Patrick Harpur | Unpacking The Paranormal, Our Daimonic Reality, Myth, & Alchemy

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01:57 Alright, Hiresite Chatters. It seems that as far back as we can take human history man has been interacting with the many faces of the paranormal from early cave drawings and the rituals of our ancestors to fairies elves Bigfoot lake monsters and of course those pesky gray aliens And the Western debate still rages on. Are they from some other planet, the inner earth, some other plane or some product of our own deeper mind? Not surprisingly while our modern culture is still stuck on these sorts of questions and the acceptance of such creatures we need only look to the past to pull out explanations that suit this situation just fine And sadly, the models constructed by Plato, Socrates, other Greek philosophers and plenty of indigenous cultures are not brought into the current discourse like they should be.

02:43 Well, my friends today's guest Patrick Harper knows this all too well as he has dusted off these old frameworks stitched together more insights awarded by the passage of time and laid it all out in his book Demonic Reality way back in the mid 90s. And for me It still dwarfs a lot of the offerings of paranormal publishing today He's also tackled topics like alchemy in Mercurius, the marriage of heaven and earth. The true nature and history of the imagination in the philosopher secret fire and the rest of life's great mysteries in these secret tradition of the soul all the way from Dorsett England a keeper of deep Fortean files restore of neglected ideas and passionate advocate of the mystic imagination Patrick my man welcome to THC

03:28 Thanks, Greg. Lovely introduction! I try! Hope i can live up to it Oh, I'm sure you will. I am really excited for this. I know that you primarily concentrate on your novels and the work I'm focused on goes back a while now but I have read both Daemonic Reality and The Philosopher's Secret Fire And I think they're both great and deserve to be talked about despite their age They've helped me to color in some blank spots on the mental map for sure. And I don't typically start by asking the old cliche question of how did you get into this stuff? But you seem to be born into a family that was quite open to the weird, didn't you? Yeah, that's right Greg. Well my mother was a keen spiritualist her own mother having been a very fine trance medium and My father who is Irish

04:20 pretty much took me in diginous being the violence for granted even though strangely he wasn't kind of a native irish she was what's called anglo-irish that's to say a protestant i wish not a cataclysm, and so his culture was really english and he wasn't supposed to believe in fairies but all the same you saw them twice and he would. You know pretty hard headed business man he had no truck with supernatural normally so became a surprise to him but he never attempted to push it up or anything like that so you don't pay this with stories of the good people i know. When we were children so i was pretty much open to the notion of other worlds from an early age and despite the attempts of my expensive education to drum this out of me if failed, i thought that once i left university school

05:20 I thought i better get a job but i couldn't get a job until i had a world view and that will you have to include. No more than things like you know, fairies and UFOs which I got very interested in. I thought it would take me about a week to sort that out, then i could settle down and become a respectable banker or something like that but of course you know 20 years later... ...I'm still not a respectable banker, I am not respectable anything you know? I still haven't sorted it out. Well I think that is just super interesting about your father he saw the Fae Folk twice were these just brief sightings I assume

05:59 No quite long sightings no he was a teenager he was in a place called macross abby which is near to prairie and county limerick is it not counted temporary, i'm too small creatures being very little people. Tussling over a bag they seem to be putting it to and fro and a third one was watching them and suddenly the third one looked up and saw him watching them, and seemed surprised that in a flash they vanished. So that was the first time you saw them um his sister also saw them she was equally amazed and That was a very spooky sighting because she saw a dead person amongst them but I don't want to talk about it too much because it's rather personal but

06:54 It's interesting that recently died people can be seen amongst the fairies and that's why the notion of someone being taken is ambiguous. It can mean both taken to God as it were, as the priests would have us believe but it could also mean taken by the fairies I'm not very very old so cool the story is that if you dig up the grave you don't find anything in it except stone because they're taken body and soul into the other world. So let's play to that position scotland and another part of europe as well,

07:31 Well that's super interesting the one little small sighting i had when I was young had the similar motif of when the thing was seen. It like notices it's being seen looks at you and with a look up surprise and then quickly tries to be unseen, and so in that pops up but always resonates with me and another thing kind of along those lines with these encounters is it seems that a lot of time people feel compelled to look in a specific direction that they might not otherwise look, and then they see the most amazing thing they've seen in their life. And that's—I don't know—maybe some weird clue that it has some deep conscious connection?

08:10 Yes, that's true. What did you see Greg? Well I have a hard time putting it in any of the conventional boxes and the whole thing was over in like a minute but I saw a darkly colored humanoid thing black or gray when I was young on a walk with my parents looking down into a wooded ravine It was kind of hunched over on all fours and when it locked eyes with me it was obvious that had an expression and intelligence that was more than just animal But it had the same look of surprise that you described, and then it took maybe five or ten big steps off in a single direction and kind of disappeared. I called over to my parents but they didn't really realize how serious I was until it was too late And just to be the only one who saw it... Was quite upsetting

08:57 That sounds frightening. Yeah, I don't like the sound of that. Yeah i mean i'm lucky to have seen it you know? It's one of those things...I think a lot of people have these kind of weird moments that sometimes only take a few seconds but they alter your worldview forever and that may be the point of these encounters to a degree Yeah i'm a bit worried about you americans cuz whenever i watch so called real life. Shows on television that are over from america it seems to be a lot of demons in america and we just don't really have them here, no we have people like the little people like the fairies are certainly ambiguous do they can do your better harm as well is a bit of good but then not demonic you know if u american why did that

09:45 we have for instance a lot of ghosts but very few of them are really malevolent, they don't seem to be sort of demonic presences. But maybe I'm watching the wrong programs or maybe the programs are skewing it or something. Well no hey i'm worried about us too so i'm with you there um another thing about your Family that i thought was interesting is your grandmother was a medium that actually i guess channeled an entire book by an american pulp fiction writer from the thirties edgar wallace thats pretty interesting. That's right yeah i think she didn't quite finish it but no echo what is brother play he was rather angry man and rather arrogant and she didn't really like him but you thought oh well you know,

10:34 he's forcing his way through you know i hear him in the hope that it will come down to bed. There is no way of telling where this is the actual spirit of edgar wallace or something else but then thats a problem about spiritualism you don't know quite what the status of spirits is but at the same time unit, She never heard of him and she had no reason to it certainly wasn't a hug you know she was set up with having to spend a lot of valuable time. Channeling this rather racy pros which he just proved i don't know what that's about, i still got it somewhere but i've never actually read the book i think i started it but probably one of his best what is the trouble with spirit channeling

11:22 you think you're going to get truth from the horse's mouth as it were, cutting out the middle man. But in fact it is usually a bit substandard. Their philosophy isn't up too much and their messages aren't very illuminating." You know, you mentioned demons. This is kind of leading right into things I was going to talk to about because it's pretty common To compare like fairy lore and alien abduction encounters these days we talked about the cultural context It seems to play a role that sort of thing but there's still a lot of fuzziness around these ideas I think but your contention seems to be that fairies elves aliens ghost cats sea monsters and the rest of it are all manifestations of daemons

12:06 And this is an old idea, but can you flesh this out a bit for us? Where does this term and description come from? Well it comes from the ancient Greeks of course. That daemons or daemones were a recognized class of being and they were kind of interesting because they mediated between us and the gods I mean the most famous daemon in antiquity was Eros The god of love He wasn't a god he was a daemon I need kind of mediates between us and the other god i'm not sort of psychologically true in the sense that. Love is a perspective that all the gods have we have to work from that, here are his kinds of nothing interesting so right almost it's kind of an inbuilt perspective that is common to all the gods

13:03 Without a ross we couldn't connect with anything you know it isn't just about for instance sex is the way in which we can make to the world through an erotic. Connection so it makes sense that he's diamond, the diamonds were said to inhabit this strange middle realm which play refers to and wish the new place needs elaborated on the room but they called the soul of the world This whole role mediated between us and the divine world or in Plato's case, the world of the forms. The real world of which this world is only a shadow that everything in this world participates in always an echo of the real world of the forms for divine worlds. That's the idea but in order for us to have any trafficking with this real world beyond our own we have to have a mediating principle than that is the soul of the world

14:03 I'm not just where the diamond live or else it's the wrong with the diamonds manifest add. Does that make sense? It does, yes. The gods would live in the ideal world—ours is kind of a shadow mirror of that—and they're joined by the soul of the world this demonic reality they kinda connect us to the gods I think it does make sense and today its kinda common just think physical world spirit world but this model seems to give a lot more detail than that which I like How did they arrive at these sorts of conclusions? They're pretty deep. Yeah, I don't know how they arrived at them My guess is they arrived at them through observation Mm-hmm They probably saw the most perplexing aspect of the soul of the world and indeed of the diamonds or demons to us Is that they can be both physical and nonphysical which fits very well our own apparitions and visions and

15:08 otherworldly encounters we tend to identify the physical with the real and spiritual with the ethereal but diamonds can be both at once they're always contradictory creatures that paradoxical enough for the fairies are just phantoms that they can give you a nasty blow or blast or shock i bet like the aliens can give you that with their ray guns whatever, update my way that your phone seem absolutely physically real but then they behave in ways that defy the laws of physics. I'm not flying i was attracted to the diamond you know i found it in the ancient model. What didn't worry about all the contradictions and paradoxes that seemed to be set

16:00 Ufology and other studies of the paranormal Right. I think it's great too because that is the debate are they physical? Well, they're leaving these physical traces in some cases but then they're disappearing and We get stuck in this binary of what they could be and then here's this third option and to maybe flush out the soul of the world for people you know another rapper that. You could use to think about it is the imagination or the collective unconscious these are basically all trying to describe this connective tissue between our world and gods right yes i think exactly right i mean, i think that the best way thinking about it as a kind of otherworld

16:44 which is real but hidden but the intellectual models for this other world have been the soul of the world as you say and then later amongst the german romantic, what's the first time that english romantic poet they call it imagination. I'm not really the depth psychologist like cg young i've called it a collective unconscious now they're not exactly the same thing but there all analogous to each other or other i'm claiming that there are no just to each other especially interested in the romantic imagination which was. We know almost the opposite of the way we talk about imagination today it's not about making things up for picturing things that are absent of the senses, is really a whole autonomous realm

17:37 another world in its own right which generates these archetypal images, which are the diamonds. The diamonds are great shape shifters of course so they can appear as almost anything which also generates those narratives which we call myths and once again you know the word myth has become degraded it means something untrue Where is i think the miss of it the true stories of the soul where psychologically they are foundation story, do anything you should take them literally so that i know if they are. Will in fact underpin our lives one other thing i discovered when i was writing my book about the phone

18:25 What's how almost universal the idea of a personal diamond is kind of guardian angel it incredibly prevalent across the world and that guys and protect her. I need more real than we are in a way it's like our higher self but at same time its very hard to pin down and we shouldn't take it, too literally so we have this problem with it like seeing you if you think about some bolts craft but you can never lay hands on one so it is kind of for that moment a physical thing. It's also an image and we have any two choices these days the other things either a fact it's literally true or its completely imaginary and untrue, i'm saying that's a force division which are the coaches on trouble by

19:20 a true thing isn't necessarily literally a fact like a myth. It's a true story, but it's not literally true. It's not like history so it is very hard for us to grasp I spend a whole book you know trying to sort it out in my own mind because i was brought up as a western person who. Believe in facts and take things literally and phone, really exercise is dismantling my own extreme literalism no. So that you know you can reach the point where. You don't have to believe in the historical fact of the garden of eden for instance but you can believe that it's a fundamentally true story it's a myth, which contains all sorts of interesting information about also think the nature of sin the origin of consciousness perhaps our relationship with the death will put very profound things in this wonderful wonderful story

20:20 So it is true, but it's not perhaps literally so. Right I really love some of the stuff Joseph Campbell has said about myth that like almost that these myths predate man that they're so baked in that you know they're just about as close to the source as you can get and potentially that these daemons act out their myths over and over again in our physical plane. Yes, yes I just think that's an interesting idea is that kind of incorporated into your model? Yes very much so! Indeed the great poet WB Yeats thought but he quotes some ancient Greek saying that the daemons

21:03 invented the myth so that it's kind of a self-serving thing with contain diamonds and about diamond but the diamonds also made up the name, i'm the diamonds are immortal who has campbell said proceed under more important than us. Nobody knows who wrote these stories you know i mean they don't have all the personal things they belong to, the collective so they are yes the fundamental story and if u want a leader psychically healthy life you have to read the myth and you'll find one that. resonates with you more than others and maybe that's the myth you are, without knowing it living out. And indeed in The Philosopher's Secret Fire I try to suggest or indicate that modern myths or rather modern scientific hypotheses are quite often just the old myths rewritten and taken literally

22:05 Well, I see a big parallel to even just a novelist who wants to create a world like Middle-Earth to play out with characters. A particular story arc it's kind of similar yes of course it is Yes and that is what the imagination does but the job of our little imaginations is somehow to get in touch with this great universal imagination and the more that we embody Universal imagination the more products are works of art because they contain more and more levels in them and some authors. Shakespeare one other reason he said good is that you got a million books have been written about shakespeare and he hasn't been go to the bottom yet,

22:58 What are the tests of a work of art in other words is the number of levels it can be read on whether it's sculpture by michelangelo or weather it's a novel weather play or poetry. That's one of the test that if you could be ready on many many levels, down to some universal level it will never age and it will never be out of date and they will always be relevant to us that's what we find for example in shakespeare why he just famous, it's just that his imagination was in touch with the collective universal romantic imagination about his place are like me.

23:41 That's why so many of them echo existing myth that he rewrites the moment uses them for his own purposes. So that's what i think roughly about life. Well, it's kind of funny because the say the hero's journey myth is something that I think Hollywood has figured out and cashed in on for many years over and over and over again. They've kind of broken the code so to speak and built an empire on it Yes, I mean George Lucas famously said that he drew on Joseph Campbell for the basic heroic journey of Star Wars And so on he drew one Campbell the heroes a thousand faces

24:26 I need a d there are that many stories you know and all the stories i really even in novels if they're any good as novel play echo. Music theme for example boy meets girl boy loses go boy gets girl again is a recapitulation of the ancient myth of iris and psyche we never tired about me, that's just the basic formula of the romantic with a small r novel and most if not all novels i must be trying to be famous but most. Involve some kind of other world journey now that may not be supernatural it might be the journey from one land to another or one class, turn over all is involved some kind of imaginative shop to the main protagonist that they find themselves in another world

25:25 Obviously it might be the other world of illness the medical or it might be underworld that's a great thing to going down into the underworld of haiti. That's what a lot of crime is about you getting into the underworld criminality or whatever. So these are all ancient, Myths which are retold again and again, but the settings change But the motifs remain the same Mm-hmm. It's so interesting when you unpack that that we just haven't got bored with it yet but I also find it really interesting that Socrates would talk about contact with his own Damon pretty openly as did writers like Yates who you mentioned yeah Yeah And you just wouldn't see that today?

26:09 I guess what are some of the things that you've picked up on that they have said about their own daemons or facilitating that contact? Well, it's only our culture that doesn't really believe in personal daemons. A lot of other cultures do and they often believe its one of their ancestors for instance amongst northern Siberians and some Inuit tribes You know they won't be given a name immediately until it's established which ancestor is protecting and guiding them in memory named after that ancestor. In play tell it's not an ancestor it's kind of a more neutral diamond who is the lottery to before you're reborn, add interesting that yes no everybody aware of it

27:00 I don't know what they are more aware of it than they'll say or they don't have the language for it. But certainly exceptional men and you mentioned yates and i would mention young prince very very well where is their day when we call him a day man, and they were aware of You know the paradoxical role of the dayman place in your life because it drives you quite ruthlessly to fulfill yourself or to fulfill its plan for you, the payment has a blueprint of what your life should be. It isn't faithfully stick is not predestined anyway it's got quite a lot of room when will leeway any.

27:43 Basically there is a kind of we all have a plan that was supposed to enact or unfold with you would say, individuate coming into our souls and fulfilling ourselves self realizing ourselves. I'm aware of this kinda group listening but often it would take them down the path that was against their will either that you had to sacrifice certain things like for instance you might have to sacrifice love or something because the dayman wanted to keep you following a path in that case writing, pursuing psychiatry so there are casualties along the way and you can bring great sadness and it can bring suffering and pain

28:29 What basically you know there are compensations what you get instead is the life of meaning and the light your supposed to have led that's more or less how i understand it. Mm-hmm. I love that concept that our Damon has a plan for us Of course, we talked today about finding your path or doing what you were born to do But it's provocative to think some overarching entity is trying to nudge us towards a certain path We might not be aware of I'm just compelled by that. I want to see my Damon's blueprint like let's collaborate Let's negotiate a bit here. Yeah, I Think you already are without knowing it You know

29:08 Yeah, that's probably true. But I guess I would ask is there a way to better connect or align with our daemon or learn what it wants from us so that we're not in a life of constant conflict or some sad cubicle situation? Yeah, ask it! I get nothing And It may not give a direct answer as it did to Socrates but even Socrates who was the wisest man in Greece it didn't give him clear instructions. It tended to say no, in other words it tended to stop him when he was doing something that was displeasing to the gods you know? He would suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say oh I'm not going there! I've just heard no from my diamond but you know there are examples of people who have had direct instructions now sometimes it's from Jesus or God

30:05 but it may be that's how they interpret it. I'm not going to say, oh, it's not really God—it's just your daimon. The daimon might just be the face that God shows us. I use the word god loosely—whatever you want to call it, the divine plan or whatever. The trouble with huge things like god and the divine plan of the god head in the day is that they're not very personal you know it's very hard for us to believe. That such a thing takes a personal interest dinner, i need christianity we are sure that he does when it may well be that the diamond is just the personal face but the impersonal dirty shows to it

30:48 That's just a working hypothesis, Greg. I wouldn't be an expert on that. It's my own kind of feeling about my own daimyo. I feel there are greater powers still behind my daimyo. And it gets really interesting when you think about say Constantine's vision or something that you wrote about that was new to me, that Napoleon used to see a glowing orb that sometimes came as a dwarf dressed in red. I've also heard that Columbus on his journey to America he wrote about some orbs that flew around the sky went down in the water

31:26 underneath the boat and came out the other side. Like when you think about those kind of things, it starts to be like this right place right time type of situation where these entities can change the course of our world pretty dramatically. Yeah yeah absolutely I mean i think a lot of people do get fairly clear instructions they either see a light that seems to be intelligent to them and tells them things they hear voices that say enigmatic sentences to Do i not quite the story of jack prieger who was a farmer in wales and he's playing his field one day and here is a voice saying you've gotta be adopted. I think that's a bit funny when actually thinks he's going mad so it test the voice and says, who said so and the voices i say so he says well who are you and the voices will under paraclete so we go home anything

32:27 What the hell is that? So he looks up paraclete in the dictionary and it says, Paraclete Holy Ghost. And he thinks well there's a thing so that's kind of convincing because you know the paraclete tricked him by telling him a word he'd never heard before. It was all the more convincing to him anyway became a very famous doctor. He works on the streets of India still there I think. Wow! great man you know now is that wasn't the first diamond or was it was it personal diamond they're great tricksters and i have a sense of humor, i'm the diamond might be saying i'm the power clean in order to convince him.

33:06 Because he hadn't heard that word before and convinced him that he was really in touch with the Holy Ghost. Who knows? I find the trickster personality element to be quite interesting, i mean some people are fearful of it they equate it to something more demonic like we started talking about but I think of it like...I've heard some people say that the best Personification of the tricksters probably bugs bunny and that is the model i try to think about when kind of flashing out the trickster personality, i can see just never worried about anything always one step ahead not really causing anybody harm but definitely mixing things up. Yeah yeah like funny it's like a rabbit both direct descendants of hair in the hair is the trickster figure in so many

33:58 Native american mythology so you know where to send it back is one of the things that are kind of monolithic monotheistic. Scientific culture doesn't take much account which is power genuinely tricky, our cultures also very serious it doesn't really taking into account the ridiculous but in pagan cultures that is to say non christian culture There are tricks to God like Hermes or Loki, or even Krishna who plays tricks and so on. But they are both sublime and ridiculous at the same time you know? They see no problem in that they have a sense of humor they play tricks And Christianity has excluded that element That very necessary kind of psychological principle

34:50 and has tended to demonize it. The devil becomes the arch, and tricky cunning deceiver but a sensible mythology takes account of trickster gods who can both enlighten you and deceive you. Well with the Catholic Church when you set off on a mind control and wealth extraction venture who has time for jokes? Well exactly yes it's all got a bit serious you got a lot of things through the cracks otherwise it all becomes too brittle and rigid dogmatic and so on, tricks to loosen things up keep things fluid my favorite manifestation of the world is. The alchemical figure of mercurius when i was writing my long chemical book which is called mercurious that was my initiatory journey really

35:49 but in trying to crack the code of alchemy, I found that it wasn't a code that you could crack. It wasn't like that at all. It was a mystery you entered into and you started to embody it. And so my book about alchemy became a book of alchemy, although it was partly written by Mercurius himself who began to work his tricksterish nature through me. Sometimes even my hand would even move without Willing it you know i write things i never knew when you that happens to some extent with all intense concentrated writing but, when your writing about alchemy is quite spooky and. That turn my world view upside down really how can we such a deepened fantastic discipline so contradictory weird strange but it deals over time in the problem of

36:45 the spiritual and material you know that they move in and out of each other the whole time. The volatile and fixed as the alchemist call it, sulfur mercury all these principles are constantly changing into each other and so on its best model of the psyche that i know and thats why jung seized on him when he read our chemical text he suddenly realized this was historical counterpart of his own psychology unconscious And I haven't read Mercurius yet, but it is on my list and it does tie into maybe some things you do talk about in the Philosopher's Secret Fire a bit. But with the context of the demonic realm, you write about alchemy in that book, of course, the first level understanding of alchemy

37:33 is turning lead into gold. And then for a fringe show like this, we have a lot of guests who say no no it's really just an allegory for enlightenment and turning spiritual lead into gold. Yes there is a deep study and path of initiation there But I don't think that's the end of the road. And perhaps when you fully grasp the demonic realm, transmutation of real material can take place or maybe a daemon can bring something from the gods that is perfectly pure gold of some kind? Is that entertainable in your concept of alchemy? Well there are some very fine and interesting stories about transmutations taking place it's impossible to say

38:16 The whole purpose of alchemy is not to let spirit and matter become two separate people say it's only really a spiritual discipline i think completely wrong the alchemist were working with matter with substances, i made it just see those chemical transformations allegories of their own inner transformation i think that the two leeched into each other but inside became outside on the outside became the inside. And so it's not possible to say finally when the spiritual and material are all dissolved, separated and rejoined at some higher level like being twice born. It is not possible to say quite what the result of that is or what people might be capable of or whether matter can indeed be transmuted well I know that

39:10 It's a mystery as difficult and as deep, say the doctrine of the incarnation that Christ is both God and man simultaneously. That is the ultimate paradox you can't think it. You can only relate to it through some other faculty not through reason but you have to relate to it through another faculty such as imagination or perhaps faith so it's The Great Mystery as Paracelsus called One can't say for certain whether what the result of making the philosophers stone or transmuting yourself through the elixir, what the outcome might be.

39:53 Mm-hmm. Yes, man And here's a quote about the true nature of the great work that I took to Pull out of The Philosopher's Secret Fire to kind of get at what you're talking about here But it says the great work takes place in a realm intermediate between mind and matter It's a demonic process a chemical theater in which material processes and psychic transformation Interpenetrate I mean wow that pretty much does it yeah That sounds quite good. Yeah! Did I write that? You did, well who knows who had your hand but it's got your name on the front. Oh yeah well good that's not bad Not bad at all and that idea is sort of contained in this story that you have in The Philosopher's Secret Fire from 17th century scientist

40:42 hell vicious i think is how you pronounce it but yeah he says in his book the golden calf that on december twenty seventh sixteen sixty six he was visited by a stranger who criticized his dismissal of alchemy saying would you even know the philosopher stone if you saw and then finally shows the guy three pieces of stone and after a lot of convincing he let some keep one And he's supposed to come back the next day, but he doesn't which is a common broken promise of the daemons. This guy's wife throws it in the fire and it unfolds into gold. It unpacks itself into this gold substance they take the gold to an expert who says it's the finest purest gold he has ever seen. And it's like BAM! I guess that is an archetype that

41:26 as weird as it sounds, as fringe as it sounds has happened before multiple times. Yeah yeah he does sound like a kind of myth or fairy tale and yet is presented history and even Leibniz the great philosopher came over especially to have a look at that gold check it out you know so the goal existed I don't think he was hell vicious playing tricks you know who knows It's one of the best stories of transmutation, but there are a lot of others. And it wasn't thought very outlandish in those days. You know it was thought possible to transmute metals because they believed that all metals were sort of growing and evolving into the perfect condition of gold and all you had to do somehow was to accelerate that process this motif reoccurs in the modern folklore surrounding red mercury which is

42:21 supposed to be this wonderful substance. It's interesting that it was called mercury, although it is not mercury just like alchemy and the Russians claim to have some and the idea you can I don't know...it's credited with many powers like enabling you to make a kind of suitcase-sized neutron bomb things like that And one of its properties is supposed to be able to accelerate nuclear fission at a much higher rate or something like that you know the scientists who claim to have seen this stuff or to have it, i was a bit vague and they always promise to bring definitive proof next time you meet them but they never turn up all their arrested whatever you know if one of those. Interesting modern things which echo alchemy doesn't go away even in the photo

43:11 material scientific well there are chemical myth it's not just a kind of allegory of psychological transformation but it is that as well, it was bottomless great alchemy you know me and i didn't get the bottom of it i just sort of. Gave up after three or four years of studying it but if it worked its magic on me i can tell you how to complete different world view What is with all these things you know you have to draw a line somewhere otherwise you get mad because it is about this mystery yes. Now, another motif that I liked that you discuss when dealing with Daemons is some type of treasure. To quote the book you say, Ah yes! The tale of lost treasure is familiar across the world like the crocks of gold pointed out to the Irish by the fairies. The visionary condition is a fragile one once the enchantment is broken by summons of expediency or common sense the treasure evaporates and the great secret is again forgotten

44:12 I mean that is an archetype i've read 40 in stories that a day man comes and tell someone hey there's a treasure here they come back the next day and it's not there or just as you say once the enchantment where's off. Reality changes and thats gone forever what do you think is going on in these situations are other tales without treasure is actually extracted Well, you know irish fairy law. You know the ferries will tell you where gold is buried is the idea but I don't have any instances with people that actually dug up gold except possibly when they've dug out places that are thought to be a horns of the fairies and turn out to be bronze age chimney which do contain some sort of archaeological treasure

44:58 What is really about it but if you take a break and do performance service for the may my pay in silver or gold, when you get home turned out to be dried leaves. I think that is the kind of universal mythological idea and it's about the difficulty of translating the other world into this world and vice versa there is a kinda barrier otherwise everything would just dissolve seamlessly into everything else and so it is difficult but joseph campbell's hero, the motif is definitely the journey to the other world where you do bring back something. Can you bring back something for the good of humanity in a huge something like that magical plant that heals or an elixir of some sort. But whether that happens in real life as opposed to this i'm not sure

45:58 I think it does because its symbol of knowledge and enlightenment, if you travel into the other world you come back changed. You do come back with a secret or treasure but it probably isn't material treasure, you probably don't come back with a bag of coins, just come back with some deeper insight into the nature reality so that seems to be fairly straightforward don't you think? Yeah I think so You make some excellent points too about the greys and how they fit into the big picture. Of course our western culture lacks an initiation ritual for adulthood, and maybe that is why the greys have emerged at this point in the timeline but

46:48 You have an excellent comparison between the Greys and those adulthood initiation rites of some African tribes. Can you talk to us about how they compare and contrast? Well, the point is that when trying to explain or do something to elucidate the nature of the Greys, you know, you're really clutching at straws so I cast around me first of all i thought they may well be Will clearly in their behavior they were analogous to ancient fairy law for instance so. I mean when i pointed that out of my book not many people held back view jack valley had already gestured towards it and some way, i'm gonna make a list in france but also suggested it but it's fairly commonplace now but it wasn't in ninety five or ninety six when i read my book having done that you know i've been told well

47:47 What are they doing if you're abducting just as the fairies do perhaps it's some form of initiation. When i was reading anthropology in a truck by the way which is fun societies. Masked elders of the tribe appear dead at night and snatch their children away, the children kind of know who they are one cent another since they don't far as they can send the game to suffer something really terrible. They might even die because the stories are that these are puberty initiation right and i told you know we're going to undergo these rights and that they are potentially lethal, i'm not taking away into abortion there often buried in a shallow grave of their starved and so on and then

48:41 drag out and circumcised which is painful or given scars and tattoos things like that so you know the message is. You know the idea that we have to be initiated at puberty, what's the universal right of universal custom if not initiate it with a potentially die in b reborn as he died to ourselves will suffer kind of ego death and rebirth but we never really attain adulthood It may be that because we in the West almost completely lack any serious initiation rights of puberty, any formal ceremonies of initiation anymore. We have a lot of informal ones—people joining gangs and they have the initiation rights or

49:31 Even customs at school what kind of you know if your new boy or girl at school there are certain initiations you have to go through but their informal and make an offer look like terrorizing bullying. It struck me that because we lack these perhaps the other world is really nearly initiated and that we are as it were, calling for from the depths of our own collective unconscious These kinds of initiatory entities these other strange mask like creatures who come and take us away. Subjective to painful operations and then i was reminded to the model of all initiation switch are the exceptional initiation undergone by shaman,

50:17 Who traveled to the other world and dismembered and you know i read a couple of abductees who felt that. Limbs have been twisted or their brains have been taken out and put back in all the eyeballs are being taken out and put back in, these are familiar images from shamanic initiations in siberian region. So that's what I tried to do. I tried to kind of suggest that the Greys may not be just an isolated, weird impossible phenomenon but they may belong to this family of either normal tribal initiation rites or possibly two more advanced shamanic initiation rites. Mm-hmm! I love that

51:03 Analysis and to take it a step further you have a small section in demonic reality titled why grays? Why now, and I really like this paragraph where you say we have the Appearance of small and apparently malevolent gray aliens which look like a regression But is much more like an improvement they have recovered something of their original demonic nature not so much as imitating the triumphal scientific perspective as parodying it, and so drawing attention to its darker side. They treat us much like we treat the natural world—sampling, analyzing and operating on us with exemplary scientific detachment in their lab-like spacecraft. They issue no warnings about the abuse of technology—they simply turn it on us."

51:52 translating its potential for power, knowledge and destruction into an image of a super technology which enthralls and initiates us thereby destroying the technological perspective itself." I mean wow man that is a mouthful but But I think it makes a lot of sense and you're really getting at the core of the technological aspect of the Greys situation. Do you think that's kind of the point? They're holding up a mirror to our technological age and trying to wake us up by treating us as coldly as we treat nature? Will i think it's once again i was touching a straw but you know i couldn't come up with anything better and i haven't been really, i got the idea from young who said that you know the unconscious shows us the face that we show to wait until if we treat the other world is kind of. If we try and prove it technologically its gonna come back at us with a kind of

52:50 fake technology which is, you know their technologies are very good it turns out. They can't do the simplest thing without causing us pain and distress have they not discovered anesthesia in the other world? So my idea was that yes they do sort of mirror some aspect of us and that aspect of us which is What are the least desirable aspects of west culture which is overweening kind of rationalism, which doesn't allow for any world but this world and i think they're coming to tell us on the contrary there are other worlds. And we mistakenly say oh well you know we still take this rationally if they all they must be from other planets

53:34 But i see no reason to believe that there from other planets it could well be for my own unconscious lives where the unconscious is as young says an alien country outside the ego. I like that phrase. So you mentioned spirit and soul a couple of times, it's kind of late in the game but this is maybe one of the last major things i wanted to ask you was...I didn't get to read The Secret Tradition Of The Soul but I have heard you talk about the difference between soul and spirit kinda like a left brain right brain or inner conflict between logic and emotion can you flesh that out a little bit? The way you define spirit and soul? Oh! It's very difficult

54:14 As you say we tend to divide the world into two spirit and matter mind and body emotion intellect romantic traffic. You can go forever you know i think that the world is kind of too full, add it shows the word spiritual soul because they are often conflated and used interchangeably but i want you to Distinguish between them draw them apart and use the notice words that have definitions but symbols which suggest certain perspective on the world is a two different kinds of perspective on the world. And it was really kind of evoked in me by the new age, what are things to get from my nerves slightly about new age people very spiritual

55:04 And by this I mean interested in the images associated with spirituality are always ones of light, height, ascent climbing higher purity moving up the hierarchy becoming more pure becoming more holy. Where's the word soul for me is more congenial and i see that it's more psychological Not less theological that more psychological and so was monster dean descent and death. I'm the model of this world and it's part isn't straight towards heaven but kind of a labyrinthine wondering path towards the underworld where, transformation take place in song.

55:55 Fancy the spiritual activity it's covered by. The god apollo who is the god of spirituality he's far seeing apollo associated with the sun and light enlightenment to delimitation, where is more associated with her me more tricky he's a phone in the side of apollo, steal his cattle he misses his head and bring them together is quite difficult they manage it they do it through music but that's another story And the hermetic path is the path of soul and it's full of, I don't know there aren't many jokes in the spiritual world are there? You know they're sort of cosmic jokes which aren't very funny but you know real jokes occur in the soul world of the Hermetic Universe. Whenever your meditating and being very very spiritual soul always interrupts you with

56:48 burps and farts and giggles. The soul doesn't like a single-minded monotheistic search for light and purity, it likes many gods not just one god. It likes muddle and mud, it likes poetry, the spirit likes prose you know In my chapter on this subject, I evoke all sorts of associations with each of these symbols in order to try and suggest the two different perspectives. You can't really define the perspective that's a spiritual activity to define and pin things down whereas the soul is much more symbolic poetic imagistic and so on. So i try and use

57:36 the soul approach to distinguishing between it and spirit tell your viewers to buy that book and read it but two chapters I most wanted to write in the secret tradition of the soul where the one on spirits and souls, and the one on the personal diamond. And the one on me after life at the end those three chapters were the most important for me to write because I haven't kind of coped with any of that in my previous books So it's the third really book in a kind of trilogy. And after that I went back to novels because being more enamored of soul and spirit, I wanted tell stories you know the soul hates philosophy and spiritual disciplines things like that and prosaic theology it just wants stories myths. So you know I returned to diamond reality in a sense when I wrote my novel The Good People

58:33 which is all about a reduction in fairies because i still have unfinished business. I'm written a prose book about it you know what to write about from the inside create characters who were abducted really had other world experiences, so the good people of modern fairy tale set in london in nineteen eighty nine at the height of the abduction phenomenon, how do other things too which is significant like the berlin wall coming down So that was my last novel but one and I'd like to mention my most recent one Of course which is a counter blast of the whole idea of demonic reality, and it's a novel based on the life of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who was very much in either or man rather than a both-and man And it's a work about the daimonic struggling with the spiritual you know which is embodied in Kierkegaards life and works

59:29 What once again i didn't want to write a boring book about kirk god or biography of something i wanted to write a book. Which he speak you know who is the main character in the book and that's demonstrate existential philosophy from personal and passionate point of view rather than looking at it objectively, That's enough publicity, I think. Greg, is that you? Yeah! I had maybe a couple of little more things to help you out there but in terms of Spirit and Soul the quote i had written down that I really liked was you once expressed it as spirit has high ideas it thinks are new and soul says there are no new ideas just repackaged ones and uh...I just thought that was fun kind of spoke to exactly the breakdown you were giving us

1:00:20 Like we said in the beginning you consider yourself more a novelist and like inventors some of the best fiction writers have talked about these worlds kinda coming to them sometimes nagging them compelling them. Do right more about this world that they conjured forth like a token or ursula lagoon and uh, It just it just has that kind of shape to it. It seems to fit in the box of the things that we've talked about as if these ideas are seeded by their daemons and I just wanted to ask you, and as we're closing this out, has your study? And your understanding of all this kind of stuff helped your novel writing do you think you've connected with your own damon in a way that plays out in your fiction and your world building? I think it's the other way around.

1:01:09 It was writing novels engaging deeply with the imagination i mean there is nothing like sitting up in the middle of night. In a room full of cigarettes smoking coffee sinking deep into a story which, you're probably inventing but it's partly invented new people who are coming alive unit. Almost like a shamanistic experience you know all this and poet have that imaginative capacity within them I'm not a great novelist but i'm good enough if you know what i mean to have sunk into that imaginative level where it's no longer your. Personal invention or fantasy you know where you are engaging with the diamond realm and so when i read stories about people encountering aliens on lonely road whatever,

1:02:01 It didn't strike me as outlandish you know i was able to bring my novice skills to bear on these. So cold real life encounters so i think it was that way around do you know how i thought yes well, the imagination can do that too if its a whole other world but you can sink into it's also another world manifest in this world suddenly spontaneous. Anomalistic events And you know these books are a bit older and if everything is myth, when you look at our problems today or the things like the internet or the polarizing American president. Do you see these as relating to old myths? Are there specific myths that you think we're...that are in our cultural cycle right now

1:02:51 Well you know i do write a bit about technology in the philosophy secret file i could have written a whole book on that if that. The philosopher's secret file is gonna be twenty books originally but i thought i'll just write twenty chapters and not bore people to tears, But the one on technology is definitely about how technology literalization of what we used to call magic doing home at a distance for instance is what bullets look like. Country got the other world, is what television looks like with little people moving around you know the internet is absolutely a kind of literalized version of the soul of the world that dream is connect everybody

1:03:35 buy invisible thread you know her me is behind that because he's the god of communication and i point out when you. He only got the travel from the world of the gods to the world of man to be underworld of haiti in other words his trajectory is vertical is the god of, depth and he connects the above and below. That's why he is hermetic, Hermes. If you deny him his depths, he just works on the horizontal plane at high speed. I think that he is the god behind the internet which lacks that vertical dimension and it's more horizontal spread out entirely over the globe but moves faster and faster until who knows what will happen? It'll probably crash in

1:04:22 In other words you know all these technological things are foreshadowed in mythic images as far as i'm concerned or else in magical and shamanistic practice. I will just been driven to the age old dream of flight where so great by that dream and of course, shamans can fly quite easily just leave your body and saw off I know many people who aren't shamans that can do that. I've done it myself, but somehow we'd be so gripped by that dream of flight that you know we had to invent these cumbersome flying machines. That's what the industrial revolution was dedicated to doing really with literalizing and making physical with all its engineering, the age old imaginative

1:05:10 flights and capacities and superpowers of the magicians and shamans. Don't you think, Greg? Yeah! Provocative You don't have to agree to that It's only an idea Yes well it's an idea that I really like Good Also why I guess promotional wise...you do courses on some of this stuff with your siblings if people are near you right Well we do about one a year because its hard to get organized but We've just done one actually About ten days ago and i think six americans came. We have twelve people it's very intimate, add it about the mythic imagination really but i've taken a backseat of regards talking my brother who is an excellent poet runs it we get wonderful guest speakers in unions and novelists and poets to come until i'm my sister also run to my sisters written one of the best studies of the diamond actually

1:06:11 It's called mystery big cat i should get that a plug about black panther appearing in britain and she made an index study of that. Is one of the best sort of micro studies of demonic phenomena, and I warmly recommend it to all your listeners. Great, that's great! I think it's right up our alley yeah no it's great you should have her on she's great that could happen yes and uh we mentioned some of your recent novels but maybe also tell people about your website because that's a website that you share with your siblings and their work as well well we have separate pages on it you know it's really an independent website

1:06:53 So yeah, my website is www.harper.org slash Patrick but if you Google Patrick Harper I think my website comes up at the top. It's got to it's got to google this thing figured out here well luckily i have this funny spelling of Harper with the UR at the end which distinguishes me from all the other hoppers. So that's a bit of luck, yeah. Well right on Patrick I really can't thank you enough! I thought this was a great time i had to guess Joshua Cutchin who really cited you as one of his inspirations so I really sought out your work and... Oh God bless him yeah he's done some great work Joshua yeah

1:07:41 He has, he has. And of course you inspired that and I think you've done some great work too! Oh thank you Greg and thank you for having me on it's very kind of you It was a lot of fun. And i'm sorry if I ramble incoherently but... ...it's difficult stuff to talk about and i'm not very articulate Yeah ya are. It was great so awesome man I appreciate the time have a great evening take care out there Same to you bye-bye Sweet Jesus hallelujah people, Patrick Harper rocking us like a hurricane. If you remember back to Joshua Cutchin he was the first person to make me aware of Patrick Harper and once I read Daemonic Reality and The Philosopher's Secret Fire man! I was blown away Well it turned out to be a pretty great episode And i think these two books are really under-the-radar gems for this type of material

1:08:34 And you know, I am a big fan of paranormal topics but a lot of the time it's hard to have a two-hour conversation that offers a different perspective because i don't want to just have the same conversation about these things every time. And I think offering up the ways in which the Greek philosophers analyze the paranormal and how initiation relates to The Greys those are both great chunks that I knew we'd be building around and it turned out to be quite interesting not just paranormal entities, but also a deep and rich look at alchemy and pretty nuanced look at the power of myth in the imagination. These are not simple ideas to me anymore they're very complex and quite important so big thanks to Patrick for taking the leap of faith and spending two hours with me we covered a lot ground in the first hour but on The Plus Show we also talked about a few things like anthropology and the paranormal

1:09:35 Looking back at Dr. Jack Hunter, that's another reason why I thought he was a great guest because he could talk about these things from the anthropology side and that's a unique perspective as well We also talked about things like witches and orbs science and myth that was interesting conspiracy paranoia and ritual magic Virgin Mary manifestations and the ancient myths that seem to be manifesting in today's era If you heard the plus show, there is a funny moment when Patrick asks me to describe my favorite conspiracy and I laid it out there. And then there was a bit of a pause and he says really? And I just thought that was really funny probably my favorite part of this show Was that pause because I don't need my guests to agree or accept every single thing that I entertain

1:10:29 Every guest is their own special person here for their own unique reason. Obviously when it's all said and done, we can see that Patrick is more than at home here but when he gets to the elite consortium with multi-dimensional entities to dominate the planet well maybe he breaks from me a little bit But I think that's where we should be with our worldviews. There are things i know, and there are things I entertain as possibilities and I'm comfortable with all of it and I don't really need to convince anyone else of it And as we go into another holiday week I think we should all remember To just smile a nod when one of our less than enlightened friends or relatives has to spout off about this or that

1:11:12 Don't take the bait and actually just look for common ground. We're all people, so there has to be some... In fact we're all standing on common ground actually So think about that I don't know that our feelings about politics and religion used to be worn on our sleeve or on our hats the way it is now I think it was actually considered pretty rude to talk about those things And I think maybe we should go back to that when we are with our families There's just more to life than our political opinions, at least I hope. Also tonight is another THC joint session! Come and tell me all your wild insights and experiences We'll have a drink and smoke...and gay old time Check Facebook Twitter or the Plus site for the actual call-in info Sometime after 5 6pm but before 7pm Pacific It should not be hard to get yourself in if you're interested

1:12:12 I also wanted to give a shout out to Gramerica. Apparently they have officially been banned from PayPal Suddenly and without warning it seems PayPal decided they don't want Gramerica's business And this is one of those things that has been happening So, I like to point it out when it does and I don't really care about Alex Jones I can't sign off on everything he says. I don't vouch for him. I don't support censorship in any form But Gramerica is a lot closer to what I do, and so when that happens to someone like them... ...I think it's pretty messed up. I consider their show interesting and entertaining but i don't even consider it that controversial So.. ..i am kind of confused by this but- I've been transitioning away from PayPal over the last year

1:12:58 I don't mess with any of the plus accounts that are still on those plans, but i did remove PayPal from the new sign up options because i just feared this exact kind of thing. I know it's tough out there and people like to just have what they can for free but It's important to actually support things that you want to stay around. Support Gramerica if you listen to them, sign up for THC+, if ya listened to me... ...'cause we can weather any storm IF we're well prepared and becoming a member now helps ME to do that if the day ever comes. Fingers crossed! Knock on me. But there it is guys I gotta go get beautified because I'm gonna be on camera soon Thanks for listening! I really am lucky and appreciative every day

1:13:43 and I want to keep you entertained, and i try to find roads less traveled in which to do that. So I've done what I can! Your move Diamonds Keepers of Alchemical Secrets and Facilitators Of The Big Grey Initiation... your fucking move. Well they tie the yellow ribbon round the oak tree They've worn out all their prayer in their heart All along thought they were rooting for the home team As they're sent to the game and torn apart We twist this tourniquet upon the pipeline That it carries all the pain in the world As we blindly clap and cheer from the sidelines It's clear, on a losing streak from the very start And that's where they found me In the cemetery

1:14:49 A smoking gun in my a- I'm down for the end of the f- THC, The American Scream! They took that faded ribbon off the oak tree. They've worn out all hope in their arms. All thought I was doing Now I'm lying in a pool of my blood And that's where they found me

1:15:34 In the cemetery A smoking gun in my hand I'm damned from the land of the free Sing with me And that's where they found In the cemetery a smoking gun in my hand Now, I'm damned from the land of the free THC The American scream! The American scream

1:16:23 And that's where they found me, in the cemetery A smoking gun from nowhere and I'm free Sing with me, the other can't scream