Harpur gives us a taxonomy of spirits - some will be recognizable to those familiar with this strange field, others might be new. For example, Harpur describes a series of strange,, phantom social workers who visited homes a few years ago in England. One thing about these social workers, and the men-in-black described by John Keel in The Mothman Prophecies, is how they seem to dress and act in ways that are exaggerated stereotypes. The female social workers with their hair in tight little buns, and the MIB's in their improbably starched white shirts. It is as if these characters were dressing for a part, and overdid it just a bit. The serious ghost hunters reference Harpur's book for its thoughtfulness, and often put it up there will Charles Fort and Jacques Valle in its impact. Recommended.......but destined to sit aside lesser works under the New Age banner at your local bookstore. That has always been the problem with this frustrating field - preaching to the chior.

This is a book of the Anima Mundi, the living soul of the world. It is this soul (like Jung's collective unconscience) that serves as a great reservoir of primordial images. Prior to the age of rigid religious dogma, and equally rigid scientific materialism, human beings naturally seemed to tap into this living soul that permeates and unites all. Indeed, people actively sought to tap into this "otherworld" to gain guidance and gifts for themselves and the community.
Now, even though modern man no longer believes in such things, this "otherworld" is as potent as it ever was. Perhaps it is more so, for if people ignore and repress this alternate reality, it seems to "break out" into the "real" world with even more insistence. Harpur speculates that such unexplained phenomena as fairies, UFO's, angels, Yetis, crop circles, lake monsters, etc., all represent such breakthroughs by the otherworld.
This is indeed an important and ground breaking book, not because it contains anything truly new, but because it reemphasises something quite old- perhaps older than the species itself, perhaps the fount from which we came....
Above all, just because modern men are through with the otherworld does not mean that It is through with us. Not at all.

One of the best books on anomalous events I have ever read. To often in reporting things such as bigfoot, UFOs, or the like, the event is merely ridiculed as a hoax or delusion or fit into an acceptable point of view, whether that viewpoint is scientific, theological or some form of common sense. Investigators of bigfoot usually try to explain it as some form of giant primate. In the Himalayas or the remote forests of the northwest that might be believable. But in Oklahoma? Ufologists usually try to stress how consistent the reports from around the world are, claiming that this shows that a single reality, a "real" reality, is behind them. They are anything but consistent. UFO encounters are weird. They don't fit a pattern, at least not that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft. Patrick Harpur does not "explain" these events, but he does shed a great deal of light on them. I highly recommend his book if you are lucky enough to get a hold of a copy.

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.

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'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.