Author Description

The author uses a wide range of extracts from the sages of true philosophy to illustrate the many aspects of the path: chapters on Dialectic Meditation, Contemplation, Theurgy, Initiation, the Guardian Daemon, Mythology, Virtue and Love demonstrate the richness hidden within this long-neglected yoga of the ancient west. The book offers to the reader a starting point for a lifelong discipline which leads to the discovery within his or her own soul of the most profound wisdom, the broadest understanding of the self and the cosmos, the highest happiness, and, ultimately, a friendship with divinity. It does not, however, suggest any shortcuts - as Plato wrote in this Seventh Epistle: "For a thing of this kind cannot be expressed by words like other disciplines, but by long familiarity, and living in conjunction with the thing itself, a light as it were leaping from a fire will on a sudden be enkindled in the soul, and there itself nourish itself." The book is for those who are prepared to live the life, and for those who prize above all mere possessions the light enkindled in the soul. New edition published in 2011.