“Do not invoke the self-manifesting image of Physis.” The Chaldaean Oracles instruct the theurgist to avoid the face of the moon, as Proclus identifies the self-manifesting image of Physis [Nature]. “Do not look upon Physis!” says another Oracle, “For her name is like Fate.” In the so-called Mithras Liturgy, a spell for immortalization contained in the Great Paris Magical Papyrus, the magician seems to heed the advice of the Oracles, for the ritual preparations are carefully timed to avoid the presence of the moon in the sky, and the magician does not see the moon during his ascent through the heavens to a meeting with the supreme god. Why must the theurgist take such precautions and carefully bypass the power of the moon? By contrast, Emperor Julian's Selene shows a beneficent face to the sleeping world below: “Selene beholds the intelligible which is higher than the heavens and adorns with its forms the realm of matter that lies below her, and thus she does away with its savagery and confusion and disorder.” Likewise, Plutarch claims that the face in the moon is the face of the prophetic sibyl, and the moon is the necessary way station for the soul in Plutarch's myth of the soul's ascent in De facie. The theurgists, however, are not the only testimony to the moon's terrifying face.