‘The Consciousness Hour’: Talking about the Faeries with Anthony Peake

The great Anthony Peake was kind enough to invite me on to the January 2020 edition of his Consciousness Hour podcast to talk about the faeries and how they might interact with human consciousness. For those unfamiliar with Anthony’s work, I recommend checking out his website, which holds a big dataset of information, or, even better, sourcing some of his books, which investigate consciousness from a variety of perspectives. They are always deeply insightful. His most recent publication is The Hidden Universe: An Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences, published in December 2019. It’s excellent.

During our hour-long conversation we talked about:

• My background and how I became interested in folklore, and especially the faerie phenomenon.
• The chronology of cultural representations of the faeries, from Palaeolithic cave paintings to Tinkerbell.
• The place of faeries in modern culture.
• What are the faeries? Are they physical or non-physical?
• How are the faeries experienced? This led down the cosmic path, which always ends up with an investigation of altered states of consciousness.
• We finished with some of my own experiences and how they have affected me.

Please make an allowance for some garbled sentences, but I hope the basic concepts of the subject matter are conveyed.

Here’s the link: Anthony Peake’s Consciousness Hour, January 2020: Dr Neil Rushton

The interview can also be found on Anthony’s own website here.

The cover image is from Faeries (1978) by Brian Froud and Alan Lee; an influential book which is discussed during our conversation.

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