Curating your unique inner imaginarium
Working with the mythic imagination
Where does the idea of an ‘inner imaginarium’ come from?
We tend to think we make them up, the myths, stories, images and dreams which populate the human imagination. We think they’re part of us. But what if they have an existence that’s independent of us?
It might seem like a peculiar idea – maybe even a bit woo-woo – but it’s one with a long, long history, beginning here in Europe with the writings of Plato and other Classical Greek philosophers. More recently, psychologists Carl Jung (in his later years) and James Hillman also argued that these things that we like to think are products of our own imagination actually have an independent existence, outside of us. Hillman went so far as to say that perhaps it is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined.
They’re not exactly mainstream today (hello, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Age of Reason’, ‘Scientific Revolution’, uber-rationalistic contemporary Western culture) but these ideas are found across cultures, over millennia. And they were fairly mainstream not so long ago: the Romantic poets, W.B. Yeats, William Blake, Kathleen Raine and many other writers absolutely subscribed. James Hillman’s vast and fascinating body of psychology was strongly influenced by Henry Corbin, a twentieth-century French theologian and philosopher who wrote extensively about Sufi mystical traditions. Corbin used the term mundus imaginalis (the ‘imaginal world’) to describe a particular order of reality which is referred to in ancient Sufi texts. These texts tell us that, between the physical world of our senses and the world of abstract intellect or ‘mind’ which we imagine sits inside our heads, lies another world: the world of the image – and it’s a world that is just as real as either of the others.
The imaginal world is the world of psyche – of soul. It’s the place where archetypes live and where stories are born. It’s the source of synchronicities, of creative insights; it penetrates into our dreams and visionary experiences. It communicates itself to us through images, so that the act of imagining (and an active engagement is required, quite different from more passive activities like day-dreaming) then becomes an act of connection to it. When we hear the wind singing to us, when a story stops us in our tracks, when we dream a Big Dream or pick the same symbolic tarot card three times in a row, then we are piercing the veil and seeing into the imaginal world. This, according to James Hillman, amounts to ‘seeing with the eye of the soul into the soul of the world’. A key task of psychology, he wrote, is ‘to hear psyche speaking through all the things of the world, thereby recovering the world as a place of soul.’ The world, to quote the English poet John Keats, then becomes ‘a vale of soul-making’. And this is why imaginal work matters: because it builds soul.
We seem to have forgotten that this imaginal world exists – though the idea of an Otherworld (or several) which runs alongside this one, which can (sometimes) be reached from this one, which influences this one, which is inhabited by archetypal beings – gods, grails and goblins – and story-patterns, and which has many of the characteristics of the mundus imaginalis, is a key part of several cosmologies throughout the world. If you think of the Otherworld (later downgraded to ‘fairyland’) in our own mythic and folk traditions, then you’re thinking of something that’s not dissimilar to the idea of the imaginal world.
The practice of mythic imagination which I write about and teach, then, springs from these ideas – as translated for the contemporary West by Jung and Hillman. Image and the imagination, and what he called ‘the poetic basis of mind’, are the foundations of Hillman’s psychology; cultivation of the imagination was the primary methodology in his therapeutic approach.
So, the inner imaginarium
My own work, following on from these ideas, holds that each of us has our own unique inner imaginarium. In other words, we are each haunted by different images; we each resonate with different myths or fairy tales and with different archetypal characters. Different poems and artworks illuminate our world and enlighten us. And each of us identifies with different stories, archetypal characters and images (verbal or visual) at different times in our own lives. Acknowledging our images, bringing them together and allowing them to work on us, is the work of soul-making.
Developing a ‘mythic sensibility’ is a key feature of soul-making in contemporary depth psychology; it requires us to be open to, and actively contemplate and work with, the images which arise unbidden in our dreams, in stories which haunt us, in the poems and art we adore. But it’s not about striving to interpret them; an image is like a kiss: once we begin to dissect it, the magic is gone. Once we insist on defining (and so confining) an image, we’ve killed it. It’s simply about being with the images which call to us. It’s about letting them reveal themselves to us. Letting them reveal ourselves to us.
Your personal inner imaginarium, then, is the unique collection of images, stories and archetypes which have somehow attached themselves to you, ‘captured your imagination’, and insist on continuing to haunt you. Read on for ways of collating and working with this collection.
Image by Nicola Slattery
