Welcome,
Dr.Voss.My time at the European and Comparative Literary Studies programme at the University of Kent and with your Cosmology and Divination course in the context of the MA in the Study of Mysticism and
Religious Experience, and the papers I wrote there, are among the highlights of my educational life.
I had championed the Cosmology and Divination programme the course developed into on these fora until I was told the programme had been discontinued.I found that very sad since I very much admire the pedagogical model you were using in that programme,
a model I described on this forum in terms of my understanding of it.
I find the conference call for papers interesting.It inspires a question I would like to share.
The question emerges from the relationship between these three paragraphs extracted from the call for papers:
"In many traditions the fount of creative vision and the source of divinatory insight is located in an intelligent ‘other’, whether this is termed god, angel,
spirit, muse or daimon, or whether it is seen as an aspect of the human imagination and the activation of the ‘unconscious’ in a Jungian sense. This conference is not concerned with ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ the existence of such beings. Rather, we would invite
papers that address the theme of how the ‘numinous other’ is conveyed and depicted, how its voice is heard, how it informs, and has always informed, human experience. We would like to engage the imagination and open up discussion, particularly around the subject
ofhow researchers might best approach the study of such marginalised and culturally anomalous visions and experiences, and what their value might be".
To what degree is it possible to extricate the question of the ontological validity of claims of the existence of such a phenomenon from evaluation of the significance of its mode of manifestation?How far can discussions of "how
its voice is heard, how it informs, and has always informed, human experience" go without addressing the question of in what sense it can be described as real?
True,one could argue that a truism of the Western academy is that,to a large extent, conceptions not definitively asserted by the official world view are to
be studied outside the sciences more as examples of human possibility than as efforts to prove whether or not they are factual.In that spirit, anthropologists could be described as studying the relatively strange beliefs of distant ethnicities without claiming
to explore whether or not these beliefs demonstrate the details of a universal reality that is binding on all humans as factual, whether or not any humans are aware of it.
Would a study of esoteric epistemology,as this conference can be described as being,be fully discharging its duty if it sidesteps this question of the truth
value, in an absolute sense,as far as that can be understood, of this conception of an inspirational Other or co-presence with the conventional mind?
Thanks
Toyin
On 26 November 2010 09:43, Angela Voss
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear all
I have just joined this list, and would like to inform you all of a conference to be held at the University of Kent 6-7 May 2011 on 'Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence'. The call for papers is at
www.kent.ac.uk/mythcentre This is being organised under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Myth, of which I am co-director. I have been running courses
at Kent in cosmology and divination for 10 years, but was made redundant in August although I am still involved in the myth centre. The concerns of our programme and my interests can be found at
www.cosmology-divination.com
best wishes
Angela
Dr Angela Voss
10 Arnold Road
Chartham
Canterbury CT4 7QL
07787 434958
01227 732457
