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"Anomalous lights in the sky, mysterious creatures, angelic figures, strange subhumans ... People have always seen funny things. But in our Western culture (though only in the last four centuries or so) apparitions and visions have become discredited. Yet however much they are outlawed by the official agents of our culture, whether science or the churches, academia or the press, they continue to disconcert us as often as ever - UFOs, Virgin Marys, phantom animals, 'aliens' and so on are seen all over the world." "Daimonic Reality offers an understanding of apparitions and visions by describing the background common to them all - by appealing, that is, to a world-view very different from our own, in which supernatural events are taken for granted. In modern times this world-view has been independently articulated by such visionaries as William Blake, W. B. Yeats and C. G. Jung. But Blake's notion of a myth-making Imagination, for example, no less than Jung's collective unconscious, drew on an older, more venerable tradition, including that Soul of the World beloved of alchemy, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. All these philosophies, in a post-Christian, post-scientistic age, are once more stepping out of the shadows to meet the needs of the modern soul." "Visionary entities were known to the ancient Greeks by the general name of 'daimons'. According to Plato they were intermediate beings linking mankind to the gods. Appearing now as maddening tricksters, now as divine guides to the Otherworld, the daimons differ less in kind than in degree, so that a chicken-stealing Bigfoot, a weird 'extraterrestrial' and an exalted apparition of the Virgin Mary all exist on a continuum between the ridiculous and the sublime." "The latest most comprehensive and most explicit reconstruction of this esoteric and neglected world-view, Daimonic Reality penetrates that Otherworld where we encounter the daimonic figures of folklore and myth in a treatment which is both highly readable and serious yet without academic solemnity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
User reviews
To get down to the nitty-gritty, Harpur applies psychologist Carl Jung's interpretation of unidentified flying objects to a broader range of supernatural sightings. Jung noted that many UFO sightings "seemed to be of solid objects--which, moreover, registered on radar screens," writes Harpur. "(Jung) thought it possible that projections from the collective unconscious might have a physical aspect; or else, although UFOs might be physical, they were not necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft." See what he did there? It's okay to talk about flying saucers (and ghosts, and Bigfoot) as long as you proceed from the premise that they simply can't be what the average goofball thinks they are. Coat the subject with an academic gloss (unidentified flying objects "symbolize the disintegration of psychic unity by arriving in numbers and in a multitude of shapes") and suddenly it's respectable. Whew! Problem solved.
Sheer intellectual snobbery. It may not be deliberate, but it stinks as unmistakably as any form of snobbery does. And it reaches absurd depths when, after describing a fascinating series of unexplained big cat sightings, the author concludes that it is "tempting" to see them as "a return of wild instinctual life" to the commuterized suburbs--a "fanged unconscious force which menaces the bland surface of stockbroker-belt consciousness." Tempting it may be, at least to an academic ninny; convincing it is not. In 2005, a spate of big cat sightings occurred in my hometown; interestingly, they were confined to a single neighborhood not far from where I was living at the time. This was an area of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses on quiet, tree-lined streets, a setting which surely would have put a damper on Harpur's fantasies about archetypal forces bursting forth from the collective unconscious to menace complacent stockbrokers. (Or whatever.)
I don't want to judge the author too harshly. As I've said, he appears to be sincerely interested in the subject (see his description of Roy Fulton's eerie 1979 encounter with a vanishing hitchhiker), and there's room for multiple theories about the paranormal. I just think that he's essentially barking up the wrong tree. Paul Devereux's Haunted Land: Investigations into Ancient Mysteries is a better, more clearly stated book in this vein.