The Lost Language of Imagination

Essay | Part 1 - "People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within."

This article is part of my series The Lost Language of Imagination tracking imagination through human history, from the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic, into the poetics of Islamic mysticism, the shamanistic nature of the British Romantic era, and the poetry of Spanish Surrealism. You can find the full series under the tab: Imagination and the Imaginal Realm.

Papilla Estelar, 1958, Remedios Varo

Listen to this essay via audio

The imagination is an animal that I have been tracking for some time now. I believe it to be the bridge that connects the material world with the divine. To be clear, when I say “divine”, I mean an invisible realm that is acknowledged cross-culturally by both pre-monotheistic peoples and within institutional religion, and which can be interacted with in order to access a deeper wisdom.

I propose that approaching the imagination as a type of lost language that can be relearnt in order to better interact with our inner and outer worlds may ultimately move us towards re-balancing the social scales that are overly weighted towards literal, one-sided, unilateral thinking. The danger of this type of thought is the construction of a worldview that is rooted in a dogma enforced and in favour of an elite few. I suggest that we can begin to re-learn the language of the imagination first and foremost by de-literalising it, a theory I draw from the twentieth-century French theosopher Henry Corbin, and whose work holds one of the primary pillars of my own cosmology. As does that of Ted Hughes, who understood our imaginative, visionary capacities to be our primary faculty. He writes:

The character of great works is exactly this: that in them the full presence of the inner world combines with and is reconciled to the full presence of the outer world . . . The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine. That is only a way of saying that it is the faculty without which humanity cannot really exist. It can be called religious or visionary. More essentially, it is imagination which embraces both outer and inner worlds in a creative spirit.¹

My background is in both academia and the study and practice of mystical traditions, and my work over the past decade has been to find a bridge between them. Essentially, to engage with the world, both inner and outer, in a holistic way that seeks wisdom through the mind and the heart, and bridges the gap between experiential and intellectual knowledge, so that the wisdom of the mystic stops being dismissed by the academic as lacking in quantifiable evidence, and inversely, academic scholarship is integrated into spiritual wisdom so as to fortify it and make it more robust. This premise forms the foundation and essence of all of my work. I believe that cultivating an approach to the world that is rooted in both intellectual and experiential ways of knowing will lead to a wisdom that can assist us in rebalancing the scales of western society.

Last year I undertook a master’s degree in the Poetics of Imagination with storyteller Martin Shaw and poet Alice Oswald to delve deeper into the study of the imagination. The “poetics of imagination” was not a name that stuck in most of my friends’ or family’s minds, and no doubt inspired more questions than it did answers. 

The word poetics comes from “poiesis”, which means “to make” in ancient Greek. In other words, we were studying the makings of the imagination. Essentially, I found myself grappling with two root questions: what is the imagination? And why does it matter?

Martin Shaw put it this way: when we imagine, we imagine in story. I understand that it is from these stories that we create a reality, be it a relational experience, a future prospect, or an entire culture. The stories we tell shape our reality. Political ideologies will tell us stories to “other” anything that does not serve a particular agenda. We “other” religions, belief systems, sexual orientation, skin colour and so-called disabilities… The stories we tell create worlds. They shape identities. They can divide or they can unite. They destroy and they create. Social contexts cannot be separated from what we imagine. Everything exists because it was once imagined.

“And then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”, 1953, Eleonora Carrington

After years of trying to understand the predicament of the modern western world, I came to the foot of this prospect: if we imagined ourselves into the state we are in, then surely we can imagine ourselves out of it. This may seem overly simplistic, but I do think that our task is to find a thread of simplicity in the tangled web the western world has been stuck in for some five millennia, since we began to give our gods human form and organise them into a hierarchical pantheon with a singular all-powerful male deity that was then mirrored in a new rising social structure and that did away with an egalitarian, matrifocal, relatively peaceful, life-affirming culture and became patriarchal, elitist, warring and venerating a single male-god head. For more on the backstory of European ancient history, see my piece on the Neolithic peoples of the Balkans titled Two Thousand Years of Peace.

By re-learning the language of the imagination, we might be able to move beyond the confines of modern western thought that is rooted in dogma - let’s remember here that the western educational system was originally created by the clergy to train new monks - and open our inner eye to a richness and multi-layered cosmology that is simply not accessible to us unless we dare to step over the edge of literal thinking. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her collection of essays, ‘People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.’² 

De-literalising the Imagination

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.

All other wars are subsumed in it.

            […]

There is no way out of the spiritual battle

There is no way to avoid taking sides

There is no way you can not have a poetics

no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making

or not making your world

you have a poetics: you step into the world

like a suit of readymade clothes.

[…]

            the war is the war for the human

            imagination

            and no one can fight it but you / and no one can

            fight it

                for you.

Diane di Prima, from "Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems"³

“Nightmakers”, Christian Schloe

Literalism has waged war on the imagination since direct religious experience first began to be institutionalised some five thousand years ago. Dogmatic thought arose to support a particular political ideology and sought to implement principles that were presented as uncontestedly true. This resulted in the dismissal of the rich and infinite spectrum of inner experience that was once based on spiritual agency. Direct experience of the divine was reserved for a self-designated authority as Europe moved out of the polytheistic and oral cultures of the Neolithic and into the Bronze and Iron Ages where we begin to see writing used as a weapon rather than a tool. By the time we entered the Middle Ages, divinity was accessible only through religious scripture, and therefore only accessible to the wealthy and the clergy - the rest of the population being, for the most part, illiterate. Any communion with the divine that did not go through the religious elite became heretical and punishable by death. The Inquisition of the eleventh century saw to it that all belief systems that were not in line with the Catholic Church were suppressed and, during roughly seven hundred years, systematically annihilated them with such success that we have forgotten our pre-Christian heritage all together.

Institutionalised religion is based on the literal interpretation of religious texts. It rejects personal inner experience and, as a result, the imagination, which is the faculty through which we can access the divine. The imagination is now often dismissed as synonymous with fantasy, make-believe and child’s play. And beside the fort of monotheistic religion, it doesn’t really stand a chance.

To invoke the imagination and acknowledge it as a valid inner experience is a revolutionary act. It calls for a new interpretation of the world, one that is metaphorical rather than literal and that can perceive layers of meaning, a full spectrum of possibility between the black and white poles of literal, one-sided thinking.

Henry Corbin saw this struggle to de-literalise the imagination as nothing less than the battle for the soul of the world. As poet Diane di Prima wrote in the poem above, ‘all wars are subsumed’ in the war against the imagination.

If we are to heal the rifts in the fabric of ourselves and our world, we need to re-learn what I refer to here as the lost language of the imagination. As I mentioned earlier on, I am currently writing a collection of essays on the imagination within different worldviews and schools of thought that understood its importance and the consequence of its dismissal. Over the following weeks I will share some of these pieces, beginning with the Romantic Movement of nineteenth-century Britain.

I will pause for today with a few more words from di Prima’s poem,

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance

it is a war for this world, to keep it

a vale of soul-making

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power

and it is bitter as death

bring your self home to yourself, enter the garden

the guy at the gate with the flaming sword is yourself.

1. Ted Hughes, ‘Myth and Education’, Winter Pollen, pp. 150-1.

2. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination.

3. Diane di Prima, “Rant,” in Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2: From Postwar to Millennium, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 449-50.