For many philosophers as well as scientists, imagination isn’t a knack for making things up. Instead, it’s a path to wisdom, knowing, and deep transformation.
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2022
“You’re just imagining it.”
On the surface, this disparagement warns against getting lost in daydreams and fantasies. Some people do. But the majority of us living in cultures emphasizing routinized work and making money do the opposite. Living under the weight of relentless realism, we restrict our imaginings to the productions of Star Wars, Star Trek, Disney, and fantasy series so popular they have grown empires worth billions of dollars. Imagination seems to be doing just fine for them, fiscally and practically.
In truth we fear the power of imagining, otherwise we would not belittle it so. Imagination changes the world. No human achievement, no reform or revolution, no transformation of worldviews is possible that does not begin in fantasy. No wonder Freud referred to the deepest layer of mind as the “primary process,” with everything built on top of it (1989, 43). Sociologist Robert Bellah suggests that our capacity for going “offline,” when survival pressures are off and we are free to mentally roam, may be a source for science, religion, and art (2017, xxii).
Below we will explore the tradition of imagination as a path to deep knowing. My dissertation will outline an Earth-honoring gnosis of imagination called loreology.
First, let us consider briefly what the research tells us about the reach, power, and efficacy of imagination.
The findings below have been gathered from “The Healing and Inspiring Power of Story: A Glance at the Science” (Chalquist 2021) along with findings on the power of play.
One of the most consistent research findings, one echoed by neuroscientists, is that imagination allows us to predict possible futures instead of finding out about them the hard way (Seth 2021, 7). Instead of dashing around a noisy street corner, we may avoid a collision with heavy equipment by visualizing that the roaring and clanking increasing as we get closer represent an oncoming bulldozer. A hunter able to imagine a lurking lion up ahead possesses an evolutionary edge over one who rushes forward and hopes for the best.
In its imaginative work, the brain actively knits together representations drawn partly from memory, integrates them with analogies, and makes predictions without waiting to be activated by a random sensation. The resulting representations are rich, complex, and alive in many areas of the brain and capable of rapid updating and switching.
Although recollection and imagining share mutually supportive neurology, several brain regions (e.g., right posterior cerebellum, left precuneus, left lateral premotor cortex) show more activity when envisioning the future than when remembering the past. This makes sense in terms of immediate survival needs. Even so, simple recall or task completion activate fewer regions than imagining either past or future, which lights up entire subsystems. Additionally, planning amplifies memory more than other memory-accessing operations and connects to core network activity involved with imagining the viewpoint of others.
How we imagine also has implications for how we deal with difficulties. People who believe they can handle a stressor, for example, recall past events and imagine future ones in more episodic detail. Anticipating positive outcomes can be more emotionally evocative than simply mulling what has gone before. Imagining threats in a safe, calm environment is just as effective in helping us face them as employing cognitive-behavioral extinction regimes.
Using imagery can crucially link motivation and pursuing goals; even daydreaming is important for preparing for the future. Imagery can be visual, but imagination is also motor and somatic.
It is no surprise that creativity requires imagination, but the kind it needs is vivid, original, and innovative, especially when involving learning and implementing. Creativity joins sharpened focus to imaginative spontaneity.
Using imagination is linked to neuroplasticity, wherein the brain rewires itself. Perhaps this is why the more advanced a scientist is in their career, the more imagination they bring into their work (Chalquist 2021).
Overall, these and other findings suggest that being conflicted, fearful, or traumatized impairs our ability to manage stress, work creatively, or imagine better futures. Freedom of imagination—perhaps we could call this imaginal liberty—enhances real-world performance in many areas, activates and strengthens networks spread across the brain, increases empathy and appreciation for difference, as writers like P. J. Manney (2008) point out, and makes the futures we fantasize more likely to reach.
Despite all efforts to limit and control imagination, an underground tradition of revering it as a path to deep knowledge runs throughout the history of Western civilization. A detailed survey would require a longer study; instead, consider some of the high points.
When we survey the past for signs of when imagination began to be used as an instrument of knowledge, we run into the problem of how to interpret those fictions known as myths. The Orphics and Pythagoreans, for example, used myth as a vehicle for esoteric knowing. Plato made up myths as a teaching device; his gods seem either fanciful characters in a teaching fable or, elsewhere, examples of ontological reality (Tarnas 2011, 13). Enheduanna of Akkad, the first author to sign her name to a document, wrote rapturous songs while imagining the goddess Inanna. Ancient cave paintings ritually depict important animals in enduring images.
To focus our inquiry, we will begin in the third century in Alexandria, where lore from Egyptian religion mixed creatively with that of Judaism, Greece, and other ancient cultures to produce Hermeticism, a cosmos-honoring philosophy of embodied reflection and practice.
“Image” appears throughout G.R.S. Mead’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, a key document of the Way of Hermes Trismegistus (2016, 6). For Hermeticism, “coming to be is nothing but imagination,” as Book V of another translation puts it (Copenhaver 1992, 18), a power that gives us experiential access to Big Mind, a Hermetic term for God. “But if you cannot see what is within, how can God who is Himself within you appear to you through your eyes?” (1992, 9). Book V invites an imagining that seems to foreshadow Earth seen from orbit:
Would that you could grow wings and fly up into the air, lifted between earth and heaven to see the solid earth, the fluid sea, the streaming rivers and the pliant air, the piercing fire, the coursing stars, and heaven speeding on its axis about the same points…(1992, 19)
According to Book XI, to understand the divine we must be able to imagine it. To practice science, an endeavor praised by Hermeticism, we should try to imagine the cosmos as a whole while exploring specific aspects of it (1992, 41). No wonder so many of the greatest scientists took Hermeticism seriously, including Da Vinci, whose paintings contain Hermetic symbols, Newton, a practicing alchemist, and Copernicus, who derived the idea of a Sun-centered universe from reading the Corpus Hermeticum, where a centralized Sun is described as a beneficial demiurge giving light to all.
Gnosticism, a wisdom path some scholars regard as an offshoot of Hermeticism, uses a similar cosmology but is biblical rather than pagan. The original Gnostics, also from Alexandra, modified Genesis and other biblical tales to depict gnosis—transrational experiential knowing—as an endeavor beyond doctrine or creed. Warning the reader not to take their tales literally, they made fun of the new breed of dogmatic Christians for hardening wisdom tales about Jesus into supposed history, worshipping a dead man (Barnstone 2003) instead of discovering the Resurrection within.
The dogmatic worship group that started calling itself “orthodox,” meaning “straight-thinking,” did not get along with its Gnostic counterparts. Early church fathers like Irenaeus and Clement complained that Gnostic “heretics” (meaning “to choose” before Irenaeus gave the word a pejorative meaning) engaged in questionable practices (Irenaeus 2014, 2) like deep contemplation, work with dreams, and study groups led by women. Furthermore, these heretics perverted biblical tales, making Eve out to be a heroine of light and the serpent “the Instructor” sent by God to encourage Adam and Eve to leave Eden and enter the world productively.
“Those Who Know” told stories in which Adam and Eve and all of humanity were created by evil powers called archons (“tyrants” or “rulers”) whose influence possessed religious and political leaders. The chief among archons was Yahweh, who went by other names like “Fool” and “Chaotic.” Jesus, their stories said, did not fully die on the Cross; instead, with his body interred, he returned in spiritual form to teach his students the way of gnosis (Meyer 2009, 38).
It is important to understand how imaginative the Gnostic taletellers were. They borrowed lore from several ancient traditions, including the Platonic image of the Soul of the World (anima mundi); the Neoplatonic vision of a cosmos brought into being in emanations from God; the elaborate angelic presences inhabiting the Zoroastrian religion; tales from the Hebrew Bible and from mystical sources reaching far back through Judaism; and contemplative rites of passage from Orphism, which originated in Greece. The purpose of all this was to rely on imaginative stories to help clear a path to higher and deeper states of consciousness illuminated by wisdom, personified as Sophia.
Visions of Sophia also permeate gnostic Islam. Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, for example, Master of Illumination (shaykh al-ishraq), wrote five key philosophical works emphasizing direct experience obtained through imaginative intuition. Although he has been viewed as a one-time Aristotelean and a follower of Plato and Neoplatonism, his Hermeticism draws on Zoroastrian angelology blended with his own explorations during visions and retreats to offer a uniquely Iranian Science of Intuition (dhawq) critical of atomism, dualism, and materialism while evoking a world of luminous entities shining into the soul. His Light of Lights emanating other luminosities echoes the unfolding aeonic realms of eastern Mediterranean Gnostics. His best-known work is the Philosophy of Illumination.
Unlike mysticisms that call for abolishing the “I” or ego, Suhrawardi’s gnosis holds the self-aware I as a vehicle for opening consciousness to a mediating layer between material being and the realms of highest lights and archetypal forms: the World of Images (‘alam al-mithal), a term scholar Henry Corbin (1998, xi) translated as mundus imaginalis (“imaginal world”). The entities of this world, which create image material for dreams, visions, miracles (what C. G. Jung would call synchronicities), and ghostly bodies, are “suspended forms” (muthul mu‘allaqa) neither wholly material or wholly spiritual but visible to the soul’s imaginative capabilities. It was left for his commentator Al-Shahrazuri (1181-1288) to give the World of Images a more topographical feel of location between realms and to make it the eventual home of even demons and jinn.
Muyiddin Abu Bakr Allah Muhammad Ibn ‘Arabi, also known as the Greatest Master (shaykh al-akbar), was born in Andalusia (Murcia) on Ramadan on the first anniversary of the Great Resurrection by the Imam Hasan, instituting Iranian Ismailism (non-literalist Shi’ism). During a life-threatening illness while young, he saw a beautiful being calling itself the Sura Yasin (the Qu’ran’s 26th Sura, intoned for the dying), which his grieving father recited at his bedside. He lived to circumambulate the Ka’bah, where he encountered Sophia (who asked him if he were already dead). His student Sadruddin was friends with Rumi.
Ibn ‘Arabi left a lot of writing. His longest book, the Meccan Revelations (al-Futuhat), runs to 560 chapters. Although most Sufism was originally Sunnite, Shi’ite Sufism bears a more gnostic presence from Ibn Sina onward, especially in its evocation of the Angel, an imaginal entity feared (as Corbin points out) by the Aristotelian Averroes, the Scholastics, Bishop Guillaume d’Auvergne of Paris, and Ibn Taymiya, among others.
For classical Gnosticism, the Angel appears in some texts as a heavenly counterpart; for Ibn ‘Arabi, the Angel is also the source of our souls. It is a form taken by God so we can know and be a mirror for each other. Ibn ‘Arabi’s gnosticism is intensely and deeply relational; gnosis (ma’rifa) includes knowing that we are known. Corbin (1998, 114) cites a hadith saying famous in Sufism: “I was a hidden Treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them.” God sees God in our hearts and feels the divine yearning to be known satisfied by us. We feed the Angel from our own substance, just as Abraham fed the three visiting angels (Genesis 18:1-8) and showed them hospitality.
God knows God most deeply through our heart, the organ of gnosis and eye of the Divine. Not merely a pump in the chest, the heart (qalb) serves as a center for subtle physiology and activated imagination. This heart is a source of himma, or creative spiritual force manifesting as reflecting, desiring, influencing, loving, and imagining. It can even project apparitions and paranormal occurrences.
God appears in the spiritual heart in the form or Name of what we personally love about the divine. Names are attributes or states (hadarat) of God. The Names are sighed compassionately (nafas rahmani) by the sadness (ilah) of the unknown God yearning to be known and Named. We too are created from this Sigh. The Names also include the forms (images) by which God shows up for people in accord with their tradition. Fighting about which Name is correct shows a failure to see past them to what lives behind them. (Corbin (1998, 118) calls this kind of literalization “metaphysical idolatry.”)
God appears in the spiritual heart in the form or Name of what we love. As the Book of Theophanies reads, “I have created perception in you only in order to be the object of my perception…It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself.” The passage continues: “Why can you not reach me through the object you touch / Or breathe me through sweet perfumes? / Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me?”; “For if you approach me, /It is because I have approached you.”; “Be mine, be for me as you are in me” (Corbin 1998, 173-174).
By contrast, mental imaginings tend toward dependence on the imaginer (khayal muttasil), whereas those of the heart come to life with a self-subsistence (khayal munfasil) reminiscent of Suhrawardi’s “suspended forms.” Imagination gives form to absolute nonexistence, the impossible, the necessary, and the possible; it makes existence nonexistent and nonexistence existent (Ibn ‘Arabi 2012, 16).
This mediating imagination (hadrat khayaliya, or “imaginative Dignity”) puts us in conversation with the God felt in the heart. Ibn ‘Arabi might not have studied Suhrawardi, but he uses the term ‘alam al-mithal when describing the second kind of imagining, which he considers an expression of God’s imagining. The World of Images, or what Shaykh Ahmed Ahsa’i calls the Interworld, is made of immaterial matter shaped from clay left over from Adam’s creation. Here, immaterial beings take on apparitional bodies and material things become subtle.
The creativity of imagination is essentially feminine and symbolized by figures like Fatimah, Maryam, and Sophia. Ibn ‘Arabi thinks all Arabic terms referring to origin and cause are feminine. Haqiqa, for example, is a feminine word for the reality that is true, the truth that is real, the essence of being, and the origin of origins.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s gnosis included an interpretive move called ta’wil: the creative and imaginative “carrying back” that converts surfaces, events, and sensory details into symbols (mazahir) to interpret discover the Image or Name behind them (Corbin 1998, 12). Every exoteric or visible meaning (zahir) comes with an esoteric meaning (batin). Ta’wil means working, not horizontally on the plane of passing events, but vertically, from heaven to earth and back. When Joseph as a boy dreams of eleven stars and a moon bowing to him and then is welcomed one day by his brothers in Egypt, and Joseph says, “This is the ta’wil (interpretation) of my dream,” Ibn ‘Arabi says he is wrong. Ta’wil carries the lower to the higher, not the reverse (Corbin 1998, 240). It moves from the evident to the symbolic, the surface to the deeps.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s mentions of alchemy are not fortuitous. What has been called the technical side of Hermeticism flourished alongside more esoteric pursuits since the time of ancient Egypt. Jung considered alchemy to be a continuation of Gnosticism.
It is difficult to find out where the technical Hermeticism known as alchemy began. Signs of it appear very early in India (second century), China (70 BCE), and parts of Africa. Egypt, where embalming began around 3200 BCE, may have led to alchemical practice, although Shannon Grimes argues for a stronger source in Egyptian statuary art (2018, 20). The word itself is Arabic and might refer to “the Egyptian science” (al-kimiya).
Alchemy is the sacred craft of chemically transmuting matter from a theorized lower, base, or confused state into a higher, purified, and refined state through a series of operational rituals that also evolve the practitioner. “Evolve” refers to the Hermeticist goal to refine, purify, and perfect our humanness. By the second century, Greek and Buddhist writings refer to what the Greeks called chrysopoeia, or changing lesser metals into “noble” gold. The interior symbolism was not lost on alchemists, who had a saying: “Our gold is not the vulgar gold.”
Alchemy had always focused on understanding the workings of the natural world, but its strong emphasis on creative procedures and intricate art found a name when the Swiss physician Paracelsus began to practice it: vera imagination, or True Imagination, the bridge between the aspiring alchemist and the plants or metals.
Paracelsian epistemology, as a reflection of holistic cosmology, was based on the power of the imagination as the link between body and spirit. As microcosms, human beings were miniature replicas of the greater macrocosm… The astral spirit was located in the heart, circulated throughout the body, and formed the imaginative faculty joining the physical with the spiritual world (Merchant 1990, 119).
When the French scientist Lavoisier reduced alchemy to chemistry, he mentalized it into instrumentality just before losing his head during the French Revolution, in which all death sentences were by law executed by means of machinery. Nevertheless, the underground tradition of imagination as gnosis had flowed on, first into the esoteric Renaissance natural magic practiced by the likes of Marsilio Ficino, early translator of the Corpus Hermeticum, and then into European Romanticism.
Fourteen years after Giordano Bruno was burned to death by the Inquisition for advocating a Hermetic cosmology, philologist Isaac Casaubon conducted an analysis of the Corpus Hermeticum. Ficino and other admirers of the work believed it to be ancient, but Casaubon found that it could not have been written before the first century. The claim that Hermes Trismegistus had authored it was false. That the text did contain references to ancient Egyptian lore escaped him, however, as did the practice of pseudepigraphical writing, a common practice in antiquity. Denouncing Hermes Trismegistus as the author of the C.H. is rather like denouncing John Watson as the biographer of Sherlock Holmes. It takes a creative fiction literally, as a lie.
Casaubon’s debunking and its supercilious tone greatly encouraged critics like Marin Mersenne, priestly friend of Rene Descartes, who despised literature and history as irrational, and Pierre Gassendi, for whom ethics came down to a quantifiable tranquility. They did not merely admire Galileo and his scientific achievements: they worked as ardent missionaries of the new mechanistic worldview, an ideology totally opposed to Renaissance naturalism and Hermeticism at large, including magical imagination, cosmic sympathy, anima mundi, and the participatory nature of reality. To paraphrase Francis Bacon, they wanted nature on the rack so they could torture the secrets out of her. Imaginative partnership was out of the question, and all who embraced it were by definition superstitious hucksters who needed to be suppressed. This was wholesale character assassination (Lachman 2015, 19).
A counter-reaction was inevitable. That it carried a Hermeticist glow signaled an enchanted return of the repressed.
Romanticism is often described as a counter-industrial cultural movement of European artists, writers, and philosophers, although the movement stimulated other realms of creative endeavor as well. Romantic creatives also opposed the Enlightenment overemphasis on order, reason, harmony, and uniformity, some of which descended from the Classical period. Romantic thinkers and doers underlined the power of the irrational, the importance of situated personal experience, the free play of imagination, the joy of spontaneity, the celebration of eccentricity, and the exaltation of the visionary, whether in dream, art, or other forms.
An early German Romantic, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), was no system builder, nor did he use highly abstract language. Yet his ideas influenced thinkers like Hegel, Dilthey, Mill, Goethe, Humboldt, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and the brothers Grimm, convincing them that one’s native land speaks through its folklore and common tongue. He collected and published folk songs, promoted a hermeneutics of interpretive “feeling one’s way in” (Forster, 2022) before either Schleiermacher or Gadamer’s later “fusion of horizons,” and called for philosophy to abandon paper problems created by language and focus instead on understanding our relationship to nature and to each other. In interpreting an expression, an action, a text, or the language of nature, one must rely on disciplined imagination. To be human was to be a whole, with thought and feeling, solitude and company, meaningfully joined.
As a theologian, Herder thought of God as a kind of cosmic force: in effect, an active, creative Mind permeating all things, including the world of nature. Anticipating depth psychology, he also thought of the human mind as an interplay of interior forces, an idea reaching back to the philosopher Aesara of Lucania (Warren 2009, xi), author of the mostly lost On Human Nature. Teachings about God such as the Bible were to be taken neither literally nor allegorically, but poetically.
When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) published his 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, he stepped into the Romantic stream, although he later complained about its turgidity.
Hermetic threads abound in Goethe’s work: the magus’s search for deep knowledge in Faust and Faust II, his alchemical studies, the recurring theme of sympathy between self and world, the interconnectedness of all living things… Although known mainly for his literature, Goethe produced a body of holistic Earth science as well. Looking intently at the shape of a plant, Goethe’s imaginative faculty (exact sensorial imagination) discerned the archetypal image within rather than behind the growth and death of the form under consideration. Today we call this non-reductive qualitative approach Goethean phenomenology. Its investigations rely on a science of imaginative relationship.
Goethe’s nature science influenced Romantische Naturphilosophie, which in the hands of Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) opened a vista upon nature as an organic, self-regulating intelligence to be appreciatively studied by us, one aspect of itself. Atomistic materialism could not provide a complete sense of how inner and outer depths coincided, nor could it address how nature lived for its own trans-human purposes. The mechanical metaphor of the world was itself a constriction of perception and should be replaced by the image of an organism. This organic image was compatible with scientific discovery, as shown by Hans Christian Ørsted, who relied on it during his explorations of electromagnetism. Another advocate of Romantic science was Lorenz Oken, botanist, ornithologist, mathematician, and professionalizer of German science.
Like Herder and Goethe, Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801) was interested in harmonizing a variety of interests and skills into an actively creative whole. His loss of his spouse, “heavenly” Sophie, prompted the early six-poem Hymns to the Night. His pen name, Novalis, means “cultivator of new land,” a fitting choice given his insights into how poetry, folklore, and a felt sense of land and place joined in his work, most of which was not published during his life. He also tended an archetypal sensibility, as evident from statements in “Christianity or Europe” such as, “When there are no gods, phantoms rule” (1996, 75). His day job was one of unconscious alchemy: an assessor of salt mines. He identified with the gnostic Jakob Böehme. Long before Marx, Novalis warned of the common use of religion as an opiate.
In his notebooks, Novalis conceived the figure of the magus as a magical idealist, a synthesizer of poetry and philosophy cultivating deep relations with the neglected natural world. These relations should be those of reenchantment rooted in sympathetic love and actualized through creative imagination. Although interested in science, Novalis thought myth a more exact instrument for dissolving dualism between “I” and the world and embarking on a deep exploration of creaturehood rooted in history, community, and nature.
From Germany we move to England, where Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) struck several Hermeticist and Romanticist notes in writings later referred to as a metaphysics of imagination (Thomas 2018, 188). Her main Romanticist area of interest often goes by the word “naturalism,” but her questions probed below this surface: Was matter, were objects, possessed of a kind of consciousness? She knew this to be a minority position:
I perceive man has a great spleen against self-moving corporeal nature, although himself is part of her, and the reason is his ambition; for he would fain be supreme, and above all other creatures, as more towards a divine nature: he would be a God, if arguments could make him such…(Cunning 2012).
The Cartesian split between mind and matter, spirit and substance, made no sense to her. How could what is non-material interact with what is material? When we travel, for example, our supposedly non-material thoughts travel with our bodies. Surely the Creation is a seamless wonder in which even matter thinks. Rather than being purely passive, nature and matter have agency and organize themselves.
Cavendish anticipates the Romantic fascination with liminal states of consciousness by writing about how actions are often prompted by invisible influences like “custome, force and strength” (Cunning 2021) operating below or behind conscious adaptation. Here we find too an anticipation of depth psychology, the psychology of how conscious and unconscious interact.
Although Cavendish does not write explicitly about Hermetic sympathies joining microcosm and macrocosm, she does propose that material bodies, including ours, respond to one another even from a distance. Each body carries a kind of copy or image of those it interacts with; each participates in dense webs of interactions forever in motion.
Cavendish wrote at a time when few in the West took heed of women philosophers, poets, or playwrights. (Her husband was an exception.) The Romanticist penchant for conveying deep ideas and transformative programs in literary works blossoms in her poems, plays, and works of fiction, including Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, perhaps the world’s first science fiction novel. It depicts women as empowered leaders and high achievers.
Cavendish believed that employing the imagination in “fancies” could allow access to opportunities absent from daily life, give the mind pleasure and recreation, strengthen the feminine sense of self in a world of male power, and leave accounts of how the world could be different and better: “For the mind takes as much pleasure in creating of Fancies, as Nature to create and dissolve, and create Creatures anew: For Fancy is the Minds creature, & imaginations are as several worlds, wherein those Creatures are bred and born, live and dye; thus the mind is like infinite Nature” (Cunning 2012). Imaginal entities also share the agency of natural bodies: they take on a life of their own.
William Blake (1757-1827) had much to say about imagination, which he referred to as Divine Imagination, Poetic Genius, Spirit of Prophecy, and Jesus the Imagination. For Blake, these do not just describe a human capability, but a bridge between inner and outer, matter and spirit, intellect and heart, body and soul. Imagination precedes rather than hinders how we know the things of the world because it founds our very participation in them. “I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination,” he wrote in Jerusalem (1994, 352). In “The Lament of Albion,” he calls the imagination a divine body (1994, 337).
Like Hermann Hesse, C. G. Jung, and J. R. R. Tolkien, Blake did not consider himself a Gnostic, but he wrote like one. He even invented a Gnostic visionary lore complete with demiurge (the Workman or Urizen plus Governors), Los as the creative savior, mental wars waged against dark principles, a primal spiritual human, a demiurgic separation of the sexes, and, above and behind it all, an androgynous God. Blake’s counterpart to the mystical cities of Islamic gnosticism was Golgonooza, a word combining “Golgotha” and “Nous.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) had a different use for the word “fancy” than Cavendish’s, but like her and Blake, he held imagination to be preeminent, archetypal, and even divine. In his Biographia Literaria, “Fancy” meant simple pedestrian imaginings: a conscious play with things already known, as when we call up memories and put them together. “Secondary imagination” runs deeper, working with consciousness but also well beyond it, off in the realm of symbols. This kind of imagination makes art and literature, drawing on the “primary imagination” of involuntary incoming impressions emanating from the world beyond the mind (Coleridge 2004). (William Wordsworth drew a similar contrast between Fancy and Imagination but considered them, at their best, complementary.)
Coleridge too knew some Hermeticism, including alchemy, which he thought of as the true end of chemistry rather than its predecessor and the means to transmute vision into art. He read Ficino, Plato, Schelling, Böehme, and various works about Thoth. Reading Shakespeare convinced him of the playwright’s Hermetic ability to use imagination to become other people. Coleridge’s spiritual guide for this creative envisioning was Hermes Trismegistus.
Other English Romantics imagined by means of alchemical metaphors. John Keats (1795-1821) worked as an apothecary while composing sonnets and odes. Opinions have ranged from making him a Neoplatonic wizard of sorts to considering him a chemist who wrote poetry. Religion may have been just a “mazy Mist” to him (Wunder 2016, 1), but resurfaced correspondence with John Spurgin points to an acquaintance with basic Hermetic teachings, and his letters and poems contain ideas from Swedenborgians, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians, all popular sources in Romantic circles.
For Keats, the relationship between the poet and the natural world could “burst our mortal bars” (Wunder 2016, 3) and mark a path from earth to heaven. This relationship could deepened by our wandering in Nature and gathering impressions, ideas, and feelings. Keats shared in full measure the Romantic/Hermetic appreciation for the beauty of the world.
As Jennifer Wunder observes, Keats’ use of alchemical metaphors like “materials” and “touchstones” underlines his understanding of alchemy as a metaphor of how imagination synthesizes thoughts and feelings into a new creative whole (2016, 18). He also compared the imagination to a monastery and himself to its monk. “Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition” (2016, 3) is an exquisitely Hermeticist observation about how realm-bridging sympathies link the earthly heart to its celestial source.
Our list of Hermetically inclined European Romantics could include William Wordsworth, who saw nature as a set of symbols and imagination as ultimately redemptive (Abrams 1971, 119) and knew of Hermeticism through reading Henry Vaughan, and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, whose remarkable Grasmere Journals accounts of the natural world—lifted by Coleridge and Wordsworth—are permeated with spiritual feeling. Victor Hugo’s sharp sense of Notre-Dame, whose Hermeticist imagery he noted, would be worthy of study, as would Robert Burns, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Georgie Hyde-Lees, the source of much of Yeats’s interior insight. Lord Byron would make the list. The American Transcendentalists are also worth looking into, especially Whitman, Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau.
Through the early psychologists Fechner, Silberer, Freud, Jung, and others, the onflowing Romantic current of imagination as gnosis fed depth psychology.
By the time Pierre Janet began seeing hospitalized patients in the mid-1800s, the Hermeticist quest for gnosis had donned the coat of the physician. Janet wrote down what he called Psychological Analysis: a treatment approach that encouraged patients to talk and write freely about the promptings arising from the “subconscious,” think of their symptoms as symbols, and reimagine what had traumatized them, in effect rewriting the story of their life (Ellenberger 1981, 121).
Sigmund Freud went to France to study with Charcot, the supervisor of Janet, and learned some specifics of Janet’s methods. Upon returning to Vienna, he formed a treatment method he called Psychoanalysis.
Freud’s writings were nothing if not imaginative. The case histories he wrote like detective stories (he admired Sherlock Holmes) and passed off as factual were heavily altered, speculative interpretations were expressed as psychic reality or as fact, new terms were reified into internal entities, analytical guesses appeared as patients’ thoughts, patient insights sparkling in published accounts never appeared in the case notes, and important details—for instance, Breuer’s exit from the Anna O case—were outright lies (Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani 2011, 174). (Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim) was not cured by Breuer, as I verified by reading his case notes, but by becoming a highly creative activist.)
Little wonder Freud felt anxious. He wrote to Jung about the need to erect “an unshakable bulwark” against “the black tide of mud” arising from occultism (Jung 1989, 50). For Freud, “spirit” was the superego sublimating libido into works of higher culture. Yet Freud wrote papers on premonitions and telepathy, visited mediums, held a membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and said in a letter that if he could choose his career over again, he might be a researcher of psychic phenomena.
When depth psychology began to be repressed by mainstream psychologies eager to assume the empirical trappings of nineteenth-century physics, the imaginative psyche-nature connection celebrated in the Corpus Hermeticum went underground too. Even now, the textbooks talk about Freud’s formulation of id, ego, and superego, but not about his long walks outside with patients, his mushroom-gathering expeditions, or the presence of his dog in therapy sessions. We hear of Gustav Fechner as a researcher on sensory thresholds, but not as an ecstatic lover of the natural world, which he perceived as animate and intelligent. Until recently, the work of Herbert Silberer, who was fascinated by flight, on dreams, alchemy, and what Jung would call active imagination remained untranslated into English. Janet’s gardening metaphors are lost on us, as are the peak experiences (to use Maslow’s term) of William James, who wrote to his wife about his visionary encounters while hiking in the mountains. The Tepitates Journal of Jungian analyst Jane Hollister Wheelwright remains unpublished, it records the aliveness of Hollister Ranch, where she grew up, even suggesting that the missing deity we seek is Earth, here in our own solar system. (“Tepitates” means “sacred high place” in Chumash.)
As for Jung, he did not like being asked if he were a Gnostic. In spite of this, he wore a large signet ring bearing a Gnostic serpent symbol, and in his writings he refers to Gnostics as early depth psychologists. His celebrated confrontation with the unconscious is packed with Gnostic imagery. It would be no stretch to refer to Jung’s later version of depth psychology as updated Hermeticism.
In 1913, Jung suffered visions of floods sweeping over Europe and began his own self-analysis through imagination, emotion, and body states, not just intellect. He wrote down the details of his almost nightly inner onslaughts in his Black Books (published in 2020), later placing excerpts into a Red Book (published 2009) intended at first for publication in his lifetime. These deeply personal documents record an internal upheaval of images and impulses Jung tried to interpret psychologically. An internal cast of characters, some mythic, some historical, rose to confront him about his shortcomings.
The basic trend of Jungian psychology is inward. Its attitude toward alchemy is characteristic: the alchemists, wrote Jung, thought they were doing chemical experiments, but they were really projecting their psychology of the unconscious into their retorts and onto their materials. Likewise, the Romantics who wrote about nature enspirited and ensouled were actually putting their own soulful spirit into dales and rivers. The gods, in Jung’s famous formulation, have become diseases, and the nature spirits have fled the woods and taken up habitation in our complexes (1983, 37).
Even so, the revelations recorded in the Black and Red Books taught Jung much about the autonomy of the imaginal. Accused by the fantasy figure of Philemon of treating his thoughts as self-generated, Jung came to see that “there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me” (1989, 183).
Additionally, Jung was influenced by William James, who placed more emphasis on religious experience than on belonging to a particular church, and on the (pragmatic) noetic fruits of this experience in how we live, “toward yes and away from no” (James 2004).
Since Jung, deep psychological work on the imagination has diverged. James Hillman, for example, writes about “soul” as an imaginative capacity of the psyche (1997, xix). According to Stanislav Grof, numinous figures, be they spirits, deities, or other mythic or archetypal presences, commonly visit during holotropic states—a subgroup of nonordinary states characterized by perceptual alterations and healing insights—akin to those Jungian psychologists refer to as “imaginal” (2000, 271).
Despite an early chapter by James Hillman, ecopsychology has not found much use for imagination, and still less at present, when the field’s primary journal focuses on what used to be called environmental psychology: empirical research about what ties us to the natural world. With some exceptions, most of the deep ecopsychology now resides in Europe.
In 2004, Laura Mitchell wrote a remarkable graduate paper. Citing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, the expressive quality of the world that gestures beyond subject and object but through both, Mitchell stated, “Just as the organs inside my body communicate in intelligent and complex ways, so too, my body communicates with all other sentient and nonsentient life because we all share this common condition of belonging to the same earth body. All things communicate: we belong to a ‘speaking’ world—a world naturally replete with meaning” (2004).
She continued:
The eco-imaginal is thus the interface we share with Nature that makes possible nature-human communication—a communication, not defined exclusively in terms of the human but experienced at the more biological and elemental level at which all life shares the same consciousness. In this place, we access another mode of intelligibility in which human consciousness is not the only measuring stick—an intelligibility arising from the shared condition of our interinvolvement. This co-mingling is a psychoidal state neither psyche nor matter but both; neither ecological nor imaginal but both (2004).
Because of this shared ground of existence, we and the features of the world resonate with each other in continual communion. Mitchell’s work brings to mind animistic traditions around the world, Emerson’s “strange sympathies” (1968 199), and what Teilhard de Chardin calls the “within” of things (1975, 55).
The work of Mitchell, Matthew Cochran, and, over the past two decades, a number of other colleagues and students has taken shape under the name of terrapsychology, the study of how the things of the world—not only rivers, seas, skies, and forests, but roadways, cities, houses, and cars—speak to us from within our own moods, conflicts, dreams, and imaginings. Terrapsychological Inquiry offers an Earth-honoring qualitative/theoretical research methodology for accessing the mind, body, and imagination for studying these complex relations (Chalquist 2020, 5).
In The Great Work, where Thomas Berry refers to imagining twenty-five times, he writes:
…For the inner life of the human depends immediately on the world of nature. Only if the human imagination is activated by the flight of the great soaring birds in the heavens, by the blossoming flowers of Earth, by the sight of the sea, by the lightning and thunder of the great storms that break through the heart of summer, only then will the deep inner experiences be evoked within the human soul (2000, 55).
He calls for us to honor these in literature, architecture, ritual, art, music, dance, and poetry. Not just through intellect and reason.
In our time of escalating global eco-crisis, we need every tool available to repair our relations with the world—including imagination, for our reaching this dire pass largely represents its collective failure. In World as Lover, World as Self, Joanna Macy refers to “imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies” (2021, 39) and touches on how imagination can limit through imagined ego needs (78) or, when schooled, illuminate our place in the web of life (154).
My own ecopsychological, terrapsychological, and story-based work emphasizes the need to reintroduce a sense of reenchantment. Not positive thinking or rainbow-draped unicorns, but the recovery of fascination in an animate world—sometimes dangerous and uncanny, often beautiful—packed with symbolic possibilities and imagistic communications.
But is this possible? “The enchanted world…is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in,” according to Taylor (2018, 26); but after Galileo, the charge is in minds, not things. The modern self is buffered now, not porous to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. Owen Barfield has also argued it is given over to the idolatry of preoccupations with objects in their own right, quantitative only and divorced from human consciousness (2011, 165).
Nevertheless, we see reenchantment daily among the practitioners of deep imaginative methods that rejoin us with the “dream of the Earth” (Berry 2015).
Perhaps such work operates within a new eradigm, that of Earthrise; “eradigm” (2017, 510) refers to a larger collective shift in thought and imagination than “paradigm,” which Kuhn restricts to sweeping changes within science when what is normal undergoes change; the word should not be used beyond that context, he insists (2012, 173).
“…Thanks to Copernicus and his followers,” according to Kelly, “European intellectuals started to accept the idea that the Earth, along with the other heavenly wanderers, is a planet (from the Greek, planetes = wanderer). Thus began the Planetary Era” (2010, vii). This parallels the birth of a planetary wisdom culture (128). In Becoming Gaia, Kelly frames our current time of deep crisis as we enter the Gaianthropocene as a planetary initiation with its own collective near-death experience toward a new Gaia-rooted identity (2021, 32). Morin calls for a planetary cosmopolitanism comfortable with the complexity which current technological, political, and financial systems try to simplify. He also reminds us that Earth is actually Homeland Earth, the place where we all belong together (1999).
All this requires a change in basic stories, including the story of who we are and how we got here.
The great opportunity before us today is to tell this new universe story in a way that will serve to orient humans with respect to our pressing questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? How should we live together? How can the Earth community flourish? (Swimme and Tucker 2014, 5).
Telling that story, which we know in fragments rather than as a whole, “is a task that requires imaginative power as well as intellectual understanding. It requires also that we return to the mythic origins of the scientific venture” (Swimme and Berry 1994, 237). To challenge the dominant story of mechanistic domination of nature through instrumental reason, a venture ultimately patriarchal, Val Plumwood argues for remaking the story:
Those of us from the master culture who lack imagination can gain new ideas from a study, undertaken in humility and sympathy, of the sustaining stories of the cultures we have cast as outside reason. If we are to survive into a liveable future, we must take into our own hands the power to create, restore and explore different stories, with new main characters, better plots, and at least the possibility of some happy endings (1993, 196).
Returning to feminine mythic figures like Spider Woman in lieu of narratives of heroic violence, Catherine Keller underlines the need for metaphors of reconciliation, connection, and possibility. “The metaphor of the actual occasion has replaced the idea of substance with that of composition: I am not a separate and enduring substance but an event in which the universe composes itself” (1986, 186). The Web image represents a “hermeneutics of connection” (218).
…There is so much to remember, to reread, to revision, to redeem. There is always the world, coming in: its immanence. We make something of it, flowing out: our transcendence. Remembering in its work of immanence, of taking in and reconnecting, breaks into imagining, in its work of transcendence, of envisioning the possible (248).
We have yet to see what role imagination might play in these great shifts. We should remember, however, that rather than dismissing imagination as mere fancy, it was one of the qualities along with courage and initiative that precipitated activism in Birmingham and Selma (King and Washington 2003, 587). In his speeches and writings King mentions imagination many times as an ingredient in changing society for the better.
The systematic use of imagination, then, will be requisite in the future, not only for the increase of knowledge, but also for saving the appearances from chaos and inanity. Nor need it involve any relinquishment of the ability which we have won to experience and love nature as objective and independent of ourselves (2011171).
Indeed, how can we move forward if we don’t imagine how together?
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