It is a long period, this stretch from Aristotle to Sartre by way of Kant, during which philosophers held imagination to be a derivative product—whether wedged between intellect and sensation, or, according to Malebranche, reduced to “the force the soul has to form images of objects,” or again (Kant) to the intermediate faculty between intuition and understanding.
Yet one sees gradually emerging, over the past few years, a movement contrary to that which took shape with the marriage of Aristotelianism and Averroism (13th century)—that is, with the divorce between Faith and Knowledge. This new orientation takes seriously what the Neoplatonic heritage and the esotericism of the religions of the Book have called creative imagination. To be sure, this tradition and this esotericism had never died; they had never even been moribund. But what is genuinely new at present is their progressive intrusion upon the territory of official—that is, academic—philosophy. An intrusion that is not aggressive, for they had long since grown accustomed to living in their entrenched camp: it is simply that, lacking air to breathe, it is academic philosophy that comes soliciting them.
One of the first merits of this partial reversal perhaps belongs to Heidegger, who entirely renewed the Kantian notion of imagination by showing that it was “homeless.” Since then, Henri Corbin has forged the concept of the imaginal (l’imaginal) by revealing to us the treasures of Shi’ite gnosis, and one is no longer surprised to see gathering around a name such as his other academics who by no means feel obliged to give their rationality the sense of “positivist rationalism,” nor to confuse serious historical work with agnosticism.
There would indeed be much to say about this renaissance, and a fortiori about the long peregrination of creative imagination in the West. I shall limit myself to one aspect of it, itself sufficiently rich and bushy.
By “creative image” I mean here the faculty that imagination would have to act upon the external world, directly or by the intermediary of a “plastic mediator” (which may, moreover, be identified with this imagination itself). To limit the subject further and not multiply anecdotes belonging to the history of magic in general, it will be a question above all of the theosophical or philosophical justification upon which the proponents of this conception of the creative image believed they could rely—a conception which, in itself, would suffice to show that in the Western esoteric tradition the status of the image is inseparably linked to the problem of Evil, since the original fall diminished our power of action upon nature and our communion with it.
This justification rests only, sometimes, upon a scriptural reference: several of the authors studied cite Genesis XXX, 37-39, inasmuch as theologians since Saint Jerome and Saint John Chrysostom have had recourse to the concept of creative image to explain how Jacob’s white sheep could, by looking at colored bark, conceive spotted lambs.
In a beautiful text, Denys the Areopagite explains that the painter ends by resembling his model.
Origen, contrary to Valentinus, defends the dignity of the image, which is founded in the perfection of the Son, himself image of the invisible God, and he already exposes a voluntarist conception of the generation of the image.
Closer to our subject, Porphyry taught that demons (daimones) are endowed with a cloudy spirit (aerodes pneuma) which takes diverse forms according to their imaginations of the moment, so that they can appear to us in extremely changing forms. This is already, in some sense, conceiving magical imagination in the manner of a plastic mediator; and it is no doubt in this manner as well that one must understand a passage from the celebrated book of Synesius, On Dreams.
The Middle Ages did not lack philosophers who sought explanations of this magical action.
According to Al-Kindi (De radiis stellicis, 9th cent.), imagination can form concepts and then emit rays which will affect external objects, especially if astrological conditions are favorable.
Avicenna sees in it the effect of the natural domination of spiritual essences over matter, and for him the virtue of imagination can move an object such as a stone or a camel.
Jean Ganivet, in Amicus Medicorum (1431), cites a story reported by Nicholas of Lyra in the 14th century, according to which a Spanish woman was unjustly suspected of illicit relations with a man of color because she had given birth to a black child, when it was in fact the effect produced upon her by a painting hanging in her chamber depicting a group of Ethiopians.
However, this belief seems to have spread especially in the 15th century from Marsilio Ficino, who writes in De Theologia platonica de immortalitate animorum:
“Imagination produces four feelings: desire, pleasure, fear, and pain. All four, when violent, affect at once the body of the person, sometimes even that of another […] How evident it is that the desire of the pregnant woman transmits to the tender foetus the mark of the object of her desire. How varied, how different from their own, are the manners and physiognomies that parents give to their children, because of the diverse objects they can represent to themselves during coitus […] How often has a person with ill intentions harmed men, animals, and even plants by her spells and charms […] By its sentiment alone, the soul will bring winds into a serene sky, resolve them into rain, calm them again, and restore fair weather.”
Marsilio Ficino would be much copied, especially by Pomponazzi and Agrippa.
Pietro Pomponazzi, physician and professor at Bologna, writes in 1520 De naturalium effectuum admirandorum causis, sive de incantationibus. He intends to de-occult the occult, but believes in imagination which realizes the imagined object—and takes the miracles of the Gospel to task, interpreting them as the effect of a natural magic. In his commentary on Ficino he gives the creative image its mythic foundation by referring to Boethius:
“[…] the image of the divine idea is the cause of the imagined being, even without intermediary. For God produced this visible world upon the idea of the world which is in the divine thought, as Boethius says in Book III of the Consolation. Then the idea of things to come, which is in the Intelligences, produced the inferior world by the intermediary of instruments which are the celestial bodies.”
Paracelsus goes further. He makes imagination the magical intermediary between thought and being, sees in it the incarnation of thought in image. The Soul (Gemüth), Faith, and Imagination represent the three great faculties of which man disposes. The Gemüth is “the irruption of sidereal power in us, the privileged link of our opening to the invisible world which, from within ourselves, governs us.”
“Faith,” writes Paracelsus, “produces Imagination, the latter produces a star, the star an effect. Faith in God therefore produces Imagination in God.”
Paracelsus sees in the soul a plastic and magical center of force capable of creating the body, of forming it—that is, of proposing to it, by imagination, an end to realize. If our imagination were strong enough, we could change our seductive aspect as well as we modify the expression of our face. Our desire, our thought, become incarnate in the image which, once formed, serves as mold to the soul which flows into it, realizes itself in it.
Our imagination functions like a seed: the images that our soul produces are not a simple modification of this soul but a body, an incarnation, of thought and will; they become autonomous and then develop according to their own laws, like the children we conceive. To conceive is to engender; every conception is organic. Images are born from the Gemüth in an organic manner. Paracelsus readily employs solar and igneous symbols: “What then is imagination, if not an interior sun acting in its own sphere?“
By imaginative speculation, the vital fluid (semen) is converted into active seed, as the sun ignites wood. The entire heaven is nothing but imagination: it acts upon man, can unleash scourges, not by the intermediary of corporeal vehicles but by its form (Gestalt), just as the sun lights fires. For the Einbildungskraft traverses all things, the little world as well as the great. As all matter, and all spirit, of heaven and earth, are concentrated in man-the-microcosm, the latter is capable of working prodigies; to a sufficiently strong imagination, nothing is impossible, since it is the very principle of all magic and can transform our body, act upon the sky.
Hence the necessity of distinguishing false imagination from true (vera), or authentic. By the false, or extravagant, the fantasia, one gives oneself only a pale reflection of visible things instead of rejoining the power of the unfathomable nature. The fantasia is not true imagination but seed of madness; it lacks the anchorage that sounds imagination and magic together, the rooting of the image in our sidereal being, as that of the plant in the soil. The true image gives body to our thought, transforms it into desire; it is the very body of the latter and of our desire, which become incarnate in it.
The mythic foundation of this magical conception of imagination is similar to that given by Pomponazzi: God created the universe by imagining it, he drew the world from his own bosom, from his eternal and uncreated essences and powers; man, epitome of creation, disposes of analogically similar powers.
Valentin Weigel, one of the pioneers of German theosophy, germanizing imaginatio into imagination, speaks of the power it has of in bilden (forming within), and, inspired by Paracelsus, notes that it is “the sidereal spirit, the star in man, it is all the stars, acts similarly to the firmament and bears in itself its own light; star, or rather ‘all the stars at once,’ it acts as the firmament acts.”
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, author of the most characteristic work of magical literature at the beginning of the Renaissance (De Occulta Philosophia, 1510), had hardly recognized in imagination more than the power of influencing for good or ill the health of others thanks to the stars. But a passage from his book, so curious and so widely read, will fuel the speculations of his successors. One sees, he writes, in the urine of those who have been bitten by some mad dog, figures of dogs. One makes white peacocks by hanging white cloths around the beds of brooding hens. The basilisk and the catoblepas kill men by their gaze.
In France, Montaigne popularizes the idea by his essay De la force de l’imagination, which opens with this phrase: “Fortis imaginatio generat casum, say the clerks.” He reports that some attribute to the force of imagination the wounds provoked in King Dagobert by the fear of gangrene, and in Francis of Assisi the stigmata of the crucifixion. However, “all this can be referred to the close stitching of mind and body communicating their fortunes to each other,” so that some troubling facts remain: “Tortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs by sight alone… So much so that we see by experience women send to the bodies of children they carry in their wombs the marks of their fancies.”
But the work of Giordano Bruno De Imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione is more useful than Montaigne’s essay for understanding the treatment of images in the Renaissance. Bruno there exposes his theory of imagination as the principal instrument of magical and religious processes. In so doing, he transforms the art of memory, which was merely a rational technique using images, as already in the Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas, into a religious and magical technique.
More interesting appears the treatment of the creative image by 17th-century theosophy—that is, by that particular and specific form which baroque mysticism then takes. Sentiment and imagination appear indeed as the two new powers to which religious literature in the Germanic lands accords a right of citizenship never before recognized. Imagination, which the Dominicans of the 14th century had wished to banish, comes to replace Gelassenheit, while the bildnerinne of Tauler finds itself rehabilitated by Jacob Böhme and his disciples.
In Böhme, desire and imagination are linked. More than any before him, Böhme gives imagination an ontological foundation. At the level of Lust—enjoyment, desire which has not yet lost its object—imagination coincides with desire; once the paradisiacal unity of enjoyment is broken, it ceases to coincide with desire, which Böhme then calls Begierde. Unity was broken when Adam’s own thickened, coagulated, “imagined” itself in a gross form. The original fall was therefore nothing other than a perversion of desire by imagination.
The apple eaten by Adam symbolizes the image aroused by the encounter of his desire and Satan’s desire. Inversely, when our faith is sufficiently exalted to encounter the Grace from above, then, “durch gottes Imagination und Anzündung” the holy flame springs forth. The efficacious image forms at the intersection of God’s desire descending upon man and of our desire which comes to meet it.
Imagination thus conceived has itself a model: that of God. For divine imagination, which is a thought, incarnates itself in forms and figures, realizes itself in sensible images. God manifests himself by engendering, by his fiat, the universe which is a real image (figürliches Gleichniß) of the image God has imagined and which is eternal. God imagines in the Sophia; but “to imagine in” signifies that this imagination makes the subject participate in the quality of its object, and modifies at the same time this object conformably to the imagination of the subject.
In expressing himself, God incarnates himself in a universe situated between pure spirit and concrete reality—that is, in what one might call a mesocosm, an intermediate place, therefore, but at the same time the very seat of creative imagination par excellence, where Shi’ite theosophers situate what Henry Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal. In other words, to imagine is to reveal oneself, is to create; to unite oneself to God amounts to transforming oneself into him. Just as he created the world by his imagination, so by it we find God again and can work prodigies. Magia and imagination, two words that Böhme associates: all that man imagines (sich ein-bildet), he can realize. “Imaginatio macht Wesenheit“—imagination creates essence.
Johann Georg Gichtel, who is perhaps the greatest disciple of Böhme in the 17th century, also sees a magia divina at the origin of creation. Within the divine nature there exists an archetypal model of the external world. God’s desire permits divine imagination to manifest itself and the latter projects, thanks to divine magic, uncreated forms. As with Böhme, the first fall of Adam, as Gichtel sees it, unfolds on the plane of imagination. One finds in Gichtel the paronomasia: imagination, magic, Magnet. This author completes one of the boldest and most original enterprises of Böhme: to give imagination a theogonic and cosmogonic foundation.
In that same epoch appears the work of Pierre Poiret: L’Oeconomie de la création de l’Homme (1687). One reads in the chapter entitled De l’Imaginative:
“God willed to see himself figuratively (or to see his material portraits) in an exterior manner and outside himself. This divine will gave birth not only to the existence of matter, to its movement, and to its different dispositions and conducts; but also to the imaginative faculty in man, inasmuch as God willed that man, as his Image, represent him as well in this regard as in the others already marked. […] things existed and moved themselves at the same time and from the first moment by virtue of this powerful desire and this strong thought of God which figured things to himself as present and in movement; a thought which I have called elsewhere, the Imagination of God, which is also the Creator of the world.”
Poiret then asks whether man could “have received from God the power to augment matter by the force of his Imagination.” He recognizes “ingenuously” that he has nothing to reply, “neither by affirmation, nor by negation.” But he adds at once:
“If it is true that the created spirit cannot make matter increase, there is nothing at least easier to understand than that it can very well augment, diminish, and determine its movement by the force of its desire and its Imagination, supposing, as is the truth, that God has given it this force so that it might represent as closely as possible its Original, namely, the Imagination of God, of which it is the living copy...”
Before Poiret and before Gichtel, the creative image had been evoked in France by the baroque and eloquent pen of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the Etats du Soleil and the Etats de la Lune (1648) he drew from this idea the last consequences and the most picturesque. Journeying in the moon he discusses miracles and medicine with a Selenite who refuses to believe in miraculous healings for, he says, “You do not know that the force of imagination is capable of healing all diseases […] because of a certain natural balm spread in our bodies containing all qualities contrary to all those of each illness that attacks us.”
Visiting the Sun, Cyrano meets beings capable of metamorphosing into anything whatsoever. It is no miracle, one of them tells him, but “nothing but pure natural effects.” The imagination of the solarians, encountering no obstacle in the matter that composes them, arranges it as they will. “Thus my eagle, having its eyes put out, had only to imagine a clear-sighted eagle to restore them […] You other men cannot do the same things, because of the weight of your mass, and the coldness of your imagination.”
The alchemical practices—spiritual and material—of the 17th century would merit here a long development, for transmutation is not only that of the experimenter but equally of Nature. Numerous are the alchemical treatises inspired by Paracelsus. And if, for the preparers of the Great Work, imagination has remained traditionally the quintessence of all the forces of man—vital, moral, and physical—this quintessence, according to the Paracelsian tradition, concretizes itself in the Astrum, veritable subtle body. Imagination is “Astrum in homine, coeleste sive supracoeleste corpus,” writes Rulandus.
The Paracelsian Astrum meaning approximately “quintessence,” imagination is therefore a concentrated extract of corporeal and spiritual energies. It is often difficult to know whether such and such a hermetic author means that the work must lead to a material result or whether it is a matter of purely spiritual realization. But it would falsify the problem—Jung has very justly remarked—to pose this either-or alternative; the essential remains the affirmation, implicit or explicit, of the existence of an intermediate world—Zwischenreich—between matter and spirit: it is the domain of subtle bodies.
The Rosarium Philosophorum affirms that the Work must be realized “secundum naturam” with the “true imagination,” and not with the “fantastic.” Jung adds that this imagination must be taken in the classical sense of Einbildungskraft as opposed to empty phantasia, and that the imaginatio, active evocation of interior images, makes itself “according to nature” so that thought does not function haphazardly but attempts to grasp the inner given in representations which are the faithful representation of Nature.
However, Michel Sendivogius makes himself on this point the interpreter of the hermetic tradition when he writes around 1616 that what the soul imagines produces itself only in the spirit (exequitur nisi in mente), while what God imagines produces itself in reality. In other words, active imagination has no direct action, it merely sets in condition—but this is only possible through it—of effective realization an interior and exterior process of transmutation.
The philosophy of the Enlightenment obviously rejects this esoteric heritage. Albrecht von Haller criticizes the belief in the effects of the imagination of pregnant women, in the abundant commentaries with which he enriched in 1745 the medical writings of Hermann Boerhaave who, for his part, believed in them. Shortly after, the article Imagination, in vol. VII of Diderot’s Grande Encyclopédie, constitutes a good example of the reductive treatment to which image and imagination in general are then submitted. And one will recognize in this remark the sometimes savory irony of the “philosophical spirit“: our sensations, writes the author of the article, “do not resemble the objects which cause them,” fortunately moreover, for “there would be almost only male children; all women, for the most part, are affected by ideas, desires, objects which have relation to that sex.”
One must turn again toward the guardians of the esoteric flame to find specific commentaries concerning the magical image, toward Georg von Welling (alias Salwigt) for example, author of the Opus mago-cabbalisticum et theosophicum published in 1735. Commenting Hebrews XI, 1, he says that faith is wahrhafte Einbildung, or impressio imaginationis, of things which one does not see. He adds:
“Each is attracted, after his death, by the rays of his imagination as by a powerful magnet, toward what he has imagined during his life, and then will befall him what is written in the Apocalypse XIV, 13: ‘For their works follow them’ […] The effects of our imagination are unfathomable and almost incomprehensible, as daily experience of pregnant women instructs us. What strange effects has not their imagination (Imagination oder Einbildungskraft) had upon the fruit of their wombs. Among other examples, I can indeed cite that of one of them who had seen someone’s hand cut off; and she then immediately gave birth to a child lacking a hand, as if the latter had been freshly cut off, and the stump was still bleeding. The hand could not be found, neither after the birth, nor afterward in any other manner. One could give other examples of this kind, more terrible and more incredible still, but it would be impossible to report them all. One wonders whether the child had its hand, or not, or whether it lost it due to the strong impression caused by the mother’s imagination? And then, where did this hand go? In short, the radiation (Strahlung) exercised upon such and such an object (Vorwurf), these are the virtues or powers (Kräfte) of our spirit and our souls; and will not he who understands them well be capable of working prodigies of true, false, or even diabolical Magic?“
Friedrich Christoph Oetinger gives in 1776 (Dictionnaire biblique emblématique) a definition of imagination which interests our subject: “Imagination can at first be a thought without essence; but afterward it makes itself essence, and it is no longer a nothing but a something which has developed organically while engendering itself from itself. Be therefore on your guard.”
With William Blake, Romantic thought is not far; there is sometimes in him like an approach toward Fichte’s theory of creative imagination: “In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven and Earth; and all you behold, tho’ it appears Without, it is Within, in your Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.“
As often with these authors, the word “imagination” takes on different senses in Blake according to context. It can signify “faculty of vision” (clairvoyance), “spirit of prophecy“; but also: “spiritual existence” or “spiritual body.” It is this last sense which interests us. Blake writes in Jerusalem: “Imagination, the Divine Body”; and elsewhere: “All things are comprehended in these Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination.”
Imagination is thus the spiritual part of man, that which, having come forth from God himself, possesses the vision of all things. It will belong to Saint-Martin and to Novalis to draw the consequences.
Imagination, for the Unknown Philosopher (Saint-Martin), can be “the faculty of representing to oneself bizarre beings and monstrous assemblages” which are “chimerical beings or products of pieced-together parts.” This is, if one will, the fantasia, the false imagination according to Paracelsus. Saint-Martin does not insist upon this secondary aspect; he develops rather a theory of creative imagination which the notion of “magism” permits us to grasp in its broad outlines.
First, on the divine plane, God manifests himself ad extra by the Sophia, but also by other mirrors which in their turn demand new mirrors in which they reflect themselves, these “millions of spirit beings” permitting God to know himself while at the same time he “holds his own belly enveloped in his ineffable magism.” This divine magism tends to “unveil to us the reflections of eternal magnificence,” but only “by letting pierce through as many of its rays as is fitting to make it loved,” and in such a manner that man cannot “seize it and appropriate its principle to himself.”
Then, on the plane of Nature, there is also a magism which is triple. The first is more or less identified with divine magism, since it is divine generation itself, or the “veil of things” which lets filter through what the spirit can sustain. It is the capacity that Nature has to manifest God, the permanent means of passage from the state of dispersion or indifference—”abyssal,” said Böhme—to that of sensibilization. But the Fall has disfigured the original universe, which is why another magism must be exercised, a universal-actual one, which serves as protective rampart against the Enemy of humankind and steals “from our painful sensations the reign of horror and infection” consecutive to the Fall.
The principle of these two natural magisms—that of real or primitive nature, and the universal-actual one—is however the same:
“In this sense, each particular production of nature also has its magism; for each of them in particular, such as a flower, a salt, an animal, a metallic substance, is a medium between the invisible and insensible properties which are in its root, in its principle of life or in its fundamental essences and the sensible qualities which emanate from this production and which are manifested to us by its means. It is in this medium that all that must issue from each production is elaborated and prepared; now it is this place of preparation, it is this laboratory finally into which we cannot penetrate without destroying it and which for this reason is a veritable magism for us, although we can know the number of springs which concur to produce it and even the law which directs its effect. The principle of this hidden march is founded upon divine generation itself where the eternal medium forever serves as passage to the infinite immensity of universal essences […] thus all the mediums of actual nature, all those of spiritual nature are but images of this eternal and primitive medium.”
Unfortunately there is a third natural magism, consequence of the fall and called the astral. Because of it our spiritual being can take “disordered and irregular images“; this “active and powerful region” whose physical properties also act upon bodies can distance us from our true destination. Now, the human form of divine magism is what Saint-Martin calls imagination, and he even employs in this regard the expression “magical imagination.” The role of the latter was to embellish more and more the dwelling which man inhabited, to increase ever further its perfection. Since the Fall, a part of this imagination has remained to us, which manifests itself in our regenerative mission. The activity of man is thus analogous to that of God in the sense that the universal work has for object the search for unity, the passage from the insensible to the sensible.
One must therefore turn away from the sidereal magism which generates works inscribed against the project of universal harmony and restoration. God has need of us, Nature too, “for it is a truth that there is not a being which is not charged with engendering its father.” Let us therefore be the mirror of God and of Nature; by “mirror” one must not understand what can only reflect passively, but what concentrates, gathers, makes germinate, grow, pass from dispersion to the unity of the person. The body of beings, “instead of being a prison for them, should be like a mirror which helped them to gather and develop their marvels.” Mirror, magism, imagination… Three terms almost synonyms which attempt to express complementarily, and to illuminate, a fundamental notion of Saint-Martinian anthropology: imagination is not a faculty among others but a primary vocation insofar as task and power of reflecting, realizing, propagating, recreating; demiurgic power, to be sure, but theogonically and anthropogonically founded.
Dupont de Nemours, contemporary of Saint-Martin and guardian of a spark, at least, of this esoteric flame which Saint-Martin bears so high, published in 1793 a Philosophie de l’Univers which in certain respects indubitably belongs to the Illuminism of the epoch. He says he conceives imagination as “a middle sense, cast like a bridge between the terrestrial animal kingdom and the other kingdoms of a higher order.” In truth, it recovers there its role of magical mediator between spirit and matter, prolonging reason more than truly supplanting it, rendering it accessible to a super-nature. If Dupont de Nemours does not pronounce the expression “plastic mediator,” the idea is there nonetheless. Indeed, it is “very natural” that intelligent created beings feel the need to animate bodies.
For Novalis, man is in synchrony with the rhythm of the universe, which renders him capable of modifying the latter. If one wants intensely something which one represents distinctly, it is possible to transform it into a phenomenon of the external world. In other words one can influence materially and visibly this world by an intensive will: “The physical mage knows how to animate Nature, and to treat it voluntarily, as he does his own body.” Such is the magical idealism of Novalis if to this we add the idea of reciprocity:
“If you do not succeed in making your thoughts external things, then make external things—at least—become thoughts: if you cannot transform a thought into an autonomous soul, proceed—then at least—inversely with external things and transform them into thoughts. The two operations are identical (that is to say, they constitute a dialectical unity). He who has perfect mastery of the one and the other is the magical idealist. Would not the perfection of each of these two operations depend upon that of the other?“
His disciple and friend Johann Wilhelm Ritter, inventor of ultraviolet rays, perhaps the first of the Romantic Naturphilosophen—chronologically—, wishes to show scientifically in 1808 that the magical idealism of Novalis has become a reality. Let us observe, he explains, a ball of zinc in the hollows of a damp and immobile human hand; we will note that it describes, if the experimenter wills it, circles similar to those of the earth around the sun. Thus, concludes Ritter, if previously one knew that the organism of the universe is reflected in the body of man, one now shows that the latter is capable, by a conscious action, of manifesting these correspondences: the ball follows us as the planet follows the sun.
Ritter writes to Karl von Hardenberg—Novalis’s brother—on February 1, 1807: “The point demanded by Archimedes is found. We will really move the earth.” A few days earlier (January 11, 1807), Schelling, interested by the experience, had written to Hegel: “That is a veritable magic of the human being; no animal is capable of doing the same thing. Man truly detaches himself from all other beings, like a sun among them, they are all his planets. Here begins the Physica coelestis or uranis, after the terrestris which existed until now.”
Certain works of Schelling permit one to understand this enthusiasm. His Philosophy of Art indeed resuscitates the Böhmean conception of imagination understood as faculty of incarnating the idea, of rendering it visible, of thus realizing the synthesis of the infinite with the determination of form. Yet Schelling does not really retain the Paracelsian Einbildungskraft, nor the Böhmean Imagination; he transforms it into Kraft der Ineinsbildung, auf welcher alle Schöpfung beruht—formative energy in the One and upon which all creation rests.
Subjectivity hardly existed in Paracelsus and in Böhme; it appears, with the German Romantics, mingled with their conception of genius, expressivity, originality. For Paracelsus and for Böhme, to imagine was to “correspond in natural light, and in a sui generis experience, to the invisible plenitude of the world, of man and of things.” Magic resulted less from an intention than from a harmony or natural process. Curiously, the thought of Fichte, though stripped of all magic in this sense, retains from Böhme not only the idea of a will-tendency which becomes conscious of itself by experiencing resistance, but also that of creative imagination giving birth to the sensible world and translating spirit “into forms and colors.” This is why Novalis believes he discovers in Fichte’s doctrine of imagination the key to a forgotten conception through which he recovers the accents of Böhme and Paracelsus, although the Kantian imprint is too evident in Fichte for Novalis to see in him a veritable continuator of Böhme.
It remains that, according to Fichte, if empirical reality is only the product of an almost all-powerful imagination of the Ego, of the subject, there is no more magic since everything is magic. There are no more magical actions. The unheard-of character of this pretension of an imagination giving birth to the whole sensible world, less hypothetically formulated and more concretely defended than in Berkeley, joined to the intense activity of this thought reactivated by that of Schelling who ceaselessly relaunches in his turn that of Fichte, this is what will have contributed powerfully to creating that incomparable climate of Jena Romanticism, with its internal oppositions so characteristic as well.
For if one admits according to the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) that the object is no longer determined from itself but from the subject, then the universe becomes spiritual, reality is the world-mirror of consciousness. A theory which, one cannot repeat too often, is nevertheless in the eyes of a Novalis as of a Baader irremediably tainted with abstraction, an impression which the very style of Fichte ceaselessly confirms—for there is finally too much “spirituality” and not enough incarnation. Schelling then re-establishes the reality of the external world by transforming the monologue of the Fichtean Ego into a dialogue of this Ego with the preliminary “objective” stages of consciousness, which themselves correspond to the diverse and successive forms of Nature. But Baader will be able to say that in Schelling there is too much naturalism. It will therefore belong to Baader to resolve the problem theosophically by referring to Christian Hermeticism of which, according to him, the two principal representatives had been, before his dear Saint-Martin, Paracelsus and Böhme.
Baader speaks often of imagination, in very dispersed texts each of which would merit a study in itself, and on the other hand one can hardly isolate from his reflections on the creative image those which bear upon creative imagination in general. Following Paracelsus and Böhme, Baader distinguishes impotent, sterile imagination and creative (schöpferische Einbildung) really productive both in the subject and outside of him. Above all he presents a veritable theory of imagination.
Baader distinguishes first in Nature and in man a double imagination: the active and the reactive (the latter not to be confused with impotent or sterile imagination). Thus there is man’s active desire, and his nostalgia (Sehnen, Sucht) or, outside man, sidereal imagination (active) and elementary world imagination (reactive); likewise one can distinguish radiant light and phosphorescent light, sun and moon, nerves and ganglia. Baader is astonished that the Naturphilosophen of his time, though inclined to seek polarities everywhere, did not trouble themselves about this one. To illustrate this thesis he proposes the example of an artist who paints a lion and generally succeeds in his painting. This is, says Baader, because the psychic-plastic nature (active) which produces real lions has continued its work, no longer solely in animal creation but this time in the (reactive) imagination of the artist: “It is the same nature,” writes Baader, “which creates the natural forms of the lion and which equally projects the type of this animal into the imagination of man.” There exists therefore in Nature itself an active and creative imagination, root and beginning of all production, primus motor.
But how does this articulation between the two imaginations function? Here intervenes the Baaderian symbolism of the mirror. For there to be creation in whatever domain, a conjunction of two elements (active and reactive) must operate, like hunger and food, man’s desire and woman—or, on the divine plane, the eternal Father and Sophia. From this conjunction will result a genitus: the child, the son, or the positive action of nourishment upon the body. Now, this conjunction is effected only if active imagination manifests its power, that is, if “the will enters into its mirror.” My desire must project itself into the desired object, mirror itself first in it; then the object sees me, it becomes thanks to my regard a living image which sees itself and experiences itself in me.
Baader founds upon this process his notion of the magical, for he brings together, by paronomasia: to mirror, to admire, miracle, Magnet (magnet), mag, vermag (I love, I can). All that exists has a magical origin and proceeds from imagination—that is, from the entry of imagination into mirrors.
In different places in his work he specifies what he means by “mirror.” A mirror possesses in potency all possible forms. An image will reflect itself in it: it is desire (Begierde) which will create it, render it substantial (wesentlich). Our eye, itself mirror, is potentiality of all possible forms. The corporeal image which will reflect itself in it will engender there an interior, “magical” form, which in turn, if there is desire and not only simple visual perception, will “originate” (ist Ursache) the perceived object. Thus the image of the object initially exterior to me, and the interior form in me which this image has engendered, will “originate” each other mutually according to a process of reciprocity. What Baader calls “imagination” is thus a reciprocal engenderment, a magical formation (Gestaltung) which tends toward its own realization from the instant that the mediation of desire intervenes thanks to which the magical form passes from potency to act. All reality is indeed the result of imagination—that is, of this reciprocal engenderment which is the mediation without which subject and object remain separated. Imagination is the entry of the will into a mirror; henceforth, on the divine plane, what the Hebrews call Sophia, the Hindus Maya, the Greeks Idea, corresponds to the same concept of “reflection” (Spiegelung; speculatio): Böhme said that God “imagines” in the Sophia. And on the human plane I am also the mirror in which God looks and through which at the same time the dark region covets me. I can then respond to the regard—to the imagination—of God, or to that of the dark forces. In contemplating—in imagining—the Glory of the Lord who regards us—imagines us—we are transformed into him. For to imagine, or to desire, in something, is to give oneself to that in which one enters. One forms oneself in the image of what one can look at, of what one loves, of whom one loves, which renders love and engenderment possible. This “plastic power” which is imagination thus acts not only upon the external world to form or transform it, it modifies ourselves magically.
Such a conception of the creative image naturally has great consequences on the cosmic plane. Baader subscribes to the Böhmean idea according to which, by virtue of the “law of reflection,” two entities know each other, and create something new from this mutual knowledge, only if they “enter” each into a mirror which is superior to them, which surpasses them—a third mirror, therefore, which adds itself to those of the two entities but of which they will depend. Always concerned to make hierarchies intervene, Baader establishes one between the two initial entities. Thus the man before the fall had to be the corporeal bearer (leibhaft) of the image of God, his mirror, to communicate to all Nature the divine light which he received. Nature was therefore itself the mirror of man; although it was also that of God, it had need of that of man. Original Adam entered into this Nature, into all creatures situated beneath him, to find himself in them as in a mirror by the projection of his power into them. This active projection is a Fiat which delivers from its “daedalic” form the perceived form, confers upon it a sense, a direction, a consistency. Thus, to the passive or reactive imagination of man in God there had to correspond his active imagination in the (in die) Nature, the very foundation of his original magical powers. It was a matter for Adam of serving at once as mediator between God and created Nature, and as prison to demons. Man fell in his turn but he has conserved at least in potency a part of his lost powers, and Nature itself, as Saint Paul says (Romans, VIII, 19-22), still awaits from man its…
Such is the process of what Baader calls imagination, or Inbildung, or again Einbildung als Hineinbildung. The prefixes In, Ein, Hinein, permit him to posit the synonymy of imagination and information, of Ein-bildung and In-bildung, for it is indeed a matter of “formation within,” for thinking as for non-thinking creatures: all have their imaginativum, for the “desiring imagination” (imaginierende Begierde) exists everywhere, not only in God, in man, or in animal: all Nature is nothing but Imaginieren and Begehren. For example the conjunction of the “formative imagining instinct” (imaginierender Bildungstrieb) of a star with that of the earth produces a spiritual substance, an idea formatrix, capable of modifying the elements of the earth. Baader sees the effects of this formative, creative, and plastic power which is imagination even in talismans, for they confine, enclose, the signature of the spirit of which they are like the organic body. Magical objects, in the common sense of the term, are the result of this faculty. To imagine, or “to act per imaginent.”
Every being bears within itself the image of that which is superior to it; by means of this image the second possesses the first as its own organ or “name-bearer,” and the dependence of the inferior upon the superior takes place by the intermediary of an Inbildung of the superior in the inferior. If it is the superior which depends upon the inferior, we will have to do with an abnormal, monstrous and yet living Inbildung, a spiritual substance certainly but not necessarily intelligent, which Paracelsus and then Böhme called an evestre and which after death torments us (turbiren) by holding us far from the region of light; it is the result of a derogated imagination. At bottom, Adam’s fall created a gigantic evestre of which our present state bears the mark. It always remains possible, alas, to engender by imagination, in a region lower than myself, such a spiritual substance, just as the child of a noble father and a common mother will always be nobler than the mother and will not equal the father.Let us therefore watch over this queen of faculties: it is easier to avoid the magical marriage which engenders an evestre than to kill the latter once conceived, as it is still more difficult to rid oneself of a child than to have oneself aborted.
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