The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination [Hardcover]

Patrick Harpur (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2002

The visionary tradition of spirits, gods, and demons continues to subvert our rational universe, erupting from the shadows in times of intense religious and philosophical transition. In this dazzling history, Patrick Harpur links together fields as far apart as Greek philosophy and depth psychology, Renaissance magic and tribal ritual, Romantic poetry and the ecstasy of the shaman, to trace how societies have used myths to make sense of the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This fascinating book provides a historical look at the expressions of human imagination and how ideas of reality have been shaped over time. Harpur (Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld) examines a wide range of imaginary creatures and concepts, including those found in folklore and mythology, religion and philosophy, poetry and drama, spiritualism and psychology. He thoughtfully presents traditions from around the world and illustrates the cultural similarities and symbolic role each plays in society and for the individual. The author demonstrates that in modern times beliefs have moved away from explanations based on the supernatural toward an overreliance on scientific interpretations. However, he also shows that even scientific methods and models rely on the imagination and that new concepts of reality continue to be created. The book is scholarly in tone, presenting a wealth of literary allusions and erudite analysis. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.
Eloise R. Hitchcock, Middle Tennessee State Univ. Lib., Murfreesboro
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

British writer Harpur, author of Daimonic Reality (1994), is a passionate explorer of the vast, varied, and vital Otherworld, the realm of spirit, soul, archetype, and the imagination, and he begins this fluent, wildly inclusive, and exponentially thought-provoking tour of the wellspring of myths (which by his bold definition include folktales, religion, and science) by introducing an assortment of the realm's magical denizens, beings who mediate between the human and the divine, such as fairies, jinn, and mythological heroes. But Harpur's main mission is to trace the course of Western civilization's effort to turn "the Otherworld into an intellectual abstraction," and relocate in our psyches what was for eons envisioned as an integral aspect of nature. A learned and holistic thinker, Harpur excavates the "root metaphors" in everything from shamans' dreams to Plato's concept of the soul of the world, the Kabbalah, Greek myths, Jungian psychology, and the theories of evolution and particle physics. Whatever readers may make of Harpur's intriguing, even daring interpretations, the truth that emerges is while myths change, the great mysteries remain the same. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (November 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566634857
• ISBN-13: 978-1566634854
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #727,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Mythologist Revisits the Wide World of Imagination, January 19, 2003

By 

Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Hardcover)

Rilke once wrote: "Don't kill my demons, you might kill my angels too." This aphorism could serve as the epitaph of Patrick Harpur's new book, The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination.

Harpur, who lives in Dorchester, England, is the author of The Timetable of Technology (1982); Mercurius; or The Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1990); and Daimonic Activity: A Field Guide to the Otherworld (1994).

In The Philosophers' Secret Fire, Harpur revisits "the Otherworld," a realm of imagination--of mythology and folklore, metaphor and analogy, spirit and soul. It is a world celebrated by Plato and neo-Platonists; by shamans and soothsayers; by alchemists and magi; by mystics (Jacob Boehme and St. John of the Cross); by Romantic poets (William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and W. B. Yeats); and by the psychologist C. G. Jung.

The burden of Harpur's message is that modern man has lost his soul. The spiritual hubris of his literalism, materialism, rationalism, and scientism has separated him not only from his own "soul, but also from Nature and from the "World Soul," which permeates the cosmos and which, in a pantheistic sense, is the cosmos.

Two of the Synoptic Gospels record "The Parable of the Haunted House" (Matthew 12:43-45; Luke 11:24-26): "When an evil spirit leaves a person, it goes into the desert, seeking rest but finding none. So it returns and finds that its former home swept and clean, but empty. Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there. And so that person is worse off than before."

Mythologically and psychologically speaking, asserts Harpur, this has happened to modern man, who has exalted quantity, but exorcised quality; who has explored the heights of outer space, but has starved his inner self. Arid and empty, he is easy prey to the daemons he has denied, which revisit him with a vengeance because of his repressions.

Harpur takes pains in his disclaimers: that he is not a latter-day Luddite; that he is not debunking science or reason, but only their doctrinaire permutations of scientism and rationalism; that his book is not "loony," "stupid," or "drivel" (as Richard Dawkins describes The Facts of Life, in which a science writer questions the scientific validity of the theory of evolution).

Harpur argues strenuously that modern man must cultivate his aesthetic appreciation of beauty, must transcend the secular with the sacred, must reconnect with the depths of his psyche, and must develop a "double vision"--the ability to appreciate the ambiguities and paradoxes of life, to embrace a both/and, holistic monism rather than an either/or, alienating dualism, and to become re-enchanted with the "awe"-some mysteries and wonders of the universe.

Only by recapturing the visionary tradition of spirits, gods, and daimons, and embracing the truths expressed by the myths of Renaissance magic and alchemy, tribal ritual, Romantic poetry, and the ecstasy of the shaman, asserts Harpur, can we escape the meaninglessness and despair of our nihilistic culture.

Philosophical idealists, neo-Platonists, and "New Age" theosophists will applaud The Philosophers' Secret Fire. Philosophical materialists will ridicule it as atavistic, delusional, neurotic, and superstitious.

Harpur's debunking of rationalism and scientism seems valid. For, as Einstein once said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Harpur agrees.

However, like C. G. Jung, one of his heroes, Harpur spreads his net of neo-Gnostic credulity too far asea. Does he really wish to deny that the earth revolves around the sun? Either it does or it doesn't; a symbolic "both/and" approach strikes this reviewer as bizarre.

Harpur's book is rich in folklore and mythology, one of the best books available on the subject; his explication of metaphorical and analogical communication is fascinating; and his psychological insights are pregnant with meaning.

However, as a system of metaphysics and cosmology The Philosophers' Secret Fire is intellectually embarrassing. Apparently, Harpur expects us, like Alice in Wonderland, to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Harpur probably would reply, "Such criticism is guilty of the cardinal sin of modern man: literalism."

Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an amateur philosopher, Civil War buff, classical music lover, chess enthusiast, and aficionado of fine literature. He is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville publishing house.

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Thus We Are Initiated By What We Cannot Control", April 21, 2003

By 

J. E. Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Hardcover)

Patrick Harpur's The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (2002) is further hard evidence that Harpur is a bright, complex thinker with a genius for digesting and assimilating complex threads of Western history, philosophy, religion, and science, as his Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld (1994) has already demonstrated. In fact, The Philosopher's Secret Fire reads like a sequel to the first book. While Daimonic Reality dealt directly with cases of paranormal and metaphysical visitation, The Philosopher's Secret Fire underscores and elaborates on the history of Western culture's "golden thread," Harpur's name for the centuries - old ideas, beliefs, and mystical traditions which have attempted to identify, name, and encompass the broadest possible view of the nature of reality. Harpur's work stands as a considerable reproof against books like Daniel Pinchbeck's recent Break Open the Head and other earnest but ill - conceived works which attempt a grasp at the inexplicable.

Beginning with Plato and moving through the Neoplatonists, Christian mystics, Renaissance High Magicians, alchemists, Enlightenment scientists and philosophers, Romantic poets, and 20 - century depth psychologists, Harpur lays down an extremely complex argument in the simplest of language. Plotinus is here, as are Heraclitus, Cornelius Agrippa, Jacob Boehme, John Dee, Paracelsus, Copernicus, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, William Butler Yeats, and Carl Jung, among several dozen others. In Harpur's view, each of these men (no significant female figures are included, leaving readers to speculate about what Harpur has overlooked or dismissed) added important contributions as well as errors in theory to the historical chain of elevated knowledge. With a keen understanding of metaphor, symbol, allegory and other figurative expressions of language, Harpur, working with an incredible overview of timelines, moves from author to author and idea to idea, adding and subtracting conclusions and ultimately building his own very solid equation.

Unlike Daniel Pinchbeck, who argues that natural and artificial hallucinogens are the most reliable method of perceiving and interacting with the world of spirits, Harpur is wise enough to know that thousands of people all over the planet suffer or enjoy unexpected contact with "daimons" - intermediary spirits - every day, and usually without desire, foreknowledge, or belief in their existence. Whether manifesting as phantom animals, fairies, channeled or medium - visiting spirits of the dead, "gypsies on the roof," vanishing hitchhikers, poltergeists, unidentifiable aerial phenomena, voodoo loa, "soul guides," lake monsters, "men in black," hairy humanoids, the "terrors that come in the night," alien "grays," or even the mysterious quasars at the ends of the known universe, Harpur argues that mankind coexists and always has coexisted with these entities throughout time. Natural parts of the reality of the universe, the slippery daimons dwell nowhere and everyone at once: in the Anima Mundi or "soul of the world," in our speculative laws of physics, and in the mankind's conscious and unconscious psyche, specifically in the human imagination (as defined in higher and lower forms by Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Harpur's final argument appears to be that not only is the daimonic world simultaneously "real" and metaphorical, but that everything we call reality is both "real" and metaphorical, including mankind.

Intelligent readers with an active or innate sense of the miraculous will gain the most from The Philosopher's Secret Fire. Reality as portrayed by Harpur is not a sterile, meaningless, stagnant plane at the inevitable mercy of entropy, but a place where "God might at any moment make himself manifest out of the wind or the clouds." Highly recommended, especially those seeking enlightened answers to some of the fundamental questions of Western civilization.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hermetic Labyrinth Leading to the Otherworld, October 31, 2003

By 

OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Hardcover)

While I have read many excellent books in the last few years, I would have to say that this volume is the most profoundly significant of them all. It is profound because it successfully challenges the accepted, modern view of "reality."

This book is a continuation of the ideas explored in the author's previous masterpiece, _Daemonic Reality_. It examines the "Otherworld", the Anima Mundi, or soul of the world. This is the larger Reality that was accepted by all traditional cultures, but which is now rejected, suppressed, and ignored by Western man. Yet, just because it is ignored doesn't mean that it doesn't exist- and doesn't make itself felt in our lives.

While _Daemonic Reality_ emphasized the modern phenomena that seem to represent "break-outs" from the otherworld (UFO's, crypto zoological species, Marian apparitions, angels, etc.), this volume goes into more historical and philosophical depth. It is a round about approach, but then it almost has to be for such a complex and unusual subject. Modern language and mindsets are simply inadequate for the purpose. Indeed, the book appropriately mirrors a hermetic labyrinth in its approach.

Yet debunking the hyper-rational and ultra-materialistic world of modern scientism isn't the foremost objective here. The author is primarily trying to give us some sense of the mind-set of traditional man, of a supernatural world that existed in close communion with the natural world and human society. Our western religious and scientific tradition has driven a wedge between us and both nature and heaven. This is an alien and unbalanced state for a person, or a society. This seems to be why the old immortal daemons periodically break through the veil into our false, shallow, consensus reality. They are trying to awaken us.

Yes, we are truly initiated by what we cannot control....