The Imagination… You Mean Fantasy, Right?

Summary

“Imagination” is a tricky word … It lends itself to a variety of meanings, and in fact it is not synonymous with “fantasy.” So in what sense are we to understand it? A pejorative interpretation all too easily comes to mind, as in Blaise Pascal's (1623-1662) famous statement. He calls it

that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, all the more deceptive as she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.

If the term “imagination” is preceded by the adjective “creative,” it loses that negative ring. Indeed, poets, authors of fiction, and artists are nothing if not people endowed with a certain amount of imagination. There is no dearth of theories and studies investigating the variety and the nature of that faculty, but I do not intend to dwell thereon (bibliographies are a-plenty – it is just a matter of browsing around on the internet).

Given the orientation of this anniversary volume, I will focus on “creative imagination” as understood within some sectors of the so-called modern Western esoteric currents. In that context, the notion can be approached in a way that is not all too vague, albeit not deprived of some complexity. Sometimes called vis imaginativa or “magical imagination,” it can be intransitive. In this case, imagination acts within the mind of the imagining subject, providing, for instance, visions or forms of superior knowledge; it may act upon the body, which undergoes a transformation in the process. But it can also be transitive. In this case, the action of imagination is exercised on objects (be they material, natural, or spiritual) that are exterior to the subject. Finally, it can also be both intransitive and transitive at the same time. Be that as it may, let us look at a few classical examples taken from the referential corpus of modern Western esoteric currents.

Let me begin with a typology I already had occasion to present elsewhere, that of the esoteric current called Christian Theosophy, thereby trying to bring out what seems to me to be its three characteristics.