"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