MA Dissertation: Jung, Corbin and active imagination

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Marieke Van Den Doel and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'Imagination', in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and others (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 606-616 (p. 615).
See Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 4-15.
See Gerhard Wehr, 'C. G. Jung and Christian Esotericism', in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. by Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (Chestnut Ridge, NY: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 381-399 (p. 393).
As Faivre says of this characteristic:
It is the imagination that allows the use of these intermediaries, symbols and images to develop a gnosis, to penetrate the hieroglyphs of Nature, to put the theory of correspondences into active practice and to uncover, to see and to know the mediating entities between Nature and the divine world.
Faivre, Access, p. 12.
See Faivre, Access, p. 5 and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 385.
The earliest known recorded distinction of the adjectival terms esoteric/exoteric is from Lucian second Century C.E. The strict etymological sense refers to doctrines and practices that are exclusive to an inner circle of initiates because of their secret or arcane nature. The substantive term 'esotericism' does not appear until the early nineteenth century.
See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'Esotericism', in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and others (Leiden, Brill, 2006), pp. 336-340 (pp. 336-337).
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 368-9 and pp. 375-377.
Ibid., p. 369.
Cited in Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, p. 371.
Ibid., p. 370.
Hereward Tilton, 'C. G. Jung and the Red Book', unpublished EXESESO study paper, 2013.
Hanegraaff, 'Esotericism', p. 337and p. 339. To be fair Hanegraaff accepts that an a priori typological approach may have validity but for a comprehensive understanding 'a fully-developed academic study of esotericism should give attention to all the dimensions which may be distinguished in religious traditions generally (social, ritual, experiential, doctrinal, mythic, ethical, and symbolic)'. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'On the Construction of "Esoteric Traditions"' in Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion, (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 42-43. Cited in Arthur Versluis, 'What is Esoteric? Methods in the Study of Esotericism', Esoterica, IV (2002), 1-15 (p.3). Versluis notes that the religionist view entails 'an emic perspective from within a particular religious viewpoint as opposed to a more neutral historical or etic approach. Ibid., p.3.
Versluis, 'What is Esoteric?', p. 4.
Versluis writes that 'the word "gnosis" refers to direct spiritual insight into the nature of the cosmos and of oneself, and thus may be taken as having both a cosmological and a metaphysical import.' Metaphysical gnosis refers to a personal transformation and direct 'non dualistic' spiritual insight into transcendence, while cosmological gnosis refers to knowledge of the hidden and esoteric aspects of the cosmos and nature. Ibid., p. 2 and p. 10.
See Roelof Van Den Broek, 'Gnosticism I: Gnostic Religion', in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and others (Leiden, Brill, 2006), pp. 403-416.
Merkur, p. ix and pp. 16-17. The unio sympathetica is the type of 'unitive experience' Corbin describes in the encounter with the angel.
Ibid., pp. 19-20.
See the 'Psychology of the Unconscious Processes', in C. G. Jung, Collected papers on Analytical Psychology, ed. by Dr Constance E. Long, second ed. (London: Ballière, Tindall and Cox, 1917), pp. 417-419.
From 'The Structure and dynamics of the Psyche', in Jung on Active Imagination, Key Readings Selected and introduced by Joan Chodorow (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 43 and p. 47.
Jung defines the symbol as 'the best possible expression for a complex fact not yet clearly apprehended by consciousness'. Ibid., p 48.
'Psychology of the Unconscious Processes', in Jung C. G., Collected papers on Analytical Psychology, ed. by Dr Constance E. Long, second ed. (London: Ballière, Tindall and Cox, 1917), pp. 417-419.
Ibid., pp. 415-417 and see 'Definitions' in Jung, C. G., Psychological Types (Collected Works of C G Jung vol 6) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 425-427.
Jung took the concept of Enantiodromia from Heraclitus (c.535-c. 475 BCE), which Jung refers to as 'the regulating function of antithesis' whereby a force or psychological tendency will always run into its opposite: the opposite unconscious psychological tendency will emerge to compensate for a one-sided conscious viewpoint. In mythology Zagreus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, was entrusted to the care of the Titans. They abused their trust and sought to hold him captive. Zagreus attempted to flee from them by assuming many different forms, the last being that of a bull. In this form he was finally torn to pieces by the Titans. Only his heart survived which was swallowed by Zeus, who destroyed the Titans with his thunderbolts and used their ashes to make mankind:
'Man thus partakes of a nature both evil and good, infected with the Titanic element, but having a portion of the divine. To subdue the Titanic to the divine, and to reunite what has been violently sundered, is therefore the highest task of humanity'.
Lewis Campbell, 'Religion in Greek Literature', The Gifford Lectures (1894 -1896) http://www.giffordlectures.org/Browse.asp?PubID=TPRIGL&Volume=0&Issue=0&ArticleID=13 [Accessed 20 June 2013]. See also Walter F Otto, Dionysus Myth and Cult, trans. by Robert B Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 191-192 for the equation of Zagreus with Dionysus.
Jung later wrote that:
The grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil.
C. G. Jung 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales', in C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol 9.I) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 215.
Christian Gaillard, 'The Egg, the Vessels and the Words: From Izdubar to Answer to Job', Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57 (2012), 299-334 (p. 332)
Jung, CW 6, pp. 427-433. Jung also uses the term fantasy in different senses – as in fantasm and imaginative activity: Imagination is the 'reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general…fantasy as imaginative activity is identical with the flow of psychic energy', while a fantasm is a 'definite sum of libido that cannot appear in consciousness in any other way than in the form of an image'.
Ibid., pp. 442-443 .
Chorodow, p. 50 and p. 53.
As Tina Keller-Jenny has stated of Jung's chapter entitled 'Confrontation with the Unconscious' in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 'there stands out the idea that strong emotions could become images and some of these could become personified'. Tina Keller-Jenny, A Lifelong Confrontation with the Psychology of C. G. Jung, ed. by Wendy K. Swan (New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books, 2011), pp. 130-131. For an interesting account of Keller-Jenny's own experience of active imagination see pp. 27-36. In her case fear was the affect which had to be present for the production of images.
Chodorow, p. 53.
Jung writes: '…."looking", psychologically, causes the activation of the object, as if something was emanating from the psychic eye to evoke or activate the object of vision'. In German this attitude is encompassed by the verb betrachten; to consider, look upon, to esteem. In this act the image is objectified and made 'pregnant' with meaning. See Elie G. Humbert, 'Active Imagination According to C.G. Jung', in Jung in Modern Perspective: The Master and his Legacy, ed. by Renos K. Papadopoulos & Graham S Saayman (Bridport: Prism Press, 1980), pp. 89-109 (pp. 104-106).
Humbert, pp. 91-92.
Chodorow, p. 59.
Humbert, p. 92.
Chodorow outlines developments by post-Jungians on this two stage process, notably Marie Louise von Franz whose schema was: (1) empty the mind of ego; (2) let an unconscious fantasy image arise; (3) give it a form of expression; (4) ethical confrontation; (5) apply this understanding to life. Chodorow, p. 11.
Dan Merkur, Gnosis An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 21.
Ibid., p. 44.
Henri Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, trans. by Leonard Fox (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 1995)
D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 75-84 (p. 76)
Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, trans. by Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 99-136 (p. 99).
Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. by Margaret Cook (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 110.
Ibid., pp. 111-112.

Marieke J. E. Van Den Doel, and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'Imagination', in Dictionary of Gnosis, ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and others, pp. 606-616 (p. 606). See also Dan Flory, 'Stoic Psychology, Classical Rhetoric, and Theories of Imagination in Western Philosophy', Philosophy and Rhetoric, 29:2 (1996), 147-167
Bundy, Murray W., 'Plato's View of the Imagination', Studies in Philology, 19:4 (1922), 362-403 (p. 363) and see also Cocking, pp. 7-8
Bundy, p. 363.
Plato, Cratylus, 386 e, cited in Bundy, p. 364
See Lovejoy, pp. 49-52 and Plato, Timaeus, 28a
See Republic VI, 509d - 511e
See Cocking, p. 8. The relevant passage in the Republic indicates that although reason uses the imagination to arrive at hypotheses understanding can grasp the first principle 'only through forms and not through anything visible' (i.e: images) which suggests Cocking's interpretation is correct. See Republic VI, 51 a - b.
Sophist, 264 a.
Bundy, p. 379.
Sophist, 265e – 266e
Phaedrus, 244a - 245a, and 249d. See also Republic X and the Myth of Er.
See Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 89-114.
Cited in Burkert, p. 114.
Timaeus, 70e - 71e.
Timaeus 71 e – 72b
Bundy, p. 396.
Phaedrus 245b and see Watson, Gerard, 'Imagination and religion in Classical Thought', in Religious Imagination, ed. by James P. Mackey (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1986), pp. 32-33.
See Christopher D. Green and Philip R. Grof, Early Psychological Thought: Ancient Accounts of Mind and Soul (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 67-92 (pp. 81-82).
Aristotle, De Anima, III.3, 427b, trans. by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin Books, 1986) and see Watson, pp. 34-35.
De Anima, III.3, 428b.
De Anima, III.3 428a and see C. Braga, '"Imagination", "Imaginaire", "Imaginal": Three Concepts for Defining Creative Fantasy', Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 6:16 (2007), p. 59-68 (p.61)
[accessed 2 August 2013]
Ibid, III.7, 431a. As Cocking notes 'for the Plato of the divided line image [Republic VI] the mind's clearest thought has left sensation and imagination behind and operates with pure concepts; for Aristotle concepts have to be abstracted from the sensible world through the intermediary of images'. Cocking, p.15.
Although Aristotle held that sense perception causes movement in the pneuma, Plato and the Stoics held that perception of an object occurs by an outward movement of the pneumatic current. See Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. by Margaret Cook (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 8-9.
Watson, p.34.
Couliano, pp. 4-7
Galenus, De locis affectis, III, 10.
Cocking, p.1415
See Green and Grof, pp. 161-162.
Plotinus, Ennead, V.I. As Grof and Green point out, Plotinus argued that each part of the universe is contained in every other part, and this could therefore be a basis for magic. This was developed by the later Neoplatonists into 'sympathetic magic'. Grof and Green, pp. 172-173. We can see in Plotinus's discussion of the individual (or distributable soul) for example, that 'its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed', which is reminiscent of holographic theories of the universe. Enneads, III.4.6.
Ibid., V.I, 7.
See III.4.
Plato, Republic X, 620d.
Timaeus, 90 a. The personal daemon also conducts the soul after bodily death to Hades after which it ceases to be its guardian. See Phaedo, 107 d-e.
Ennead, III.4.

Ibid., IV.8, 4. See also IV. 3, 4-8.
Ibid., IV.3, 26.
Ibid., IV.3, 29-30.
Dillon, pp. 56-57 and The Enneads, IV.3, 31.
Ibid., I.1, 8.
Ibid., I.1, 7.
See Grof and Green, pp. 173-174.
See Shaw, pp. 10-15, Timaeus 41c, and Iamblichus, DM, I.8.
Privatio boni is the doctrine that evil is the absence of good and has no independent reality. Jung felt this was not empirically justifiable in psychological terms as the psyche demonstrates that in a one sided development that ignores the 'dark' side of human nature the psyche compensates in a correspondingly enlarged personal and collective shadow.
Shaw, p. 80, DM, I.5, and III.18.
Iamblichus, DM, II.10-11
Ibid., II.4.
Ibid., III.17.
Ibid., III.25.
Ibid., III.2.
Ibid., II.2.
Ibid., III.2.
Ibid., III.11.
Ibid., III.14. Uždavinys notes that this procedure may initially have been related to various 'meditations and invocations practiced while facing the animated stones and statues considered as receptacles for the presence of a deity. This contemplation and re-unification of wholeness…turns one's imagination inward, but without thereby ignoring the ideal external beauty of the divine face…"Imagination hence is a case of spiritual sight"'. Uždavinys, p. 199.
Shaw, p. 221.
Couliano pp. 113-114.
Shaw, p. 222.
This relates to different traditions in Neoplatonism regarding the subtle body (okhema) and whether it was attached permanently to the soul or acquired by the soul in its descent from the heavens and was abandoned in its re-ascent. Proclus reconciled these traditions in his postulation of a higher imperishable Okhema (the luminous augoeides) and a lower pneumatic one which is the vehicle of the irrational soul which disappears or is reabsorbed into the augoeides soon after death. See Corbin for a discussion of this in relation to Islamic philosophy and the 'Resurrection Body'. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran, trans. by Nancy Pearson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 90-97. See also Couliano on the conflation between pneuma and the subtle body. Couliano, p. 9 and p. 27.
G.R.S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in the Western Tradition: An Outline of what the Philosopher Taught and Christians Thought on the Subject (London: John M. Watkins, 1919; repr. Shaftesbury: Solos Press), pp. 34-39.
Synesius, On Dreams, trans. by Isaac Myer (Philadelphia; Translator, 1888), p. 6.
Ibid, p. 13.
Ibid, p.12.
Shaw, p. 40, and DM III.22.
DM, III.30.
Shaw, pp. 40-44.
Watson pp. 33-39, and Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, VI.19. [accessed 8 May 2013]. Dan Flory notes that as the Stoics' epistemology emphasised knowledge as derived from the senses rather than the ideal. Phantasia was required to do much of the work of nous and was seen as fundamental to the process of making judgments in a 'postulated nonideal, incorporeal internal realm in which mental activity could take place'. They argued that this process stressed active engagement of the creative imagination in envisioning what has not been sensed before. Stoic theorists of oratory such as Longinus referred to phantasia as 'any thought present in the mind and producing speech', or thought with the capacity of utterance. Longinus says in reference to phantasia that 'the word applies when ecstasy and passion makes you appear to see what you are describing and enables you to make your audience see it' Dan Flory, 'Stoic Psychology, Classical Rhetoric, and Theories of Imagination in Western Philosophy', Philosophy and Rhetoric, 29:2 (1996), 147-167 (pp. 151-155).
Watson, pp. 40.
Murray W Bundy, '"Invention" and "Imagination" in the Renaissance', The Journal of English and German Philology, 29:4 (1930), 535-545.
Cocking, pp. 64-65.
Ibid., pp. 67-68
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., p.64.
See Sophie Page, Magic in Medieval Manuscripts (London: The British Library, 2004), pp. 36-52 (p.36).
See Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) for an excellent survey and Robert Mathieson's article 'A Thirteenth-Century Ritual to Attain The Beatific Vision', opus cit., pp. 143-162 (p.156-157) as regards ritual trance. See also Richard Kieckhever, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Kieckhever argues that necromancy was a parody of liturgical practices and was a blend of astral magic and exorcism. Ibid., p. 165.
Abraham von Worms, The Book of Abramelin, compiled and ed. by Georg Dehn and trans. by Steven Guth (Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2006).
See Couliano, pp. 117- 127. Couliano argues that al-Kindī's concept of rays is essentially pneumatic in character. Ibid., p.123.
Al-Kindī, 'On Rays', in The Philosophical Works of Al-Kindī, ed. by Peter Adamson and Peter E. Portman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 217-241
Plotinus, Enneads, IV.3.11. Synesius wrote that 'the parts of this universe that sympathize and co-operate with man must be joined together by some means …and perhaps magic incantations provide such means for they are not limited to conveying meaning but they also invoke. He who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe is truly wise: he can derive profit from the higher beings by capturing by means of sounds, substances, and forms, the presence of those who are far away.
See Couliano, pp. 127-128. Relevant passages by Ficino here can be found in Marsilio Ficino, 'On Obtaining Life from the Heavens', in Voss, Angela, Western Esoteric Masters Series: Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2006), pp. 120-122.
Voss, pp. 111-112.
Ibid., p.112 and pp. 115-120..
Ibid., pp. 12-15 and pp. 158-163.
Faivre, Theosophy, pp. 102-3 and pp. 108-109.

Henri F Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York, NY: Basic Books 1970), p. 657.
C.G. Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, (London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; repr. London: Fontana Press, 1995), p. 120.
Marie-Louise von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time (New York, NY: C.G. Jung Foundation, 1975), pp. 32-33. Jung writes that nothing could persuade him that the image of God only applied to man; 'the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers and animals far better exemplified that essence of God than men.' Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995), p. 90.
F J W Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) trans. by Peter Heath with an introduction by Michael Vater (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1978), p. 11.
Ibid., p.12. As Shamdasani notes, 'Schelling argued that the fundamental activity which produces the world is both conscious and unconscious. While, the self-determination of the individual was conscious the original act of self-consciousness was not. Thus there existed an unconscious region of the mind: "that which exists in me without consciousness is involuntary; that which exists with consciousness is in me through my willing". In Schelling's later work an irrational principle identified with the unconscious forms the basic ground of existence. Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 171-173 (p. 172).
Power or potency here refers to how the infinitely productive tendencies of nature (Urkraft) are resisted by an opposite finite tendency as in, for example, an inorganic form. When these tendencies reach a point of equilibrium this is supposed to result in a higher level of organisation, or potency in nature. This higher potency also contains these opposing tendencies within itself, which leads to a new equilibrating point and potency. The specific mechanisms driving this are embodied in the polarities of magnetic and electrical forces. This system is teleological and tending towards the divine. Terry Pinkard, German Idealism 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 182-183.
Pinkard writes that 'prior to our awareness of objects (which always pre-supposes our making a distinction between those objects and our experience of them), there is an intellectual intuition of 'being' as something that 'is' even prior to any statement of identity at all.' This apprehension of what Pinkard terms 'criterionless self-ascription', is not just of one's own individual existence but of 'being' in general. Pinkard, pp. 139-144 (pp. 139-140).
See Bernard M.G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.34-36, pp. 39-47, and pp. 40-41.
Ellenburger notes that there were few concepts of Freud and Jung that were not anticipated by Romantic philosophies of nature and medicine. Ellenberger, pp. 202-223 (p.205).
Ellenberger, pp. 53-69. In terms of disease theory Ellenberger classifies possession as the notion that illness is due to the 'possession' of the patient's body by evil spirits. Ellenberger has a useful review of the classification of possession. One typology is that of 'somnambulic' and lucid forms. In the former the individual 'loses consciousness of his self and speaks with the 'I' of the supposed intruder; after regaining consciousness, he remembers nothing of what 'the other one' has said or done. In cases of lucid possession, the individual remains constantly aware of his self, but feels "a spirit within his own spirit"…' Possession can also be classified into overt and latent possession, and spontaneous versus artificial possession. Ellenberger views exorcism as the exact counterpart of possession and a 'well-structured type of psychotherapy.' Ibid., pp.13-14. See also pp. 53-57 regarding the famous exorcist Johann Joseph Gassner (1727-1779). Ellenberger argues that Mesmer's methods were similar to Gassner's without the religious underpinning. In an age of Enlightenment Mesmer's secular technique was to prevail.
Ibid., p. 57, and Hereward Tilton, 'Mesmerism, Naturphilosophie and the "Discovery of the Unconscious"', unpublished EXESESO study paper, 2013.
In nineteenth-century Germany this area was known as the Herzegrube (the heart cavity) which for Paracelsus and Johannes Baptista van Helmont was the seat of the Archeus, or 'life-spirit'. Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 264.
See Hanegraaff, Esotericism, pp. 262-264 and Shamdasani, Modern Psychology, pp. 108- 111. One of the most spectacular case-histories in this tradition was by Justinus Kerner. Kerner a German poet and physician, in 1826 took over the care of a patient, Fredericke Hauffe (known as the 'Seeress of Prevorst') for two years, and kept an account, originally published in 1829. Kerner relates that when magnetized Hauffe had the ability of second sight including the ability to see her disembodied soul, which had 'clothed itself in an airy form, whilst her spirit remained with it'. Justinus Kerner, The Seeress of Prevorst: Being Revelations concerning the Inner-Life of Man and the Inter-Diffusion of a World of Spirits in the One we Inhabit, trans. by Catherine Crowe (London: J C Moore, 1865), pp. 88-92 (p. 91). Hauffe prefigures later Spiritualism and Theosophy in her alleged ability to contact the spirits of the dead in her trance state, her creation of a cyclical cosmogony, and her revelation of a primordial language of mankind. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 161-162.
Jung-Stilling, H., Theory of Pneumatology, trans. by Samuel Jackson (London: Longman, 1834), p. 45, cited in Godwin, p. 161. Such magnetic states had been first been commented on by an early disciple of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puységur (1751-1825) following his treatment of a young man named Victor Race who worked on the Puységur family estate. When magnetized Race did not demonstrate the more familiar convulsions or disordered state associated with magnetized patients but fell into a kind of sleep, which became known as artificial or magnetic somnambulism and, later, as hypnotism - a term coined by James Braid (1795-1860). In this magnetic state Race displayed an enhanced awareness, greater mental acuity and precognitive ability, including the ability to diagnose and foresee the course of his illness and prescribe his own treatment. Race had no memory of the event once he revived; what we would now term posthypnotic amnesia. Ellenberger, pp. 70-76. See also Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 67-69, for the influence of mesmerism on French Illuminism and the high degree masonic orders of the Chevaliers Bienfaisants and the Elus Coëns. Puységur's somnambulism was a technique utilized by these orders to effect direct contact with the spiritual world.
See Hanegraaff, Esotericism, pp. 266—277. Ennemoser divided the history of magnetism into two parts; that of ancient magic and modern magnetism, separated by Christ, whose advent heralded the end of the night side of consciousness and who marked a new evolutionary phase of humanity; the 'daylight of self-consciousness'. Joseph Ennemoser, The History of Magic, trans. by William C. Howitt, II vols (London: Henry G Bohn, 1854), II, pp. 338-339.
Ennemoser, p. 337.
Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: the origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; repr. London: Fontana Press, 1996), pp. 64-69.
See Eliphas Levi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Germer Ballière: Paris, 1856; repr. as Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, trans. by Arthur Edward Waite, London: Bracken Books, 1995), pp. 250-256. Hanegraaff indicates that early usage of the substantive term 'occultism' is found in this book. Blavatsky drew on it in writing Isis Unveiled (1877) and appears to have been the first to introduce the term in the English speaking world in her 'HIRAF' article. Antoine Faivre has defended the use of the term occultism for referring to the practical side of esotericism. Current scholarly usage refers specifically to nineteenth- century developments within the history of Western esotericism and categorises it as a reaction to nineteenth century materialism and esotericism within the perspective of a disenchanted world view. Blavatsky appears to use the term in both senses, and also as a 'catch-all' for an esoteric worldview. Wouter. J. Hanegraaff, 'Occult/Occultism', in Dictionary of Gnosis, ed. by Wouter J Hanegraaff and others, pp. 884-889 (pp. 887-888). See also H. P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, compiled and edited by Boris de Zirkoff (Wheaton Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1950-1991), I: 1874-1878 (2003 edn), pp. 101-119, John Patrick, Deveney, 'Astral Projection or Liberation of the Double and the Work of the Early Theosophical Society', Theosophical History: Occasional Papers, ed. by James Santucci, VI (1997), and Robert Mathieson, 'The Unseen Worlds of Emma Hardinge Britten: Some Chapters in the History of Western Occultism', Theosophical History: Occasional Papers, ed. by James Santucci, IX (2001).
See C.G., Jung, C. G., Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925, rev. ed., ed. by Sonu Shamdasani (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 3-8.
See Faivre, Theosophy, p. 115.
'On the Psychology of Occult Phenomena' (1902), in C.G. Jung, Collected papers on Analytical Psychology, ed. by Dr Constance E. Long, second ed. (London: Ballière, Tindall and Cox, 1917), p. 33, and pp. 68-70. This is similar to Frederic Myer's concept of the subliminal self. Jung described 'semi-somnambulism' as 'characterized by the continuity of consciousness with that of the waking state and by the appearance of various automatisms which give evidence of an activity of the subconscious self, independent of that of consciousness'. In this case by automatic writing, table turning and hallucinations. Ibid., p. 49.
Ibid., p. 70, and pp. 84-93. To an extent Jung attributes these unconscious powers to cryptomnesia; 'an inrushing idea whose causal sequence is hidden within the individual'. Jung was here influenced by Theodore Flournoy (1854-1920) and his work on mediums, in particular Flournoy's From India to Planet Mars (1900) in which he argued that the secondary personality of the medium Hélène Smith was partly based on cryptomnesia ('the awakening and setting to work of forgotten memories'). This idea, however, has its antecedents in the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. Theodore Flournoy, From India to Planet Mars (1900; repr. Marston Gate, Amazon Uk, ?), p. 216.
C.f.: the Introduction.
Jung, CW 8, p. 178 and p. 189.
F X Charet, Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung's Psychology (Albany, State University of new York Press), pp. 93-123.
Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit Seer, trans. by Emmanuel F Gorrwitz (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900), p.69.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 72
Ibid., p. 71, and pp. 74-84.
Ibid., p. 106.
Charet, pp. 111-113.
Hanegraaff argues this constituted a discourse of alterity, opposed to Enlightenment rationalism. While the rationalist was 'spiritually asleep' the night-side of consciousness was the link to a higher, more meaningful world. Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 263. Tilton has suggested that this paradigm is an oversimplification as German Romantic mesmerists such as Reil and Schubert 'brought the prisca theologia into the realm of biological instinct' and grounded their esotericism in experimental psychology. Likewise Jung sought a 'legitimate' scientific investigation into the night side of nature. Hereward Tilton 'C G Jung and the Red Book', unpublished EXESESO study paper, 2013.
Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 287. Hanegraaff argues that whereas Ennemoser had framed the soul within a Christian soteriology, Jung emphasized the struggle in modern man between his pagan and Christian consciousness. Jung's equation of the night side of nature with paganism and the day time consciousness with Christianity had not been made by the German Romantic mesmerists. See also Sonu Shamdasani, C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2012) pp. 209- 211: 'Jung argued that the figure of Christ was an incomplete symbol of the self, as it lacked evil (which was externalized in the figure of the antichrist)'.
Ibid., p. 295.
Ibid., p. 283.
C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works of C G Jung vol 5) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 16. One can trace this back to Aristotle's postulation in De Anima that the soul thinks in images. De Anima, III.7, p. 208.
Jung, CW 5, pp. 22-23.
Jung was familiar with the works of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and his theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and applied this concept to the development of the psyche. Jung writes that 'just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organised in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists. By 'history'…I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal'. Carl Jung, 'Approaching the Unconscious', in Man and His Symbols, ed. by Carl Jung (London: Aldus Books, 1964, Pan Books 1978), pp. 1-94 (pp. 57-58).
See Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 285. Sonu Shamdasani argues that Jung conceived the cultural role of his psychology as countering the fragmentation of the sciences and providing a basis for the synthesis of their specialist knowledge. Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 13-22 (p. 22). In Hanegraaff's view the conceptual basis for this 'universal and encyclopedic project … was the German Romantic mesmerist view of the soul and its mysterious powers.' Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 286.
Jung, CW 5, p. 29.
Ellenberger, pp. 110-147.
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol 9.1) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p .43. They have been described as 'the most ontologically fundamental of all Jung's psychological concepts'. James Hillman, cited in Robert Avens, Imagination: A way towards Western Nirvana (Washington D.C.: University of America Press, 1979), p.49.
Anthony Stevens, Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), pp. 44-55 (p. 44).
Jung, CW 6, pp. 443-444. Jung derived this idea from Richard Semon (1859-1918) and his engram theory. See Shamdasani, Modern Psychology, pp. 189-191 and 233-236., who argues that Jung's concept of archetypes was an unstable marriage of Kantian a priori categories with organic memory theories. There are esoteric parallels here with the concept of the 'Book of Life' or Akashic records.
Jung C. G., The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C G Jung vol 8) (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 205. Jung argues they are linked to instincts as 'polar opposites' – a spirit/instinct polarity which drives psychic life. The realization and assimilation of instincts takes place 'only through the integration of the image, which signifies and at the same time evokes the instinct…Psychologically, however, the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives'. Ibid., pp. 206-213 (pp. 211-212). Avens argues that the function of imagination is to 'make it palpable that matter in its subjective (expressive) aspect is spirit and the spirit regarded objectively, is the material world'. pp. 25-26.
See Avens, pp. 65-67 who argues that Jung conceived of symbols as the intermediary field between spirit and matter, the view Kant had formulated in the early part of his Dreams of Spirit Seer. Avens also echoes Corbin when he says that the 'realness of the imaginal is ultimately due to its mediatory role. Imaginal consciousness is therefore an "objective consciousness" in as much as it is never confined to the subject, but has to do with a relation between subject and object prior to any artificial splitting of the two'. Ibid., p.80. For Avens the term creative imagination should be used in the sense that it establishes a 'special kind of relationship between matter and spirit' whereby the two are brought together fusing ever new images and forms. Ibid., p. 21.
Shamdasani has pointed out the incompatibilities of Jung's concept of archetypes with Kantian a priori categories and noumenon, the difficulty lying in Jung's conception of archetypes both as timeless a priori structuring forms of experience and also the historical results or deposits of repeated experiences. Shamdasani, Modern Psychology, pp. 232–237.
From the 'Foreword to God and the Unconscious', in Robert A. Segal, The Gnostic Jung, (London: Routledge, 1992), p.167.
Jung, 'Psychology of the Unconscious Processes', in Analytical Psychology, pp. 410-411. Jung's concept of Urbild, or 'primordial image', was in fact borrowed from Jacob Burkhardt. See Shamdasani, Biography, p. 57. This is what James Hillman has termed the 'archetypal image'. Hillman makes the distinction between 'symbolic' and imagistic approaches – symbols are seen as abstractions from images. Symbolic thinking's focus is on the 'generality and convention of an image', while imagistic thinking relates to the 'particularity and peculiarness of the symbol its 'howness', which is more conducive of a 'participation mystique'. See Avens, pp. 53-54.
Jung, CW 6, p. 437. See also Avens, pp. 34-35.
MacLennan, Bruce, 'Evolution, Jung, and Theurgy: Their Role in Modern Neoplatonism', p. 4. [accessed 23 August 2013]
See Jung, CW 8, p. 436 and pp. 176- 177.
Or, as MacLennan puts it, 'the archetypal Ideas are the psychical correlates of the perceptual-behavioral structures common to all human beings, Maclennan, p. 2.
Jung, 'On the Nature of the Psyche', CW 8, pp. 200-216 (p. 215). This is the region where 'spirit' and matter interacts but interestingly he also suggests there may be psychoid processes at the opposite end of the psychic scale. See also Jung's discussion of the psyche, ibid., pp. 178-190 (pp. 181-190). He distinguishes the psyche (partie superiéure) from the physiological (the instinctual drives, or partie inferieure):
The psyche has lost the 'compulsive character' of instinctual drives and can be subjected to the will. Hence the psyche is 'an emancipation from its instinctual form…With increasing freedom from sheer instinct the partie supérieure will ultimately reach a point at which the intrinsic energy of the function ceases altogether to be oriented by instinct in the original sense, and attains a so-called "spiritual" form…Just as in its lower reaches, the psyche loses itself in the organic-material substrate, so in its upper reaches it resolves into a "spiritual" form about which we know as little as we do about the functional basis of instinct. What I would call psyche proper extends to all functions which can be brought under the influence of will.
The unconscious then becomes the 'unknown psychic'. However, the unconscious also has a purposive tendency but presumably not a 'will' that can be controlled by the ego.
Jung, CW, 14, pp. 534-538.
See Jung's 'Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon', in C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung vol 13) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 124-129.
Jung, CW 8, pp. 190-199 (p. 195).
Marsilio Ficino, Letter to Lorenzio De' Medici, the Younger, 'Good fortune is in fate; true happiness in virtue', in Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1996), pp. 167-168. Ficino argued that by 'prudently tempering within yourself the heavenly signs and the heavenly gifts, you will flee far from all the menaces of fates and without doubt will live a blessed life under divine auspices.' Gregory Shaw notes that in this letter Ficino is insisting that true astrology is 'not a study of the stars existing in some distant realm; it is a study of the soul' and the purpose of astrology for Ficino is 'to lead us within to the origin of heaven that deifies the soul.' Gregory Shaw, 'Astrology as Divination: Iamblichean theory and its contemporary practice', in Metaphysical Patterns in Platonism, ed. J. Finamore & R. Berchman (University Press of the South 2007). See also Thomas Moore, The Planets Within: the Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino (Lindisfarne Books, 1982), p.40, on Ficino's astral therapy as an early form of psychotherapy.
See Ellenberger, pp. 202-210, who notes that 'Carus's theory of an autonomous, creative, compensatory function of the unconscious was to be emphasized half a century later by C. G. Jung'. Ibid., p. 208. See also Shamdasani, Modern Psychology, pp. 174-179: Jung adopted von Hartmann's reconceptualisation of Schopenhauer's Will in terms of: (a) an unconscious will; (b) that the unconscious preceded consciousness; and (c) that the unconscious represented a teleological striving towards a higher state of consciousness.
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, (London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; repr. London: Fontana Press, 1995), p.222. Jung likened circumambulation to the circulatory distillation process in alchemy, the repetition of the alchemical maxim 'solve et coagule' which 'results in the activation and development of a psychic centre, a concept that coincides psychologically with that of the self.' C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung vol 13) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 148-152 Interestingly, Tilton argues that this notion has its roots in the occult Kabbalistic 'path of the serpent'. Hereward Tilton, 'The Red Book II: the Path of the Serpent', unpublished EXESESO study paper, 2013.
Jung, CW 12, p. 22, and p.25.
Jung, CW 9.II, p. 268.
Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 129.
Romantic evolutionism represents a dynamic, progressively unfolding and teleological universe: neither God nor the universe is perfect, rather they are perfectible and ever evolving towards a perfect ideal. See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'Romanticism and The Esoteric Connection', in Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. by Roelf van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 237-268 (pp. 241-242).
See Shamdasani, Biography, pp. 79-83 and p. 100. As Shamdasani also notes Jung's self-experimentation with active imagination had precedents that Jung was familiar with and closely resembled techniques employed by the psychoanalyst , Herbert Silberer (1882-1923), who was also a formative influence on Jung's theories on alchemy, and the professor of experimental chemistry, Ludwig Staudenmaier (1865-1933). Shamdasani, 'Introduction' in C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. by Sonu Shamdasani (New York: W W Norton & Co., 2009), p. 200.
Jung, Red Book, p. 232 and see also pp. 229-231.
Jung, 'Confrontation with the Unconscious' in MDR, pp. 194 -225 (p. 203).
Probably because Jung envisages the unconscious as 'a darkness that is ultimately at the bottom of the whole [psychic] structure'. See C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures) (repr. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986), p. 48.
Ibid., pp. 151- 204 (p. 192). Jung gives some further examples in this lecture from his practice and also personal experience which involves concentration on an image until it becomes 'animated', or the objectification of dream material thorough painting for example. This objectification has a 'magical effect' a 'suggestive influence which goes out from the images to the individual, and in this way his unconscious is extended and is changed. Ibid., pp. 197-198.
Ibid., pp. 207-208.
In Jung's typology these included the anima/animus as personifications of a psychological function that mediates between the unconscious and consciousness. See 'Animus and Anima' in CW 7, pp. 188-211. Salome appears to have the role of an inner anima figure for Jung. Interestingly, Keller-Jenny, claimed that while Jung had projected his anima onto his collaborator and lover Toni Wolff, he was never able to dissolve these projections and come to 'an inner anima relationship'. Keller-Jenny, p. 30.
Ibid., p. 208. Jung's nascent theory of projection can be found in the Red Book. He writes:
Whatever I reject is nevertheless in my nature. I thought it was without, and so I believed that I could destroy it. But it resides in me and has only assumed a passing outer form and stepped toward me. I destroyed its form and believed that I was a conqueror. But I have not yet overcome myself.
Jung, Red Book, p. 279.
Cited by Shamdasani 'Introduction', in Jung, Red Book, p. 211. This is the 'mana- personality', the archetypal powerful man – see Shamdasani, Biography, pp. 105-107 and Jung, 'The Mana-Personality', in CW 7, pp. 227-241. Strictly speaking the mana-personality might be viewed as an emissary of the Self that is not to be identified with but 'dissolved' though active dialoguing and conscious assimilation which leads to the self. Jung CW 7, pp. 237-238.
Ibid., p. 313.
Ibid., p. 314.
Couliano, p. 126
Jung, Red Book, p. 238.
Jung, Red Book, pp. 253-254, and pp. 292-293.
Ibid., p.252.
Jung, Introduction to Jungian Psychology, pp. 106-107.
'Self-knowledge is knowledge of what is above because in general the effect is contained within the cause and in knowing the latter one must know the former'. Cited in Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity (San Rafael, CA.: Sophia Perennis, 2010), pp. 54-61 (p.55).
See, for example, Phaedo, 66 a - e and Meno 86a - b in Plato, Complete Works.
Jung, CW 7, p. 220.
C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung vol 13) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 317.
CW 13, Ibid., p. 123. See also 'The Lapis-Christ Parallel', in C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works of C G Jung vol 12) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 345-423.
Marie Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and Psychology (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980), p. 129.
Walter Pagel, 'Jung's Views on Alchemy', Isis 39:1 (October 1948), 44-48 (p. 45).
Ibid., p.45. Jung writes that, 'as is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomenon of chemical change'. Jung, CW 12, p. 482. See also C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works of C G Jung vol 14) (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 487-496.
Carl Jung, CW 12, pp. 242-243.
Ibid., p.244. Pagel refers to the alchemists' work as aiming for the redemption of the world soul that slumbers in matter. The alchemist yearns for redemption effected by the production of an elixir vitae produced by his own activity. Pagel, p.47. Jung argues that with the growth of natural science this projection into matter became obsolete and is now confined to personal and social relationships. C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol 13) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p.300.
Jung, CW 12, p. 245. For Jung this appears particularly true of alchemy in the early modern period where there was less separation between the mystical and physical elements of alchemy. Jung accepted that a few later alchemists in the post-reformation period such as Gerard Dorn (c.1530-1584) and Michael Maier (1569-1622) had a conscious awareness of the processes involved. Hereward Tilton notes that Jung's historiography is followed by Betty Dobbs in her book The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy where there is a distinction between ancient and medieval alchemy in which psychological processes remained largely unconscious, and a newer post-Reformation alchemy in which divisions appear between a conscious alchemical mysticism and an experimentally-based alchemy. Chemistry is seen as developing from the latter. Hereward Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the Work of Count Michael Maier (1569-1622), (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 7-8.
Jung, CW 13, p. 105.
Jung interpreted this union of spirit and soul in psychological terms as a coming to terms with the unconscious and confrontation with the 'shadow'. He argued that the analogous alchemical term for this was 'meditation' defined in Ruland's Lexicon alchemiae (1612) as 'the name of an Internal Talk of one person with another who is invisible, as in the invocation of the Deity, or communion with one's self or with one's good angel'. Jung, CW 14, p. 497. This has interesting parallels with Corbin but Corbin interprets this as an encounter with a different 'darkness' associated with the plane of superconsciousness discussed in chapter three.
Ibid., p. 474 and pp. 517-518.
William R. Newman, 'Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language? Eirenaeus Philatheles and Carl Jung', Revue D'Histoire des Sciences, 49.2 (1996), 159-188 (p. 174). See also Lawrence, M. Principe, 'Alchemy Restored', Isis, 102:2 (June 2011), 305-312 and William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, 'Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake', Early Science and Medicine, 1998, 3:1, 32-65. Principe and Newman object to Jung's theories on the grounds that they are 'presentist' in that they project modern conceptions and meanings onto the past and are therefore ahistorical. Barbara Obrist has also criticised Jung's ahistorical approach to alchemy as resulting in mistaken conceptions of the alchemical worldview as being fundamentally religious and vitalistic. Barbara Obrist, Les Debuts de l'Imagerie de Alchimique (XIV – XV siecles) (Paris: Le Sycamore,1982), cited in Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, p. 8, and p. 10.
Jung, CW 14, p. 526. Jung suggests that the second stage of the alchemical coniunctio, the reuniting of the unio mentalis (the spiritual) with the body, is psychologically equivalent to making the insights gained from the unio mentalis real and would therefore correspond to the second stage of active imagination. Ibid., p. 476.
For a brief biography see Tom Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism (Woodstock, CT: Spring Journal Books, 2003), pp. ix-xiii.
See for example Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)
This has some similarities with Schleiermacher. Christopher Bamford notes that the link between signifier and signified is human-reality, Dasein, or human presence. In Heidegger that presence is the place of revelation. Christopher Bamford, 'Esotericism Today: The Example of Henry Corbin', in Henry Corbin, The Voyage and The Messenger: Iran and Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998), p. xxxix – xl.
Cheetham, Inside Out, pp. 1-16.
Corbin, cited in Cheetham, Inside Out, p. 7. The fundamental characteristics of Dasein are ontological and existential, while the more superficial that are characteristic of our everyday existence are termed ontic and existentiell.
Corbin, cited in Cheetham, Inside Out, p. 8. In this we can see echoes of the perennialism of René Guénon.
Ibid., pp. 10-12. See also Wasserstrom, pp. 159-171.
The eighth climate, contains the Earth of Hūrqalyā, the celestial Image of the earth, and is the visionary reality of the soul, the visio smaragdina. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran, trans. by Nancy Pearson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 73-84 (p. 81)
Henry, Corbin, 'Mundus Imaginalis', in Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, trans. by Leonard Fox (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 1995), p. 5-6.
Ibid., p. 13 and pp. 31-32. Corbin refers to Avicenna's hierarchy of Angeli coelestes below Angeli intellectuales. The former were representative of imaginative power in its pure state'. Ibid., p.17. Corbin writes that 'the Angel is itself the ekstasis, the "displacement" or the departure from ourselves that is a change of state from our state'.
Christopher Bamford, 'Esotericism Today: The Example of Henry Corbin', in Henry Corbin, The Voyage and The Messenger: Iran and Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998), pp. xiv- lx (pp. xviii-xix). See also Cheetham, Inside Out pp. 91-92.
In Avicennan cosmology these correspond to human souls, angel-souls and the pure Intelligences respectively. Suhrawardi (c. 1155-1191), appears to have conceived of the mundus imaginalis as a fourth universe between the Jabarut and Malakut rather than as indentified specifically with the Malakut. See Cheetham, Inside Out, p, 78.
Corbin, Swedenborg, p. 8.
"This universe in the macrocosm, is homologous to the active Imagination in the human microcosm'. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 176.
Corbin, Swedenborg, p.10. 'There is no existent thing, whether in the intelligible world or in the sensory world, whose image is not recorded in this intermediate universe'. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 176. These archetypal Images are not the same as the Platonic Ideas as the latter are pure Intelligence – the archetypal Images are the 'incorporeal corporalized'. Spiritual Body, pp. 78-79. This is close to Jung's concept of the psychoid archetype.
There are correspondences because this intermediary world symbolizes with the worlds it mediates. See Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1969; repr. 1997), p.217. In Islamic gnosis this 'science of correspondences' was called the 'science of the Balance'. A principle which 'measures the intensity of the Soul's desire during its descent through Matter' and which, 'measures the quantities of the Natures that the Soul has appropriated for the purpose of forming their bodies'. Henry Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, trans. by Philip Sherrard (London: KPI, 1986), p. 55.
Just as the material substance and the form of the mirror are neither the matter nor the form of the Image reflected and perceived in it, but simply the privileged place where this Image is epiphanized, so sensory matter is but the vehicle (markab), or rather the epiphanic place (mazhar), for the forms produced by the absolute activity of the soul.
Spiritual Body, p. 81.
The science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring "surfaces" and of the forms that appear in them…and draws the ultimate consequences from the fact that though forms appear in mirrors, they are not in the mirrors.
Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 218.
Corbin warns against conflating the mirror and the Images that appear in it, 'The forms of the soul, being neither inherent in nor consubstantial with the mirror, continue to subsist'. Spiritual Body, p. 81.
Swedenborg, p. 15. Corbin wrote that:
The Active Imagination guides, anticipates, molds sensory perception; that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice calling him 'from the right side of the valley' - in short, in order that there may be a theophany - an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed.
Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 80.
Corbin, Swedenborg, p. 16-17.
Ibid., p. 18.
Steven M. Joseph, 'Jung and Kabbalah: Imaginal and Noetic aspects', Journal of Analytic Psychology, 52 (2007), 321-341 (pp. 334-336).
Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. by William R. Trask (Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications, 1980), pp. 7-8.
Ibid., p. 19. C.f. Jung's concept of the Self which he describes as an empirically authenticated God-image.
Ibid., p. 20.
Wasserstrom, p. 193.
Corbin, Avicenna, p. 21. This Intelligence is also referred to as the Archangel Gabriel, the Holy Spirit, and the Angel of Humanity
Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 23.
Corbin, Avicenna, pp. 28-29.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p.32
Ibid., p. 33. As Tom Cheetham writes:
For Corbin the Person is the first and final reality…The individual can only be amplified, not reduced, and the locus of the amplification towards which the person is to be raised, is the celestial, eternal counterpart, the partner in heaven, the archetype of each of us that guarantees the possibility of our eternal individuality – the locus, the telos of that spiritual motion is the Angel.
Tom Cheetham, 'The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World: An Introduction to the Spiritual Vision of Henry Corbin', p. 12 http://www.amiscorbin.com/images/documents/pdfs/CHEETHAM_T._The_Prophetic_Tradition_and_the_Battle_for_the_Soul_of_the_World.pdf [accessed 9 July 2013]
Henry, Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. by Nancy Pearson (Shambhala Publications, 1978 repr.; New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1994), p. 4.
Ibid., p. 4
Ibid., p. 6. For a discussion of hierognosis see below.
One is reminded here of Jung's multiple luminosities, tiny conscious phenomena within the psyche.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p.7. Rupture of the plane referred to above indicates a breaking through to the plane of superconsciousness.
Cheetham, Icon, p. 147.
On this Cheetham writes that Corbin's view is that the way we experience space depends on the status of presence we adopt (usually unconsciously). "This practice of phenomenology marks a profound departure from the positivism of science and the uniform and public objectivity of Newtonian absolute space.' Inside Out , pp. 6-7.
Corbin, Man of Light, p.10
Ibid., pp. 46-51 (p. 47).
Ibid., p. 47. Corbin refers to esotericism as 'the unavoidable necessity of expressing the reintegration of human beings in symbols'. Ibid., p. 48 Corbin writes that in Mazdean cosmology:
The Mazdean vision divides thinkable totality into an infinite height of light in which there dwells for all eternity, Ohrmazd (the Avestan Ahura Mazda), the "Lord Wisdom"; and an unfathomable abyss of Darkness that conceals the Antagonist, the Counterpower of negation disintegration, and death, Ahriman (the Avestan Angra Mainu). Between the Power of Light and the Counterpower of Darkness there is no common ground, no compromise of coexistence, but a merciless battle of which our Earth, together with all visible Creation, is the field, until the consummation of the Aeon, the apokatastasis or "restoration" which will put an end to the mixture (gumechishn) by the separation (vicharishn) that will cast the demonic Counterpowers back into the abyss.
Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 6.
Corbin, Man of Light, pp. 47-48. For Corbin the Pole star is the 'cosmic symbol of the reality of inner life. Inner sanctuary and Emerald Rock are then simultaneously the threshold and place of theophanies…the direction from which the guide of light appears'. Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 51.
Corbin, Avicenna, p. 45.
The 'ternary rhythm' of emanation consists in the proposition that 'the First Intelligence "intelligizes" itself in there modes: as thought by the First Being; as necessitated, or empowered by the First being; and as not necessary in itself, that is as a kind of Shadow of its own possible non-being'.
Cheetham, Tom, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012), p. 75.
The reflection here is that of the Archangel-Intelligence which 'dictates' and the Angel-Soul which 'acts and executes' .
Ibid., see p. 48, pp. 61-62, and p.67.
Corbin notes that in Aristotelian metaphysics 'each sphere is moved by the desire to assimilate itself with the intelligence proper to it; each forms a sort of closed system with its Intelligence.' Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 70. Hence, Averroes holds that Intelligences are the proximate movers of the heavens rather than Souls.
Ibid., pp. 71-73.
Durand, Gilbert, 'Exploration of the Imaginal', in Sells, Benjamin (ed.), Working with Images: the Theoretical Base of Archetypal Psychology (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 2000), pp. 52-69 (p.55).
Ibid., p. 74. Corbin argues that Souls are not purely intellective because:
They hypostatize not the higher dimension of the Intelligence - that is, its intellection of the Principle from which it originates – but a mean dimension – that is, its intellection of its own being as necessitated by the necessity of its Principle. As such the Soul does not find perfection in the first state in which it is constituted. "Hence, it is ever after assailed by the desire, the love ('ishq) that carries it toward what is not yet realized in it, toward its principle of perfection. It is in order to attain to this that it will put in motion the body that is dependent on it. Its existence is necessary in the hierarchy of beings to explain this motion.
Ibid., p. 73.
Mushin Fayz Kāshānī (seventeenth century) writes:
Because the power to govern bodies has been entrusted to Spirits, and because it is impossible for a direct connection to be established between spirits and bodies on account of their heterogeneous essence, God created the world of the archetypal Images as an intermediary (barzakh) linking the world of Spirits and the world of bodies.
Corbin, Spiritual body, p. 176.
Corbin, Avicenna, p. 74.
See Corbin, Man of Light, pp. 61-97 (p. 62 and p.78). Corbin outlines a theory of colours in which colour exists in all things, where light is the 'subtle aspect of colour' and where colour is light in an opaque or corporealized state. Light is the spiritual element of colour and both are of the same 'genus'. 'It is by means of colour that light becomes visible' and this visibility of colour is said to be possible through the element of Earth. See Henry, Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, trans. by Philip Sherrard (London: KPI, 1986), pp. 1-20.
Corbin refers again here to the hermetic principle of like attracting like, and 'light upon light' which is analogous to the alchemical principle of multiplicatio. Man of Light, pp. 69 -73.
Ibid., p. 64
Ibid., p. 75.
Corbin, Avicenna, pp. 76-77.
Bamford, p. xlix.
Corbin, The Voyage, pp. 121-122. Corbin says of Suhrawardi that 'a philosophy which does not lead to a personal spiritual realization is a vanity and a waste of time'. The Ishraqiyan-i-Iran were known as the Platonists of Persia.
Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, trans. by Liadain Sherrard (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997), p. 53, and 56. Prophetic gnosiology encompasses not only philosophical knowledge but also 'the perception of the supra-sensible, and visionary apperception'.
Ibid., p.55.
Ibid., pp. 54-56. This is akin to the double sided mirror of Synesisus, the pneumatic synthesizer, which he located in the head.
Ibid., p. 57.
Corbin, The Voyage, p. 126. The sensorium is the internal space where external perceptions converge, similar to Aristotle's 'common sensory'. Ibid., p. 127.
Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, pp. 265-266.
In the mind of a philosopher this produces mental images of the Forms without their imitative images being projected into the sensorium. In the prophet the images are projected into the sensorium so that they become 'events which are lived by the soul'. The perfect sage (theosophos) is able to integrate the vision of the philosopher and the prophet. Corbin, The Voyage, p. 128.
Corbin refers to this function as the mystical science of mirror-optics. Ibid., p. 127 and p. 129.
See for example, Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, p. 375-376. See also Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London: Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 109. Active Imagination is the organ 'par excellence of the alchemical operation' i.e. in the production of the resurrection body.
Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 102.
Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 219-220.
Ibid., pp. 221-223. Himma is difficult to translate but Corbin suggests it encompasses 'meditating, conceiving imagining, projecting, ardently desiring'.
Ibid., p. 223.
Tom Cheetham, Icon, pp. 18-19.
See Cheetham, Inside Out, p. 74. This body's substance 'derives from all the soul's movements, that is to say from its habits and ways of being, its affections and behavior, knowledge and wishes , aspirations, emotions, nostalgia's and ardent desires…it may be a body of dazzling light or of darkened light.'
Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, p. 94.
Corbin, Creative Imagination, Ibid., p. 222.
Ibid., pp. 225-227. Interestingly Corbin notes that 'by concentrating the spiritual energy of himma on the form of a thing existing in one or more of the 'Presences' or Hadarāt, the mystic obtains perfect control over that thing…as long as the concentration of himma lasts. Ibid., p. 226
See Jung, CW 5, pp. 137-138 and CW 7, p. 67 - 69.
Cheetham, Icon, pp. 140-144 (p. 144). Cheetham also makes the important point when looking at Corbin's use of archetype that 'the archetype as an impersonal "force of nature" must be differentiated from the individuating encounter with a transcendent person'. Ibid., p. 153. See also Avens, pp. 51-53.
Gilles Quispel, 'Jung and Gnosis', in The Gnostic Jung, selected and introduced by Robert A. Segal (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 219- 238 (p. 237).
James Hillman argues that Jung's model of the psyche is ultimately monotheistic as it posits a higher and unitary Self that orders and integrates the archetypes which are equivalent to the many gods of polytheism. James Hillman 'Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic', in, Working with Images, ed. by Sells, pp. 20-52.
Corbin cited in Cheetham, Inside Out, p. 162.
Van Den Doel and Hanegraaff, 'Imagination' in Dictionary of Gnosis, ed by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and others, p. 615.
The notion that the unconscious is purposive has some support in recent scientific literature. See, for example, Jack Glaser and John F Kihlstrom, 'Compensatory Automaticity: Unconscious Volition is not an Oxymoron', in Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh (eds.), The New Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 171-195. The authors conclude from research on priming experiments that the unconscious is capable of holding 'meta-cognitive processing goals (e.g., accuracy) which it will pursue through self-monitoring, and that it will, under some conditions, compensate for anticipated threats to the attainment of those goals…suggesting an unconscious that is, paradoxically, "aware". Ibid., p. 190.
Hanegraaff writes that 'the view of the unconscious as the connection between human and divine consciousness (via the Higher Self) is a general New Age tenet'. Hanegraaff, New Age, p. 218. Although some authors prefer not to refer to the 'psychological reductionism' of archetypes:
Because that implies a set of psychological personae, implying unreality. Like the Gods…., the Otherworlds and its inhabitants are real in their own worlds, in their own right, they are not the result of imaginative or mental states; for although….their forms often vary between cultures, there is close correspondence in the ways in which they are perceived.
Caitlin and John Matthews, The Western Way: A Practical Guide to the Western Mystery Tradition II: The Hermetic Tradition (London: Arkana, 1986), p. 105, cited in Hanegraaff, New Age, p. 228.
See particularly Hanegraaff, p. 247 and his discussion of Ken Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness – the objective ground of being is Mind from which arises the discriminating 'I' – a notion that appears to be heavily indebted to German Idealism and Boehmean Theosophy with its conception of the Ungrund.
Jeffrey Raff and Linda Bonnington Vocatura, Healing the Wounded God (York Beach, ME: Nicholas-Hays, 2002), pp. xii-xiii.
Ibid., pp. 94-99 and pp. 122-123
Published Anonymously as Meditations on The Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (Shaftesbury: Element, 1993) p. 375
From A. E. Waites Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911)
[accessed 24 August 2013].
With reference to card 22 of the tarot, the Last Judgment, which possibly depicts the angel Gabriel, associated with the Active Intelligence Waite writes:
It is the card which registers the accomplishment of the great work of transformation in answer to the summons of the Supernal--which summons is heard and answered from within. Herein is the intimation of a significance which cannot well be carried further in the present place. What is that within us which does sound a trumpet and all that is lower in our nature rises in response--almost in a moment, almost in the twinkling of an eye? Let the card continue to depict, for those who can see no further, the Last judgment and the resurrection in the natural body; but let those who have inward eyes look and discover therewith. They will understand that it has been called truly in the past a card of eternal life, and for this reason it may be compared with that which passes under the name of Temperance.
This resonates with the alchemical theme of the creation of the 'resurrection body' and the higher self.
Archetypal projections as Jung described had a numinous quality and this links to Iamblichus' idea that descent of the gods is associated with a drawing down of the light DM III.11 and III.14. Corbin also talks of the experience in term of light.
See also Uždavinys, p.199.
As noted Iamblichus wrote a conscious stance is a better one for receiving the gods. Ibid., II.2 and III.2.
MacLennan, pp. 19-21. In this sense it is indicative of Jung's 'romantic evolutionism'.
Hazel E. Barnes, 'Neo-platonism and Analytical Psychology', The Philosophical Review 54:6 (1945), 558-577 (p. 560).
Roth, Remo F., Return of the World Soul: Wolfgang Pauli, C.G Jung and the Challenge of Psychophysical Reality. Part 1: The Battle of the Giants (Pari, Italy: Pari Publishing, 2011).
This I think may be questionable and requires further research. See also the discussion in Chapter one as regards Couliano on Ficino's revival of Stoic pneumatic theory.
Roth, pp. 42 and p. 69.
Ibid., pp. 43-46
Thus in quantum physics if we observe a particle it is in a state of being, the wave aspect in a state of non being. If we do not observe that particle it is in a state of potential being. Ibid., p. 45 and pp. 76-77.
Ibid., pp. 47-48
Ibid., pp. 35-36.
Ibid., p. 69 and p. 49
Ibid., pp. 68-71 and pp. 82-83
Ibid., pp. 79-82 (p.82).
Ibid., p. 48. Jung defined synchronicity as 'the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state – and, in certain cases, vice versa. Jung, 'Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle', in CW 8, p. 441. The greater the affect's emotional charge, the more the likelihood of synchronistic events occurring. Jung traces this idea back to Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200-1280) and Avicenna's views of a magical facility of the soul in a state of excessive passion. Ibid., pp. 447-449 . Rather than actually being a doctrine that can be traced to specific authors or philosophical sources it may be considered a spontaneous tendency of the human mind. See Jean Pierre Brach and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 'Correspondences', in Dictionary of Gnosis, ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and others, pp. 275-279 (p. 275).
The reference to Plotinus is Enneads II.9, 16-18.
Faivre, Theosophy, pp. 216-217. Jung wrote that libido could be withdrawn into unconsciousness resulting in depression. It could only be released from there by bringing up the corresponding fantasy images. In fact it could only be apprehended in these forms. Jung, CW 7, p. 215.
Uždavinys writes that 'in the ancient Greek religion, daimon designates not a specific class of divine beings, but a particular mode of activity: it is an occult power that drives man forward or acts against him. Uždavinys, p. 284.
The idea of correspondences does have a strong link to the Hermetic tradition. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus contains the famous dictum:
As below, so above; and as above so below. With this knowledge alone you may work miracles.
And since all things exist in and emanate from the ONE who is the ultimate Cause, so all things are born after their kind from this ONE.
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes [accessed 28 August 2013].







Focussing on the work of C.G. Jung and Henry Corbin, what are the esoteric influences on 20th century theories of active imagination?









Student number: 600053728
Aims
In this dissertation I aim to look at some of the esoteric influences in C.G. Jung and Henry Corbin's theories of 'active imagination'. The main aim will be to consider whether Jung's theory can be said to have emerged from 'nineteenth-century Romantic, mesmerist, and occultist contexts and their "para-paracelsian" and Christian-theosophical backgrounds' as Marieke Van Den Doel and Wouter J. Hanegraaff have held, or whether there are other significant formative esoteric influences. In order to consider this I have found it necessary to research any conceptual links with earlier theories of the imagination from Antiquity to the Renaissance. In particular, I look at the connection with Neoplatonism and theurgy and the concepts of a personal daimon or guardian angel. It has also been necessary to examine the historical antecedents and esoteric influences in C.G. Jung's development of his analytical psychology. The recent publication of Jung's Red Book will be considered as an important source, both in terms of Jung's development of active imagination and his theorizing about the psyche. Discussion of Jung's analytic psychology will primarily focus on his concept of archetypes, experiences documented in the Red Book, his construct of the Self, and alchemical studies to explore the link with active imagination. I aim to explore Henry Corbin's view of the Imaginal and look at the differences and similarities with Jung's paradigm of active imagination. A related question in the research has been the exploration of the relationship between matter and psyche or spirit and its bearing on the reality of the products of the Imaginal.
Contents


Introduction: Page 5

Chapter One Page 23

Chapter Two Page 51

Chapter Three Page 84

Conclusion Page 116

Bibliography Page 128





Acknowledgements



I would like to thank all the staff at EXESESO and the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke for their efforts in presenting an engaging and stimulating course of study known as Western Esotericism as preparation for this dissertation. I wish them all the best for the future. In particular I would like to thank my supervisor Angela Voss for her insightful comments, guidance and support.









Introduction


My thesis focuses on the work of C.G. Jung and Henry Corbin to explore the esoteric influences on twentieth-century theories of active imagination. This is a potentially vast area and in my approach I have delimited the survey, focusing more on influences from Classical theories of the imagination. In particular, I have concentrated on the area of Neoplatonic theurgy. This decision arose during the course of the research as it became clearer to me that there were connections in the experiences Jung outlined in his recently published Red Book with entities that parallel the Platonic and Neoplatonic concepts of a personal daimon. I noted that this link was omitted from the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, who refers to Jung's theories of the imagination as emerging from:

Nineteenth-century Romantic, mesmerist, and occultist contexts and their "para-paracelsian" and Christian-theosophical backgrounds.

While I agree with this analysis, as I think the historical survey of the antecedents of Jung's analytical psychology in this dissertation shows, I believe it is a partial view. Jung's esoteric antecedents are diverse and complex but in my opinion a significant influence on his work derives from Neoplatonism and hermeticism. I discuss some relevant points on Jung's Neoplatonic worldview in another recently published work by Remo F Roth. For reasons of time and space I have focused mainly on the former. Henry Corbin's work has elevated the status of the Imaginal to an ontological reality. I use Corbin as a primary source. The discussion of his ideas here is more limited than on Jung but it throws Jung's ideas into relief and provides a point of contrast and complementarity. The synthesis of Jung and Corbin's theories of active imagination can be found in the work of the Jungian Jeffrey Raff, which is briefly discussed in the conclusion to this study.

Methodology

Perhaps the most influential methodological paradigm in the field of esotericism was proposed by Antoine Faivre who argues that esotericism is a 'form of thought' delimited by four primary characteristics and two secondary ones. 'Imagination and mediations' comprise one of his intrinsic components, the others being 'correspondences', 'living nature', and 'experience of transmutation' As Faivre notes, 'the idea of correspondence presumes already a form of imagination inclined to use mediations of all kinds, such as rituals, symbolic images, mandalas, intermediary spirits'. However, imagination here is more than the link between perception and concept; it is an 'organ of the soul' with which we can establish a cognitive and visionary relationship with an intermediary world. According to Faivre this form of thought arises in the middle ages in the context of the humanist reaction to Scholastic Aristotelian rationalism which was favoured over the kind of 'analogical' thinking descended from Neoplatonism.

C.G. Jung's oeuvre places him in the esoteric tradition if we consider Faivre's fundamental characteristics: there is a 'correspondence' between the inner psychological life and nature in the concept of synchronicity whereby a 'meaningful coincidence' is seen in causally unrelated psychic and physical states or events. The concept of 'living nature' may be demonstrated in Jung's view of the psychic nature of matter – psyche and matter are two poles of the same reality, the alchemistic unus mundus. Faivre's characteristic of 'mediations' is seen in the concept of the mediating and creative active imagination involved in the dialectical process of bringing unconscious contents into consciousness: the patient creatively works on the symbols brought up by the unconscious to try and incorporate them into conscious understanding in the process of individuation. An experience of 'transmutation' exists in at least a psychological sense in the synthesis of consciousness and unconscious contents with the practice of active imagination in the process of individuation.

Both Antoine Faivre and Wouter J. Hanegraaff reject strictly etymological definitions of esotericism as overly restrictive, for example; alchemy and Christian theosophy were widely disseminated and not necessarily initiatory. Hanegraaff proposes a constructivist approach, seeing esotericism as a category of polemical exclusion. He argues that our perceptions of esotericism are entwined with how we think about ourselves and are the mirror image of what we have rejected in forming this identity. Thus, on one hand, Hanegraaff argues that the historiographies of esotericism are:

Intellectual constructs grounded in the subjective beliefs and individual agendas of the scholars who constructed them… they do not mirror something historically given but construct it.

This is what Hanegraaff refers to as 'mnemohistorical' fictions from our collective memory. On the other hand, he does not take such a radically constructivist approach as Kocku von Stuckrad as he concedes that these constructs are founded on 'suggestive commonalities' and historical realities so 'there is something out there that may after all be esotericism'. For Hanegraaff the fundamental fact pertaining to this reality is the 'rejected knowledge' of paganism stemming from the clash with Greek rationalist and Christian traditions. Hanegraaff argues that the parameters of Western esotericism may thus most usefully be sought in the work of anti-apologists such as Jacob Thomasius (1622-1684) who, in examining the encounter between Hellenistic paganism and biblical traditions, concluded that there were two essential characteristics of paganism. The first came to be known as 'cosmotheism', which Jan Assman described as:

The religion of the immanent God and the veiled truth, which both reveals and conceals itself in a thousand images: images that do not logically exclude but illuminate and complement one another.

The second characteristic was that 'human beings could achieve direct experiential knowledge (gnosis) of their own divine nature'.

Hereward Tilton has criticized as untenable what he sees as Hanegraaff's view that 'the history of Western esotericism is synonymous with the history of its scholarly construction'. For Tilton, esotericism's study of marginalized European religious practices reveals historical and functional commonalities within Jewish, Islamic and Indo-Tibetan practices. He argues that such a historiography implies that as a construct Western esotericism must encompass its narrower etymological sense, that is; 'restricted religious doctrines and practices typically dealing with the production of radically altered states of consciousness'. However, this perhaps simplifies Hanegraaff's somewhat ambiguous position and his acceptance of the commonalities that do exist.

The scholarly approach to esotericism referred to as 'typological' by Hanegraaff defines esotericism by certain types of religious activity characterized by specific structural features such as the notion of secret, salvific knowledge reserved for an elite, initiated as disciples, or the inner 'mystery' of religion contrasted with its exoteric outer form. Hanegraaff argues that such an approach, congenial to scholars of a 'religionist' perspective such as Carl Gustav Jung, and Henry Corbin, is not conducive to academic rigour which is favoured, rather, by an approach which understands esotericism empirically as a historical construct comprising specific currents that display certain similarities and are historically related.

While this debate might be characterized as one of nominalism versus realism, in my view, both approaches are important and also touch on conflicting views in the field over 'emic' and 'etic' perspectives. In studying the similarities between various historical currents that are viewed as esoteric an etic typology seems necessary. If we are to identify 'commonalities' within esotericism a purely constructivist or etic approach would, as Versluis argues, run the risk of failing to understand and convey the subject, and is on its own perhaps ultimately a sterile one. Versluis' 'sympathetic empiricism' has the merit of combining both emic and etic approaches.

In these methodological debates there is arguably a consensus in the importance of gnosis, which is also encompassed to an extent in Faivre's component of 'transmutation'. Arthur Versluis's position is close to Tilton's when he defines esotericism as:

Referring to cosmological or metaphysical religious or spiritual knowledge that is restricted to or intended for a limited group, and not for society at large. The word "esoteric," in other words, refers to secret or semi-secret spiritual knowledge, including both cosmological and metaphysical gnosis.

One could certainly characterize Jung's perspective as one of metaphysical gnosis while Corbin's approach combines both types of gnosis. This study will utilize a methodological perspective acknowledging gnosis as a core esoteric element that is common to Jung's active imagination and twentieth century esoteric perspectives on the imagination. Gnosticism itself is a contested category. I will follow the use of the term 'gnosis' in the sense of an esoteric knowledge of the origin and destination of one's inner self, the idea of salvation through knowledge, which is common to Jung and Corbin. Dan Merkur argues that the key element of Gnosticism that remains in the Western monotheistic religions is not an anticosmic dualism but instead a distinctive type of visionary experience combining unitive experiences. These experiences, dependent mainly on active imagination, constitute the gnosis in Western esotericism and he identifies three types of unitive experiences: introspective union, or unio mystica, characterized by the sudden experience of the self as timeless, boundless and solitary in its uniqueness; an extrovertive union which seeks to discover the one in the many; and communion, or unio sympathetica, which involves a 'dyadic "I-Thou" unit…a sense that two – not all, but two – are at one'. Merkur believes such experiences can be explained reductively in developmental terms by psychoanalytic theory. Thus introspective union depends on memories of intrauterine life where the fetus 'naively imagined itself to be the whole of existence'. Extrovertive union is based on the 'application of the same solipsistic assumption, shortly after birth, to the perceptible world', and communion is 'an intense and prolonged experience of conscience'. Such unitive experiences are explained reductively as their 'reality' is embedded in human experience and is therefore 'necessarily not transcendent. While I feel his typology of visionary experiences is useful I do not follow him in his Freudian analysis.




What is active imagination?

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 -1961) viewed his psychology as 'a new method of treating psychological materials such as dreams and phantasies' – a synthetic approach rather than the causal-reductive method employed by Sigmund Freud 'which reduces the dream or phantasy to its component reminiscences, and the instinctive processes that underlie them'. The synthetic method presupposed that the unconscious has a compensatory relationship to consciousness and contained liminal insights that could be made conscious. In Jung's personal and professional experiences not all symbolic material could be reduced to a personal component. Some derived from outside the experience of the individual; from a postulated collective unconscious. Only through a procedure which 'synthesizes the symbol into a universal and comprehensible expression' would the meaning be disclosed. Jung called this rapprochement with the unconscious 'the transcendental function', because in bridging the conscious and unconscious, or rational and irrational, a union and a higher level of understanding arose based on a synthesis of the two. The most important technique for engaging the transcendental function was active imagination.

Early in his career Jung believed that a key therapeutic aim was the encouragement of the patient's ability to discriminate between ego and non-ego, or the 'collective psyche'. Jung writes that 'by this means [the patient] will acquire the material with which henceforward, for a long time, he will have to come to terms'; a conclusion he arrived at from his own experiences documented in the Red Book. Such a goal necessarily entails the need for a strong ego-function because of the danger of being swamped by unconscious forces. This is 'inflation', which Jung likens to Synesius's pneumatike psyche whereby 'the spiritualised soul becomes god and demon, a state in which it suffers the divine penalties'. In psychological terms this refers to an important principle, the law of enantiodromia and a tearing apart into pairs of opposites, symbolized by Zagreus in mythology. Jung argued that man cannot escape this fate by repression of the unconscious, rather one approaches the unconscious 'by presenting it visibly to himself as something that is totally different from him'. This type of thinking may be described as 'imaging' and 'emergent' and involves :

An entire set of concepts distinguished by their propensity for being visually figurative themselves: often personalized, at the same time as they are deliberately dramatized. As a result their purpose, rather than being to describe a psychological functioning from outside, is to represent it, and especially to give it a voice and a figure, thereby making it possible for the subject to better acknowledge and experience emotionally the engagement in the relationship to the unconscious at a particular moment. The scope of this second observation is both epistemological and clinical.

Jung distinguished between active and passive fantasy. Active fantasies are the product of the function of intuition. They are 'evoked by an attitude directed to the perception of unconscious contents' while passive fantasies are associated with 'the relative dissociation of the psyche'; with the withdrawal of libido from conscious control into the unconscious with a corresponding activation of unconscious material such as in psychic automatisms. Active fantasy then depends more on the 'positive participation of consciousness'. Importantly an image is only indirectly or partly related to the perception of external objects in Jung's use of the term. He uses it in the sense that the genesis of images both depend on unconscious fantasy activity for its formation as well as the conscious situation of the moment:

The image is a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole…the interpretation of its meaning, therefore, can start neither from the conscious alone nor from the unconscious alone, but only from their reciprocal relationship'.

Jung's technique of active imagination then consists firstly in 'systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention' which encourages the emergence of any fantasies with a high libido-charge. Simultaneously immersing oneself in one's current mood and allowing fantasy 'the freest possible play, yet not in such a manner that it leaves the orbit of its object, namely the affect' allows a reproduction of the content of the affect symbolically. Jung writes that the 'whole procedure is a kind of enrichment and clarification of the affect, whereby the affect and its contents are brought nearer to consciousness'. Elie D. Humbert, a contemporary Jungian analyst, writes that the precise starting point depends on the unconscious in terms of which images come through (a passive stage) and then 'gradually as the content of the unconscious takes form the attention changes. It focuses itself on the image that becomes an autonomous living object and no longer a component in a continuum of images'. The starting content or image then alters. What must then happen is that the subject should enter into the drama being enacted rather than behave as a passive spectator of images. This perhaps more important, second stage is the 'active' part of the imagination and consists of what Jung terms an auseinandersetzung – a coming to terms with the unconscious material produced, whereby the ego must consciously engage with and evaluate the material produced: 'the shuttling to and fro of arguments and affects [between conscious and unconscious positions] represents the transcendent function of opposites'. Active imagination is not simply a technique of emergence or catharsis, it is a confrontation. There is an ethical obligation to put into practice in conscious life the insights so gained. This integration of the opposites results in a new position – a widening of consciousness.

Conscious discrimination by the ego is a key part of Jung's technique of active imagination. This is essential to Dan Merkur's psychoanalytical perspective on visionary states which he describes as the function of 'reality testing' or, 'the capacity to decide whether a mental presentation represents a perceptible phenomenon or is intrapsychic alone'. Suppression of this function in trance states serves to represent mental constructs as perceptible realities ('reification'). Merkur considers active imagination a lucid hypnagogic state. He equates Henri Corbin's use of the term 'Imaginal' with 'the paradoxical status of active imaginations that are known to be intrapsychic and are nevertheless expressed as real'. Merkur cites Corbin without necessarily accepting his position on the status of the mundus imaginalis:

The forms and figures of the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as the empirical realities of the physical world…[but] these forms and figures could not subsist in the purely intelligible world [either]….they had indeed extension and dimension, an "immaterial" materiality compared to the sensible world but…a corporality and spaciality of their own'.

This is one important distinction between esoteric and non-esoteric theories of the imagination. What is reality here? Jung would argue that such visions are 'psychologically' real but as an empiricist is cautious about committing himself further. Corbin understands that such a reality has an ontological existence and is verifiable as it can be 'objectively' correlated with the growth of the 'man of light'.

A further distinction can be made utilizing the schema D P Walker proposed in with regards to theories of natural and demonic magic in the Renaissance. This was the vis imaginativa, which he described as a 'central force' usually mediating planetary influences through the natural world. In Renaisssance magia naturalis Walker noted that the most usual medium of transmission of this force was the spirit. The effects could be on animate or inanimate beings. If the effect is on the former they could be either subjective (remaining with the operator) or transitive (directed at some other person) and 'in both cases could be purely psychological, remaining with the imagination or soul, or psychosomatic, affecting the body through the imagination'. Faivre has elaborated on the magical action of the imagination as vis imaginativa, which he defines as:

An ability to act upon Nature, whether the action is exercised on the body of the imagining subject only (called intransitive action) or else on objects exterior to it (called transitive action).

Interestingly, Ioan P. Couliano in his discussion of Renaissance magic rejects this classification as overly simplistic, preferring a typology which classifies magic on the basis of 'an identity or analogy of pneumatic structure between the manipulator and the patient' and which is therefore generally transitive. He terms this 'intersubjective' magic, which includes special cases where the 'performer is his own patient'. 'Intrasubjective' magic involves an action directed towards beings or objects which do not have an analogous pneumatic structure. Magic represents a technique for manipulating nature, which takes Stoic pneumatic theory as a point of departure, and is based on the homology of a cosmic pneumatic centre, or hegemikon, in the sun, with man's pneuma. Couliano's formulation has relevance for Jung's active imagination technique if libido is equated with spirit.

In the transmutation of consciousness through active imagination, or the encounter with the Angel in Corbin's cosmology, there is an analogy with intrasubjective or intransitive magic.






Chapter 1


Active Imagination is not a modern practice and this chapter seeks to briefly place the idea of active imagination in a historical context. In Greek and Latin traditions one can distinguish several theories of imagination; Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, Galenist and Stoic. In the early Dialogues of Plato, at least, one finds no theory of imagination as a bridge between the world of Ideas and the sensible world. What is presented is a Doctrine of Ideas – Bundy argues that 'early Platonism conceived of reality as not only above but entirely separate from sensible experience'. There was no epistemological framework in place involving imagination's ability to grasp the Intellective world. Bundy argues that in this early idealism Plato rejects doctrines of relativity and materialism as unable to grasp noetic reality which is unchanging. Plato views things as not being relative to individuals, they have their own permanent essence which is not influenced by us and 'fluctuating according to our fancy'. However, in later Dialogues, such as the Republic, Plato had shifted his focus in attempting to provide a philosophy which could also account for a World of Becoming as well as Being. The latter was to be derived from the supreme Idea or Good which would of necessity lack perfection if it were not also an inexhaustible source of becoming. The supreme Good is by definition not envious of anything else that arises and wills into being an infinitely varied world, which Arthur O. Lovejoy termed the principle of plenitude. This results in what Lovejoy called the Two-Gods-in-One of Plato; a dualism which replaces his earlier monistic, Parmenidean influence and which gave rise to a dialectical tension between immutability and change, the eternal and temporal. The former is grasped by the intellect, the latter by a combination of opinion and sense perception. What is the role of the imagination in Plato with this shift in focus?

Plato and the Imagination

In the Republic VI, Plato considers that the material world can be divided into things which grow or are made, and images which are divided into separate classes; phantasms and shadows. Phantasms are the images of objects while shadows are said to be the type of image which may be glimpsed in water and mirrors, perhaps implying a more distorted form of image even further from the Ideal. Bundy argues that following Plato's acceptance of the material world in his epistemology, the beginnings of a Platonic psychology can be seen in the soul's fourfold division corresponding to a fourfold epistemology; understanding, reason, belief and 'imaging' (eikasa) which is assigned to the lower soul. Imagination can be of a type which is purely linked with the material world such as in forming opinions or beliefs (doxa) about sense perceptions. Here the imagination is connected with the function of reason, an essentially empirical kind of knowledge reached from hypotheses based on data processed from the senses. Reason is prone to the errors arising from sense-perception and can result in false judgments. Hence, the low status often accorded to imagination in Plato. However, Bundy argues that Plato allows the imagination to service the soul's superior function of understanding in revealing the essential form - the 'unhypothetical first principle of everything'- behind an image and thus links to the Ideal world. Arriving at such true understanding may start from dialectical reasoning but necessitates a gnosis which intuits the essential form. However, J. M Cocking is critical of this interpretation arguing that Bundy misinterprets the sense of the term eikasa which in some translations is rendered as 'illusion' and in Plato's epistemology is incapable of grasping the supra-sensible.

In the Sophist Plato regards phantasia as belief or judgements (doxa) occurring not independently but through sensations. Phantasia deals with objects not as they are but as they appear and this distinction is used by Plato in the Republic X in elaborating on two kinds of art – one typifying a higher creativity exemplified by craftsmen who use the imagination to refer to the Ideal to make a true likeness - and the other, mimetic type, which uses phantasia, and produces false art, such as painting which is concerned with mere appearances. In Bundy's view this is 'the first great distinction between imagination and fancy'. Thus Plato appears to link the proper use of imagination with a kind of unveiling of Ideal types. Furthermore, just as there are two types of human creativity there are also two types of divine creativity; one concerned with the making of the universe and the other with the capacity of creating images corresponding to the elements of the universe. These are the divine phantasms which appear in dreams and waking visions. This is the 'divine madness' which Plato praises in its various aspects: as a gift which allows superior prophecy; as cathartic, in that it can 'provide relief from the greatest plagues of trouble that beset certain families because of guilt for ancient crimes', poetic madness inspired by the Muses, and the lover's madness which results from the contemplation of beauty and the remembrance of its ideal. The metaphor Plato uses here for such contemplation is of the regrowth of the soul's wings enabling

ascension back to the divine. The capacity to evoke divine frenzy has been associated with ancient mystery cults. What actually occurred during their celebrations remains elusive. Proclus gives the following account, which certainly implies some kind of personal transformation:

They cause sympathy of the souls with the ritual [domena] in a way that is unintelligible to us, and divine, so that some of the initiands are stricken with panic, being filled with divine awe; others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods and experience divine possession.

In the Timaeus, Plato locates the lower soul in the abdominal region. This lower part of the soul is concerned with our appetitive nature and disregards the reasoning part of the higher soul. The liver is held to have been created by the Demiurge to have a power like a mirror to catch the mind's thoughts as a curb to the appetites. During sleep the liver 'practices divination by dreams' and this gift of divination is given to the lower soul; that is, to his animal rather rational nature. In a passage reminiscent of the technique of active imagination and the role of an analyst Plato writes:

While he is in his right mind no one engages in divination, however divinely inspired and true it might be, but only when his power of understanding is bound in sleep or sickness, or when some sort of possession works a change in him. On the other hand, it takes a man who has his wits about him to recall and ponder the pronouncements produced by this state of divination or possession, whether in sleep or while awake. It takes such a man to thoroughly analyze any and all visions that are seen, to determine how and for whom they signify some future, past or present good or evil. But as long as the fit remains on him, the man is incompetent to render judgment on his own visions and voices…This is the reason why it is customary practice to appoint interpreters to render judgment on an inspired divination.

Bundy argues that this type of (divine) frenzy deals with dreams, and altered states of consciousness. The phantasies generated are the product of 'thoughts of gentle inspiration' - the reflection in the lower nature of the truths arrived at by the higher nature, which are not only a corrective to our baser impulses but enable us through our sensible nature to have a 'phantasy', a personal experience of the transcendental realm, which is symbolic and utilizes the 'inner eye'. Whereas Plato had misgivings about phantasia - the reliability of judgements based on sense perceptions - divine frenzy affords imagination a link to the transcendental. Plato in certain passages appears to hold the power of divine frenzy in higher regard than discursive reason and states that 'this sort of madness is given by the gods to ensure our greatest good fortune', but note in the above passage the need for a rational interpretation. The Phaedrus and the Timaeus certainly open the way for the greater esteem accorded the imagination in Neoplatonic philosophy.

Aristotelian Imagination
Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE) tried to provide a more naturalistic account of imagination and focused on the link with sense-perception. Aristotle added a sixth function, the sensus communis, to the five senses, which he conceived as an integrating function bestowing a unitary experience on sense-perception. Phantasia is included within the sensus communis and is seen as a bridge between the soul and intellect. Aristotle corrects Plato's concept of phantasia as a combination of sensation and judgement or opinion. Phantasia is simply 'involved in the process of supplying the materials [to the soul] on which the mind builds judgements'. It is not judgement/belief or perception but is closely linked to both. Aristotle attributes to phantasia not only the sense impressions which continue to exist after the stimulus has been removed but also our cognitive ability to produce images in the mind's eye (a function which he says is more prone to error) and thus comprise bodily and mental phenomena, or sensation and perception. Imagination is in Aristotle less a means to accessing true knowledge than sense perception or the intellect. Aristotle held that the soul thinks in images. He describes imagination as 'a movement coming about from the activity of sense perception' and as Watson notes 'the movement which remains in the soul similar to the sensation which caused it is phantasia' (i.e. an inner sense). This movement caused by sense-perception is directed to the heart by the pneuma, or spirit; a fine and subtle fluid which is the connecting link between body and soul. There the phantasia are responsible for translating sensory images into phantasmata which can be understood by the soul, as the soul only 'thinks' in images. Phantasms are therefore the language of the soul, a 'phantasmic grammar', perhaps more important than language as the soul has primacy over the body.
Galenus (c. 129 - 201 CE) held a similar pneumatic theory but located the power of perception in the brain not the heart. Galenus held that brain functions comprise perception, movement, and a tri-partite governing power, a hegemonikon consisting of memory, a rational part, and phantasia which, as in Aristotle, allows the soul to store sensory and mental images. Galenus thought that phantasia, as bodily functions, are also subject to disturbance by an imbalance of the four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, and red and black bile. Excess black bile or melancholy could cause the imagination to degenerate into hallucinations.
As Cocking notes, Western thought was generally dominated by the Aristotelian model of sensation-imagination-intelligence as the pattern for accounts of perception down to Kant and that 'what persists is the basic notion that phantasia combines the different sensations into a 'presentation' which is interpreted by mind or intelligence, the highest power of the psyche. Imagination quite clearly takes second place as the handmaid of reason'. However, the role of imagination was to be developed further by Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Synesius.
The Neoplatonists
Plotinus (205 - 270 CE) appears to have considered himself an orthodox Platonist but instituted significant changes in the written teachings of Plato which has fuelled speculation that there was a body of Platonic teachings that were communicated orally only and these teachings were handed down to Plotinus. In his metaphysical system Plotinus proposed what are now termed the three hypostases; the One, from which emanates nous, or Intellectual- Principle, and an immortal Soul emanating from nous ('the life principle carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind') animating the cosmos. Plotinus talks of a higher soul, a kind of ideal self which operates as a Reason-Principle mediating with nous, and a lower soul which is responsible for the movement of the created realm beneath it. Plotinus accepts that there is a distinct individual soul which is fallen from the World-Soul into matter, for which it has an affinity. Individual souls have a guiding spirit, operating during our life which can reorient us back to the divine. This idea arises in Plato's Myth of Er, Republic X, where he describes the soul's choice of an embodied life, before its descent from the stars: Lachesis, one of the three fates, 'assigned to each the daemon it had chosen as guardian of life and fulfiller of its destiny'. The soul then descends through the burning 'Plain of Forgetfulness', where memory of its divine origins is lost to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much it drinks from the 'River of Unheeding'. In the Timaeus Plato writes:
We ought to think of the most sovereign part of our soul as god's gift to us, given to be our guiding spirit…it raises us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven.
Plotinus comments on this as follows:
The Timaeus indicates the relation of this guiding spirit to ourselves: it is not entirely outside of ourselves; is not bound up with our nature; is not the agent of our action; it belongs to us as belonging to our Soul, but not in so far as we are particular human beings living a life to which it is superior'.
Thus, though there is the sense here that the personal daemon is a higher power, it appears to be seen as an entity distinct from our individual soul akin to an intermediary being. In Plotinus the individual soul retains the link with the World-Soul. It has:
For ever something transcendent: by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosened from its shackles and soars – when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of essential being.
This memory of the movement of the soul from its divine origins (Platonic anamnesis) belongs to the soul alone, not the body. Plotinus links memory with the imaginative faculty. He sees memory as not only connected with this higher state of the soul and with memories of mental acts, which Plotinus attributes to a mirroring in the imagination of a pure mental concept, but also with bodily function and the recall of objects of sense perception. Thus, as John Dillon notes, there are in Plotinus two imaginative faculties of the soul serving either level of memory – one concerned with mere sense perception, the other with judgments made on the synthesis of data from sense perception or with mental concepts from the Intelligible realm. Plotinus says these two levels of imagination are like two lights one stronger than the other. When the imagination is in harmony, they shine together on a common point so that the distinction is not noticed. Dillon likens Plotinus's higher imagination to Kant's theory in the Critique of Pure Reason of the transcendental imagination responsible for the synthesis of the manifold nature of experience.
For Plotinus the soul is attuned to the material and divine to a greater or lesser degree depending on its proclivities. It is not merged with bodies but is present to them by the fact that:
It shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors.
This is an animating principle of the soul in which is vested sense-perception. However, the higher soul cannot perceive by:
The immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation; these impressions are already Intelligibles'.
Here he appears to be referring to the concept of anamnesis and the recollection of the soul of its divine origins.
In De Mysteriis, Iamblichus (c. 250 – c. 326 CE) describes an emanationist cosmos with the divine principle extending down into a complete immersion in matter. Gregory Shaw terms this a doctrine of the full descent of the soul. Iamblichus was opposed to the Plotinian view which denied the soul's full descent into matter, with the higher part of the soul remaining in the nous and doubted that the human soul could return to the nous through by way of reason as the soul normally only contemplates images or projections of the Forms. Theurgy ('divine work') was the only effective means of raising ourselves to the divine nous. Shaw argues that an unforeseen consequence of the Plotinian view of the undescended or unembodied higher soul was that the 'demonic' was projected outside the soul resulting in the desacralisation of the cosmos and Gnostic views that the cosmos is evil. It follows that theurgic practices assimilating oneself to the cosmos would at best be meaningless or even harmful. Iamblichus, following Plato, 'placed the demonic within the embodied soul, the only chaos untamed by the Demiurge'. Shaw argues that Plato's idea that each soul was given a divine spark from the Demiurge meant for Iamblichus that each soul had the responsibility to perform its own theurgy and embrace matter 'to partake in divine mimesis by creating a cosmos out of the initial chaos of its embodiment'. If the demonic is located outside the soul and the soul is undescended 'the divine is at a distance from the earth and cannot mingle with men and that this lower region is a desert without gods'. This is effectively the same complaint Jung makes in his criticism of the Christian doctrine of privatio boni.
Iamblichus saw the cosmos as populated by intermediaries; hierarchical grades of spiritual beings such as gods, heroes, daimons and archons which link gods and souls but these are separate ontological classes, which do not unite. The success of a theurgic rite depends on the presence and nature of these superior beings. The gods are said to reveal themselves in true images whilst false apparitions are accounted for by errors in theurgic technique. Iamblichus stresses that theurgy is not an intellectual exercise but that theurgic union is effected by 'the power of unutterable symbols, understood solely by the gods'. Iamblichus in fact minimises any human contribution to efficacy of theurgy stressing the influence of the gods and the importance of the symbol.

Iamblichus writes that there are as many kinds of divine inspiration as there are many different gods. He demonstrates a detailed awareness of altered states of consciousness: he refers to a form of divine inspiration causing 'possession' where conscious awareness is lost and such a condition can bring about insensibility to pain. He also refers to what we may term trance states writing that the gods can make a 'simple–minded human being utter statements full of wisdom', a phenomenon akin to the 'secondary personalities' evident in mediumship. He also distinguishes between two types of ecstatic possession: the one turned towards the inferior, which may be linked with diseases of the body, such as drunkenness and leads to folly and madness; the other tuned to divine powers helps the ascent of the soul. Normal dreaming states may by chance be pre-cognitive or prophetic but are generally prone to error. He writes that 'god-sent' (divinatory) dreams arise in hypnagogic states whereby, 'it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done' and emphasizes that this state is most conducive to 'divine epiphany'.
Iamblichus notes that where consciousness is retained in the hypnagogic state:
And the other senses are awake and consciously aware of how the gods shine forth in the light, and with a clear understanding they both hear what they say, and know what they do. This is observed even more fully when the sight is active and also the mind, with full vigour, understands the things done, and there is a response at the same time in those observing'.
He writes:
Remove, then, from divine dreams in which divination especially occurs, 'sleep' in whatever form, and 'the inability to be conscious of those things which appear in a wakeful state.' For it is surely impossible that the gods' clear presence could be inferior to that of wakeful consciousness'.
Again, we see here a clear parallel with the technique of active imagination in the engagement of consciousness. Iamblichus appears to be describing a lucid hypnagoic state but where 'reality-testing' has been supressed - we are in the paradoxical realm of the Imaginal.
Descent or withdrawal of the god is associated with a luminous spirit or fire, and through our corresponding luminous spirit – the soul vehicle or subtle body linking soul and body - we are able to receive the god. Iamblichus argues that many forms of divination can be characterised as having as their aim drawing in or 'evoking the light' (phōtagōgia). This illuminates our subtle body with a divine light 'from which vehicle the divine appearances, set in motion by the gods' will, take possession of the imaginative power in us'. As Gregory Shaw notes, Synesius (c. 373 – c. 414 CE) had identified this subtle-body with the imagination. Shaw writes that 'on the horizontal level phantasia was merely the play of the discursive mind, but if properly purified and trained, the vertical dimension that sustained it could be awakened'. However, Synesius held that the imaginal body of the ordinary person was diseased and without purification could not serve as a vehicle for the god. Thus the preliminaries to theurgic practices entail a cleansing of one's pneuma or subtle-body. Shaw argues that the Neoplatonic doctrine of the subtle or imaginal body exemplifies an Eliadean 'mystical physiology'. That is; physiological terms are used to describe experiences that transcend the physical realm. Shaw notes the similarities between yoga traditions and doctrines of the subtle body and its purification into higher forms:
The presence of the god heats the soul and effects a visual theophany. The divine heating occurred within the soul's 'mystical' body, yet the fact that this body was called pneumatic (pneumatikos), as well as aetheric (aitherodes) and luminous (augoeides) suggests that physical breath (pneuma) played a role in this heating and
incandescence.'
Shaw suggests that breath may have been the means through which the soul was translated into its mystical body.
The theosopher G.R.S. Mead wrote that the most general term for the subtle-body in its inferior aspect is spirit (pneuma) or spiritual-body and argues for the view that the subtle-body no matter what changes it undergoes is essentially one. In its superior aspect he uses the term augoeides. Spirit is 'an embodiment of a finer order of matter than that known to physical sense, and not soul proper'. Mead argues (from Aristotle) that in the Hermetic literature the spirit is the 'common sensory' that is distributed into the various sense organs. In its higher function it can attain to understanding of objective reality but if it concerns itself with appearances it is given over to phantasy. For Synesius intellect can grasp the true image, while the soul 'contains images of things which are becoming (contingent)' and that imagination, which is located in the head, is like a mirror which reflects the images in the soul. Synesius holds that imagination is the 'common sensory' acting as a mediator, a double-sided mirror reflecting both the intelligible and sensible world. When we live in conformity to nature, imagination remains 'pure and undefiled' and can act as a vehicle for the soul:
It (the soul) uses it as a chariot, in order that it may accomplish its journey in the physical world; and it (the soul) strives to lead it back to the higher regions, or at least not to remain borne down with it (the soul) in matter.
Synesius praises the universal possibility of divination through dreams, and the imagination as having a divine character through which it approaches the intuitive intellect. Imagination is closely connected with the soul and they both influence each other:
Virtuous the soul renders the imagination lighter: it crushes it under the weight of its stains. Naturally imagination raises itself above, when it is endowed with heat and dryness; these are its wings….on the contrary, when it is thick and humid, imagination is drawn by its weight towards the lower regions, into the subterranean depths, the abode of bad spirits'.
The task of the soul is to ascend to the divine heights taking with it the subtle-body of the imagination/spirit if sufficiently purified.
Iamblichus has some ambiguity about matter. He denies that the soul 'by means of its inherent powers, shapes the products derived from matter into daemons' (they precede this inferior principle) but daemons lead souls down into nature: they bind souls to bodies but they also disseminate the divine presence into matter. Evil daemons are associated with phantasms produced by false magic. This can lead the soul to an over-identification with matter. Paradoxically, as the soul learns to free itself from the bonds of generation through theurgic sacrifices aimed at overcoming the daimonic powers of nature, the soul begins to participate in the fundamental unity of the cosmos which extends from the gods to matter and in which the materializing daimons play an important and beneficial role. Matter comes to be seen as an index or mirror of the soul's internal condition – a measure of the soul's ability to integrate corporeal existence into a divine pattern.
Watson argues that though there are antecedents in the Stoic tradition, the idea of what might be termed the creative imagination begins to be more fully realised in a work by Philostratus, the Life of Apollonius (third century CE) where Apollonius, in a discussion on the superiority of the images constructed by the Greeks of their gods, concludes that:
Imagination…wrought these works, a wiser and subtler artist by far than imitation; for imitation can only create as its handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it has not seen; for it will conceive of its ideal with reference to the reality, and imitation is often baffled by terror, but imagination by nothing; for it marches undismayed to the goal which it has itself laid down.
Augustine and the later Latin Neoplatonists in equating the Greek phantasia with the Latin imaginatio were to blur this distinction between mimesis and imagination. However, the ideal of poetry in the Renaissance was to revive the idea of the inventive capacity of the imagination.
An important development in the status of imagination takes place in Arabic philosophy and may be traced back to al-Kindī (c. 800 – c. 866) and al-Fārābī (ca. 870 -950). It is what Cocking describes as the splitting of the nous of Neoplatonism and the Hermetica into two components; not only exclusively the rational component as in Aristotle but something more aligned to the imagination and designated by a separate metaphysical entity - the Active Intelligence. This Intelligence is identified with Gabriel, the Angel of Revelation, who mediates between the human mind and the spiritual world. The Active Intelligence gives intuitive knowledge, illumination, or gnosis. It is a central concept in Corbin's work. Al-Fārābī accorded a creative power to the imagination with the imagination having the power to contemplate and recreate the Forms of sensible things symbolically in sleep and waking visions. Imagination for al-Fārābī has an imitative faculty which could translate knowledge of the higher world, mediated by the Active Intelligence, into sense-data, so that abstract concepts and visions are presented to the mind as real. As Cocking puts it:
There is a direct line to the transcendent world in which imagination can play an important part; the soul can receive intelligbles directly from the spiritual world and represent them, through imagination, as sensibles.
Furthermore, as Cocking argues:
The Scholastics, on the whole, played down the mediating role of the angelic hierarchy in creation. Very few Western thinkers accepted the notion of the Active Intellect as a separate entity at all; some were prepared to concede that the illumination it was supposed to provide came directly from God and to accept the rest of the details of Arab psychology with that substitution. Aquinas and the most influential Schoolmen would have nothing to do with illumination coming directly from a superhuman source, except as Augustinian grace enlightening judgment, and firmly fixed the principle of intellectual understanding and insight in the human mind itself.
The tradition of the Active Intelligence is discussed further in chapter three. However, this 'deviation' from Aristotelianism in Arabic philosophy has parallels in Western esotericism beginning with the medieval tradition of angelic (and demonic) magic and the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which addressed the desire for direct contact with the divine. This tradition typically involved lengthy ritual purifications, petitions or prayers to angelic beings, the Holy Spirit, or God to grant knowledge (for example in the Ars notoria) or visions (for example, the Sworn Book of Honorius) possibly resulting from the effects of 'ritual trance' – the 'impact of patterned, repetitive acts on the human nervous system'. The influential Buch Abramelin, by Abraham of Worms from the late fourteenth or early fifteen century translated by S L Macgregor Mathers in 1893 became a key text in Golden Dawn rituals and twentieth century Western occultism. It describes an arduous eighteen month programme of prayer and ritual devotion culminating in a vision of the Guardian Angel and personal transformation. What is striking is not only the relative simplicity of the operation but the intensity of focus and the lengthy repetition of prayer to achieve a transformation in imaginative consciousness, paradigmatic of ritual trance. The outcome of this change in consciousness was an ability to control spiritual forces (unredeemed spirits) and manipulate nature.
Also of note in the history of active imagination is the work De radiis, attributed to al-Kindī, who postulated that everything, including immaterial things such as music, words, and the imagination, emits rays which affect the things they come into contact with. The whole cosmos is interconnected by these rays, and this provided a theoretical basis for Renaissance magia naturalis, with Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) reclassifying al-Kindī's rays in terms of Platonic Eros. Al-Kindī argued that it was possible for the imagination, combined with ardent desire and faith, to effect changes in the material world. We are a mirror of the macrocosm:
The condition of an individual in this world, once fully known, shows, as if through a mirror, the whole condition of the heavenly harmony as each thing in this world is an image of the universal's harmony.
However, ultimately, as the most powerful rays affecting the sublunar world are emitted by the stars the theory can be seen as deterministic.
As Couliano shows, Ficino, who translated Synesius's De insomniis in 1489, revived his theory that the subtle body (or pneumatic synthesizer) was the basis for magic. The explanation here is twofold: firstly that Platonic dogma holds that the soul 'contains intellective marks of sensory objects', thus there is a basis for correspondence and sympathy between man as microcosm and the macrocosm. The pneumatic synthesizer receives (mirrors) the impressions from the external senses which are converted to the 'phantasmic grammar', the symbolic imagery by which the soul thinks, judges and establishes universal concepts according to its pre-existing Ideal information. The pneumatic synthesizer when pure mirrors this information coming from above. The second point is the idea that it is possible to influence the synthesizer to invoke higher presences. This is effected by sympathetic magic, explained by Plotinus, as the concept that soul can be attracted by objects and things that are sympathetic to it and capable of receiving some portion of it. The basis for this attraction in man is spirit, and on the cosmic level, the World-Soul, concentrated in the sun and communicating with the cosmos through the cosmic spirit (the quinta essentia). The World-Soul sows the seeds or seminal reasons of Ideas in the nous in the material world which in effect are the occult properties of matter. Ficino writes that:
This is why every single species corresponds through its own seminal reason to its own Idea and oftentimes through this reason it can easily receive something from the Idea since it was made through the reason from the Idea…And if in the proper manner you bring to bear on a species, or on some individual in it, many things which are dispersed but which conform to the same Idea, into this material thus suitably adapted you will soon draw a particular gift from the idea, through the seminal reason of the Soul.
Daemons, and 'gifts from the ensouled world and living stars can be attracted in this way' using images, and talismans for example that are sympathetic to the celestial virtue or power that one wants to attract. Imagination in conjunction with desire and spirit become the connecting link, the locus whereby the divine is given form and meaning. They are the means through which the soul remembers its divine origins and can start an ascent to the divine completed by the intellect.
According to Faivre, Paracelsus (1493-1541), took the idea of the imagination to its ultimate consequence, making it the intermediary between thinking and being, although arguably this notion is pre-figured in al-Kindī. True imagination for Paracelsus is conceived as a magical power acting through the soul's desire to create images which are the 'bodily' incarnations of thought, having an existence of their own. While false imagination is a 'pale reflection of visible things'. Imagination conceived of as the 'star in man', is a quintessence of corporeal and spiritual energies. This notion has parallels with the Neoplatonic subtle body and appears to be an affirmation, as in the work of Henry Corbin of the existence of an intermediary world. It also influenced Jung in his conceptions of alchemy as we shall see.












Chapter 2

It must not be forgotten that it is just in the imagination that a man's highest value may lie.
Carl Jung

In this chapter I will briefly consider the historical antecedents and some of the philosophical and more 'esoteric' influences that contributed to Jung's development of his analytic psychology. I will look at Jung's development of the concept of archetypes and their importance to psychic imagery mediated through the unconscious. I will also consider ideas on the imagination and the psyche that he derived from his own confrontation with the unconscious as documented in the Red Book and subsequent exploration of alchemy.

Some Historical Influences on the Development of Jung's Analytical Psychology
Henri F Ellenberger provided the early foundation for the contextualization of Jung's analytical psychology, writing that, like Freud's psychoanalysis:
It is a late offshoot of Romanticism, but psychoanalysis is also the heir of positivism, scientism, and Darwinism, whereas analytical psychology rejects that heritage and returns to the unaltered sources of psychiatric Romanticism and philosophy of nature.
Jung, did indeed, acknowledge his debt to the German Romantic mesmerists such as Carl August von Eschenmayer (1768-1852), Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780-1860), Justinus Kerner (1786-1862), and Johann Karl Passavant (1790-1857). Jung had a deep love of nature and according to one of his early followers, Marie-Louis von Franz, Jung was convinced that the 'facts of nature are the basis of all knowledge…for him nature is not only outside but also within'. This early feeling for nature was combined in Jung with the influences of German Idealism and Naturphilosophie. The latter was a term first coined by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797). German Idealism had been preoccupied with Immanuel Kant's legacy of the division between the phenomenal and the noumenal and Naturphilosophie was an attempt to bridge that divide. Schelling in his System of Transcendent Idealism (1800) conceived of a pre-established harmony between the ideal and the real worlds to explain how our subjective representations corresponded to the objective world and vice versa. Schelling saw Nature as purposive and having an immanent, but unconscious intelligence. Nature has a tendency toward a growing self-organizing unity and interiority, or self-consciousness. Various 'powers' symbolize how the lower forms of self-organisation in nature such as mechanical systems give rise to higher forms such as chemical and organic systems and finally mindedness. Schelling was indebted to Jacob Boehme's concept of the Ungrund and that consciousness or 'self-realization' arises dynamically from an eternal unconscious.
The idea that the unconscious represents a pre-reflective unity of being can be found in the German theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who contended that in this unity one finds 'a revelation of the Infinite in the finite'. Schleiermacher perceived that the essence of religion lies in this pre-reflective awareness of the Whole. As such, religious feeling is seen as an innate and essential component of man. The German Romantics' concept of the unity of this pre-reflective self-consciousness and of an organic, inter-dependent Nature was a formative influence on Jung's model of the psyche.
Ellenberger proposed that the antecedents of dynamic psychotherapy lay in exorcism and Mesmerism with Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) representing the turning point from which exorcism as a form of 'psychotherapy' develops into dynamic psychiatry. German Romantic mesmerists maintained the idea of the unconscious as an experimental entity and developed practical methods for accessing and exploring it. Hanegraaff argues that the specific development of mesmerism in German Romanticism was based on a medical theory, proposed in 1807 by Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), that there were two separate, but complementary nervous systems in the individual – the 'cerebral system' centered on the brain, and the 'ganglionic system' revolving around the gastric plexus, the individual units of which he likened to semi-conductors. When the ganglionic system becomes potentiated by magnetization the individual units of nerve bundles, which in their normal state act as 'isolators', unable to communicate their sensitivity to other units or the brain, are able to communicate their otherwise unconscious impressions through a unified network. The gastric plexus thereby becomes an organ of perception - the organ of the unconscious soul. Reil associated the phenomena of dissociation and posthypnotic amnesia with the existence of two autonomous selves housed in the same body corresponding to the cerebral and ganglionic system. Schubert argued it was through the ganglionic system, which took over from the dominant cerebral system in sleep, trance states or somnambulism, that we have access to an interior sense; the nachtseite, or 'night side of nature', expressed in the symbolism of dreams ('the hidden language of the soul'), and somnambulistic phenomena such as clairvoyance and precognition. Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817), Professor of Political Economy at Heidelberg and Marburg Universities in his Theory of Pneumatology, published in English in 1834, wrote that in certain cases of magnetism:
The Exaltation of the inner man rises in many persons to such a height that they come into connexion with the invisible world and they very frequently reveal hidden mysteries, and also remarkable things, which are taking place at a distance, or will shortly happen.
The Tyrolean physician Joseph Ennemoser (1787-1854) in his revised Geschicte der Magie (1844) proposed that the history of magic could in fact be read as the emergence of a natural science explicable in terms of Mesmer's animal magnetism. This occult history played a part in a 'psychologisation' of somnambulistic phenomena. Ennemoser refers to the psychological effects induced by magnetism and seen in somnambulic trance, as 'a waking up of the inner consciousness' and heightened sensitivity of the external senses; 'or the more rare and still higher state of the soul, which is known as the power of the seer, - clairvoyance, ecstasy, &c.'.
Richard Noll suggests that Jung was influenced by the ideas of the Theosophical Society, particularly the works of the theosophist G R S Mead (1863-1933). To what extent remains unclear but it appears that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Emma Hardinge-Britten (1823-1899) were both concerned with repositioning Spiritualism in terms of an older occult philosophy, key to which was the centrality afforded the will that they had derived from the French occultist Eliphas Levi. Levi believed that imagination 'is only the soul's inherent faculty of assimilating the images and reflections in the living light, being the Great Magnetic Agent'. Here Levi was influenced by Mesmer's idea of a magnetic fluid permeating the universe. Levi's astral light prefigures notions of an astral plane whose 'realities' may be accessed by imagination and a directed will. This resonates with Jung's notion of the unconscious as purposive will, derived from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), which has the power to create a 'secondary personality', often prefiguring the emergence of a better or higher conscious personality. Jung would also have been familiar with the magical idealism of Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenburg (1772 -1801) who believed that one could influence the material world with a sufficiently intense will.
In Jung's 1902 doctoral dissertation into the investigation of the spiritualistic phenomena produced by his maternal cousin Hélène Preiswerk, Jung referred to Preiswerk's 'somnambulic self', a secondary personality known as Ivenes, which was a continuation of her 'waking self' in somnambulic and semi-somnambulic states. In fact, Jung disparagingly referred to Ivenes as an improvement on patient's normal self. Although Jung used Freud's sexual repression theory to explain the emergence of Ivenes in this work, he also suggested that Ivenes represented an attempt by Preiswerk to 'dream herself into a higher ideal state' and were 'character formations for the future personality'; an early indication of his concept of the purposive nature of the unconscious operating in a creative and imagistic manner, with a receptivity superior to consciousness. Jung is arguably witnessing here a form of active imagination - an 'emergent' thinking in the sense defined by Gaillard. Jung eventually discounted the idea that there existed a second 'ego' in the individual but he argued that the evidence pointed to 'highly complex, quasi-conscious processes in the unconscious' or something like an 'approximative consciousness' midway between consciousness and unconsciousness: a second psychic system co-existing with consciousness', which was of 'revolutionary' significance for our view of the world.
F. X. Charet has outlined the importance of Jung's early interest and experiments in spiritualism with his cousin and his attempt to position these experiences in a philosophical framework influenced by Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant's Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766) was particularly relevant here. In this work Kant considers the question of how disembodied immaterial spirits, postulated as having extension in space but not mass and not subject to the laws of repulsion, could communicate with the sensible world. Kant's view on the possibility of such communication has been read in different ways. However, in part one Kant writes:
Spiritual ideas can pass over into the personal consciousness of man, indeed, not immediately but still in such a way that, according to the law of association of ideas, they stir up those pictures which are related to them and awake analogous ideas of our senses. These it is true, would not be spiritual conceptions themselves but yet their symbols. For, after all, it is both one and the same substance which is a member of both this world and the other, and both kinds of ideas belong to the same subject and are connected with each other.
Thus Kant appears to concede in his initial investigation that spiritual ideas can pass over into consciousness in a symbolic manner 'if they act on correlated ideas of the senses':
In such a way ideas which are communicated by spiritual influx, would clothe themselves with the signs of that language which man uses for his other purposes. Thus the sensation of the presence of a spirit becomes converted into the picture of the human figure…
Kant argues this can only occur in sensitive persons whose creative imagination is abnormally developed. Although spirits may be able to communicate with man's soul or spirit, to which they belong as to 'one great republic', Kant argues that departed souls and pure spirits can never be directly present to our external senses. Spirits act in such a way that:
The ideas that they call up in man's mind clothe themselves in corresponding pictures according to the laws of imagination, thus causing any objects which fit into the picture to appear as if they were outside of him.
The spiritual influx is in effect necessarily mixed up with the bodily senses which may produce delusions of the imagination. These delusions are held to be caused by nervous or mental disorders, whereby real spiritual sensation is 'converted into phantasms of sensuous things' which we then perceive not as in the mind but external.
Charet argues that in his later works it becomes clearer that Kant viewed the belief in access to the supra-sensible world through the symbolic imagination as a form of fantasy that was either superstition or madness. Kant concludes Dreams of a Spirit Seer by holding that our reason is simply not adequate for any definite knowledge of the spiritual world, which in his 'critical' phase is bracketed off as noumenal. Charet points to Schopenhauer's later attempt to reconcile this division of noumenal and phenomenal through his concept of the dream-organ – an intuitive faculty of perception which, unlike sense perception, was independent of external impression. In dreams images arose and impressed themselves on the mind and 'spread out to the senses' – a reversal of normal sensory perception. In the waking state the dream-organ was able to introduce internally 'intuitive representations of objects' such as auditory and visual hallucinations which appeared to the perceiver to occupy time and space because their representation was conditioned by phenomenal reality (time, space and causality) but whose source was noumenal. As Charet makes clear, this bears a striking similarity to Jung's theory of archetypes. Kant's conception in the first part of Dreams of a Spirit Seer that a symbolic communication may be possible between noumenal and phenomenal also seems to be an important influence in Jung's development of archetypes.
We have seen that the early mesmerists interpreted the extraordinary somnambulistic phenomena as natural but latent human faculties linked to a higher self. However, both Ennemoser and Jung were arguably concerned with explicating the 'facts of consciousness' through the soul and its hidden powers: Hanegraaff's thesis is that:
Jung's essential contribution is that he took the idea (invented by German Romantic mesmerism, with Ennemoser as the paradigmatic example) of a history of the magical "night side of nature" and its experiential manifestations, but repackaged it in modern psychological terms as the history of Western culture's suppressed unconscious.
We can see that the difference between daytime and night side consciousness formulated by the German Romantic mesmerists was revived by Jung in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912) in a chapter entitled 'On Two Ways of Thinking'. Jung here makes the distinction between conscious directed thinking or verbal reasoning and the non-directed thinking of phantasy and dreams. These are the products of the unconscious which thinks in images. Jung associates this latter mode of thought with 'the mythological thinking of ancient man which correlates with the thinking found in children, primitives and in dreams'. Jung proposed an analogy from comparative anatomy and biology that there is in psychology also a correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis: 'infantile thinking and dream thinking are simply a recapitulation of earlier evolutionary stages' which correspond to the 'instinctive archaic basis of the mind'.
The empirical study of the night side of consciousness and myth are therefore central in Jung's psychology to an understanding of the mind. As Jung notes, the fantasy products engaging the conscious mind not only constitute waking reveries and dreams but also in 'split-off complexes there are completely unconscious fantasy-systems that have a marked tendency to constitute themselves as separate personalities'. This idea was associated with a model of the mind termed polypsychism, whereby several 'subegos' can exist subject to an 'ego-in-chief', traditionally viewed as the personality or self. This theory grew out of the early magnetizers' discovery of secondary personalities (dipsychism) to account for the findings that, in fact, whole sets of sub-personalities could emerge in hypnotic states. Part of Jung's importance was to conceive of the psyche as having a self-regulating and unifying function (the transcendent function) that could integrate these fragmentary personalities or complexes through the technique of active imagination.

Analytic Psychology
Key to Jung's analytic psychology is his concept of the archetype. In postulating a collective unconscious Jung argued that it consisted of:
A second system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes'.
Although Jung owes a debt to the Platonic concept of Ideas, the archetype for Jung is not an abstract idea but a biological entity; an active, living disposition of reactions and aptitudes charged with meaningfulness and feeling. He conceived of them as 'mnemic deposits' or 'engrams' which have arisen through the condensation of ever recurring psychic experiences. The archetypes act as universal unconscious regulators which structure psychic imagery, modify, and motivate conscious contents, acting like instincts. However, the experience of archetypal contents often comes with a numinous, spiritual quality, thus they may be experienced as gods. Jung stressed that while the real nature of the archetype is irrepresentable it can be mediated via the unconscious and expressed through images, symbols and ideas. Jung likened them and his concept of the Self to Kant's noumenon (a transcendental 'negative borderline concept') and also as Kantian a priori categories structuring experience. For Jung these inherited universal 'archaic remnants' were residues of humanity's experiences. They were not inherited ideas but 'innate possibilities of ideas, a priori conditions for fantasy production', a 'form without definite content'. Indeed Jung early on referred to them as 'primordial images' before classifying them as archetypes:
In every individual, in addition to the personal memories, there are also…the great "primordial images", the inherited potentialities of human imagination. They have always been potentially latent in the structure of the brain…The primordial images are quite the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind. They are feeling just as much as thought, and might therefore be termed thought-feelings.
Primordial images are 'impersonal' images associated with a mythological character. They are fundamental determinants of human behaviour and their meaning must be derived from this psychic imagery. They are, as Bruce MacLennan notes, objectively real in that they are 'empirical, stable and public'. Although in 1921 Jung had referred to the archetypes as transcendental and spiritual - part of the collective unconscious - he later also saw the archetypes as closely linked with the instinctual physiological sphere and referred to the 'psychoid' nature of the archetype. Psychoid refers to psychic factors that cannot be directly perceived or are 'irrepresentable' but Jung also used it in the sense of 'quasi-psychic' processes such as reflex actions, and in distinguishing between 'merely vitalistic processes' and psychic processes per se. While archetypes are psychoid in the first sense Jung uses an analogy of the light spectrum here whereby the archetype lies at the ultra-violet end of the spectrum and the biological instinctual sphere at the infra-red end and he suggests that we could 'derive instinct from a transcendent archetype that manifests on a longer wave-length', implying that psychoid archetypes operate in the second sense. Indeed:
Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.
Jung postulated that the position of the archetype is ultimately 'beyond the psychic sphere' and rests in a 'unified field' equivalent to the alchemical unus mundus or Plotinian World-Soul. The Jungian analyst Jeffrey Raff has used the term 'psychoid' to designate this unified field which is comparable to Corbin's concept of the mundus imaginalis and this will be considered further in the conclusion.
In his model of the psyche Jung also suggests that not only does consciousness and unconsciousness exist along a spectrum with 'psychoid processes' buried in the instincts and incapable of consciousness but also that ego consciousness is surrounded by a multitude of lights of consciousness, a hypothesis he partly framed from the symbolism in alchemy of scintillae, or divine sparks, buried in the prima materia which is equivalent to the unconscious. Jung typically associates light with consciousness and these multiple luminosities are like 'tiny conscious phenomena' which active imagination aims at integrating into normal consciousness. The scintillae are in fact emanations from the World-Soul and conform to the Paracelsian lumen naturae, the invisible light of the 'inner man'. Jung indeed compared the psyche to the night sky whose stars and constellations represent the archetypes:
The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e. the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the unconscious join hands.
Jung is reflecting here the 'astrological psychology' of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) who wrote:
These celestial bodies are not to be sought by us outside in some other place; for the heavens in their entirety are within us in whom the light of life and the origin of heaven dwell.
Ficino's planets within may be likened to the Jungian archetypes.
Arguably, Jung's model of the psyche corresponds in microcosm to the tri-partite Neoplatonic cosmos as follows: One = Self as totality of the psyche and the divine in us, nous = consciousness, soul = unconsciousness, shading into psychoid processes and matter. However, we can see also that Jung's psyche also reflects and Gnostic and alchemistical themes of the descent of soul into matter and the awakening and reintegration of this spark.
A further key difference between Jung's model of the psyche and Freud's is that it is teleological. Here Jung is influenced by Naturphilosophie and figures such as C G. Carus (1789-1869) and Eduard von Hartmann. This concept is also seems a pre-requisite for the therapeutic effectiveness of active imagination. Jung writes that in the period 1918-1920, following his split from Freud, he began to realize that 'the goal of psychic development is the Self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the Self'. For Jung the Self is the centre of the psyche and the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning towards this centre. Jung describes the Self as 'a union of opposites par excellence' and therefore an archetype of unity. The psyche is purposive in that it has a tendency to wholeness involving an integration of unconscious contents with consciousness; a unification of opposites within itself:
Psychologically the self is a union of conscious (masculine) and unconscious (feminine). It stands for the psychic totality. So formulated, it is a psychological concept. Empirically, however, the self appears spontaneously in the shape of specific symbols, and its totality is discernible above all in the mandala and its countless variants. Historically these symbols are authenticated as God-images.
In analytical psychology then the posited Self is 'higher' than the ego as it represents the psychic totality: the ego is not necessarily in relation to the unconscious. We can see a 'Romantic evolutionism' reflected in Jung's model of the psyche as it is both teleological and the Self is representative of the Romantics' concept of a pre-reflective sense of the unity of being.


Jung and The Red Book
Jung was to undertake his own personal study of the 'night side of consciousness' which he initially documented in his Black Books and later transferred and 'aesthetically elaborated' upon in the Red Book. Although, his experience of the Self may be traced to his distinction of a No.1 and No.2 personality outlined in his 'autobiography' Memories Dream and Reflections, his experiments with introspection and active imagination beginning in 1913 with a series of apocalyptic dreams forced the issue: Jung precipitated a 'divine mania' and self-styled descent into hell involving a 'sacrificium intellectus' whereby Jung was forced to recognize the 'irrational dynamism of his soul' over sterile intellectual theorizing. We can see this in the Red Book in Jung's encounter with the 'spirit of the depths':
The Spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware I had lost my soul.
Jung writes that he decided to confront the fantasies that were stirring up in him at that time in the conviction that a direct experience of the unconscious would help in his ability to understand and treat the fantasy material of his patients. In retrospect Jung felt these experiences were the creative foundation of his life's work. Jung describes the onset of his active imaginations as follows:
It was during Advent of the years 1913 – 12th December to be exact – that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears . Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into the dark depths…
To 'get hold' of these fantasies Jung often imagined a descent. However, the method he taught depended on the individual and may start from dream contents and hypnagogic impressions, for example. As we have noted active imagination is likened to the imaginatio vera of the alchemists. It is 'purposeful creation'. In this process images have a life of their own and 'symbolic events develop according to their own logic, provided conscious reasoning does not interfere at this point'. In these descents Jung often encountered personified figures: Elijah, Salome, Izdubar, and Philemon, whom Jung described as follows:
Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration…It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche...Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.
Philemon and other fantasy figures brought Jung the insight that there were autonomous products of the psyche which had their own life. Jung describes conversations with Philemon in which 'he said things I had not consciously thought' and helped him 'disentangle' the creations of his active imaginations, as he learnt to withdraw his projections.
In Psychological Types (1921) Jung described the Self as:
An (ideal) greatness which embraces and includes the I. In unconscious fantasy the self often appears as the super-ordinated or ideal personality…'.
The Self, here represented in the guise of Philemon, as a guiding spirit or psychopomp, has parallels with the personal daimon of antiquity. Philemon in mythology unwittingly welcomes the gods into his home. There is a parallel here in that Jung's initial attempts at this technique, later formulated as active imagination, release archetypal forces – the gods of antiquity – in what is essentially a theurgic operation. Philemon is also described as a magician who teaches Jung's 'I' that 'magic happens to be everything that eludes comprehension' or rational understanding. The purely rational man has no need for magic:
But it is another thing for whoever has opened the chaos in himself. We need magic to be able to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible. We understood that our way needs not only reason but also unreason.
Again, Jung is here I would argue talking of the power of the daimonic and the theurgic evoking of what he later terms archetypal forces. Compare this also with Couliano's view, which Jung would have endorsed, that far from being a form of 'institutionalized schizophrenia', magic is a powerful remedy against mental illness as inter alia:
Magic is not a factor of disorder; on the contrary, it is a means to reestablish a peaceful coexistence between the conscious and the unconscious.
We can also note that this opening out to the unconscious corresponds to Jung's reception of the Platonic 'divine phantasms' which appear in dreams and waking visions, the 'divine madness' which Plato praised in its various aspects. Jung wrote the following in the Red Book:
To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images, madness is divine.
In the Red Book Jung argued that god is revealed in man through a self-sacrifice: man must become a Christ, an 'imitatio christi' in an authentic sense in that one must, like Christ, live one's own life. This is a process which for Jung ends in the Mithraic 'self-deification' episode in the Red Book where Jung is transformed into Deus Leontocephalus. This I would argue represents Jung's discovery, through active imagination, of the existence of a 'higher self'. Jung later wrote about the experience as an initiation and described it as follows:
In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. The more these images are realized, the more you will be gripped by them. When the images come to you and are not understood, you are in the society of the gods or, if you will the lunatic society.
Algis Uždavinys highlights that the Neoplatonic concept of self-knowledge - knowledge of our true identity - is based on anamnesis. Platonic anamnesis consists of the idea that the truth about reality is always in our soul and through the practice of theurgy we can escape bodily passions and errors of sense perception to recollect our divine origins and attain true knowledge. Anamnesis has analogies with Jung's concept that the Self is the totality of the psyche in which a vast array of information may be accessed through the unconscious.




The Alchemical Active Imagination

The secret of alchemy was in fact the transcendent function, the transformation of personality through the blending and fusion of the noble with the base components, of the differentiated with the inferior functions, of the conscious with the unconscious.
Jung described the alchemical opus as consisting of the separation of the chaos of the prima materia into an active, sulphur (male) principle; the soul represented by the sun, and a passive mercury (female) principle; the body represented by the moon, which are then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio or chemical wedding. Mercurius (spirit) is both the agent of this transformation and the product of the union; the filius sapientiae or filius philosophorum. Alchemical iconography depicting the transformation of Mercurius in the sealed vessel is psychologically comparable to 'cooking the basic instinctual drives in their own affect until their essential fantasy content becomes conscious'. This is therefore symbolic of the process of active imagination. Jung in the main did not consider the work of alchemists as some sort of scientific proto-chemistry, as the processes they described were 'made unrecognizable by the elaborate symbolic language in which they were couched'. Jung argued that the true nature of alchemy lay in certain processes of 'projection' which took place in the psyche of the individual alchemist. These psychical processes were seen by the alchemist as the peculiar behavior of physical substances but what he was actually experiencing was his unconscious self in a form of participation mystique. Jung himself wrote that the 'alchemical opus deals in the main not just with chemical experiments as such, but with something resembling psychic processes expressed in pseudochemical language' and that the alchemist had 'little or nothing to divulge in the way of chemistry'. In trying to answer the question of why then the alchemist undertook laboratory work to manipulate and monitor chemical processes, Jung argued that this was part of an exploration into the real nature of matter which was unknown to the alchemist. In seeking to explore it he projected his unconscious into the 'darkness of matter in order to illuminate it'. The process itself was involuntary. The alchemist Jung argues had a theory of correspondence derived from the actual experience of pre-existing ideas in physical matter; 'he experienced his projection as a property of matter but what in reality he was experiencing was his own unconscious'. The mystical or spiritual side of alchemy then was psychological – a 'concretization, in projected and symbolic form of the process of individuation'. Jung argues, for example, that the first alchemical coniunctio, the unio mentalis, represented the union of the conscious self-differentiated 'male' spirit with a 'female' spirit abstracted from previously unconscious contents (the soul freed from matter), which may be regarded as a 'quintessence of fantasy-images that enter consciousness either spontaneously or through active imagination'. According to Jung the early alchemists interpreted the fantasy images that arose from their contemplation of the mysterious properties of matter allegorically whereas modern psychology regards them 'as genuine symbols' pointing to archetypal psychic contents. This view of the practice of alchemy is, however contested. William R Newman, for example, argues that alchemical texts in the early modern period are codes (Decknamen) for actual chemical processes and do not bear any relation to symbols of spiritual or psychological transformation. Jung's claim that 'the alchemical operation is the 'equivalent of the psychological process of active imagination' does not fit easily with his assertion that the early alchemists were largely unconscious of what they were doing unless the correspondence is with the first stage of active imagination.


Chapter 3

He who does not know the status of imagination is totally devoid of knowledge
- Ibn 'Arabi

Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was one of the foremost scholars of Islamic mysticism and philosophy. Along with Jung and Gerschom Sholem he was an influential figure at the Eranos Conferences established in Ascona Switzerland 1933. Like Jung, Corbin has been accused of being ahistorical. However, as Tom Cheetham argues, Corbin was influenced by Martin Heiddeger's phenomenological approach in Being and Time, an enquiry into the characteristics of Being or Dasein. Dasein is a postulated ontological priority; prior to a subject, ego or consciousness. Heidegger's analytic of Dasein showed it to be fundamentally an 'act of presence', which reveals and orders our notions of space and time, rather than holding space and time as a givens which are 'out there'. A further ontological aspect of Dasein is 'historicality', 'which makes possible the characteristics of temporality in a more fundamental sense'. According to Corbin his debt to Heidegger lay in his analysis that:
There is a historicity more original, more primordial than that which we call Universal History, the history of external events, the Weltgeschicte, History in the ordinary sense of the term…There is the same relationship between historicality and historicity as between the existential and existentiell. This was a decisive moment.
Cheetham writes that for Corbin this decisive realisation was that 'the history of external events is somehow subordinate to and takes place within this more basic structure of Presence, we are not entirely at its mercy'. 'If there is a "meaning of History" it is not at all in the historicity of historical events; it is in this historicality, in the secret, esoteric, existential roots of History and the historical'. It is a step into what can be described as metahistory or mythic history and mythic consciousness. This chapter treats Corbin's work as a primary source and aims to elucidate and compare his views of the Imaginal and active imagination with Jung's.
Mundus Imaginalis and Active Imagination

Corbin proposed the use of the term mundus imaginalis, designated by Islamic theosophers as the 'eight climate', to describe a level of reality perceived by the imaginative consciousness as an organ of perception. Corbin insisted on this precise term to avoid associations of this Imaginal realm with the unreality or phantasy of the 'imaginary'. The mundus imaginalis is a world accessible by the 'psycho-spiritual senses' in a visionary state – a state Corbin describes as intermediate between waking and sleeping, involving a passage into an interior and hidden spiritual reality, which once penetrated paradoxically envelopes and contains material reality. This spiritual reality is cryptically described as 'a place outside of place' or the 'land of No-where' (Nā-kojā-Ābād). Corbin was influenced by Immanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and his proposition that 'all changes of place in the spiritual world are effected by changes of state in the interiors, which means that a change of place is nothing else than change of state…' Proximity in spiritual space consists of those who are in similar 'interior' states, and is analogous to the hermetic principle of 'like attracts like'. Corbin argues that spiritual 'space' accords with the interiors of angels who may be perceived when we are in an ecstatic state. As Christopher Bamford notes this view presupposes an 'ontologization of knowledge', that is:
It is the soul's modus essendi (mode of being) that determines its modus cognoscendi (mode of knowing)…to know is thus to attain to a level of beings. It is to unveil and comprehend the beings in question and their world…we cannot know what we are not; and the great search is to meet, to uncover, the true person that we are.
In the Neoplatonic cosmology adopted by the Arabic authors whom Corbin comments on (for example, Avicenna (c. 980-1037), Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240), al-Suhrawardi (1154-1191) and Mulla Sadra (1572-1640) there are three universes ordered in a hierarchy. In Suhrawardi these are the sensory world of phenomena (molk), the suprasensory world of the Soul or Angel-Souls (Malakūt) and a universe of 'pure archangelic Intelligences' (Jabarut). These three universes correspond to the three organs of knowledge: the senses, imagination and intellect, and the division of body, soul and spirit. The world of the imagination, the mundus imaginalis, corresponding to the Arabic designation 'ālam al-mithāl, is an intermediate world linking the sensory world and Intellective world. It is constituted by the Archetype-Images of individual things, the spirits which have left the terrestrial world, and the forms of our thoughts and desires. It is a world with extension and dimension but which is not of the order of corporeality of the material world - it is a world of subtle-bodies and correspondences.
For Corbin active Imagination is 'the pre-eminent mirror, the epiphanic place of the Images of the archetypal world'. Its function is to permit a symbolic relationship between the sensory world (body) and the Intelligible world (spirit). Active Imagination is:
The organ that permits the transmutation of internal spiritual states into external states, into vision-events symbolizing with those internal states…this transmutation is itself what spatializes that space, what causes space, proximity, distance and remoteness to be there.
Here we see Heidegger's influence on Corbin in that the active Imagination can be read as an ontological or existential characteristic of Dasein, in contrast to Jung's emphasis on active imagination as more of a technique allowing access to unconscious archetypal forces.
Corbin posits two things about this Imagination. Firstly, that it is a pure spiritual faculty independent from the physical organism and able to subsist after its disappearance. In this pure state, withdrawn from the bodily senses, it can perceive the essence or Form of material things in a manner in which there is no subject-object divide. In this state the five bodily senses are constituted internally by a single synaisthēsis (or sensorium). Like Synesius, Corbin alludes to the Imagination in its purified state as the vehicle of the soul, or subtle-body. Secondly, active Imagination 'is a cognitive power, an organ of true knowledge', the Imaginatio vera of Paracelsus, which elicits information about a world as real as the empirical one. Here he differs from Jung who does not make this leap; conscious discrimination (reality testing) is required for integration. Its function is to 'perceive or generate symbols leading to the internal sense' and provides a symbolic knowledge mediating the sensible and Intellective worlds. Corbin emphasises the distinction between allegory, a disguising of something already known, from symbol which he describes as:
An image having the quality of a symbol is a primary phenomenon (Urphänomen), unconditional and irreducible, the appearance of something that cannot manifest itself otherwise to the world where we are.
Corbin refers to the 'full and autonomous reality presented by the intermediate world of the symbolic Imagination. Like Jung, he rejects a Freudian reductionism of the symbol to instinctual drives and argues that 'the spontaneous flowering of symbols should appear to us as corresponding to a fundamental psychic structure'. They are not 'subjective projections' but transcultural phenomena similar to Jung's concept of archetypes. However, as Stephen M. Joseph has written in connection with the contrasting views of the symbol in Jung and Gershom Scholem; for Jung the symbol is an imaginal expression which is a part of a temporal, psychical process in which an unconscious content with sufficient energy charge becomes conscious, provided the 'appropriate symbolic attitude of consciousness is present' (i.e. the process termed the transcendent function). Whereas, for Scholem, the symbol is 'an imaginal presence which "makes another [noetic] reality transparent…something which lies beyond the sphere of expression and communication''' and which is trans-temporal. Corbin stands with Scholem in this respect.
Corbin writes that each of us carries an image of the universe within:
The Image in question is not one that results from some previous external perception; it is an Image that precedes all perception, an a priori expressing the deepest being of the person, what depth psychology calls an Imago. Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out. He may not be conscious of it, and to that extent he will experience as imposed on himself and on others this world that in fact he himself or others impose on themselves….[this situation] ceases in proportion to such an acquisition of consciousness as permits the soul triumphantly to pass beyond the circles that held it prisoner.
This is very reminiscent of Jung. Similarly, though more explicitly, in Corbin's Neoplatonic metaphysics there is an element of the soul that can retain consciousness of its kinship with the divine, or celestial beings – 'the true family of the gnostic' – to which 'the soul must find a way of Return. That way is Gnosis, and on that way it needs a Guide'. Corbin argues that this occurs when the soul awakens to a new consciousness of its condition as a stranger in the world (an initial Event, an awakening to itself, which Corbin refers to as a 'rupture of the plane'), wherein the soul can no longer conform to collective norms. In this emergence to itself a guide appears:
At the moment when the soul discovers itself to be a stranger and alone in a world formerly familiar, a personal figure appears on the horizon, a figure that announces itself to the soul personally because it symbolises with the soul's most intimate depths.
This duality can be conceptualised in various ways such as the ego and Self, or self and higher self. As Wasserstrom notes:
For Corbin's Jungian-inflected view of the individual, the self is transformed to Self, the mere little man to Cosmic Anthropos, by means of "exemplification, which constitutes the individual person and raises him to the dimension of an archetypal Person".
Corbin writes that the phenomenon appears when there is 'sufficient psychic energy' and this image of the Self tends to manifest in a hynagogic state (i.e. between waking and sleeping). It is a syzygy, or unio sympathetica, envisioned as the embodied soul (a fallen angel) and a celestial guardian angel, or Perfect Nature, which represents what Corbin refers to as the 'Active Intelligence', an entity which is 'pure imagination'.



Hermeneutics and the Oriental Philosophy
An important concept in Corbin's spiritual hermeneutics is the practice of ta'wīl paired and contrasted with tanzῑl. The latter designates exoteric religion 'the letter of Revelation dictated to the Prophet by the Angel' and causes the descent of this Revelation from the higher world. Conversely, ta'wῑl is a symbolic exegesis of the letter of Revelation effecting a return to an esoteric, inner spiritual reality. Corbin writes that the action of ta'wīl 'is essential symbolic understanding, the transmutation of everything visible into symbols'. Both are necessary components of reality; an inner and outer form. In this hermeneutic there is not only a transmutation of the 'text' but also the soul which invites:
An exodus from metaphor and slavery of the letter, from exile and the Occident of exoteric appearance, to the Orient of the original and hidden idea'.
The 'Orient' here is the Platonic world of pure Form, and archangelic Forms of light, as opposed to the 'Occident' of matter and the terrestrial world. Oriental philosophy is a spiritual orientation towards a symbolic, celestial (North) pole rather than a matter of geographical location, and is characterized by a vertical dimension. Ta'wῑl is an understanding of symbols, not reductively by substitution of allegory or rationalisations, but 'anagogically'. Very much like Jung, Corbin argues that the symbol 'is not an artificially constructed sign; it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise'. He writes that:
The transmutation of the sensible and imaginable into a symbol, return of the symbol to the situation that brought it to flower – these two movements open and close the hermeneutic circle.
Ta'wῑl then is a process in which the soul takes as point of departure an exegesis of a scriptural or 'cosmic' text and in this effort a transmutation is effected in the soul; a 'real, but inner and psychic, Event', which is a leading back to the what the symbols signified - the true and original meaning of the text. Corbin writes that the 'Event' of the Avicennian or Suhrawardian recitals was 'an exodus from this world, the encounter with the Angel and with the world of the Angel' involving a personal transmutation. This experience utilising the active Imagination takes place in the mundus imaginalis. At this point Corbin writes that 'the cosmos is interiorized and integrated with the soul. Psychic energy transmutes the text into a constellation of symbols. 'What the soul recognises in this is its own archetypal image - the Self'. This is the 'culminating point of a spiritual experience in which the soul attains not only to consciousness and realization of itself, but is set in the presence of the Self'. This transcendent relationship is experienced not as an abstract Platonic Form but as a person, an aspect of the Mundus imaginalis.
It is implicit in Corbin that Jung's revival of the 'night-side of consciousness' from the German Romantic mesmerist tradition is two dimensional in that it lacks a 'vertical', spiritual dimension.
Corbin writes:
Light rising in the east and light going down in the west are two premonitions of an existential option between the world of Day with its criteria and the world of Night with its deep insatiable passions.
However, a third possibility exists that is not located in the opposition between East and West, Light and Darkness, or consciousness and unconsciousness. This possibility is represented by the Northern Light, which symbolises with the light of the 'midnight sun' and the heavenly pole:
It is no longer a question of day succeeding night, nor night, day. Daylight breaks in the middle of the night and turns into day a night which is still there but which is a Night of light.
To see beings and things "in the northern light" refers to the transcendent dimension:
Whose growth is concomitant with visionary apperception, giving shape to the suprasensory perceptions and constituting that totality of ways of knowing that can be grouped under the term hierognosis.
Corbin argues that the mystical symbols of the North point to a psycho-spiritual realm which has three planes. In the purely psychological contrast between consciousness and unconsciousness Corbin argues that there is a failure to take into account the existence of two darknesses; one the darkness of unconsciousness which conceals and holds light captive. When light escapes from it:
This Darkness is left to itself, falls back on itself; it does not become light. But there is another Darkness, called by our mystics the Night of light, luminous Blackness, black light'.
This is associated with the 'Darkness at the approaches to the [celestial] Pole' which Corbin refers to as 'the Divine Night of superbeing' in contrast with a darkness which is 'the extreme occident of Matter and of non-being'. As Corbin puts it:
The Avicennan recital explicitly shows us a twofold situation and meaning of the "midnight sun": on the one hand, it is the first Intelligence, the archangel logos, rising as a revelation over the Darkness of the Deus absconditus, and which in terms of the human soul, is the arising of superconsciousness on the horizon of consciousness. On the other hand it is the human soul itself as the light of consciousness rising over the Darkness of the subconscious…That is why orientation requires here a threefold arrangement of planes: the day of consciousness is on a plane intermediate between the luminous Night of superconsciousness and the dark night of unconsciousness. The divine Darkness, the Cloud of unknowing, the "Darkness at the approaches to the Pole," the "Night of symbols" through which the soul makes its way, is definitely not the Darkness in which the particles of light are held captive. The latter is the extreme occident, and is Hell, the demonic realm. Orientation by the Pole, the cosmic north, determines what is below and what is above; to confuse one with the other would merely indicate disorientation.
Cheetham notes that 'the darkness at the approach to the Pole corresponds to the journey towards the unknown God. The Darkness of the North then provides the orientation for a truly human life'. This polar dimension is a 'bi-unity' that includes the heavenly partner, the angel, guiding us up toward the celestial pole. Here we have the vertical dimension which in Corbin's view gives rise to a different sense of history - a 'historicality' concerning our spirituality – and entails an orientation, a mode of presence which has the effect of spatialising the world around us in a different way.
Corbin thus differs from Jung in the sense that imagination operates not only in the sense of the light of consciousness overcoming the 'darkness' of the unconscious but also in the context that 'the divine Night of super-consciousness irradiates the field of light of consciousness'. Corbin clearly states that this transcendent dimension is not just the integrated sum of conscious and unconscious contents. The shadow side of ourselves cannot be integrated but must be discarded. In his view these polarities are not complementary but contradictory and cannot be 'lumped together as a coincidentia oppositorium:
The man of light's ascent causes the shades of the well where he was held captive to fall back into themselves. Hermes does not carry his shadow with him; he discards it.
Corbin argues that if esoteric reintegration is conceived of as a 'totalization' of Christ and Satan, or Ohrmazd and Ahriman this overlooks the fact that 'even under the reign of a figure of light the satanic forces remain in operation…complementary elements can be reintegrated but not contradictory ones'. In Corbin's view this confusion has arisen because of the failure to understand the distinction between 'black light' and the blackness without light of the unconscious – a failure of orientation towards the celestial pole and transcendent dimension of light:
The Day whose constraints are deplored , and whose ambiguity is obvious because it obeys the demonic law of constraint, is the exoteric Day where ready-made notions are accepted and taken for granted. Deliverance from it lies in the esoteric Night of hidden meanings, which is the night of superconsciousness; for it is not the Ahrimanian Night, but the Night ineffable, the night of symbols which alone can pacify the dogmatic madnesses of Day. Rational dogmatic excitement and irrational lunacy cannot compensate for one another.
Corbin also rejects the notion of a collective psyche which he sees as a symptom of a forgotten vertical dimension 'for which an evolutionary horizontal dimension is substituted. The vertical dimension is individuation and sacralisation; the other is collectivization and secularization'. The collective psyche in this sense is the hypostasis of a 'fictitious conciliation' between the midnight sun and Ahrimanian Night.

Angelology
Avicennan angelology has a triple hierarchy of angelic beings: the pure Intelligences (Archangels-Cherubim) emanated from the First Intelligence; the angel-souls which emanate from them and which move the celestial spheres - the Animae or Angeli coelestes of pure Imagination - and the terrestrial angels who move human bodies. These beings emanate from successive Intellective acts in a 'ternary rhythm' producing an Archangel-Intelligence, an Anima coelestis (or Soul; 'a hypostasis of the thought that Intelligence has of itself', which is intermediate and mediatory between this heaven and the Intelligence from which it emanates), and a heaven, down to the Tenth or Active Intelligence in which the energy of emanations is unable to produce a further Intelligence, soul and heaven, but which 'splinters' into the multitude of human souls and terrestrial matter. The two intellective powers of the human soul (contemplative and practical) reflect the structure of the pleroma of dyads – Archangel-Intelligence-Angel-Souls. It is the Angel-Soul which activates the contemplative intellect through an image of itself and allows the soul to see the kinship with its angelic counterpart. In a particularly dense passage Corbin argues that Averroes' Aristotelianism, holds that Intelligence is the cause of a soul 'not because it thinks that soul, but because it is known by that "soul" as an object of desire'. In this way the moving Intelligence of the highest orb can, as object of desire, be the final cause of all the celestial movers rather than a creative cause as in the Avicennan system. Corbin argues that this metaphysical shift entailed the rejection of the necessity for an Anima coelestis and puts at issue the whole destiny of the Soul, 'whose ontological status of intermediate or minor angel is rejected in favour of pure intellect'. The Latin translations of Averroes from the twelfth century onwards gave rise to the burgeoning influence of Aristotelian rationalism culminating in Thomist-Aristotelianism that displaced notions of an intellectus agens. Corbin writes that in contra-distinction Avicenna's cosmology holds that:
Celestial Souls and human souls share the modality of not being purely intelligible or intellective in the first constitution of their essence; they have in common the function of ruling and governing bodies. To do this they must imagine…But here the celestial Souls possess a superiority; at the very origin of their being, they receive from the Intelligence or Archangel from whom they emanate everything requisite for the exercise of their being. The body with which they are furnished and which "materializes" the thought of the same Archangel is made of a celestial "matter," a subtle and incorruptible quinta essentia. For this reason, and because, unlike human imaginations, theirs are not dependent on sensible knowledge, their imaginations are true.
Angel-Souls (pure Imagination) are necessary intermediaries between Intelligence and bodies, as Intelligence cannot subsist in bodies. The Soul's ardent desire is to assimilate itself with Intelligence by becoming like it, by 'grasping the beauty of the object it loves', whose beauty increases its ardour and makes the soul look upward:
Thence arises a motion by which it can apply itself to the object with which it desires to assimilate itself. Thus imagination of beauty causes ardour of love, love causes desire (inquisitio), and desire causes motion.
Corbin is guarded on the practical aspect of a relationship with the Active Intelligence but it assists the soul in this return cycle to the world of pure Intelligence through images, symbols and dreams; 'donations' which help develop the soul's clothing of a subtle-body – the vehicle of the soul allowing the return cycle. Corbin refers to the work of Najm Kobra, a Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century, who described the mystical perception of colored lights (photisms) in visionary states as correlating with the degree of the mystics' spiritual progress and which enabled the distinction between 'supra-sensory perception' and hallucinations. Kobra outlines the gnostic theme of the divine spark, or particle of light buried in the 'man of light' which aspires to rise to its origin and in this ascent is met by a light descending from heaven. At their meeting point, the lights multiply and the angelic guide appears. This process is best effected by continuous prayer (dhikr); which develops the higher or 'pacified soul' associated with the heart (qalb) and brings about the 'opening' and growth of the particle of light. The growth of this light correlates with the development of the subtle-organs and visionary apperception. Dhikr itself is a meditative technique in which:
By uninterrupted polarization of the attention on an object the object finally imposes itself with such force, is imbued with such life, that the mystic is attracted, and is as it were absorbed into it.
Corbin compares the relationship of the Active Intelligence and the soul as pedagogical; like that of parent to child, it perfects the soul. As Christopher Bamford notes, the task of each soul is to achieve angelicity – the state of a being that is its own species or archetype: 'the Active Intelligence leads each soul to its archetypical intellectivity or state of pure intelligence, that is, its angelic being. Corbin's sense of 'individuation' therefore encompasses a transcendent dimension, in the form of a bi-unity with an angelic being symbolising pure imagination.

Gnosis and visionary knowledge
The two main characteristics of Suhrawardi's doctrine of Ishraq according to Corbin was a revival of the philosophy of Light and the inseparability of philosophy from spiritual study. The Active Intelligence identified with both the Angel of Revelation and the Angel of Knowledge 'means that the theory of visionary knowledge granted to mystics and prophets turns out to be inseparable from the theory of gnosis postulated by philosophers'.
Corbin details different categories of gnosis in relation to what he terms prophetic gnosiology, which 'are established in relation to the visible, audible or invisible mediation of the angel, in relation, that is, to the awareness that a subject may possess. The highest manifestation is 'the vision of the angel 'projecting' knowledge into the heart in a waking state, in a vision similar to the vision of the eyes'. This is the idea that true knowledge is a revelation – an epiphany or theophany - by the Active Intelligence, whose organ of perception is the heart. In such perception a veil is lifted between the mirror of the heart and the Tabula secreta on which all things are imprinted:
The epiphany of knowledge, from the mirror of the Tabula secreta into the other mirror of the heart, is like the reflection of the image of a mirror in another mirror facing it'.
Corbin writes that even in the perception of external objects:
It cannot be said that what the soul sees is a form which exists within external matter: such is not the nature of sense-perception, and such a form is not the object of it. The object of this perception is actually the forms that the soul sees with the eyes of imaginative consciousness. The forms in the external world are causes of the appearance of a form which 'symbolizes with them'…In reality, the object perceived through the senses is this symbolizing form. The production of the symbolizing form may be occasioned by the external world, in which case one is elevated to its level from the level of the organs of sense; or it may be produced from within, in which case one descends to its level from the level of spiritual intelligibilities through the activity of the Imagination, which makes these intelligibilities present by endowing them with imaginative form…However, in the first case because the external appearance (zāhir) may not accord with the inner (bātin), a mistake could occur. In the second case, there can be no mistake. The form-image born of a contemplation which is focused on the supra-sensible world, and of the illumination of the world of malakut, 'imitates' divine realities to perfection.
In Suhrawardi's Book of Eastern Theology, there is a recapitulation of the different Aristotelian functions of sensitive and passive imagination (storing of images coming from sense perceptions), as well as those of calculative and active Imagination, located in a single faculty, the sensorium, which acts as a mirror with double aspect, reflecting both sensory and 'intellective' images. There is still a twofold aspect to the imagination - passive and active. In the former the imagination is simply representational; imagination is the 'storehouse that garners all the images perceived by the sensorium. The active Imagination can operate in two ways. When it acts in conjunction with the calculative faculty (wahm) it can make judgements which 'violate the laws of the intellect' and produce the fantastic and unreal, in a way related to that of the 'rational animal'. In the service of nous, in meditative thinking (intellectus sanctus), when our inner self is sufficiently purified and liberated, it can access the mundus imaginalis. Active Imagination then has a dual function of raising sense-perception to the Imaginal level and lowering intelligibility to the same level and is akin to the Plotinian schema of the two lights of the imagination. The active Imagination as a mediatory function transmutes bodies and corporealizes the spiritual. Corbin draws parallels here with the philosopher's stone as an agent of transmutation and the conversion of gross matter into the spiritual body in 'spiritual alchemy'. The appearance of the subtle-body depends on the actions fulfilled and the inner states manifested by actions: 'in our terrestrial world, our inner states are invisible and the aspect of what we do is limited to the outer, observable appearance, but in the celestial earth the same actions assume another form and inner states project visible forms'. These forms - plants, animals, palaces, gardens, indeed anything, are real 'outside' but at the same time are 'attributes and modes of being of man'. 'Their transfiguration is the transfiguration of man, and they form his surroundings, his celestial Earth'.
A further difference with Jung can be seen in Corbin's adoption of the distinction in Ibn 'Arabi of another schema envisioning two types of imagination; one that is conjoined to the imagining subject and inseparable from them and a self-subsisting imagination dissociable from the subject. The first type includes conscious pre-meditated imaginings and also dreams, the second type 'has an autonomous and subsisting reality' in the mundus imaginalis. Corbin writes:
The fact that these "separable" Images subsist in a world specific to them, so that the Imagination in which they occur is a "Presence" having the status of an "essence" perpetually capable of receiving ideas and Spirits and of giving them the "apparitional body" that makes possible their epiphany – all this makes it clear that we are far removed from all "psychologism".

Spiritual energetics
Corbin notes that the heart, conceived of not as the physical organ, but as a 'psycho-spiritual organ', is, in Ibn 'Arabi and Sufism, the organ which produces true knowledge or gnosis. This is a 'mystical physiology' (c.f. Eliade) operating through a subtle-body. The creative power of the heart is himma. The representative or calculative faculty in man creates through active Imagination generally only things which exist in this faculty – part of the 'conjoined imagination'. The active Imagination in service to the creative power of himma is 'capable of creating objects, of producing changes in the outside world'. This is the detached imagination. Corbin writes:
Thanks to the active Imagination, the gnostic's heart projects what is reflected in it (that which it mirrors); and the object on which he thus concentrates his creative power, his imaginative meditation, becomes the apparition of an outward, extra-psychic reality.
This important creative function of the active Imagination requires participation between the human and the divine in the exploration of this subtle-realm and is at once 'discovery and creation' effecting changes in our being. These changes on the spiritual level relate to the development of the body of light which is the essential person. How do these changes occur? Corbin talks of a rupture of the plane when there is sufficient psychic energy. Is this analogous to Jung's concept of libido? Is the postulated himma an energetic mechanism that allows access to the mundus imaginalis? It appears in Corbin that himma is a kind of 'spiritual energy' associated with the action of the 'mystical' heart. It is creative in the 'epiphanic' sense. In giving 'objective body to intentions of the heart' himma fulfils an aspect of its function concerning extrasensory phenomena such as ESP, telepathy and 'visions of synchronicity'. In Ibn 'Arabi these phenomena are explained through hierarchical planes of being or 'Presences' manifesting in five Descents from the Absolute Mystery (the 'theophany of Essence') through Intelligences, Angel- Souls, Archetype-Images, and the sensible world, each lower Presence being a reflection and correspondence of the higher Presence. Creation and objectification through himma of a form in the sensible world implies not a creatio ex nihilo, but a manifestation of something which appears to have an outward reality (perhaps only perceivable by other mystics) but which exists in actu as a Presence in a higher plane of being. Ibn 'Arabi also posits that himma may function as a 'cause', a hidden potency which causes God to create things.
Jung viewed libido as a 'mysterious force', a generalised psychic energy, following the law of the conservation of energy, not identified with any specific instinct as it was by Freud. Rather, Jung derives his concept from Schopenhauer's idea of 'purposive Will'. Citing Schopenhauer Jung argues that the phenomenal manifestations of Will (e.g. in instincts) are quite different from Will as das ding an sich. Intriguingly, Jung, refers to the Plotinian hypostasis of the World- Soul as a philosophical attempt to conceive of the 'creative force' of libido as das ding an sich. Here we may have a possible conceptual link with Corbin's himma and Jung's libido as mechanisms which drive active imagination.

Corbin and Jung
I have outlined some of the differences in the views of Jung and Corbin, notably on the existence of two darknesses, integration of the shadow and the sense of individuation which in Corbin is orientated towards the 'vertical' dimension - the plane of superconsciousness which 'irradiates' the imagination. 'Individuation' in Corbin consists in angelology, orientation towards a personal invisible guide, and the growth of the 'man of light'. Cheetham citing Roger Brookes' Jung and Phenomenology, suggests that some of the difficulties in Jung's metaphysics lie in his confused Kantianism and notions of the transcendental and in the tension caused by his persona as the empirical scientist concerned only with the 'facts of consciousness'. Jung 'collapses' Kantian categories of the noumenal and phenomenal as he holds that archetypes are variously or even simultaneously; transcendental structuring categories of experience, noumenal as das ding an sich, and phenomenal images:
Most damaging is that all of this archetypal structuring and appearing takes place in the psyche. The outside world is lost. The God image becomes just a God image of the psyche.
Gilles Quispel also holds that Jung's religious experience does not comply to the 'existentialist' category of encounter (God as experienced as outside oneself), rather it is experienced only in the individual soul. Quispel highlights that it is characteristic of the Gnostic that he is not focussed on the relations with God but 'interested only in the Self', a Self that is envisioned as a guardian angel or celestial twin, accompanying the soul until death, and who imparts gnosis. Quispel proposes that Jung's religious experiences are in fact a 'kathenotheism', a term used by Corbin in the context of what he calls the 'paradox of monotheism', whereby the Godhead, as one and unique, also expresses itself in creation in a multitude of theophanic forms. The individual seeks the God to which he is able to respond to who for that time is considered single and supreme. Corbin writes that 'the Angel is the Face that our God takes for us, and each of us finds his God only when he recognizes that Face'.
The difference with Jung and Corbin here is on Jung's emphasis that the Self comprises the totality of the psyche. Corbin in postulating a mediating universe, the mundus imaginalis places this Self outside the psyche. However, they both share this characteristic of Gnosticism and the ultimate aim of active imagination in both cases lies in this encounter with the Self or Angel.











Conclusion

Jung, Corbin and the Esoteric Tradition
Jung's esoteric influences are many; alchemy, hermeticism, gnosticism, Kabbalah, mesmerism and Spiritualism to name some. What this study has focused on is that Jung like Corbin also represents a revival of certain traditions deriving mainly from Neoplatonism, which amounts to more than just the concept of archetypal Ideas. As such, I disagree with the conclusions of Marieke J. E. Van Den Doel and Wouter J. Hanegraaff that Carl Jung's concept of active imagination and Henry Corbin's mundus imaginalis seem to be:
Individual variations on the basic approaches that emerged from 19th-century Romantic, mesmerist and occultist contexts and their "para-paracelsian" and Christian-theosophical backgrounds.
I will try and set out my arguments for this conclusion here.
The goal of active imagination for Jung is individuation, wholeness, experience of the Self. In Corbin too, active Imagination represents the encounter with the angel, or our higher Self. Jung and Corbin's concept of Self has clear influences from the idea of the guardian spirit in these ancient traditions. The guardian spirit is seen in Jung's imaginal encounter with Philemon in his Red Book. However, where Jung generally differs from these sources and Corbin is his demarcation of the Self as the totality of the psyche, not as a separate ontological entity. Iamblichus as we saw, postulated a full descent of the soul into matter which puts his metaphysical position close to Jung's, though he also postulated that there were separate ontological classes of spiritual beings mediating with the divine. Jung would consider these as archetypal sources. The research undertaken for this dissertation shows that while it is the case that Jung's theory of a higher self was influenced by the German Romantic mesmerist tradition, and the discovery that in somnambulic states there appeared to be more than one autonomous self; paradoxically something like an approximate consciousness existing in the unconscious. What Jung experienced, as he documents in the Red Book, are a series of personified figures that are more conceptually related to the daimons of Neoplatonism.
When we look at other areas of modern esoteric thinking we see that Jung's concept of the Self has been adopted. For example: in the New Age movement Hanegraaff has found that there is generally a conception of a 'higher self' seen as a part of the individual that participates in the eternal Universal Mind or the divine. Retaining a personal relationship with the ego, it functions as a bridge between the Universal Mind and the ego but is viewed as our real self or true identity. According to Hanegraaff, New Age authors generally follow Jung in adopting a progressive model of the psyche which includes a collective unconscious and interpret divine experiences as contact with numinous archetypal sources within Mind rather than as separate ontological beings (thus losing the vertical dimension). The ego is fundamentally dualistic, fragmentary and based on estrangement from the higher self. Spiritual development aims at reconnecting with the higher self and regaining consciousness of the whole – a central Jungian psychotherapeutic aim via the technique of active imagination. New Agers appear to adopt an antinomian Gnostic metaphysic: although matter is ultimately illusory, the material world provides us with spiritual tests to absorb and work through. Hanegraaff also indicates that New Age authors have adopted the Neoplatonic idea of 'subtle-bodies' mediating between the physical and the spiritual, and in an innovative way utilize the same concept to mediate between objective and subjective reality. In much New Age thinking this 'objective reality' is in fact synonymous with the subjective realm of mind which is a part of the Universal Mind. Thus intermediary beings such as angels and demons are viewed as archetypal aspects of the human unconscious - part of a collective unconscious which in like manner to Jung is identified as an objective transpersonal realm. A different metaphysical position can be found in the work of the Jungian, Jeffrey Raff, in an interesting synthesis of Jung and Corbin. Raff has gone beyond Jung in postulating a world existing outside the psyche which he terms 'psychoid'. This world contains spiritual entities and forces which can be accessed through active imagination. It is equivalent to Corbin's mundus imaginalis. Raff equates the personal daimon of antiquity not with the higher Self, nor the divinity, but as a third category of spiritual being he terms the 'ally' which functions very much like Corbin's angelology in bringing the human and divine worlds into contact. This type of imaginal consciousness was discussed in relation to medieval traditions of the Guardian Angel and can also be seen in modern variants of the Christian hermetic tradition of which an outstanding exemplar is Valentin Tomberg. In his Meditations on the Tarot he writes of the fourteenth card, Temperance:
The guardian Angel accompanies as a faithful ally the divine image in man, just as vicious inclinations have made their way into the human functional organism which was, before the Fall, the divine likeness. The guardian Angel undertakes the functions, destroyed by original sin, in the likeness, and fills the breach wrought by them…the Angel acquits his charge in five ways: he guards, cherishes, protects, visits and defends. He is therefore a "flaming Star", a luminous pentagram above man.
More prosaically, A. E. Waite describes the function of the angel depicted by this card in terms comparable to the transcendent function and active imagination:
It is called Temperance fantastically, because, when the rule of it obtains in our consciousness, it tempers, combines and harmonises the psychic and material natures. Under that rule we know in our rational part something of whence we came and whither we are going.
The angel of the Temperance card may thus be said to symbolize the transcendent function.
In relating Neoplatonic theurgy back to this Jungian archetypal realm and active imagination, Bruce J. MacLennan makes several interesting points. Firstly, that the 'unutterable symbols', of Iamblichean theurgy operate by eliciting archetypal projections (the projection of the god onto an image). In this way one can produce the ensoulment or animation of a sacred image with the appropriate symbol and the image becomes the medium of interaction with archetypal forces. Secondly, 'binding' refers to the same process but using a human recipient of the archetypal projection. Thirdly, the theurgic liaison or alliance with the gods, the dialogue with them, has equivalence to the process of active imagination. Finally, theurgical ascent to the One has is the equivalence with the end goal of individuation; the experience of the Self. We can also note here an equivalence on a lesser level in terms of the transcendent function, which as we noted above in Faivre's terminology is an ascent in the sense that it is a 'transcendent synthesis', potentially on an ever evolving level. MacLennan contends that Jungian psychology and evolutionary neuroethology can reconcile Neoplatonism with contemporary science holding that mind and matter should be understood as two sides of the Neoplatonic One.
I mentioned in chapter two a possible correspondence between Jung's model of the psyche as mirroring in macrocosm the Plotinian hypostases. Hazel E. Barnes does not agree with this correspondence in full but notes that the World-Soul may be compared to the Collective Unconscious with qualifications:
The important differences between the two conceptions, I feel, can be summarized under three headings: (i) The supra-individual, as Plotinus sees it, is not limited to the All-Soul, which is actually but the lowest of three realms of true being. (2) The collective unconscious is represented by Jung as having developed as man developed, whereas the All-Soul is sprung from the divine and hence unchanging. (3) Jung, unlike Plotinus, does not deny all real importance to the individual and seeks not a flight away from the body but a balance between consciousness and the collective unconscious.
The last point that Neoplatonists are concerned with a 'flight away from the body' has been considered by Remo F Roth in the context of the correspondence between Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The correspondence is partly to do with the need to integrate the paradigms of physics and depth psychology with the goal of discovering an underlying unity between matter and psyche; the nature of 'psychophysical reality or the unus mundus. Roth argues that Jung was not aware that the Neoplatonic World-Soul was replaced by the pneuma of the stoics by the time of the Renaissance. The Stoic pneuma is less 'spiritual' as it derives partly from the body: Roth calls it a material soul and acausal, whereas the Neoplatonic World-Soul is causal deriving as it does from emanation. Roth makes the case that Pauli's conceptualization of Platonic views on matter could be encapsulated as follows: the Platonic Idea (Spirit) is the Good, eternal, unchangeable, rational and therefore 'being'. The Ideas do not create anything new. They are deterministic, something they have in common with classical physics which seeks to identify laws of nature that never change. Thus, matter is evil, changeable, irrational and therefore 'nonbeing'. Matter is a privation of Spirit, as evil is a privation of good. Aristotle introduced the concept of 'potential being' into matter, which Pauli endorses. Pauli utilizes the principle from quantum physics wherein the observer of a phenomenon by his very act of observation changes the phenomenon to oppose Einstein's view that physics could be a description of an objective nature, independent of human observation. Thus, Pauli 'not only rejects the hypothesis of classical physics and the metaphysical realms of Christians and Platonists, but he also expresses his reservations about Jung's depth psychological concept of the archetypes as being projected into heaven' with the corollary that the unconscious is equated with nonbeing. Pauli suggested the unconscious and the archetypes should instead be considered as Aristotelian potential being.
According to Roth, Pauli also argued that the dogma of the Assumption into Heaven of Mary (who is a symbol of the terrestrial, the instincts, the female principle), had been correlated by Jung with his quaternity principle of the Self in Answer to Job. This Self, 'projected into the heavens', represented for Pauli the Christian/Neoplatonic 'disinfection' of matter. That is; Mary's assumption into the world of Ideas implied a cleansing of the evil nature of matter. Jung's quaternity for Pauli is a Neoplatonic concept (essentially still triadic as a 3+1 structure) and inadequate as an approach to the solution of the problem of the unity of matter and spirit. He favours a hermetic view of alchemy which he saw as aiming for an equal unity, a symmetry between matter and spirit (the pneuma of the stoics) rather than the 'one-sided alchemy' of Neoplatonism which seeks only a spiritualisation of matter – soul descends into matter and returns to the divine unchanged. In particular, Pauli sees in the hermetic alchemy of Robert Fludd (1574-1637) that the alchemical transmutation occurs not in the empyrean of the Neoplatonic Idea but 'in the middle, the sphere of the sun', between heaven and earth. Pauli also held that Jung had contradicted himself by his introduction of the principle of synchronicity, as on the one hand the development of the archetype of the Self followed deterministic principles but on the other it was indeterministic, as with the synchronicity principle.
There are some interesting ideas here. Though, some of Pauli's views could be questionable, for example; the view of matter held by Iamblichus is more nuanced and Plotinus defended the fundamental goodness of the universe in his treatise 'Against the Gnostics'. Pauli and Remo's conclusions on the differences between hermetic and Neoplatonic alchemy needs further research. The case could also be made that in active imagination the ego is an observer of the unconscious and in its observation and the dialectic of the transcendent function there is a transmutation in consciousness. In this sense we have a demonstration of the vis imaginativa intransitive or intrasubjective magic. Of relevance to this study is the contextualisation of Jung's psychology as deeply coloured by his Neoplatonic-inflected Christian background.
Jung's active imagination is predicated on several premises: (1) the teleological nature of the psyche; (2) the purposive and compensatory nature of the unconscious; (3) that the unconscious 'thinks in images' with the related concept of images of the collective unconscious arising from archetypes; (4) a theory of correspondences between the inner and outer world, or synchronicity; (5) an energetic mechanism – libido and; (6) the transcendent function, or what Faivre terms the transcendent synthesis, here relating to the synthesis of conscious and unconscious positions on a higher level. The first two points above would appear to be influenced in Jung more by the German Romantic mesmerist tradition and 'Romantic evolutionism' where we can note Ellenburger's concept that analytical psychology 'is a late offshoot of Romanticism'. Point (3) has links with Aristotle's concept of the imagination but the idea of archetypes has roots in the daimons and gods of antiquity and mythology. It can be seen as a particular mode of imaginal consciousness. The idea of 'correspondences' is a fundamental component of esotericism and, as Brach and Hanegraaff argue, is found throughout the esoteric tradition, perhaps being intrinsic to the mind's normal functioning. Jung's concept of libido has antecedents in the Neoplatonic World-Soul and Stoic pneumatic tradition, as does Corbin's concept of himma. As regards point (6), the transcendent function operates in terms of a gnosis as defined in the sense of an esoteric knowledge of the origin and destination of one's inner self, the idea of salvation through knowledge, which is the goal of active imagination in Jung and Corbin, and has its antecedents in Platonism and the tradition of Neoplatonic theurgy. Corbin writes that active Imagination is the organ 'par excellence of the alchemical operation' and Jung drew parallels with active imagination and alchemy. This puts us back in the realm of the mundus imaginalis and an imaginal consciousness influenced by Neoplatonic ideas of the subtle-body whereby the spiritual is corporealized and the corporeal spiritualized.



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