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

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Summary: Hermetic History
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An erudite but flawed work
Review: 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.

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Summary: "Thus We Are Initiated By What We Cannot Control"
Review: 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.

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Summary: A Mythologist Revisits the Wide World of Imagination
Review: The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche 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.

Rating:
Summary: Links philosophy, psychology and romanticism alike
Review: 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.

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Summary: A Hermetic Labyrinth Leading to the Otherworld
Review: 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....