Martin Ruland’s Lexicon of Alchemy, a book published in 1622, contains the following definition of imagination:
Imagination is the star (astrum) in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.
Carl Gustav Jung noticed this definition with exhilaration, as it opened up his own perspective regarding the parallels between Depth Psychology and the Great Work of alchemy.1
To his eyes, suddenly imagination appeared as the ‘subtle body’ between dense body and abstract mind, the very stuff of the Unconscious. Jung was a psychiatrist, and wanted to secure the status of the theory of archetypes within the domain of materialistic science; yet, on a deeper level, he was tapping into something else altogether.
These enigmatic declarations become clearer when considered from the point of view of the multidimensionality of the human being.
In other words, despite materialist accounts that only recognize the existence of matter, or mind and matter at best, according to mystics from Western and Eastern traditions, the human body is made up of seven “bodies”, or dimensions of consciousness. The physical body is only the densest and the one directly visible. The others are subtle energy bodies interconnected, and nested within one another, which we can observe only indirectly, through their actions and effects. Here is a synthetic list, to be considered as a “map” to the territory:
Physical body
Etheric or vital body
Astral or emotional body
Mental or rational body
Causal body
Spiritual body
Monadic body
The third body, the astral, is the one that registers all the emotions and emotional effects of external stimuli, turning them into internal ones, and conversely, generates internal emotions and images that influence our perception and ideation.
It is the subtle body that is affected by, and at the same time affects, emotions, dreams, images, symbols, ideas: it is the substance of imagination itself, acting as a bridge linking the physical and the emotional on one hand, and the emotional and mental dimensions on the other.
This action is well visible in the dream state, which is capable of creating images without receiving sense impressions, but also of recreating impressions and emotions received during waking time.
Throughout Western history of philosophy, imagination has been seen as either recreative or productive, capable of receiving and replicating, or producing and creating internal images. At the same time, the multidimensionality of the human being has been progressively reduced to one dimensionality: mind and matter, or matter only.
For the alchemists, imagination is key:
Ruland’s definition of imagination is a constitutional metaphor, if we take metaphor to be much more than a mere rhetorical device to embellish language, as something that is wired in the human being as the way we imagine, think, embody and make meaning every day, and therefore “we live by.”2
We cannot understand imagination fully if we divorce it from the multidimensional constitution of the human being on one hand, and the embodied character of metaphor on the other. We are metaphorical beings, in that we think, feel, and act in metaphors and all we create and ideate is an “image” of something else, going deeper and deeper, in the attempt of making meaning, and finding a way of sharing it.
Behind even the clearest and most “neutral” statement and image, there are other images, and the assumptions connected to them: imagination is constitutive, not derivative, and our realities are constructed. Creative imagination is what makes them possible in the first place.
Thank you for reading and supporting Writing with Plants and Flowers, and The Magic Fountain!
Carl G. Jung, CW 12, para. 375.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980, Metaphors We Live By.