The philosophers' secret fire - Patrick Harpur

How is it that the same myths are perpetuated through different cultures at different times? Could it be something to do with the universal imagination?;This text re-evaluates Western culture in terms of a tradition which has been neglected or ignored, called "secret" or "occult" - but which is now once again stepping out of the shadows as it always does in times of intense cultural transition. It is a book about folklore, myth, magic and philosophy throughout the ages, peopled with poets, visionaries, demons and shape-shifters, depicting a world where imagination is key. The timescale stretches from the Egyptians and Pythagoreans through the Renaissance Magi, to the Romantics, Jung, and T.S. Eliot.;Following the Greeks, the author calls it the "daimonic tradition". The text aims to show how the idea of the daimonic, together with the analagous ideas of soul and imagination, provides a tool - the faculty of insight - for seeing beneath the waves of history to the great sweeping undercurrents of myth by which our changing world-views are formed.