



In the land of the blind...

Shifting focus away from the artist and towards the receivers of the art, we then have to ask precisely how it is that an audience would resonate this way, because of course art only is art when it is experienced by others. The obvious conclusion here would be that those experiencing the art would have also had to have experienced the imaginal realm to recognize its provenance. Those without such experience will encounter it as something merely interesting, or perhaps overly-focus on technique or emotions or its potential utility (“is it danceable?" or “where would I hang this in my bedroom?").

For any of you, mystic, Pagan, or radical, a few questions are probably arising in your mind. First, I suspect you might be wondering what precisely is the difference between those who experience art through the imaginal and those who do not, with the nagging fear that this implicates a division of humanity with the “mundanes" on one side and the “dreamers" on the other.

I think you should cultivate this idea and not fear it. Were you to truly observe all your interactions with others, you'd find that some of the people in your life seem to “get" your dreams and visions, while the vast majority not only do not resonate them but seem sometimes to actively mock and fear them. The reason why “muggle" became such popular currency isn't due only to the vast media empire propagandizing J.K. Rowling's work into your everyday life, but rather that many of us recognize a sense that some of us see magic while most of us are caught in the mundane world of capitalist, commercial, “normal" life.

But before you get on thinking there's something special about you and not special about others, redirect your attention to the societies created through post-Calvinist capitalism and its demands. Dreaming, fantasy, imagination, and any spiritual endeavour outside of the demands of the Market have been civilized out of you and your ancestors over the last three hundred years, so much so that we've forgotten these things can be anything more than personal leisure activities.

That is, the imaginal has been disciplined out of most of the world, at least within Liberal Democracies. “Muggles," or more properly people stuck in the mundane, aren't incapable of experiencing the imaginal realm, they just haven't gotten to do so yet. Boring schooling and life-sapping employment doesn't allow for much time and even fewer opportunities to directly engage the imaginal. Worse (and more to blame I think) is the capitalist industry which feeds us imaginary (not imaginal) material to supplement what we're lacking. It's a hell of a lot more profitable for the capitalists that you explore Skyrim than the mundus imaginalis. It's also a hell of a lot safer for them, since nothing in an Elder Scrolls game can be channeled into disruptive or revolutionary art.

This brings us to the larger historical trajectory of capitalist civilization, in which deviance, ancestral traditions, rough language or thought, and all other things various thought “barbarous" or “primitive" are socially-engineered out of our lives. Here we must speak this aloud: magic and the gods are literally being disciplined, educated, civilized, medicated, droned, and amused out of our consciousness, all to keep our modern capitalist Liberal Democracies from disintegrating under the multiplicity of truths we humans might otherwise experience.

A fellow polytheist whom I never speak to anymore once called this process “the filter," and while she never really iterated an explanation as to how such a thing exists, the experience she described is fully correct. But let's instead call it a “screen," which really has two meanings, each apparently contradicting the other. A screen is something upon which something is projected, shown, revealed, such as the screen by which you are reading this essay. Yet a screen is also something that obscures and filters out; you can conceal something behind a screen, or block out flies and debris if you hang a screen in a window.

We stare at screens which display to us images but conceal from us the sources of those images. To look at a screen is to not look at the rest of the room around you. Upon a screen you see projected an “outside" vision that, while apparently external to your reality, shapes the way you see reality. But beyond mere propaganda and social programming, the problem here is that the entire media/mediated realm takes the place (as in the way nicotine takes the place of the chemical neurotransmitters acetylcholine and glutamate) of the active-imagination (imaginal cognition), giving us the sense that we've been to another world and related to other consciousnesses, though we actually haven't.

Spectres of Desire

Perhaps worst of all, few even have the worldview to use as a framework for any experiences they might have, something which I suspect has given us many of the reports of alien (in this case, little green men or the “greys") encounters obviously screened/filtered through mass media's scientism. I'm sure I'm not the first who has noticed more than a few reported sightings of extra-terrestrial beings parallel mythic (and non-mythic) encounters with the Fae, devas, landwights, demons, and others. But “alien encounter" not only sounds a lot more credible in a society which has consigned all ancestral stories to the trash heap of superstition, it's also the only allowable Alien/Other that secular Liberal Democracies can now countenance.

Corbin hints at this problem towards the end of his essay:

Unless we have access to a cosmology structured similarly to that of the traditional oriental philosophers, with a plurality of universes arranged in ascending order, our imagination will remain out of focus, and its recurrent conjunctions with our will to power will be a never-ending source of horrors.

The problem here is also one which both Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard addressed in their discussion of the effect mechanical reproduction of images has had upon our ability to conceive of the world around us, but the most poignant analysis comes from Peter Grey in Apocalyptic Witchcraft:

We are pitted against an industrial industry which fabricates our dreams for us and insinuates them through our culture and our language. How can we dream when our vocabulary of symbols has only the nuance of newspeak? These are spectres of desire and though marked for sale, remain unattainable

If you have ever tried to trance in order to travel through these realms, you know this problem already. Our fantasies (which are not always or even often ours) not only get in the way of seeing clearly, but also shape what it is we even look for. If you expect to find your “spirit guide" or to meet Merlin on a journey, you won't come back disappointed but also won't have left at all.

This is the “will to power" Corbin warns against, a popular theme in his works because of his focus on undermining fundamentalism within religious and anti-religious thought. Besides the obvious fundamentalisms of strict textual interpretation (be that monotheist or otherwise) and that of the rabid anti-theists, there is the just-as-dangerous (though with fewer bombs) fundamentalism of the new initiate who is certain the vistas they encounter must look like what they believe they must.

We should remember (as Corbin points out also): the mundus imaginalis is inhabited. Persian mystics encountered “angels" and human teachers, just as Christian mystics encountered angels and saints. The imaginal is where the shaman or the witch finds the animal and plant spirits, the devas, the ancestors, the daemons and gods. It's where the Fae and the gods are found in Celtic myth, just past crossroads of mounds, stones, and mist. It's where the alchemist or the magician finds the goetic spirits, and maybe possibly where the few non-charlatan New Age teachers (I imagine there must be at least one or two) are finding their guides.

According to Corbin, the Persian mystics saw these beings as also-travelers of such realms, though some also live there and some dream up the topography. The point to remember here is this is all external to the human mind; unlike Jungian theory, the mundus imaginalis isn't an inner terrain of the human (collective or otherwise) psyche, but rather an exterior realm accessed by a facility we Moderns have come to believe is only interior to our imagination.

Here a folksy saying one hears often among mystics who've actually done this work is quite useful: if the gods (or spirits or ancestors or whatever) tell you what you want to hear, you're talking to yourself. Or as Judith O'Grady puts it much more politely, “you're probably just telling yourself a story." The imaginal realm is inhabited (or at least populated) with beings with other consciousnesses who don't exist for you, anymore than anyone else does (which is not at all).

That is to say, a great deal of decivilizing has to be done to encounter the Alien/Other as it desires to appear and chooses to appear, rather than how we want it to. Mystics in cultures with long traditions of mysticism obviously has a much easier time with this sort of thing, but we have no such tradition and a vast machine of corporate myth-making against which to contend.

Interrupting the Mundane

So the mundus imaginalis is the Otherworld, and also the Underworld, and the Dreamtime, and also the Heavens, and really every place mystics have claimed to visit and from which they've brought back visions, wisdom, invention, and inspiration. It is where the gods are met, and the saints, the ancestors and spirits, whether that be in ecstatic trance or in the thin-veiled sacred places where that realm somewhat intersects with ours.

The question to ask here is, how do we access the imaginal without the pale cultural trash we are daily fed? And more so, how to we re-awaken the imaginal in others?

The easy route is to not do so at all, and rather rely on creating our own fantastic stand-ins--borrowing heavily from capitalist mass-media--for the imaginal. That's what most of Neo-Paganism is doing anyway, and not only is it not liberating anyone but it's further inscribing Pagan belief into the wheels of corporate meaning-production.

Rather, I think the answer is more art. That sounds glib and simplistic (and as trite as “all you need is love"), but actually it's much harder than it sounds. We need more imaginal art, imaginal fiction, imaginal music, stuff which jars the viewer, reader, or listener with the horrifying sense they've forgotten something. Like the work I viewed at the Naïa Museum, we need to pursue, experience, and create the sort of stuff which shocks people out of the drab and mundane certainty that everything's been done, everything's been seen, the future's already written.

Our imaginal cognition atrophies when we believe that everything left to explore has been explored, everything that can be known is now known. It's beaten into a coma when we stare endlessly at screens in search of something to satisfy our deep longing for wonder. And it's menaced, abused, violated, and even possibly murdered by every disciplined act of obedience to the capitalist Order of Things which tells us there is only work, entertainment, and then death.

The ascetic path (avoiding all capitalist art) is hardly possible unless you have no desire to communicate with anyone in the world anymore. To cut oneself off from society is certainly a traditional path for the mystic, and one that will definitely hone your capacity to journey to the country of nowhere. But personal revelations remain only personal until they are communicated, and the goal for any who wants to stop the nightmare of Empire is to bring those visions from that other world into this one.

So instead we must have more alien visions and make more art, enough first to signal to our kindred that we've seen what they've seen. The art we make must also startle and horrify those who've forgotten how to see, a “short-circuit" of the mundane into the more-real currents of the Other. Our work must haunt, just as these visions haunt, just as the dead and the gods haunt only a little out of the sight of mortals. Art and artful lives with archaic logics, foreign symbols, anachronistic rituals, alien aesthetics and brutal, primitive desires.

If this seems overwhelming, or if you don't feel yourself an artist, then I suggest you expand a little your idea of what such an art might mean. This is anyway already the work of the witch, whose life embodies the Other and its alien familiarity.