The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination |
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The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination
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by Patrick Harpur
Sales Rank: 371866
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Discount: 34 %
List Price: $27.50
$14.17
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 336 pages
Published by: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher January 25, 2003
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1566634857
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1566634854
Book Dimensions:
9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.4 pounds
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) looks at 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 greater 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
Reader Reviews
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 twenty - 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.
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