Rhetoric has diminished in our culture in the same measure as Soul. Rhetoric’s triple persuasion-to-truth as ethos, pathos, and logos was mystically initiated by Plato, carried into a powerful and enduring philosophical analysis by Aristotle, and revived in its integrity by the renaissance humanists, culminating in the work of Giambattista Vico. In this talk, I suggest that rhetoric’s contemporary incarnation draws strength from an imagination that is deeply scientific as much as it is poetic, in the revolutionary reconceptualisation of elementary cognition and consciousness developed by Michael Polanyi in his framing of the ‘Tacit Dimension’ of mind. This dimension brings forth something more than knowledge; to know it is the wisdom of soul.

Geoffrey Cornelius is a tutor on the MA Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred programme, and previously for the MA Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination for the University of Kent, where he took his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies. He is well known in the field of astrology; his main academic focus is the hermeneutics of divination, and the interplay of the imaginal, symbol and spirituality.