Lapsit Exillis: The Creative Imagination

"Imaginatio est Astrum in homine, coeleste sive supracoeleste corpus"
("Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.")
-Martin Ruland: Lexicon Alchemiae, 1612

Tossing, turning, sinking/surfacing in pseudo-sleep the other night, I latched onto the passing realization that the Holy Grail symbolizes the Creative Imagination. In this restless slumber, images drift by of an emerald altar stone fallen from the brow of a seraphim ,
Coleridge clutching after, empty handed; & Hermes, solemn as a pillar holding the smaragdine table entoning its inscriptions to Ludovico Lazzarelli, who transcribes implications into the Crater Hermetis.

".... Lodovico Lazzarelli's Crater Hermetis is about a process of mystical rebirth and "regeneration" rather than about magic."

And when I finally crawled ashore, coffee'd and trawling internet discover that for Richard Barber, in The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, “it is, in all its forms, a construct of the creative imagination”.

"The first person to write on the Grail was Chrétien de Troyes, in le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail), between 1180 and 1191. Interestingly, Chrétien refers to his object not as “the Grail”, but as “un graal”, “a grail”, suggesting the word was used, in its earliest literary context, as a common noun – and that there were indeed more than one."

"For William Blake, the imagination is much more than a mental faculty. It is, he claimed, ‘the Human Existence Itself’, and ‘the Eternal Body of Man’. He was inspired by the idea of the seventeenth century German mystic, Jacob Boehme, that the imagination is divinely implanted, “the Son” being “the substantiality of the Father’s imagination”. In his own idiosyncratic version of Christianity, he came to identify the figure of Jesus with the imagination. In Blake we see the perfect integration of a highly developed creative imagination with spiritual vision. His poetic utterances are the expressions of that vision, and flow without stint or hindrance. He was able to speak, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the language of the whole man”."

"...Dakinis and other Tantric deities, appear in what is known in Buddhist cosmology, as the ‘rupaloka’, literally the world of Form, a world which is intermediary between the mundane world and the Transcendental. This realm has parallels with the intermediate realm in Persian sacred texts, which Henri Corbin calls the ‘Mundus Imaginalis’. Sangharakshita’s preferred translation of ‘rupaloka’ is ‘the world of archetypal form’.

The Muse figures that play a leading role in Coleridge’s visionary poems, like the Dakinis, do not come from the world of ordinary sense perception (though they may well be transformations of sensuous impressions). They come from, or appear in, the world of Archetypal form, which is just as real, and therefore just as important, from a Buddhist point of view, as the world of the waking senses. While they may not be Dakinis in the specifically Tantric sense of being agents of the utterly unconditioned freedom of the Mind of enlightenment, they are certainly reminiscent of the wrathful female figures that appear in a typical Tantric ritual drama. They are embodiments of psychic forces that have an urgent message for the visionary, in this case the poet. "
http://www.urthona.com/abhaya-coleridge.html

"Like the domain of the Grail, it is an interworld that is self-sufficient. (5) It is protected against and immune to any attempt from outside. (6) only one who is summoned there can find the way. (7) A mountain rises in the center; we have noted the symbols that it conceals. (8) Like Mont-Salvat, the inviolable Green Island is the place where his followers approach the mystical pole of the world, the Hidden Imam, reigning invisibly over this age- the jewel of the Shi'ite faith."

"As (Henry) Corbin summed up the matter, the "Creative Imagination is a theophanic imagination, and the Creator is one with the imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a recurrence of the Creation."

"The mythic import of kabbalistic symbolism secures the representation of the nonrepresentable by creating an imaginal body,346 a body whose ontic status is that of a "real" if not "actual" entity."347

“Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts,” he writes, “because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels and the imagination leads us astray from both. Even when the heart is allowed its reasons, they are those of faith or of feeling, for we have forgotten that philosophy itself -- the most complex and profound demonstration of thought -- is not ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ in any abstract sense of ‘sophic.’ Rather, philosophy begins in a “philos” arising in the heart of our blood, together with the lion, the wound, and the rose. If we would recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.”
-James Hillman: “The Thought of the Heart.”


He who is born in imagination discovers the latent forces of Nature. . . . Besides the stars that are established, there is yet another -- Imagination -- that begets a new star and a new heaven.
-Paracelsus