The Hermetic Imagining of the Imaginary

That archaic smile is "full of the purest metaphysical good humour... timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused… Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is… When I die, I shall have this by my bedside. It is the last human face I want to see." - John Fowles, The Magus

---

Our current seminar on “thinking the Impossible” with Jeff Kripal’s books as our guide is, for me anyway, an extremely trying, confusing and life-expanding exercise in transformational “thinking.” And that last word signals one of the many knotty issues we’re confronting. What is thinking? What has it been? What can it be? What is the history of whatever it is that we vaguely refer to when we say that we “think”?

Those of you who’ve been reading my writings or hearing me talk for any length of time are used to my recurring references to my undergraduate mentor Ed Cranz. And will be unsurprised that here he is again. I encountered the idea (what is an idea?) of the mutability of experience in 1972 in the form of what Cranz called his “reorientation thesis.” He summarized it this way in 1985:

There was a general reorientation of categories of thought c.1100AD, say in the generation of Anselm and Abelard. Against the ancient position…in which sensation and intellection lead to conjunction and union with what was sensed or intellected, we find a dichotomy between the mind and what is outside it, between meanings and things. [Rather than the] ancient extensive self, a self open to the world around it, we find a move to an intensive self, a universe of meanings separated by a dichotomy from the world of things. Finally, against an ancient reason which is primarily a vision of what is, we find a movement toward a reason based on the systematic coherence of what is said or thought. [These phases] are held together in the experience of what we call language…

He said that our modern Western mode of thought “is different from, even alien to, all previous thought, and … there is nothing normative, or even normal, about it, or us.” But it is really not just a change in modes of thought that he is concerned with, but rather ways of experiencing the world. He wrote “the thrust of my argument is not that there were different theories about the same seeing and knowing, but rather that there were different seeings and knowings.” And he clearly thought that whatever we may have gained by this transition, something had been lost. His colleague Nancy Streuver writes that Cranz’s project

shows… a deep sympathy with an Aristotelian psychology which presumes a continuum of capacities—sensation, perception, fantasy, memory, passions and intellect—that are continuously interactive… [He] describes a loss that transpires in the domain of experience: the post-Anselmian disjunction is a psychological deficit, a loss of ‘dimensionality’. And the loss is our loss as well.

Cranz was a little shy about this notion that the “ancients” experienced the world in a way radically different from ours. He knew he faced an uphill battle making his case. As Struever notes, “Cranz expressed many times his rueful awareness of the generally disbelieving scholarly response.” Although he often said that it shouldn’t be possible to ever recapture this vanished way of knowing, he was living proof that it could be done. He said to me once that as he sat lost in contemplation over those ancient texts, sometimes he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get back. As I think of this now, he was experiencing an altered state of consciousness, an alternate reality, by means of deep textual hermeneutics, a kind of lectio divina of pagan texts. My stunned reaction to all this was grounded in the assumption and conviction that his claim was at root an ontological one. The nature of Reality itself was at stake. He left me floating in mystery. No wonder he was a bit hesitant among his colleagues.

But today the world is very different, and if he’d lived to see it he would have found himself in the company of scholars and philosophers and anthropologists and the like, who are totally accepting of the notion of the historicality of experience. And even the “ontological turn” in anthropology is not laughed at by everyone. Though there are still plenty of reductionist materialists around, their dominance is fading. It is no longer unthinkable that our access to reality is conditioned by historical variables and that our scientific understanding of reality cannot ever give us anything like a Theory of Everything. It seems rather that it gives us a theory of almost nothing of importance. The simplification of reality that the Anselmian disjunction—or something like it—has made possible has resulted in the development of modern science and technology. Which have made Capitalism and the destruction of the planet possible. Oops.

All of which suggests that maybe we might want to re-think thinking and by so doing, re-imagine the place of humans in the cosmos and our understanding of reality itself. Henry Corbin is my own personal hero for showing us some of the ways we might do this. And I remain convinced that Imagination in some form provides a guide. What Jeff Kripal calls “thinking the Impossible” requires a cosmology, an ontology, a metaphysics—whatever we want to call a vision of Reality—that places something like imagination at the center of things. Hence his fondness for Corbin and the mundus imaginalis.

In this context I want to point you all to the immense work of someone whose name I have known for years but whose work I never got around to reading until very recently. I met Wouter Hanegraaff at the Corbin Conference at Harvard in 2023 and was delighted to find a kind, gentle and humble man whose scholarship is simply astounding. I had blindly assumed, for no discernible reason, that he was “merely a historian” of the esoteric currents in the western world, particularly the modern world. Maybe I was so used to Corbin’s disinterest in “history” that I never bothered to check. But probably I was just too lazy, or maybe just focussed elsewhere. I so very much regret that mistake! Because now I am old, and to catch up with Wouter will take a lot of running.

A few months ago I read an terrific recent essay of his with the delightfully suggestive title, Close Encounters with the Third Kind: A Hermetic Theory of Imaginal Consciousness. The close encounters reference is not by chance. Hanegraaff is a friend and colleague of Kripal, Mr. Impossible himself. While I am in no way competent to compare Hanegraaff’s argument with Cranz’s thesis, I have to say that there are analogies, and that’s enough for me to put them in the same pot for a while. Here is the beginning of the essay:

The so-called Hermetic treatises were written by anonymous authors in Roman Egypt during the first centuries CE. They are very well known to scholars as important historical sources for popular philosophy and religion in late antiquity, but have almost never been approached from the perspectives of psychology and consciousness studies. In this short article I argue that in actual fact, they contain a subtle and fascinating theory of consciousness grounded in classic post-Aristotelian views of the imagination (phantasia).

The Hermetic tradition overlaps with those aspects of the Western heritage that Henry Corbin wanted to resuscitate precisely because they had a different view of imagination and reality than the one that became dominant in the post-Anselmian world. (I am, by the way, not wedded to Cranz’s particular framing, but he is not alone in finding something going on in the 12th century or thereabouts. Ivan Illich’s work is relevant here). Hanegraaff continues,

My larger argument is that the human faculty of imagination (phantasia in Greek, Vorstellungsvermögen or Einbildungskraft in German), as theorized in this tradition, may well be of key importance for understanding the nature of human consciousness.

Now strictly speaking this claim isn’t necessarily ontologically radical as stated here. But I suspect that he intends it to be more than a reframing of “human consciousness”—the Hermeticists surely thought so. He places the Hermetic corpus in it’s historical context with a discussion of Plato and Aristotle, with particular focus on the Timaeus and De anima (crucial also for Franz). Hanegraaff points out that

modern English has no words that even approximate the subtle meanings of nous and noēsis in ancient Greek philosophy—these terms are strictly untranslatable. It is for this reason that on the following pages I introduce the verb noeticizing, as a neologism necessary to capture the activity of nous.

Cranz used to talk about intellecting to try to capture the weirdness of noēsis.

We’re then treated to a brief account of the “receptacle” in Plato, which is somehow a “third kind” between Being and Becoming. He then notes

Regardless of how we interpret the exact nature of this chōra (if indeed it can be interpreted at all), there is broad agreement among specialists that by introducing this “third kind,” Plato utterly deconstructs the dualism of eternal Being versus ever-changing Becoming.

This third kind seems analogous to Aristotle’s notion of phantasia, imagination. Hanegraaff notes that for Aristotle

internal images (phantasmata) appear to the noeticizing soul as objects of perception, which it then avoids if they seem bad and pursues when they seem good. Thus it is, he notes, that “the soul never noeticizes without a phantasm.”

Then with due thanks to Chiara Bottici’s analysis in her Imaginal Politics he writes

Therefore the term phantasia did not refer to mental delusions or creative inventions divorced from reality, as we usually assume: it meant simply “appearance” or “presentation,” from phainesthai (to appear). As such, it covered absolutely everything that appears to be present in human consciousness. In stating that “the soul never noeticizes without a phantasm,” Aristotle therefore referred to the imagination as nothing less than “the condition for thought insofar as it alone can present to thought the object as sensible without matter. In other words, no mental or intellectual activity of any kind is considered possible without the faculty of imagination: “there is always phantasm; we are always imagining.”

Bottici spends quite some effort comparing Corbin and James Hillman on the notion of the imaginal in their respective interpretations. I’m not entirely convinced she gets Hillman’s intention right. I should think about it some more. But for me it has become almost impossible to keep the imaginal inside any greater framing. I think we are always imagining, and that any claim to be able to stand outside of this great flux and hubbub is bound to go awry.

And here Hanegraaf tells us about Corpus Hermeticum XI,

in which the pupil Hermes Trismegistus receives instruction from no one less than the personified Nous itself, understood in a Hermetic context as the ultimate divine reality of universal Light.

Students of Corbin will find this familiar territory. The “third kind” is here termed aiōn. And now comes the super cool and wonderful part from my point of view. I’ve spent decades reinforcing, for myself, for my students in the sciences and the humanities, and under it all, for the demons who inhabited my mother, the clear fact that the world is mysterious, beautiful and thrilling throughout. This, we discover, is exactly the teaching of Nous Herself—and of course Sophia as experienced by Corbin and his various Masters. Here is Hanegraaff and the Corpus XI:

Hermes is now invited to look at the cosmos through the eyes of the Nous itself. As with earlier instances in the Hermetic literature (notably a passage in which the pupil’s attention is called to the innocence of a newborn baby ) what this means is that he must look with a gaze of wonder and love:

behold the cosmos as it extends before your gaze, and carefully contemplate [katanoēson] its beauty: a flawless body, while older than anything else, yet always in bloom, young and flourishing in ever more abundance.

And if that isn’t enough to challenge anyone’s depression and ego-centric defensiveness, Nous continues with this explanation of the cosmic vision She is presenting to Hermes:

All beings are in God – not as though they were in some place … but in a different manner: they rest in his incorporeal imagination [en asōmatōi phantasiāi]. … You must conceive of God as having all noēmata in himself: those of the cosmos, himself, the all. Therefore unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand [noēsai] God. Like is understood only by like. Allow yourself to grow larger until you are equal to him who is immeasurable, outleap all that is corporeal, transcend all time, and become the aiōn – then you will understand [noēseis] God.

I think that something like this is what entranced F. Edward Cranz, and is why he suggested I should “learn as many languages as possible” in order to unleash the imagination from the constraints of modern thought and language, and perhaps make possible something lke this kind of visionary experience. I really think that. And this is the kind of world that Henry Corbin invites us to enter. As he writes in a footnote in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism,

…like can only be known by like; every mode of understanding corresponds to the mode of being of the interpreter. I am too convinced of this not to recognize how hopeless it i to try to convey the meaning of symbols to peple who are blind to them. The Gospel parable of the Feast means precisely what it says, even from the scientific point of view. It would be ridiculous to engage in polemics against the men or women who refuse to come to the feast; their refusal inspries only sadness and compassion.

There is a lot more in Hanegraaff’s essay which you can read here, but I’ll conclude with another point he makes about the Hermetic vision. It is “world affirming” in the same way that Corbin’s vision is. Divine knowledge will indeed escape “those who are in love with the body.” But the

problem lies not in the body as such, but in a limited consciousness that “shuts the soul up in the body” and allows it to be dominated by the negative passions. The soul must be liberated from enslavement by opening its eyes to the beauty and goodness of divinity that literally surrounds it on all sides.

This is exactly Henry Corbin’s point when he makes the claim that Sophia-Angelos preserves us from metaphysical idolatry

that two-faced spiritual infirmity which consists in either loving an object without transcendence, or in misunderstanding that transcendence by separating it from the loved object, through which alone it is manifested.

OK, so that’s kind of a lot. But that’s the kind of thinking we’re trying to do in order to get some sense of how to “think the Impossible” along with Jeff Kripal and his band of Merry Pranksters and other devotees of Rejected Knowledge. It’s a wild ride and

(here comes the Marketing)

anyone who wants to sign on now can get the recordings and join us for the rest of the seminar. Click on the link at the begining of this post or just send me an email tcheetham@gmail.com.