Tag: symbolism

Ouspensky, Italy, and Symbolon

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My latest interview with Jeffrey Mishlove on his excellent Thinking Allowed site is on the life and work of P.D. Ouspensky, one of my heroes. I apologize for the echo effect on my voice; apparently it’s a problem with the acoustics in my living room. I can’t move so I will look for some other remedy. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them on.

I’m heading off to Italy tomorrow for a brisk three-day book tour, promoting the Italian edition of Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. It looks like quite an active itinerary. I suspect I’ll see as much of Rome as I can in the cab from the airport to the hotel and then to the interviews. Then there’s the train to Milan, and then one to Turin, where Nietzsche’s mind finally snapped and he was taken off to the caring but not particularly understanding ministrations of his sister. Poor Nietzsche.

At the end of the month I’ll be speaking about the lost knowledge of the imagination at Symbolon, a conference on symbols and symbolic thinking held in Gilching, Germany. I’ll be there with my friends and colleagues Rudiger Sunner, a filmmaker from Berlin, and the artist Martin Weyers, as well as many other people I look forward to meeting. It promises to be a good gathering - dare I say an Eranos for a new generation?

Legalize Freedom with Colin Wilson

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Greg Moffitt has posted the third part of our discussion about the life and work of Colin Wilson, based on my book Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, on his popular Legalize Freedom site. Like myself, Greg is a dedicated Wilson reader, something that comes through in his comments and questions. Wilson’s antipathy to the ‘socially conscious’ - read left wing - sensibilities of many of his early contemporaries starts us off, which seems apt for our own time, when practically everything has taken on an unfortunate political character. Personal growth and development versus political ideologies and utopias: that seems a significant contrast today, and much of what Wilson had to say is applicable to our own situation. And if you’ll allow me the plug, I touch on some of this in Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, which will be coming out this summer.

In other news, I’ve been asked by the Swedenborg Society to contribute to a series of short works, exploring the many areas of the eighteenth century Swedish savant’s work. I’ll be writing a long essay on the notion of ‘correspondences’, which is central to Swedenborg’s vision of a earthly, physical realm informed by links to the higher spheres. I’ve talked about this in other books - Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas and A Dark Muse (aka: The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse) - and of course the idea of correspondences is a central theme in the western esoteric tradition. I will place Swedenborg within this tradition and look at how his ideas influenced people like the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who took them and, with some borrowing from Edgar Allan Poe and the the German fantasist E.T.A. Hoffmann, invented Symbolism.