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The word sema principally stands for "sign", therefore the body (soma) may be understood as a means by which the soul indicates (semainei) its eidetic paradigm and the goal to be achieved. Likewise, sema is an enclosure (peribolos), the morphic frame of the soul: it keeps the soul within its limits that it may be saved (hina sozetai).

The Egyptian term sia is difficult to render. However, Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks maintain that it designates the special noetic faculty "that enabled the gods to perceive an event the instant it occurred, together with the reason for its occurrence"

Human learning may be contrasted to the divine omniscience
as discursive reasoning is to Neoplatonic intellection (noesis).

Orpheus was considered by the ancient world to be the representative of cultic music .... Music had the same character of epiclesis. It was supposed to "call down" the good gods ...

Likewise, the (elletu) Ishtar, the prototype of the Orphic
Persephone, elevates the soul and reintegrates it into the "Pythagorean" decad of the Assyrian sacred tree. This reintegration is analogous to the baqa of the Sufis.

Likewise in Neoplatonism, the dialectical and telestic becoming like the divine (homoiosin) leads to unification (he arrhetos henosis) with the god through the contemplation of his
animated statue, for the telestic art makes the statues in the
here below (ta tede agalmata) to be like the gods by means of
symbols and mysterious theurgic tokens

The Old Babylonian gods grant prophetic revelations only in the sanctuary. Dreams may occur at other places, but prophecy, properly speaking, is confined to the temple .... When a god speaks directly through the mouth of a prophet, the latter utters the prophecy first in the temple.

Even the ancient Hebrew "prophet" (nabi), in its initial context, may appear simply "as a courier for an important letter passed between two politically interested parties, perhaps coconspirators of some sort".

The prototypal "winged souls" of the Neoplatonic "golden
chain" (chruse seira) were Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato.