December, 2024

Owen Barfield: Harbinger of the 21st Century

The following article was first printed in the 2005 edition of The Golden Blade, an annual anthroposophical publication which survived until 2009. It was written as the draft of a lecture ultimately given in the English Auditorium at the Goetheanum on Thursday 7th August 2003. As Simon Blaxland de-Lange wrote in a footnote to its appearance in The Golden Blade, “the actual lecture took into account what had been expressed during the preceding days of the second ‘English Week’ conference, and was strongly based on Barfield’s remarkable text of the modern mysteries, Unancestral Voice, from which several quotations were taken.


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New Barfield Press edition of The Silver Trumpet forthcoming in 2025

The Barfield Press has been very glad to receive a goodly number of inquiries about when a new edition of Owen Barfield’s first book, The Silver Trumpet, a story written originally for children, will be published.

This is still more the case since we had been hopeful of publishing it in the earlier part of this year, 2024, and announced as much.

But to all those who have inquired, and to sundry others, we can say that the Barfield Press will publish The Silver Trumpet in 2025!


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On Attending the “Plotinus and Barfield” Conference at the University of Cambridge

In September 2023 I attended the first conference on Owen Barfield held at Cambridge University. That weekend, Cambridge basked in the golden embrace of a radiant sun, the city awash in warmth and light. This year’s conference, titled Plotinus and Barfield: Emanation and Evolution, took place on 14th September, and the atmosphere in Cambridge was no different. As I wandered through the narrow streets toward the Divinity Faculty, I crossed over quaint bridges, where punting boats lay moored, poised for a busy day of guiding tourists along the river, offering them glimpses of the city’s breathtaking architecture.


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Owen Barfield’s Imagination of Ireland

As a long-time reader of Owen Barfield and as an Irishman, I have naturally wondered about Barfield’s relationship to Ireland. Did he visit? When? And since the imagination was so central to his conception of life, what was his imagination of Ireland?

It has to be admitted that, at the time I write this blog, there is not yet all that much to go by in answering these questions. What there is, though, is tantalising.


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