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

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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.

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.

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....

Patrick Harpur is clearly the willing beneficiary of a classical education and has digested large chunks of social theory. This alone marks him out in today's world. Coupled with an accessible style and a confident command of the matter in hand, this should make for masterful work. However, the power of his argument is fatally undermined by weaknesses in his understanding of some of the subject matter, in particular his analysis of evolutionary theory, and this makes instead for an initially dazzling but ultimately disappointing read.

His project throughout is to argue that science is a belief system, one of a long line of mythologies seeking to explain the world around us. Its only novel feature is its empirical linkage to material phenomena, and Harpur argues that while this distinguishes it from other mythological belief systems, this should not privilege it. This in itself is not a particularly contentious position. There is a well-established academic discipline (commonly called Philosophy of Science) within which this argument is well understood, and it is not this aspect of the book with which this reader takes issue.

The problems centre around Harpur's understanding of the theory of evolution, which is simply wrong. His explanation of evolutionary theory is incorrect and his subsequent demolition of it is therefore risible to those who are familiar with it, and misleading to everyone else. In particular, his discussion of the case of light and dark coloured moths in Northern England (a case that was long taught in schools as a textbook demonstration of evolution in action, but which is now well known to be based on flawed data) is disappointing because he simply does not understand the posited mechanics of the theory which he seeks to attack. This section rapidly degenerates into an attack on a straw man, and for all the spectacle of the dust and chaff flying, it amounts to nothing because it misses the point.

As a polemicist, Harpur writes well and his command of myth is impressive. The early chapters are an accomplished synthesis and it is a shame that he is unable to sustain the exalted level of the early discussion throughout the book.

On balance, this reader would recommend this book to someone who is already comfortable with the subject matter, but not to anyone who is uncertain about the fundamentals.

Writing of this kind is to be encouraged. Harpur is a natural successor to the pamphleteers and sceptics of bygone ages and there is too little of this kind of questioning thinking available in accessible forms today. This makes it all the more a pity that the book does not live up to the promise of its opening chapters.

This book captivated me already from the text on the back cover (Spanish edition) making a metaphor of the hermetic truth as revealed in closing circles as if seen through a prism with a thousand faces, each time gaining insight of another aspect and getting closer but being unable to ever grasp it in its entirety. I did not know what to expect, maybe a magical novel. Instead, the author takes the reader to a tour through the myths, sightings and other encounters with so called feeric beings, the inhabitants of "the otherworld", as reported in very different parts of the world and in different times in history. The author claims that "the otherworld" starts where our material world ends. Since through science we have expanded the frontiers of the rational world beyond the visible sky, these feeric beings were forced to retreat to other planets and to the depths of our subconscious.

The author makes a comparison of myths and explains that there are similar myths in very distant cultures, with only slight variations in the main characters of the myth. As an example, sometimes the main characters are a goddess and a male hero, in another myth the main characters are a god and a beautiful woman, sometimes it is a young man that marries his mother, in the next myth it is a young woman that marries her father, etc. Through these ever-changing myths, the people can "live" and therefore assimilate and unify the different aspects and dualisms essential to all human beings, for example the female and the male aspects, passion and rationality, the human and the divine, etc. He claims that fixing the myths in a dogma and thereby stopping them from drifting makes myths "literal". By doing so, the myth loses its freeing or liberating power for our souls.

The book is beautifully written and covered with interesting stories, myths and good literature. The first chapters are somehow "magical", so I highly recommend this book.

On the other hand, I deeply disliked the chapters about Descartes, Darwin and even the one dedicated to the ecologist movement of Gaia, since I perceived them as "literalized" versions of the story. The author claims that in our quest for "scientism" we are "literalizing" the myth, allowing for reason (male character) to be the only character in our modern myths, whereas nature (female character) is left out of the scene. Isn't this "literalizing" a bit? The essence of science relies precisely in its holistic approach; true scientific theories radiate beauty and are conceived in the imagination of the brilliant minds of all times. As Einstein put it: "Imagination is more important than knowledge". How else can one explain that scientists visualize organic molecules that "dance in circles holding hands" and listen to the "music of the spheres".

So a really beautiful book ends in a "literal" pessimistic world view with no supply of new freeing myths that can feed our hungry souls. It seems as though the eternal flame is extinguishing in front of us. In a next edition, the author might consider ending with a contemporary Saga to give a reviving burst to the "Secret fire of the philosophers". Five stars for the good parts of the book, just skip the rest.

Another interesting approach to the origin of myths can be found in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, which includes an extensive chapter called: "From mimetic to mythic culture" or if you enjoy difficult psychoanalytical explanations you can try The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series) by Campbell.

Years ago I read Harpur's Daimonic Reality, his effort to give greater weight to the possibly real existence of the multivarious accounts of the highly diverse varieties of visionary creatures, from fairies to alien grays, by concatenating them into a single type, the daimons of Greek belief, who, he proposes, shape change to fit the expectations of each generation's and society's expectations. Harpur continues that line of thought here, developing the thesis that the Otherworld believed in by all premodern societies is a necessary complement to our materialist, literalist and reductionist view of the world today. I was with him when he disparaged Christianity for its own reduction of all nonphysical entities into entirely good ones (angels) and entirely evil ones (demons) in place of the earlier view of daimons as simply as diverse in character as humans characteristically are. Harpur lost me when he came to Darwin and sought to impute to Darwin the simplistic survival of the fittest notions of Herbert Spencer and then began to dismiss biological evolution because of alleged missing links. That is bunk and, in contrast to Harpur's usual erudition, plainly ignorant.

That leaves open in my mind whether, and of what kind, "nonphysical" entities may exist, and if so, what Otherworld they may represent. The distinction I would make is this. Science has large areas where its discoveries, while always subject to potential later revision, are the closest to factual that we have, and to disregard them out of prejudice or unsubstantiated "theory" is to abandon the plane of what real knowledge we have for the wilderness of made up things. I also believe that scientists have their own prejudices and make a priori dismissals of phenomena they have not personally investigated, or where they are extrapolating from areas in which there is real evidence to ones where this becomes their speculations solely by analogy with issues that are more factually settled.

Human interaction with "nonphysical" entities is at least a very widely reported experience, including in our own time in modern industrial societies. Whether this reflects a reality we have not yet found a causal explanation for or not depends on the underlying nature of our reality. That was a much more settled question in science at the end of the nineteenth century, when simple philosophical materialsm answered everything, than it is today, when pretty much all of the competing cosmological theories of modern physicists pose systems of multi-dimensions, multi-worlds, or our universe as an information system more than as a material fact, suggesting that there are unsettled scientific issues here and make it reasonable to look at Otherworlds and other entities with an open mind.

Harpur is lucid and very widely read. Much that he says is enlightening, but I part company with him entirely with his rejection of biological evolution as an established reality.

This history of the imagination blends insights on myth, folklore and philosophy alike, tackling issues of imagination and unconscious insight to consider how beliefs in the otherworld have fueled philosophical and spiritual innovations. The Philosophers' Secret Fire skirts the line between spirituality and philosophy, drawing important connections between the two disciplines and providing a history which links philosophy, psychology and romanticism alike.

Patrick Harpur has been a household icon since the introduction of "Daimonic Reality" in 1994. Of course we are Forteans all and our bookshelves overflow with Keel, Sanderson, Jung, Vallee, Holiday, Wilson, and Coleman et al.
"Damonic Reality" is a survival guide for anyone aware of the anomalous events that pervade our lives. It is a Fortean necessity.
"The Philosophers' Secret Fire" is more fun and illuminating. It's a more difficult read but a lot more history and mythology is explained and deconstructed. A labor of love, it presents the Hermetic/Alchemic history of mankind in an interesting and usable fashion. "A guide to the Otherworld" was for our survival; "Secret Fire" is for our souls . Elegant in style and language, it is a worthy companion to Daimonic Reality.

The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination
Patrick Harpur
323 pages
Ivan R. Dee publishing

This book takes the concepts Harpur discussed in Daimonic Reality and extends them further, exaining how the other world intersects with everyday reality through myth, imagination, dream, and even popular culture. He also explores the intersection of these themes with identity and how identity is formed for a person. Harpur does a good job with this book, showing how imagination impacts memory and identity, while also exploring Jung's archetypal theory in mythology. Certainly it's a useful book for otherkin who might find some of his concepts intriguing.

If there was one thing which did disappoint me and consequently lowered my rating of this book, it was that he didn't focus much on alchemy and his exploration of it was fairly thin, when he did focus on it. I'd have really liked to have seen more attention directed to that subject, especially given the title of the book. That said it's worth reading and is useful for anyone who finds the imagination fascinating.

4 out of 5