I’m pleased to report that the publication of the book Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence, which will feature my essay/paper “In Search of Higher Intelligence: The Daemonic Muse(s) of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson,” is imminent. The book is edited by Angela Voss and William Rowlandson, former co-directors of the Centre for the Study of Myth at the University of Kent. It consists mostly of papers presented at the 2011 conference they convened at the university under the same name as the book title. With my enduring interest in daimonic matters, I was quite disappointed when I heard and read about the conference a couple of years ago and knew that I wouldn’t be able to make the trip across the Atlantic to attend and participate. So it was a pleasure when Angela contacted me afterward with a request to include my paper, which was then going through the peer review process for publication in Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, in the forthcoming book.
Today she sent a note to contributors letting us know that the book’s publication is right around the corner, perhaps as early as this month. Here are its description and contents. It looks like a rich feast indeed, and I’m proud to be aboard (and am raring to read the whole thing).
DESCRIPTION:
From the artistic genius to the tarot reader, a sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly attested; this “other” may be termed god, angel, spirit, muse, daimon or alien, or it may be seen as an aspect of the human imagination or the “unconscious” in a psychological sense. This volume of essays celebrates the daimonic presence in a diversity of manifestations, presenting new insights into inspired creativity and human beings’ relationship with mysterious and numinous dimensions of reality. In art and literature, many visual and poetic forms have been given to the daimonic intelligence, and in the realm of new age practices, encounters with spirit beings are facilitated through an increasing variety of methods including shamanism, hypnotherapy, mediumship and psychedelics. The contributors to this book are not concerned with “proving” or “disproving” the existence of such beings. Rather, they paint a broad canvas with many colours, evoking the daimon through the perspectives of history, literature, encounter and performance, and showing how it informs, and has always informed, human experience.
CONTENTS:
Preface (Geoffrey Cornelius)
Introduction (Angela Voss and William Rowlandson)
Part I: Daimonic History
1. When Spirit Possession is Sexual Encounter: The Case for a Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece (Marguerite Rigoglioso)
2. Encounters at the Tomb: Visualizing the Invisible in Attic Vase Painting (Diana Rodríguez Pérez)
3. Parodying the Divine: Exploring the Iconography of the Cult of the Kabeiroi in the Ancient Greek World (Kirsten M. Bedigan)
4. Of Cosmocrators and Cosmic Gods: The Place of the Archons in De mysteriis (Christopher A. Plaisance)
5. “Showeth Herself all Naked”: Madimi in John Dee’s Conversations with Spirits (Stephanie Spoto)
6. Burke’s Aesthetics of the Spirit (Simon Wilson)
7. Uncanny Intelligence in Psychoanalysis and Divination (Maggie Hyde)
8. The Scientific Approach of F. W. H. Myers to the Study of Mystical Experiences, Divination and Psi, and its Value to Psychology (Terence J. Palmer )
Part II: Daimonic Literature
9. Definitive Demons: Frankenstein and Dracula as Ultimate Representations of the “Monstrous Other” (Vered Weiss)
10. Sceptical Scepticism: Reason and Uncanny Experience in Scottish Fiction (Kenneth Keir )
11. The Daimonic in W. B. Yeats (Chiara Reghellin)
12. But Who is That on the Other Side of You? The Daimonic Sources of Consciousness in Literature and Dreams (Wojciech Owczarski )
13. “Necessary Monsters”: Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings and the Ontology of the Daimonic (William Rowlandson)
14. Privileging the “Other”: Illicit Forms of Knowledge in the Detective Fiction of Reginald Hill (Hilary A. Goldsmith)
Part III: Daimonic Encounter
15. Fireflies and Shooting Stars: Visual Narratives of Daimonic Intelligence (Angela Voss )
16. In Search of Higher Intelligence: The Daimonic Muse(s) of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson (Matt Cardin)
17. So long as you’ve got your Elf: Death, DMT and Discarnate Entities (David Luke)
18. C. G. Jung, Tibetan Tantra and the Great Goddess: An Exploration of Sacred Entities and Archetypes (Judson Davis)
19. Cultural Variation of the Feminine in Psychedelic Personification (Cameron Adams)
20. Daimonic Ecologies: An Inquiry into the Relationships between the Human and Nonphysical Species (Alex Rachel )
Part IV: Daimonic Performance
21. Seeing Voices: Elucidating the Unconscious via Tarot Hermeneutic with Jung and Deleuze (Inna Semetsky )
22. Imaginal Inquiry: Meetings with the Imaginative Intelligence (Marie Angelo)
23. Imaginal Doorway: Seeking a Daimonic Theatre using Dramatherapy (Toby Chown)
24. Numinous Conversations: Performance and Manifestation of Spirits in Spirit Possession Practices (Jack Hunter)
25. The Call of the Spirit: The Training and Practice of Sangomas in Relation to an Astrologer’s Vocation (Darby Costello)
26. Spirit and Shaman: Altered Consciousness and the Development of Creativity (Zoë Brân)
Will this be available in ebook format?
That’s a good question. Unfortunately, it’s one whose answer I don’t know. Keep tuned to the Website for Subterranean Press, where I assume details will be forthcoming.
This seems interesting. I would like to someday write some kind of a paper on the self loss practiced by Victorian spiritualist and Korean mediums. I suspect it is also an important concept in Shinto and Vietnamese Dao Mau but I should do more research. The famous theorist for the idea of the self loss is Marcel Mauss. To put it succinctly, the idea is that the neophyte haunts the possessor. And the return of energy empowerment is greater than the the initial offering, to keep the possession ongoing. This is fundamental to Koren shamanism. Even though spiritualists were less aware of this relationship between the possessor and the possessed they used the self-loss all the same. The initiation methodology of Korean and Victorian mediumship is the same. Thus, for persons interested in western occult medium ship, the self-loss of ch’i in Korean medumship is a very useful comparison; like A Solitary reiki.
Essence of Shinto by motohisa yamakage’s essence of Shinto is very good but lacks this crucial explanation.
I should like to add this book to my library when it is available. I live in the United States and would prefer the hard volume as opposed to E formats. Anacrhronistic I know, but I would like to have this fine volume.