In the eleventh treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, Mind gives Hermes an instruction that is really an exercise. Make yourself grow to the size of the cosmos, it says. Leap beyond every body, rise above all time, become eternity, and you will understand God. Imagine yourself everywhere at once, in earth and sea and sky, unborn and in the womb, young and old and dead. Only like understands like, and the mind must make itself as large as what it would know. It is the earliest instruction in the Hermetic literature for the deliberate use of the imagination, and the tradition has been training that faculty ever since.
In brief
- The tradition treats imagination as a faculty of knowledge and of power, not as mere fancy.
- It is trained in stages, from simple recall to the stable inner scene.
- The body of light is an imagined form in which attention can be placed and exercised.
- What is seen in imagination is judged by its usefulness and its effect on conduct, never taken on trust.
The faculty between
The psychology the Renaissance inherited from antiquity placed imagination between the senses and the reason. The senses receive impressions, imagination holds and combines them as images, and reason works upon what imagination presents. Imagination was therefore the meeting place of body and mind, and the magicians drew the obvious conclusion: whatever acts upon the soul must pass through it, and whatever the soul does in the world begins in it.
Marsilio Ficino thought of the imagination as working through a fine bodily spirit that could be tuned to the life of the heavens. Cornelius Agrippa collected stories of the imagination acting upon the body of the one who imagines, and argued that a strong and trained imagination could act beyond it. Paracelsus called it a creative power, the means by which the inner world takes shape in the outer. All of them agreed on two points that still hold. Imagination is the organ through which symbols act, which is why every practice on this site uses it. And it is the faculty most easily deceived, which is why every practice on this site checks it.
Training the image
Most people can imagine vividly for a moment and not at all for a minute. The training consists in making the image stable, detailed and responsive to the will. It is gradual, and each stage should be secure before the next is begun.
| Stage | Exercise | Sign of competence |
|---|---|---|
| Recall | Rebuild a studied object | Details return easily |
| Stability | Hold one colored triangle | Two minutes without drift |
| The senses | Add sound, touch and scent | Each sense comes at will |
| Movement | Turn it, recolor it, enlarge it | Changes come when willed |
| The scene | Build a room, walk through it | The same room each day |
The first stages are given in more detail as the fifth exercise on our page on meditation. Sessions should be short, ten to fifteen minutes, and always followed by a moment of returning fully to the body and the room.
Active imagination
Training makes the imagination obedient. A second kind of work lets it speak. The alchemists described part of their practice as meditatio, which a dictionary of alchemy published in 1612 defines as an inner conversation with someone unseen: with God, with one's own self, or with one's good angel. The images are allowed to move of their own accord while the one who watches remains awake, attentive and free to answer.
In the twentieth century the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung developed a similar method, which he called active imagination, and later found it foreshadowed in the alchemists he studied so closely. It has become a common tool in the work described on our page on shadow and integration. The figures that appear are treated as real in the sense that matters: they have something to say, and the conversation changes the one who has it. The rule is to stay conscious. One is a participant in the scene, not a spectator carried away by it.
The body of light
The later Platonists taught that the soul is clothed in a subtle vehicle, finer than flesh, which carries it through its descent and ascent through the spheres. In its purified state they called it luminous. The magicians of the nineteenth century revival drew from this idea a practice. The student imagines a form, usually one's own shape made of light, standing before or within the physical body. Attention is placed in it, and through it the student explores imagined landscapes: the scenes of the tarot trumps, the spheres of the Tree of Life, the realms of the elements. The practice went under several names, among them traveling in the spirit vision and rising on the planes. Today it is often called pathworking when it follows the paths of the Tree.
Crowley, who wrote about the practice at length, gave its training in three parts. The body of light is to be strengthened by regular ritual, purified by invocation, and educated by experience, learning to move freely and to meet whatever it finds. He also insisted, rightly, that the question of whether its journeys are real in some objective sense is beside the point. Their value lies in what they teach and what they change.
Keeping the work honest
Imagination produces what it expects. A student who has learned that a certain sphere is green and is guarded by a certain figure will tend to find green and the figure. This does not make the exercise worthless. It means that what is found must be judged with care.
- Record before you check
- Write down what you saw and heard before consulting any book. Agreements found afterwards mean more, and so do surprises.
- Value the unexpected
- The details you could not have predicted are more likely to be worth attention than the ones the books prepared you for.
- Take no orders
- Nothing met in imagination has authority over your conscience or your reason. Advice is weighed like advice from anyone else.
- Judge by the fruits
- The work is going well if your waking life becomes clearer and steadier. It is going badly if it becomes more confused, more anxious or more absorbed in the inner world.
Corwin Hale's essay on results and the honest record describes the same discipline applied to practical magic.
Caution
Intensive work with the imagination is not suitable for everyone. If you have a history of psychosis, dissociation or trauma related conditions, consult a qualified professional before taking it up. For everyone: keep sessions short, never practice when exhausted or intoxicated, always close by returning deliberately to the body, and stop at once if images begin to intrude outside of practice. The full guidance is on our page on ethics and safety.
Practice
The room within
- When the stages of recall and stability are secure, sit as for meditation and imagine a door. Open it and step into a small, plain room: four walls, a floor, a window, a table and a chair. Notice the light, the temperature, the sound of your steps.
- Spend no more than ten minutes there. Leave by the same door, close it behind you, and open your eyes. Stamp your feet lightly, look around the actual room, and write down what you noticed.
- Return to the same room each day for a month. Add one detail at a time, and notice what changes without your adding it. Always enter and leave by the door.
- At the end of the month, read through the record. The room is now a place of practice, and it can be used for the meditation on a symbol or for the inner conversation described above.