traditions reinforced each other's worst instincts, and the incubus-succubus mythology solidified into the form we know today: demons who visit humans at night for the purpose of sexual intercourse, draining their life force and corrupting their souls.

VI. The Assembly Line: From Medieval Theology to Modern Occultism

The migration path from medieval demonology to modern occultism is direct and traceable.

The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the infamous witch-hunting manual, devoted extensive sections to incubi and succubi. Heinrich Kramer, its author, was obsessed with female sexuality and convinced that witches copulated with demons. The Malleus was the bridge between theological speculation and judicial murder: real women were tortured and burned on the basis of this mythology.

The early modern grimoire tradition inherited the demonological framework. The Ars Goetia, the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, and related texts catalogued 72 demons with specific powers and attributes, but notably did not assign any of them the function of sexual predation. The Goetic spirits were summoned for knowledge, treasure, military assistance, and political power. The "sex demon" remained a theological rather than a practical magical concept.

The Left Hand Path traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries absorbed the incubus-succubus mythology through three channels. First, through the "Satanic" inversion of Christianity, which accepted the Christian demonological framework wholesale and simply reversed the moral polarity (what Christianity called evil, these movements called liberating). Second, through Aleister Crowley and the Thelemic tradition, which treated sexual magic as a genuine spiritual technology and borrowed freely from both grimoire demonology and Kabbalistic imagery. Third, through popular occultism and horror fiction, which found the "sex demon" commercially profitable and psychologically compelling.

By the late 20th century, the "succubus experience" had become a fixture of internet occultism, complete with guided meditations, "summoning" rituals, and community forums where practitioners reported "relationships" with succubus entities. The phenomenon is a layered deception: a medieval Christian fabrication, built on a rabbinic projection, built on a mistranslation of Plato, now consumed by people who believe they are practicing authentic ancient magic while actually performing the fantasies of sexually repressed monks and rabbis.

VII. The Spiritual Damage: Why This Matters

The incubus-succubus mythology is not merely historically false. It is spiritually destructive in specific and documentable ways.

It replaces real divine connection with masturbatory fantasy. A person who believes they are in a "relationship" with a succubus is not engaging with any spiritual reality. They are engaging with their own imagination, possibly augmented by sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations, or deliberate self-suggestion. The "entity" they believe they are interacting with is a projection of their own sexual desire onto a mythological framework that was invented to explain nocturnal emissions in 13th-century Europe.

It trains the practitioner to associate spiritual experience with sexual arousal. This conditioning is the exact opposite of what genuine spiritual practice does. The Platonic tradition, the Egyptian mysteries, the Vedic system, and every serious initiatory tradition in human history teaches that spiritual ascent requires the refinement of desire, not its indulgence. The "ladder of love" in Plato's Symposium moves from physical desire to philosophical contemplation. The succubus mythology inverts this: it tells the practitioner that the ultimate spiritual experience is sexual, that union with a spirit is copulation, that the goal of practice is arousal. This trains the soul downward, not upward.

It creates dependency on a fantasy. Practitioners who "develop relationships" with succubus entities frequently report emotional attachment, jealousy, inability to form human relationships, social isolation, and psychological disturbance. These are not the marks of genuine spiritual development. They are the marks of dissociative fantasy behavior, reinforced by a community that validates the delusion. The spiritual harm is real: time, energy, and psychic attention that could have been directed toward genuine growth are consumed by an elaborate performance that produces nothing except increasingly detached internal experience.

It perpetuates the Christian demonization of the Gods. Every person who "summons a succubus" and treats it as a "demon" is operating within the Christian theological framework, whether they realize it or not. They have accepted the Christian premise that spiritual beings are predatory, that interaction with them is transgressive, that the experience should be hidden and shameful. Even practitioners who claim to be "Satanists" or "Left Hand Path" are performing Christianity in negative: they have accepted every Christian category and simply reversed the moral sign. This is not freedom from Christianity. It is Christianity's shadow, and it perpetuates the very framework that slandered the ancient Gods in the first place.

VIII. The Real Eros: The Zevist Understanding of Daemonic Connection

Zevism returns to the original Platonic and Hellenic understanding. The "erotic" connection between humans and daemons is real, but it is not sexual. The word ἔρως, as Plato used it and as Zevism inherits it, means attraction, longing, the force that draws the soul toward the divine. It is cognate with the function of Hermes, the intermediary, the guide of souls, the one who moves between worlds. The eros of the daimon is the pull that the divine exerts on the human soul, and the pull that the human soul exerts upward toward the divine.

Plato, Symposium 203a:

Διὰ τούτου καὶ ἡ μαντικὴ πᾶσα χωρεῖ καὶ ἡ τῶν ἱερέων τέχνη τῶν τε περὶ τὰς θυσίας καὶ τὰς τελετὰς καὶ τὰς ἐπῳδὰς καὶ τὴν μαντείαν πᾶσαν καὶ γοητείαν.⁷

"Through this [the daimonic] passes all divination and the priestly art: sacrifice, initiation, incantation, prophecy, and all of magic."

Notice what passes through the daimonic realm: divination, priestcraft, sacrifice, initiation, prophecy, theurgy. Not sex. The entire domain of sacred practice operates through the intermediary function of the daimon, and its engine is eros understood as spiritual attraction.

In Zevism, this connection is cultivated through meditation, ritual, vibration of sacred names, and the refinement of consciousness. When a Zevist experiences the presence of a God or Daemon during ritual, the experience may include intense emotional states: awe, gratitude, joy, a sense of vastness, a feeling of being held or guided. These are the marks of genuine spiritual contact. They are "erotic" in the Platonic sense: they are experiences of attraction toward the divine, of the soul recognizing its source and longing to return. They are not sexual, and framing them as sexual degrades them into something they are not.

Iamblichus, the Neoplatonic theurgist whose De Mysteriis is one of the foundational texts of genuine theurgic practice, was explicit about this distinction:

Iamblichus, De Mysteriis III.31:

"The divine is not drawn down to the level of our passions. Rather, we are drawn up by the divine fire to the level of the Gods. The union (ἕνωσις) that theurgy produces is not a meeting of bodies but a communion of the soul with its divine source."⁸

The theurgist ascends. The theurgist does not wait in bed for a demon to descend. The direction matters. Ascent toward the Gods, through purification, through virtue, through the disciplined practice of sacred rites, is the Zevist path. Descent into fantasy, into self-stimulated hallucination, into the pornographic mythology of medieval Christianity, is the opposite of that path.

The Zevist who vibrates the name ΖΗΝΙΑΩΘΑΡΡΑΘΩΑΙΝΗΖ is not summoning a sexual partner. The Zevist is establishing a connection with the divine order, aligning the soul with the Strategos, opening the channel through which prayer ascends and divine guidance descends. The eros of this practice is the eros of the Symposium: the force that lifts the soul from the particular to the universal, from the body to the Form, from ignorance to knowledge, from mortality to participation in the divine.

This is what the Ancient World actually taught. This is what Plato actually wrote. This is what the daimon actually is. Everything else is medieval fanfiction, and the fact that it has been adopted by millions of people across occult, "Satanic," and Left Hand Path communities does not make it true. It makes it popular. Popularity and truth are different things, and in this case they are opposite things.

Conclusion: It Never Existed

The incubus and succubus do not exist in the Ancient World. They do not exist in Greek religion, Greek philosophy, Egyptian theology, Egyptian magic, or any genuine pre-Christian spiritual tradition. They are fabrications, produced by the collision of three forces: Christian demonization of pagan spirits, rabbinic sexual repression projected onto mythological entities, and the theological requirement that sexuality be evil and therefore demonic.

The genealogy is clear:

Plato described a daimon whose function was spiritual intermediation, and called its motive force eros, meaning the soul's attraction to the divine. Christian translators inherited the word daimon, declared all daimones to be fallen angels, and reinterpreted eros as sexual sin. Simultaneously, rabbinic Judaism produced Lilith, a succubus figure constructed from a desert animal in Isaiah, inflated by the needs of sexually anxious scholars who required an external explanation for their nocturnal emissions. Medieval Christianity merged both streams in the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, producing the formal theology of the incubus and succubus: demons who collect and deposit semen, who seduce the sleeping, who corrupt through carnal intercourse. The Reformation and the witch trials weaponized this mythology, and real women died because theologians had invented imaginary sex demons. The 19th and 20th century occult revival inherited the entire framework without questioning its Christian origin, and modern "demonolaters" and Left Hand Path practitioners now perform medieval Christian fantasies while believing themselves to be practicing ancient paganism.

It is a lie from foundation to rooftop. No ancient Greek ever imagined a daimon collecting semen. No ancient Egyptian ever described a netjer seducing a sleeping man. No Orphic, no Pythagorean, no Neoplatonist, no theurgist in the entire history of the genuine tradition ever described spiritual practice as sexual intercourse with a spirit. The concept is Christian. The anxiety is rabbinic. The pornography is modern. And the damage it does to people who believe it is real.

The Gods are real. The daemons are real. The connection between humans and the divine is real. But it is a connection of the soul, not of the genitals. It is eros in Plato's sense: the upward pull, the longing for the Good, the force that binds the cosmos into unity through the intermediary function of beings who carry prayers upward and divine will downward. When you feel the presence of a God during ritual, that is eros. When the vibration of a sacred name produces a shift in your consciousness, that is the daimonic intermediary at work. When you meditate and the boundaries of the self become permeable to something larger, that is the metaxy, the "between" that Diotima described to Socrates twenty-four centuries ago.

Honor that experience. Do not degrade it into the fantasies of men who feared their own bodies. The Ancient World deserves better. The Gods deserve better. You deserve better.

Plato, Timaeus 90a:

τὸ δὲ δὴ περὶ τοῦ κυριωτάτου παρ᾽ ἡμῖν ψυχῆς εἴδους διανοεῖσθαι δεῖ τῇδε, ὡς ἄρα αὐτὸ δαίμονα θεὸς ἑκάστῳ δέδωκεν.⁹

"Concerning the highest form of soul within us, one must understand it thus: that God has given it to each person as a daimon."

The daimon is within you. It is the highest part of your soul. It is not a visitor to your bed. It is the divine element that Plato said God placed in every human being, and its eros is the pull toward the stars.