Imaginal Love

Alchemical Traditions from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde, ed. A. Cheak (Melbourne: Numen Books) 421-433, 2013

This essay appears in a remarkable collection of essays entitled Octagon: The Quest for Wholeness, Volume 2, edited by Hans Thomas Hakl (Gaggenau, Germany: H. Frietsch Verlag, 2016). Hakl is an independent scholar of Western esotericism, philosophy, and religion and is also the author of the excellent study, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (McGill, 2013). The essays in Octagon Volume 2 are unlike any to be found in a strictly academic journal. The authors disclose more, take risks, and it makes for a fascinating volume, reasonably priced by Scientianova at under 50 Euros. I am delighted to be able to contribute with my reflections on James Hillman’s archetypal psychology, Neoplatonic theurgy, and dreamwork.

The method of active imagination … is not a plaything for children."-Carl Jung Late Antiquity's definitive text on divination, sacrifice, and spirit possession must have been missing from the library at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or left unread. For if Harry Potter and his friends had studied Iamblichus' De Mysteriis, 1 they would have understood what happened when Harry involuntarily moved across a room "as though he were on castors" and spoke Parseltongue (snake language) to prevent a giant snake from attacking a classmate. 2 What remained a mystery to Harry, and made him suspect in the eyes of his classmates, is explained by Iamblichus as a form of divination, for which, he says, "the more simple and the young have a greater aptitude." 3 He also explains that the causes of divine possession are lights and spirits that descend from gods. When they penetrate us, he says, we are entirely under their domination and control: "[T]hey surround everything in us and completely expel our own thinking and movement, speaking words that are not understood by those who pronounce them. " 4 Harry's disturbing sensation of being involuntarily moved and spoken through was an experience of otherness and displacement that was quite familiar to antiquity's theurgists. * I would like to thank Peter Durigon and Richard Frankel for their comments and questions. Most especially thanks to Dan Merkur for his editorial suggestions; all flaws and errors in the essay are my own.

This article examines the nature of the duologue between artist and creative source, as a lost interplay and negotiation within the gestation of the work in a uniquely individual language that can never be fully revealed, translated, or understood by a viewer. The author, an elder, late career studio artist, draws comparisons to sacred language and interpretation positing that the conversations and relationships that form between artist and art are very different from those between works of art and humanity and have never been appropriately examined from an insider perspective. She offers reflections and writings of master artists as an attempt to illuminate the intimate exchange between artist, medium, and creative source.

This M.A. dissertation (Cosmology, Myth & The Sacred, Canterbury Christ Church University, completed with Distinction, 2016) considers the human experience of the longing which comes from the soul, and its potency. It finds that soul-longing has a unique function, entirely apart from everyday emotional longings for this or that. This function is to have experience of ourselves in relation to divine intelligence. The dissertation takes three steps in its argument, as follows: a) Soul-longing is an active impulse for known unity with divine intelligence and love. b) When the soul longs in conscious choice to know, this deliberate impulse is met in return by that divine intelligence and love. c) This meeting directly transforms the one who longs, by indelibly transcending previous knowing. The work is to continue in this knowing and not occlude it. Therefore I conclude that soul-longing exists as an evolutionary force because it is transformative, by which I mean the virtue of transforming by transcending previous consciousness for good, whether individually or culturally. Asking what it means that mankind considers the cosmos, Joseph Milne clarifies the task of philosophy: ‘Its task is to bring to light that which being shows out of itself, so that it may be recognized’ (2008, p.21) and I believe the same is true of the work of soul-longing.

There are some questions and issues that have been hotly debated by critics of Kashmiri Sufi poetry. Reviewing the contemporary scenario of criticism of Kashmiri Sufi poetry one acutely feels the problem of hermeneutical despair. We have sharply divergent views equally guilty of meaning closure or epistemic chauvinism. We have critics admitting their failure to identify the signified of the term Kashmiri Sufi poetry as a separate genre. We have other critics disputing number of genuine Sufi poets and questions regarding Sufi poetic credentials of even major Sufi poets like Shams Faqeer and Wahab Khar. One reading reduces their number to seven. We have extremely conflicting estimates of more recent Sufi poets – mostly they are written off as copyists or not warranting serious critical attentions. We have from modern We have critics deploying psychological or psychoanalytic reductionism that reduces both loal and Sufi understanding of ishq to sex. We have no proper treatment of symbolism deployed by Sufi poets. We have neither metaphysical nor philosophical commentaries on it. We don’t see systematic application of any of major critical perspectives on representative selections of it. We have no systematic study that clarifies relation between Sufi and “non-Sufi romantic” or modernist poets. Sufi poetry has been subject of some doctoral theses from such stalwarts as Rashid Nazki and later scholars but a cursory perusal of all these studies shows their limited canvas in treating the deeper hermeneutical questions that we shall be exploring. Even such elementary questions as appropriation of traditional religious, philosophical and literary heritage in illiterate Sufi poets don’t seem to have been properly dealt with and we find senior scholars like G. N. Khayyal expressing inability to get proper answer to this issue from any contemporary work on criticism. Given this scenario, the paper calls for better attention to three things to properly study Kashmiri Sufi poetry: Metaphysics, symbolism and sacred centric criticism. All these things need to be properly clarified and salvaged from current misappropriations of them in academia. None of them are duly taken care of or taught in any of the departments devoted to literature due to various reasons. Kashmiri Sufi poetry awaits its proper appreciation and critical introduction to international audience let alone quality criticism. But our critics have written on certain aspects that is valuable but far from enough and that often evades or distorts certain issues in connection with it.

e publication of
e Red Book (2009) has provided a better appreciation of C.G. Jung’s use of the imagination while exploring the unconscious. e imagination seems to have its own way of knowing that informs Jung’s active imagination, Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, and the Islamic notion of ta’wil. Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious coincides in a number of ways with the mundus imaginalis. Corbin’s rendering of the mundus imaginalis and Jung’s collective unconscious seem to intimate a return to the root metaphors of human experience. All of these ideas suggest that image is essential to the formation of knowledge.