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El fuego secreto de los filósofos. Una historia de la imaginación
¿Puede escribirse en un solo volumen una historia completa de la Imaginación? Patrick Harpur lo ha conseguido admirablemente en este libro, partiendo de campos tan heterogéneos como la filosofía y mitología griegas, la poesía romántica, la alquimia, la psicología junguiana, la magia renacentista, el chamanismo, la ciencia moderna, los relatos de hadas, la náusea de Darwin o la magdalena de Proust… para mostrarnos un fascinante y coherente itinerario por el que han pasado todas las diferentes sociedades humanas que han dotado a su mundo de un sentido pleno rebosante de imágenes.
Con gran finura intelectual, Harpur sacude los cimientos de los rígidos «mitos» que han gobernado en los últimos siglos nuestro universo racional para recordarnos poco a poco la existencia de otra manera de ver el mundo, que sabe también mirar las cosas desde el ojo interno de la imaginación; pues el secreto de esta singular Historia descansa, sobre todo, en la comprensión de esta sutil manera metafórica de entender el mundo, que la cultura occidental ha querido insistentemente olvidar. De este modo, la gran lección que extraemos de la imaginación es que, finalmente, sólo es posible contemplar el mundo a través de una perspectiva imaginativa, en definitiva, de un mito, porque «en realidad el mundo que vemos siempre corresponde al mito en el que estamos», sea del género que sea, ya que nuestra visión del mundo es solamente una visión del mundo, pero no el mundo.
479 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
74 people are currently reading
1026 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Harpur
12 books112 followersPatrick Harpur is an acclaimed author, best known for his philosophical works, which include
The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History Of The Imagination
and
Mercurius: The Marriage Of Heaven and Earth
, the latter of which, after being out of print for several years (and fetching a small fortune on auction sites like eBay) has finally been re-released in a paperback edition.
Other works include Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld and The Serpent's Circle .
He currently has a couple of new projects in the pipeline, including The Stormy Petrel, a fictional biography of Søren Kirkegaard, and The Savoy Truffle, a witty, dramatic novel about life in Britain's richest, wildest Surrey suburb in the early 1960s.
Patrick Harpur lives near Dorchester in Dorset.
Other works include Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld and The Serpent's Circle .
He currently has a couple of new projects in the pipeline, including The Stormy Petrel, a fictional biography of Søren Kirkegaard, and The Savoy Truffle, a witty, dramatic novel about life in Britain's richest, wildest Surrey suburb in the early 1960s.
Patrick Harpur lives near Dorchester in Dorset.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
July 7, 2013
I’ve been slow about writing this review because, at first, I wasn’t sure I had anything to say, and then, once I thought about it more and came up with some topics, I wasn’t sure how to put them together.
Partly that’s a result of the book’s organization--which leads to a first gloss: imagine Richard Tarnas’s “Passion of the Western Mind” cut into four page chunks and re-arranged at random (rather than chronologically.) That gives a sense of both the book’s content and arrangement.
Another attempt: Harpur is a Jungian structuralists unbothered by post-structuralism and post-modernism--indeed, he’s anti-modern, looking to a lineage of thought that predates much of what we call Western civilization but which was reclaimed by romantics first during the Florentine Renaissance then Elizabethan England (alchemy is an important practice; John Dee an important character) and later again by the German and English Romantics. He sees Jung (and himself) as operating in the same tradition.
Beyond “Romantic,” what is that tradition? It is the belief that, as Blake put it, imagination--not sense perception--is the key to human understanding of the universe, forcing an engagement with the the sacred.
Which raises the question, what does Harpur think the imagination is? That’s where the book gets weird. He believes that the imagination is another world, both spiritual and material, populated by what he calls daimons--these are real beings. They manifest themselves in the world as fairies and monsters and aliens, all of which he thinks are both real and metaphorical (but still: real). They are ambivalent forces, good and evil, manipulable by some. Harpur calls this world world imaginal, in reference to Henry Corbin’s work on the Mundus imaginalis.
Poets, shamans, and, of course, psychoanalysts (he especially likes James Hillman) have access to these creatures; they see the other world not simply as metaphor--not simply as abstract creations of human musing, but as an actual entity. This part of the book reminded me of the end of Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind,” which discussed just such a mental landscape--one that is not just a collective unconscious but a place subject to its own rules, a place where actions feedback into the human world.
Normal people can also access this otherworld, usually through dreams, though possessions, out-of-body experiences, and alien abductions may also be encounters with this daimonic reality. Generally, though, we ignore this place, or make it an intellectual abstraction--the soul of the world, the imagination, or the collective unconscious--but not a real place that is (again) both actual and metaphorical. There’s a strong Neo-Platonist strand that runs through the book, and that’s another way to think of Harpur: he really seems to believe that the world of Platonic forms exists. Jacob Boehme is, of course, central to the intellectual history Harpur is trying to write--Boehme thought imagination was what held the universe together, imagination understood in this Romantic way.
Harpur blames ignorance of this other world on Christianity, generally, which made demonized the daimonic (as Victoria Nelson has also argued) and Cartesian dualism in particular. The separation of mind and material left no room for understanding this world (it was a Fortean damned fact, so to speak) and unleashed a heroic modern ego that saw itself as completely individual and disconnected, focusing only on the literal meaning of its senses rather than the metaphorical. (He calls this rampant rationalism, as opposed to reason.)
Building on Mary Midgley’s (really brilliant) book “Science as Salvation,” he argues that science has become a modern myth--the myth of scientism, in which everything can be explained materially, rationally, without recourse to metaphor or myth. Technology aids in focusing the human attention on the literal to the exclusion of the metaphorical, and so turns the mind away from the daimonic realm. The clock divided time and the compass divided space (this is reminiscent of Charles Taylor’s argument in “The Secular Age” about the loss of ritual time and ritual space). The telescope literalized the heavens, the printing press literalized knowledge, and television literalizes the imagination, creating a simulation of the other world, but one that does not nourish the human soul.
This focus on the material, he argues, has led to a contemporary ennui and poisoned souls--medicine treats the body, but nothing nourishes the psyche. We need myths to do this (shades of Robert Bly). If we understand how myths work, he claims, then we can understand how imagination works, and therefore the human soul.
So how do myths work? Harpur does not want to offer a single theory--citing anthropologist Rodney Needham, he notes myths do a lot of things: they reflect history, provide social character, embody a metaphysics, respond to nature, express both the timeless and the historical. Any single theory could not account for all this--and more to the point, any single theory of myths would itself become a myth, the way science has become a myth.
Instead, Harpur looks at how myths work. He is a (mostly) unapologetic follower of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in arguing that myths are structured analogies (moon:sun::woman:man, for example). The content of myths do matter--the heroic myths are used to prop up the idea of individuality, for example--but structure is preeminent. Nor are the values always the same: they change and can be reversed; they are only known by considering a whole collection of myths, and deciphering the structure. Myths, then, are not just good to think, as Levi-Strauss had it, but good to imagine as well.
Understanding the imagination in this way requires what Harpur calls double-vision: seeing both the metaphorical and the literal at the same time, with the ability to switch back and forth. The mad (he’s a Romantic, after all!) are good examples of this ability--often, he suggests, citing Odysseus, they are playing (or acting As If, in Michael Saler’s terms). Rites of passage are also important to seeing the world this way (shades of Bly, again), and Harpur condemns modern society for downplaying them. He notes that the English Romantics were great walkers, and so had chances to have experiences with the Other World on their peregrinations.
He also insists that science is a place where the imaginal world can be seen to operate, and offers two examples (by my count), one of which is interesting, the other just odd. The odd one is an extended consideration of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he says--but does not really argue--literalizes nature and hides its metaphorical side. I got the feeling that this was mostly trotted out so that Harpur would not be seen as to enthralled by science. That was necessary because of his other example: quantum mechanics and modern physics, which replaced Newtonian mechanics and is currently accepted, he says is an example of the daimonic realm. Subatomic particles are daimons, unpredictable, unseeable, affecting the nature of reality. Harpur’s approach, then, is not so different than Erik Davis’s “Techgnosis” in seeing mystical metaphors structuring the world, although it is not clear to me that Davis actually believes in Gnosticism.
This view also solves some of the problems presented by Cartesian dualism--well, not solves so much as dissolves. There is no difference between subject and object, he notes--they are connected, and so epistemology isn’t really needed (although there is an inherent epistemology in this system; he just doesn’t acknowledge it). Memory, he notes as well, is not a literal remembrance of things past, but a recreation--in this he parallels Alison Winter’s recent work--and so is both something literal and metaphorical.
Given that the current system is, in Harpur’s view, unstable, what should we expect of the future? He rejects Tarnas’s conclusion that the masculine intellect will merge with the feminine instinct. Implicitly, he also rejects Victoria Nelson’s suggestion that these mystical themes are working themselves out--indeed, evolving--in popular culture to nourish the soul and give access to the other world, the daimonic. Rather, sees a collapse brought on by a kind of dialectic. Science will be brought down by those who try to literalize the paranormal, maybe, and materialism be lost when people accept angels and demons as purely literal creatures.
So, after all this, what do I think? A hint is given in my continual attempt to connect Harpur to more legitimate thinkers. I want him to be right. I like Penrose’s ideas and loved Tarnas, who I encountered about the same time that I first read Midgley. There’s something to all of this that I think is right: the imagination is bigger than we think, not just flights of fancy. Science is a myth, and sometimes a pernicious one, a myth that will have to be accepted but ultimately transcended. I’m a Romantic at heart, I guess.
And then there’s the discovery that “fort” meant, at one time, a fairy hill--or part of this other world. This is to perfect: Charles Fort’s very name suggesting that his ideas were a passage to the imaginal world. Harpur’s ideas have to be right!
But I am reluctant to follow Harpur too far. Maybe I’m just scared: I don’t want to be thought crazy for believing in real demons (even if they are also metaphorical). But that’s not the whole reason. I’m enough of a postmodernist to be skeptical of these grand narratives attempting to explain the entirety of human beings. A few Greek myths don’t convince me that all people are guided by similar structures. Harpur is right to be skeptical of theories of myths that attempt to explain everything--but he is writing just such a myth himself. And if there’s anything I learned reading this book, it is to question such myths.
Partly that’s a result of the book’s organization--which leads to a first gloss: imagine Richard Tarnas’s “Passion of the Western Mind” cut into four page chunks and re-arranged at random (rather than chronologically.) That gives a sense of both the book’s content and arrangement.
Another attempt: Harpur is a Jungian structuralists unbothered by post-structuralism and post-modernism--indeed, he’s anti-modern, looking to a lineage of thought that predates much of what we call Western civilization but which was reclaimed by romantics first during the Florentine Renaissance then Elizabethan England (alchemy is an important practice; John Dee an important character) and later again by the German and English Romantics. He sees Jung (and himself) as operating in the same tradition.
Beyond “Romantic,” what is that tradition? It is the belief that, as Blake put it, imagination--not sense perception--is the key to human understanding of the universe, forcing an engagement with the the sacred.
Which raises the question, what does Harpur think the imagination is? That’s where the book gets weird. He believes that the imagination is another world, both spiritual and material, populated by what he calls daimons--these are real beings. They manifest themselves in the world as fairies and monsters and aliens, all of which he thinks are both real and metaphorical (but still: real). They are ambivalent forces, good and evil, manipulable by some. Harpur calls this world world imaginal, in reference to Henry Corbin’s work on the Mundus imaginalis.
Poets, shamans, and, of course, psychoanalysts (he especially likes James Hillman) have access to these creatures; they see the other world not simply as metaphor--not simply as abstract creations of human musing, but as an actual entity. This part of the book reminded me of the end of Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind,” which discussed just such a mental landscape--one that is not just a collective unconscious but a place subject to its own rules, a place where actions feedback into the human world.
Normal people can also access this otherworld, usually through dreams, though possessions, out-of-body experiences, and alien abductions may also be encounters with this daimonic reality. Generally, though, we ignore this place, or make it an intellectual abstraction--the soul of the world, the imagination, or the collective unconscious--but not a real place that is (again) both actual and metaphorical. There’s a strong Neo-Platonist strand that runs through the book, and that’s another way to think of Harpur: he really seems to believe that the world of Platonic forms exists. Jacob Boehme is, of course, central to the intellectual history Harpur is trying to write--Boehme thought imagination was what held the universe together, imagination understood in this Romantic way.
Harpur blames ignorance of this other world on Christianity, generally, which made demonized the daimonic (as Victoria Nelson has also argued) and Cartesian dualism in particular. The separation of mind and material left no room for understanding this world (it was a Fortean damned fact, so to speak) and unleashed a heroic modern ego that saw itself as completely individual and disconnected, focusing only on the literal meaning of its senses rather than the metaphorical. (He calls this rampant rationalism, as opposed to reason.)
Building on Mary Midgley’s (really brilliant) book “Science as Salvation,” he argues that science has become a modern myth--the myth of scientism, in which everything can be explained materially, rationally, without recourse to metaphor or myth. Technology aids in focusing the human attention on the literal to the exclusion of the metaphorical, and so turns the mind away from the daimonic realm. The clock divided time and the compass divided space (this is reminiscent of Charles Taylor’s argument in “The Secular Age” about the loss of ritual time and ritual space). The telescope literalized the heavens, the printing press literalized knowledge, and television literalizes the imagination, creating a simulation of the other world, but one that does not nourish the human soul.
This focus on the material, he argues, has led to a contemporary ennui and poisoned souls--medicine treats the body, but nothing nourishes the psyche. We need myths to do this (shades of Robert Bly). If we understand how myths work, he claims, then we can understand how imagination works, and therefore the human soul.
So how do myths work? Harpur does not want to offer a single theory--citing anthropologist Rodney Needham, he notes myths do a lot of things: they reflect history, provide social character, embody a metaphysics, respond to nature, express both the timeless and the historical. Any single theory could not account for all this--and more to the point, any single theory of myths would itself become a myth, the way science has become a myth.
Instead, Harpur looks at how myths work. He is a (mostly) unapologetic follower of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in arguing that myths are structured analogies (moon:sun::woman:man, for example). The content of myths do matter--the heroic myths are used to prop up the idea of individuality, for example--but structure is preeminent. Nor are the values always the same: they change and can be reversed; they are only known by considering a whole collection of myths, and deciphering the structure. Myths, then, are not just good to think, as Levi-Strauss had it, but good to imagine as well.
Understanding the imagination in this way requires what Harpur calls double-vision: seeing both the metaphorical and the literal at the same time, with the ability to switch back and forth. The mad (he’s a Romantic, after all!) are good examples of this ability--often, he suggests, citing Odysseus, they are playing (or acting As If, in Michael Saler’s terms). Rites of passage are also important to seeing the world this way (shades of Bly, again), and Harpur condemns modern society for downplaying them. He notes that the English Romantics were great walkers, and so had chances to have experiences with the Other World on their peregrinations.
He also insists that science is a place where the imaginal world can be seen to operate, and offers two examples (by my count), one of which is interesting, the other just odd. The odd one is an extended consideration of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he says--but does not really argue--literalizes nature and hides its metaphorical side. I got the feeling that this was mostly trotted out so that Harpur would not be seen as to enthralled by science. That was necessary because of his other example: quantum mechanics and modern physics, which replaced Newtonian mechanics and is currently accepted, he says is an example of the daimonic realm. Subatomic particles are daimons, unpredictable, unseeable, affecting the nature of reality. Harpur’s approach, then, is not so different than Erik Davis’s “Techgnosis” in seeing mystical metaphors structuring the world, although it is not clear to me that Davis actually believes in Gnosticism.
This view also solves some of the problems presented by Cartesian dualism--well, not solves so much as dissolves. There is no difference between subject and object, he notes--they are connected, and so epistemology isn’t really needed (although there is an inherent epistemology in this system; he just doesn’t acknowledge it). Memory, he notes as well, is not a literal remembrance of things past, but a recreation--in this he parallels Alison Winter’s recent work--and so is both something literal and metaphorical.
Given that the current system is, in Harpur’s view, unstable, what should we expect of the future? He rejects Tarnas’s conclusion that the masculine intellect will merge with the feminine instinct. Implicitly, he also rejects Victoria Nelson’s suggestion that these mystical themes are working themselves out--indeed, evolving--in popular culture to nourish the soul and give access to the other world, the daimonic. Rather, sees a collapse brought on by a kind of dialectic. Science will be brought down by those who try to literalize the paranormal, maybe, and materialism be lost when people accept angels and demons as purely literal creatures.
So, after all this, what do I think? A hint is given in my continual attempt to connect Harpur to more legitimate thinkers. I want him to be right. I like Penrose’s ideas and loved Tarnas, who I encountered about the same time that I first read Midgley. There’s something to all of this that I think is right: the imagination is bigger than we think, not just flights of fancy. Science is a myth, and sometimes a pernicious one, a myth that will have to be accepted but ultimately transcended. I’m a Romantic at heart, I guess.
And then there’s the discovery that “fort” meant, at one time, a fairy hill--or part of this other world. This is to perfect: Charles Fort’s very name suggesting that his ideas were a passage to the imaginal world. Harpur’s ideas have to be right!
But I am reluctant to follow Harpur too far. Maybe I’m just scared: I don’t want to be thought crazy for believing in real demons (even if they are also metaphorical). But that’s not the whole reason. I’m enough of a postmodernist to be skeptical of these grand narratives attempting to explain the entirety of human beings. A few Greek myths don’t convince me that all people are guided by similar structures. Harpur is right to be skeptical of theories of myths that attempt to explain everything--but he is writing just such a myth himself. And if there’s anything I learned reading this book, it is to question such myths.
June 24, 2009
A Hermetic Labyrinth Leading to the Otherworld
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 roundabout 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....
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 roundabout 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....
April 14, 2021
Patrick Harpur is a remarkable author and philosopher. In "The Philosopher's Secret Fire" he sets himself the task of deconstructing and reconstructing the Imagination itself. Imagination, we soon learn, has been rudely demoted and infantilized in our modern world. Harpur's eloquent prose is here to change that. We are taken on a magical tour of the imagination from mythical Iceland and the realm of trolls and elves, to the fairy kingdoms and the realm of the Sidthe. The realm of imagination has been no laughing matter through most of human history. Harpur's great versatility with philosophy, myth and literature from the ancient Greeks, to the neoplatonists and gnostics to the renaissance and romantic poets and mystics makes this work at once a true tour de force and an absolute delight to read. I found myself cradled in the words of the great artists and story tellers of the ages as I encountered the fearsome and wonderful beings that haunted and resourced the minds and hearts of people throughout the history of the western world and beyond. Harpur introduces us to the concept of the daimonic, that world of "little people", fairies and trolls that have been drawn on by shamans for spiritual power and inspired fear, wonder and respect in common folk over the ages. He explains how the arrival of Christianity attempted to banish the daimonic, and ultimately polarized it into the angelic and demonic. The advent of the enlightenment and the rational worldview further attempted to "sterilize" the world of "irrational" imaginary elements and the daimonic forces receded further until they were discovered once again by the great shamans of the depth psychology movement, Freud and Jung, residing in our unconscious, our dreams and our "active imaginations". The realm of science claims to have no such fanciful elements but Harpur has us question the "dark matter", the quantum and the cosmic entities that we are asked to believe in as possible manifestations of the daimonic, protean shape shifters that they have always been. This is a wonderful book, that I will almost certainly reread very soon. I recommend it for all of you with a curious imagination and a sense of awe about the imagination itself, especially any of you interested in learning more and being entertained by the poets and shamans of the ages.
February 1, 2014
I really wanted to like this book, but strong writing, interesting content, and the occasional insight cannot overcome the glaring lack of structure or continuity that makes a book into a book. Don't get me wrong -- this is not a Deleuzian rhizomatic masterpiece exploring alchemy in a poststructural way. This book desperately needed an editor that could tie Mr. Harpur's thought into an argumentative piece of scholarship. The re-enchantment project is definitely needed, but Mr. Harpur's effort unfortunately falls short as an academic work and instead is just a paean on the virtue of James Hillman's "soul".
September 6, 2014
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. what I find interesting is how he shows how the otherworld interacts with people across cultures in a consistent way. It's an intriguing book that'll help you appreciate imagination and its intersection with the otherworld.
May 25, 2015
Patrick Harpur propone el entendimiento del Otro Mundo como ese objeto elusivo que siempre se trata de aprehender así sea a través de las artes, los mitos o las ciencias. En ningún momento, a esto innombrable, le coloca una etiqueta inamovible que lo defina, sino que abstrae ciertas características que encontrará en común entre elementos tan disímiles como lo pueden parecer la materia oscura, los hados, el inconsciente y la alquimia medieval. Un libro lleno de datos que rompen fronteras y, como el subtítulo del libro lo especifica, con el desarrollo de una historia de la imaginación que va más allá de lo temporal.
August 27, 2024
Los ensayos de Harpur se pueden considerar «de culto» y este no es la excepción. Volviendo a la filosofía, la mitología, la alquimia, la poesía, la psicología y la antropología, Harpur nos narra qué se ha considerado como «alma» durante la historia de la humanidad, abarcando sueños, pesadillas, el concepto de «sombra», experiencias místicas, el espiritismo y mucho más. Es una obra breve, pero que resume todas las obsesiones de Harpur y quizás es la que recomendaría para empezar a leerlo.
February 18, 2020
This book was full of promise, covering some intriguing subjects — but unfortunately, it’s just not clearly written. It leaves you with the impression that the author never really got a handle on the ideas and themes he was exploring. Chapters skip from subject to subject without any coherent thread tying them together, interrupted by apparently irrelevant tangents (the most bizarre of which was an awkward and poorly informed rant against the theory of evolution). The author seems to justify his lack of clarity as being the result of the ambiguous, mysterious nature of his subject matter — but it seems to me he just didn’t do the hard work of thinking more carefully about what he was trying to say. Disappointing.
August 1, 2025
De Parmenides hasta Einstein pasando por Kant o Coleridge una apasionante corriente filosófica oculta recorre los meandros de la Historia. La que perdimos con la Ilustración y nos reconcilia con nuestra naturaleza.
March 5, 2016
Eu diria que esse é o verdadeiro guia de iniciantes para a realidade, muito mais do que o livro do Baggot. A história da imaginação do Harpur começa pela relação existente em todas as culturas entre o mundo onde vivemos e um Outro Mundo, habitado por seres sobrenaturais, eventos fabulosos e como Mundo e Outro Mundo podem ser vistos como antagônicos ou como continuum.
Nessa ambiciosa história da imaginação, Harpur não ignora as posturas filosóficas desde Platão até as mais recentes teorias da ciência - da física em especial. Passa por mitos, pela psicanálise, alquimia e como a "literarização"' de mitos, de arquétipos levou a um abandono desse Outro Mundo que embora ignorado, não pode ser eliminado da nossa psique. Todos os rituais de iniciação, de aceder a um plano transcendente são tirados de seu significado metafórico/simbólico e por isso são tomados como absurdos e acabam amplamente rechaçados pela ciência que busca a verdadeira realidade do mundo.
Nessa ambiciosa história da imaginação, Harpur não ignora as posturas filosóficas desde Platão até as mais recentes teorias da ciência - da física em especial. Passa por mitos, pela psicanálise, alquimia e como a "literarização"' de mitos, de arquétipos levou a um abandono desse Outro Mundo que embora ignorado, não pode ser eliminado da nossa psique. Todos os rituais de iniciação, de aceder a um plano transcendente são tirados de seu significado metafórico/simbólico e por isso são tomados como absurdos e acabam amplamente rechaçados pela ciência que busca a verdadeira realidade do mundo.
November 6, 2024
Uno de los libros más hermosos que he leído en mi vida porque contrasta dos ideologías y establece que ambas son importantes para el ser humano: la imaginación y lo racional. Aunque se enfoca en la imaginación como forma de protestar hacia un mundo cada vez más ligado a lo literal te queda la sensación y el aprendizaje de que todo es equilibrio y que el ver el mundo solamente desde una perspectiva lo vuelve insostenible e insoportable. Es una belleza. Incluso hay una película de Pascal Laugier que establece la idea principal del libro en su argumento (lo literal vs lo metafórico, la imaginación vs lo racional etc.): "Ghostland"
October 31, 2008
This book looks at the history of imagination, mystical experience, and myth. The author draws together seemingly unrelated phenomenon to explain what they tell us about the imagination. The book is well-researched, and included a lot of information with which I was unfamaliar. It was also nice to see a book defending the "non-rational" aspects of life, as authors often tend to ridicule the imaginative side of life. However, I felt the book's structure was somewhat disorganized. The author seemed to jump from one unrelated topic to another with very little transition.
April 9, 2016
Future reader beware: this book is difficult to read because of lack of coherence, labyrinthic development and somehow repetitive message. However, it is a very good reminder of how our society has repressed connections with Anima Mundi and how we neglect messages from our soul. Alchemists, shamans and other shape-shifting creatures are so called "daimons", messengers that convey the images from this Jungian archetypal world (or "Otherworld"). Harpur reminds us to listen to their messages, as they catalyse a dynamic and fluid psychic life.
November 21, 2014
I found this a frustrating read. I liked his attempt to challenge perceptions of reality, in the same way that Robert Anton Wilson does in his best work. I liked the way he untangles a thread that runs from the Neoplatonic World Of Forms to the Archetypes of Jung, but ultimately , like many reviewers here, I found the lack of coherent narrative frustrating, and feel that he needed an editor to bring this book to life.
July 31, 2024
Sabiduría pura. Es tanto una recapitulación de toda la filosofía esotérica (desde el animismo de las sociedades tribales hasta la física contemporánea, pasando por el neoplatonismo, la alquimia, el Renacimiento, el romanticismo y la psicología profunda) como una aplicación de toda esa tradición de sabiduría en una crítica de la sociedad occidental moderna y contemporánea.
January 25, 2018
I read both this book and Harpur's "The Secret Tradition of the Soul" over the holidays, and very much appreciated them both. These are holistic books that attempt to bridge contemporary and historical mythologies and frame them in terms of a modern conception of soul. Recommend.
January 25, 2021
The author claims that this book is part of the Golden Chain. He is correct. I wish I had read this book years ago. If you often wander in the dark, hidden places of the self, this book may provide some illumination to guide you on your path.
February 10, 2017
I want whatever this man is smoking.
December 29, 2019
A very interesting account of esoteric history. At times Harpur goes a bit too far for me, such as when he gives long accounts of people's interactions with fairies or other such supernatural beings, but his history contains fascinating discussions of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism and a variety of other perspectives that in a past that was much more civilised than the present were taken much more seriously. It has been said that we live in an age of shiny barbarism, and one of the best points of this book is that it helps to make that clear.
April 14, 2023
Sentimientos encontrados con esta obra. Esperaba algo impactante al nivel de "la realidad daimónica" pero esto es otra cosa... Se centra demasiado en conceptos muy abstractos como el alma del mundo, el secreto de la transmutación de los alquimistas y muchos otros temas que al no desarrollarlos en profundidad se van perdiendo a medida que pasamos las páginas. Aún así algunos pasajes aislados me gustaron. Si algo es seguro, es que sabe mantener el interés hasta el final, lo que ya es bastante decir en un libro de filosofía
July 27, 2025
As always with Patrick Harpur this was a very fun and illuminating read, flying through a vast array of topics and exploring all sorts of strange and exciting ideas. There's a bit of a dodgy chapter where Harpur gets into his problems with Darwinian evolution, which would be easily answered if he cared to read a bit of biology, but with the enormous scope of this book I'd be surprised if there was nothing in it that rubbed me the wrong way.
September 22, 2019
It is an interesting and entertaining read, but it could absolutely have been better and sharper edited. The point is good and relevant, that we have lost touch with the daimonic and imaginative world, with our soul, and the world's too. That is: Anima Mundi. But this point drowns in way too many examples. I think, though, that the many references points to other interesting reads.
December 6, 2019
Nadie tratado la historia de la imaginación como Harpur. El inconsciente colectivo, los arquetipos, el surgimiento del ego racional son definidos desde la perspectiva del alma individual y colectiva. La mejor obra de Atalanta junto con la imprescindible "Los oscuros lugares del saber" de Peter Kingsley.
January 29, 2021
This is a really interesting, if somewhat confusing book in parts, looking at the various shamanistic practices, rituals and ideas as well as the people behind them that have threaded themselves through history. As others have said, I was at a bit of a loss in the way it was organised, really interesting but this made for a somewhat difficult read.
January 2, 2019
Whilst presented in a somewhat disjointed and nonlinear way, The Philosophers' Secret Fire is a treasure trove of fascinating and valuable information and provides countless thought-provoking passages.
July 1, 2022
Le pongo tres estrellas, no por un libro malo, pero este tipo de mensajes e ideas ya lo he leido en otros libros mas antiguos, no por eso pierde su vigencia. Como recomendación para ampliar informacion recomiendo el retorno de los brujos de Jacques Bergier y Louis Pauwels.
January 17, 2019
Harpur along with Kripal is one of my favorite current authors. I recommend Harpur's "Daimonic Reality" before reading this one.
July 12, 2019
selente
January 7, 2021
Fascinating and persuasive book on a topic that is relatively unexplored because it crosses disciplines.
July 2, 2021
Many interesting hints, but not even a sketch of a map.
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