This chapter examines the reception of Plato’s take on cosmology and religion in the works of the Early Academy. It argues that the Academics continued to develop the theology of Ouranos, who remained the primary cosmic god in their cosmological systems. They also moved towards a tighter union of the traditional and cosmic gods. Philip of Opus used the identities of the traditional gods to uncover the divinity in planets and stars, while Xenocrates extended the procedure of religious naming to all ontological and cosmological principles, thus fully assimilating the traditional gods with the philosophical gods. Finally, their moral systems adopted a strongly intellectualist version of the ideal of godlikeness, according to which only the cosmological beings can be the ethical role models.

One of Plato’s successors, Xenocrates (395–314 BCE), envisioned the human soul as daimonic after death but still subject to fluctuating emotions. He proposed a kind of purgatory in the region below the moon. Daimones who became pure from negative affections traveled from moon to sun to become daimonic minds, ideas more fully developed by Plutarch, Apuleius of Madauros (about 124–190 CE), and Maximus of Tyre (about 180 CE).