Ma'at 1999.
Review:
DAIMONIC REALITY:
A
Field Guide to the Other World
By Patrick Harpur
First edition published by the Penguin Group 1994
Penguin Books Ltd., 27 Wright's Lane, London W8 5tz, England
Copyright 1994 Patrick Harpur
[NOTE: Although the concept of "Daimonic Reality" presented in this book is practically identical with that of the Gnostic Pagan formulation, and likewise both often refer to the philosophical speculations of renowned psychologist Carl Jung--Patrick Harpur is in no way associated with the organized expression of the Gnostic Pagan Tradition. Our similar conclusions regarding "daimonic reality" in contrast to literal/biological reality, were derived independently of each other--as, indeed, the historical concept of the daimon (or "daemon") is at least several thousand years old. The similarity of our ideas on this subject is the product of a serendipitous metaphysical event.]
DAIMONIC REALITY is a well-documented, scholarly work on one level, and an extremely entertaining collection of folklore, ghost stories, monsters, myths, visions, Blessed Virgins, stigmata, sacred places and UFO encounters on an equally engrossing other level.
We will be addressing the philosophical aspects of the book in this review--and leave the lighter, anecdotal contents for readers to discover and enjoy for themselves.
Sci-Fi and horror buffs will not be disappointed.
On
the philosophical and speculative plane DAIMONIC
REALITY is an intellectual treat--and for Gnostic Pagans reading it may
be described as akin to a deja-vue experience, one of those times when
exploring a new book seems to reveal the reader's own thoughts and ideas in the
text.
In the Introduction, Patrick Harpur discusses some differences between the two basic groups of scientists who involve themselves with the so-called "paranormal":
The first comprises the devotees of scientism who cling, like old Stalinists, to an outmoded cult of dreary mechanistic materialism. Theory has long since hardened into dogma, as rigidly upheld as that of any extraterrestrialist. (There is a telling film of such customers at work on a rival cult--a bunch of heretical children in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, who claim visions of the Virgin Mary. At the first sign of ecstasy, they are wired up to inquisitorial machines, poked with sharp instruments, assaulted by loud noises in their ears and flashbulbs in their faces.) Why anyone at the end of the twentieth century still wishes to woo this kind of "scientist" is something of a puzzle.
The reason
why the second group of scientists--honest, open-minded, reasonable-- dismisses
[a painstaking, scientific analysis of--.ed] the evidence in favor of the
paranormal is more of a mystery. Ufologists are inclined to see their silence
as a conspiracy or as a fear of the unknown. But I think there is a simpler
answer. No one who reviews the evidence for, say, UFO's for an hour is likely
to deny that SOMETHING strange is being seen. The trouble is, few people who
have been brought up with strict rationalistic principles CAN concentrate on
anomalous phenomena for an hour. They are like classically trained musicians
who cannot listen to pop songs. A terrible ennui sets in immediately. Messages
from the Otherworld, whether delivered by spirits, UFO entities or Virgin
Marys, are so often trivial or banal. In addition, any respectable scientist
will be repelled by the sheer absurdity of so many visions.
[Pgs. xvi-xvii]
As to the author's own approach:
I shall be arguing that the very triviality and absurdity of so many visions and apparitions are an essential part of them, pointing to a radical re-alignment of what we commonly regard as reality. In doing this, I want to suggest that the irrational is not necessarily unreasonable nor the incommensurable incomprehensible. I do not want to convince or convert, but merely to persuade people to recall odd experiences of their own which, lacking official sanction, have been forgotten, as dreams are. I would like to stick up for people who, having seen funny things, have set themselves apart from their otherwise ordinary lives because such things have been outlawed by the orthodox, respectable world of science or literature, of the Churches or even their own families...
[P.xvii]
Prefacing
"Part One: APPARITIONS", Patrick
Harpur quotes from Carl Gustav Jung's COLLECTED
WORKS 5:
There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as DAIMONES, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination", as rationalists would have us believe.
In drawing parallels between UFO's and folklore (or, the Folklore of Flying Saucers), Harpur writes:
It is often said that visions and apparitions are experienced according to the culture in which they appear. To draw a religious parallel, it is a truism that no Buddhist ever had a vision of Christ, and no Christian ever had a vision of the Buddha...regardless of how they are originally experienced, apparitions and visions are inevitably interpreted, on reflection, according to their cultural contexts. These may even co-exist within the same society, as when, for instance, a Christian labels a demon what a ufologist calls an alien.
[P. 10]
This chapter is really a short prelude to the fascinating following chapter "UFO's and Dreams", wherein the author demonstrates his pleasing talent for weaving literary allusions between the spiritual, the psychological, and the historical.
Jung argues that the appearance of large balls of light on a grand scale reflects a tension which is no longer confined to the individual psyche but to the collective. There is a split in the psychological world, between the conscious and the unconscious, and also in the political world, between East and West...it was natural that 'signs in the heavens' should appear as UFO's in shapes that reflect our own technological fantasy...Jung's real contribution to the debate, however, lay in his discovery of a part of the psyche--the collective unconscious--which is objective. Thus he dissolves the question as to whether UFO's are subjective ('all in the mind') or objective ('really out there'), and asserts that they are always objective, but they derive from the inner realm of the psyche...
[Pgs. 18-19]
Later, in Part Two: VISION, Chapter 7, "Seeing Things", Harpur elaborates:
By way of an initial summary, then, I would assert that literal reality is only one kind of reality, deriving from a superordinate reality--here called daimonic--which is metaphorical rather than literal, imaginative rather than empirical. Literal reality is...LESS real than daimonic reality. Moreover, in relation to the history of our culture, and also to traditional cultures, a belief in the literalness of reality is the exception rather than the rule. Literal reality is the product of literalism...which...insists that it is the only reality and, as such, actively denies other kinds of reality, especially the daimonic, which it calls unreal, fictional, even delusional.
[P. 94]
Be that has it may, Harpur would probably agree that rationalism has both an historic and positive present role to play in psychic evolution. It is the ego's obsessive identification with rationalism (out of fear for its own mortal survival) that causes both emotional and spiritual problems, resulting in alienation and destructive tendencies. The section, "Psychic Reality (Aliens and Fairies)", is another short, yet remarkably concise, exposition on the "gnostic roots" of Carl Jung's revolutionary theory of the Collective Unconscious.
More than anyone in
the twentieth century, Jung held a world-view which made apparitions
intelligible. He discovered it empirically be examining his patients' dreams
and fantasies, which led him to uncover a deep collective level of the
unconscious containing archetypal images that lived an independent objective
life...he cast about for some historical counterpart to his idea, and he found
it in... alchemy. Far from being...a primitive form of chemistry, this turned
out to be a complex ritual system of self-initiation...
We can
imagine his excitement when...he read in an alchemical text...'the soul is only
partly confined to the body, just as God is only partly enclosed in the body of
the world'. It confirmed his own conclusion that 'the psyche is only partly
identical with our empirical conscious being; for the rest it is projected and
in this state it imagines or represents those things which the body cannot
grasp...' Here, the objective nature of the psyche is firmly established. But
Jung still clings to the fundamental inwardness of the psyche, whose outward
manifestations are only projections. By the time of his magnus opus--MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS (1955-56)--even this
conviction has been shaken. 'It may well be prejudice,' Jung muses, 'to
restrict the psyche to being "inside the body". In so far as the
psyche as a non-spatial aspect, there may be a psyche
"outside-the-body", a region so utterly different from "my"
psychic sphere that no one has to get out of oneself...to get there.'
[P 34-5]
Harpur continues on to relate Jung's encounter with his own daimonic figure named Philemon:
One of the details that Jung tells us about Philemon is that he 'brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration'. In other words he came from the Greek-speaking culture which extended around the eastern Mediterranean in the early centuries after the birth of Christ. At this time Christianity was simply another set of beliefs competing for sovereignty with several others, such as Gnosticism, Hermeticism and, especially, Neoplatonism. These were eventually either declared heretical or partially absorbed into Christianity...Cast out with them was a belief they took for granted--a belief in what Jung called psychic reality. And so Philemon, who had done so much to initiate Jung into this world, was truly his spiritual ancestor.
[P. 36-7]
In relation to this, we find in the chapter "Soul and Body":
...The sense that our bodies are literally real is a construct of the rational ego which, while it does not identify itself with the body (it sees the body as its vehicle), nevertheless allies itself so closely with the body as to impose its perspective on the body. It makes our physical reality the only reality--makes of our physical reality a literal reality. This leads to the erroneous belief that, with physical death, we cease to exist. But our physical death releases the daimonic body. Moreover, if we undergo initiatory death, which destroys the rational ego's literal perspective, the physical body is deliteralized, freed from its single perspective...It becomes, in fact, daimonic. If this is the case, we might expect the physical body, now daimonized, to be able to contravene what we call physical laws.
[P. 260-1]
Zeroing
in on the history of daemons, Harpur is characteristically lucid and right on
the mark.
A few excerpts from the chapter "Daimons":
Guardian angels
derived from Neoplatonism and, along with other classes of angels, became part
of the Christian dogma at the Council of
Nicaea (AD 325). but, long before this, the ancient Greeks believed that
individuals were attached at birth to a daimon who determined, wholly or in
part, their destiny.
[P.40]
The first
of the great Neoplatonists, Plotinus (AD 204-70), maintained that the
individual daimon was 'not an anthropomorphic daemon, but an inner
psychological principle, viz:--the level above that on which we consciously
live, and so is BOTH WITHIN US AND YET
TRANSCENDENT'...Like Jung, he takes it...that daimons are objective
phenomena...only...paradoxically, they manifest inwardly (dreams, inspirations,
thoughts, fantasies) and outwardly...(visions and apparitions)...He seems to
agree with Jung...there is a psyche outside the body...also suggests that the
real distinction to be made is not between inner and outer, but between
personal and impersonal. There is a sense...daimons can be both at once.
[P.41-2]
Christianity's
chief method of getting rid of the daimons was to DEMONIZE them. This process began with the earliest
of the New Testament writings, the epistles of St. Paul: '...the things which
the gentiles sacrifice,' said Paul reproachfully, 'they sacrifice to the
devils, and not to God.' The Greek word he used for devils was DAIMONA: daimons. At a stroke, the host of
intermediate beings recognized by all pagan peoples...were stigmatized as
demons in the service of Satan (DIABOLOS).
[P.54]
Bringing his "little history" of daemons up to contemporary times, Harpur notes:
The daimons of subatomic "inner space" are called particles, although strictly speaking they aren't--electrons, for example, are both particles and waves at the same time. They are paradoxical; both there and not there, like fairies. Like UFOs they cannot be measured exactly: we can calculate their speed, or their position, but not both. This, roughly, is what Werner Heisenberg called the Uncertainty Principle, and it applies to all daimonic phenomena. We cannot know the subatomic particles in themselves; we can only identify them via their daimonic traces. Like miniature yetis, they used to leave tracks in vats of detergent placed at the bottom of mines; nowadays they are more likely to leave their spoor on computer screens linked to particle accelerators.
[P.178]
This brilliant and far-reaching statement coincides with our interest in physics and the theory of parallel universes, introduced in 1957 by Princeton University physicist Hugh Everett III.
[NOTE: We might also note here that while Patrick Harpur states that "for the sake of convenience" he classifies ALL apparitional and psychic entities as daemonic--and we agree that they certainly are inhabitants of the daemonic or metaphysical realms--Gnostic Paganism is more specific in the use of the term Daemon to refer to the trans-rational and trans-physical, or intuitive component of integrated, individual Ka (psyche)]
Harpur concludes the philosophical outline of the book in the poetic, exciting and illuminating Appendix: The Golden Chain, a sort of alchemical summation on the subject of Gnosticism, Alchemy and Daemonic Reality.
This
is thrilling gnostic "stuff", but we also remind readers that all the
scholarly observations and reflections are enlivened by a treasure trove of
photographs and historic and contemporary eyewitness accounts of the
"paranormal" and strange happenings. We were particularly bemused by
a photograph of a Midwestern-type posing with "one of the pancakes he
claimed were given to him by the occupants of a spacecraft that landed in his
back yard." Another charming photo shows a tiny fairy slipper
(hand-stitched and "possibly made of mouse skin") posed next to a
thimble. Of course there are also included obligatory "snaps" of
Bigfoot, crop circles, the Virgin Mary, etc.
DAIMONIC REALITY has something of interest for just
about everybody. It's always surprising, always a pleasure to pursue. If we had
to limit our Gnostic Pagan reading list to only 10 books, this would definitely
be one of them.
REVIEW:
ARTIST OF THE MONTH (Vesta) Loreena McKennit
REVIEW
(1998): "INITIATION" by Elisabeth Haich
REVIEW
(1998): "OPHELIA" Natalie Merchant
REVIEW
(1999): "AWAKENING OSIRIS" by Normandi Ellis
Updated 08/07