Our country from which we came is There… How shall we travel to it, where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from one country to another. You must
not get ready a carriage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not look. Shut your eyes and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.
The above quotation from Plotinus, which inspired the title of this volume, points to what is perhaps its central thread..
This book is a collection of essays from a conference held at the University of Kent in 2006, and marks the inauguration of the MA in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination which ran there until 2011. Its twelve essays by distinguished authors mark the beginnings of a new approach to the study of astrology in an academic context.
From the artistic genius to the tarot reader, a sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly affirmed; 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
