There are twin Gates of Sleep. One, they say, is made
of horn, and lets true visions pass through easily.
The other gleams with complex work in ivory,
but through it shades send lying visions to the light.
Anchises and the Sibyl brought Aeneas
to this gate and sent him through. He hurried
along the coastline to Caieta’s harbor
and cast anchor. The sterns rested on the shore. (Aeneid VI.893-901, trans. Bartsch)1
This October has been devoted to articles on “spirit and the imagination.” In the first, I considered the “Vehicle of the Soul,” specifically, Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions about the astral body. In the second, “Realms Imaginal,” I considered Ibn Arabi’s understanding of the barzakh in conversation with South Asian philosophy on the topic of imagination’s role in epistemology and the corresponding ontological status of imagined representations. In both of these, we saw that the questions involved concerning spirit and the imagination provide something of a bridge (let’s say it’s made of rainbow, or even emerald, if you like) between metaphysics, psychology, and epistemology, such that we cannot successfully move from how we know what we know to who it is we are that know to what it is we know about without having some kind of cohesive understanding of our imaginal powers and of the imaginal landscapes within which we exercise them. Then, finally, I hinted at the end that this would take us straight into the question of dreams and dreaming, and the strange median they inhabit between the real and the unreal.
Let us recall briefly the major elements of the doctrine of the soul’s pneumatic vehicle in this tradition. Plato is the first to speak in this way, in Timaeus 41d-e, 69c-d, and Phaedrus 246a and 247b.2 Aristotle defines πνεῦμα as “the substrate of the lower, irrational parts of the soul, comparable in its fine substance to the ‘element of the stars’”3 in De generatione animalium 736b-737ac. Later Middle and Neoplatonists, especially after the introduction and adoption of the Chaldaean Oracles as divine revelation, would combine these views to create their notion of the soul’s “chariot” as a pneumatic sheath around the pure, incorporeal life-force and its noetic core. By the time of Synesius of Cyrene in the fifth century CE, a Neoplatonist and Christian bishop, “the pneuma is essentially…an intermediary substance between the soul and the material body: a ‘no man’s land between the irrational and the rational, between the incorporeal and corporeal’. As the ‘first body of the soul’, it mediates also between the intellectual activity of the soul and the senses of the body as the κοινότατον αἰσθητήριον (‘the most common organ of sense’), a basic and perfect organ of perception.”4 The pneuma is in other words the organ or substance more responsible for providing unified sensation, that which “perceives as a whole, in a unitary manner,” as the “first body” (Synesius, De insomniis 135D) or “divine body” (140D). For Synesius, this is an essential component of the human person that resolves a variety of ambiguities in Plato himself, such as “Platonic philosophoumena which seem to imply a materiality of the soul, e.g. spatial movement in the cosmos, or the experience of purification and pnunishment, both of which are key elements of the Platonic and Plutarchean myths.”5 The pneuma’s levity and agility or gross materiality, just as in the Corpus Hermeticum, is reflective of the soul’s moral inclination.
What is interesting, perhaps unique about Synesius is his use of the pneumatic or astral vehicle of the soul specifically to think about phantasia and dreams. The interpretation of dreams has a long prehistory in Greek thought, inclusive of Antiphon, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Philo of Alexandria, Artemidorus, and Aelius Aristides.6 In general, there is a turn from the Classical to the Hellenistic era in the appreciation of the possibility of divine involvement in dreams, with denial from Plato and Aristotle being succeeded by affirmation of the promonitory and ominous value of dreams by the Stoics, who “consider prophetic visions a divine gift—a means through which the gods themselves send their forewarnings.”7 This is a democratic power: “diviniation by dreams was held to be a public domain, open to everyone regardless of his personal background. The assumption of divine benevolence towards mankind is part of the larger concept of an ‘affinity of all things’ (συμπάθεια τῶν ὅλων), in which the world is conceived of as a unified organism with mutually interrelated parts, including the gods themselves.”8 Stoic positivity about dreams, together with their scriptural warrant, accounts for Philo’s attitude towards dreams, which may have been derived straight from Posidonius: dreams are either “1) god-sent, 2) of both divine and human origin, and 3) mere products of the human soul,”9 differentiable largely on the basis of the moral quality of the dreamer.
It is this Stoic positivity that is reflected in Middle and Late Platonic attitudes towards dream divination, especially Synesius’s enthusiasm. Synesius recommended ἐπινυκτίδες, better known as ἐφημερίδες, “dream-journals”; and in these, “As a consequence of his esteem for nocturnal φαντασία, Synesius’s expectations concerning a faithful rendering of dreams are extraordinarily high, and he considers it a literary challenge of its own kind to convey in words their complicated train of images.”10 For Synesius, “the close contact with the intelligible—συνάψαι τῷ νοητῷ—[is] the supreme scope of divination by dreams.”11
However, that “close contact with the intelligible” is conveyed exclusively through φαντασία, “the imagination” itself, and the φαντάσματα, the “appearances” that our senses behold. Perhaps in common with the history of thought on dreams, imagination also has a long history in Greco-Roman philosophy and rhetoric. Plato speaks about it in Sophist 235c-236c, as a kind of image-making that produces appearance rather than strict likeness, with a negative connotation attatched to the former; later, Plato’s Stranger clarifies in 264b that it is a mixture of “perception” and “opinion.” In Philebus 38b-39c and 40a, “imagination” has a distinctively deceptive, negative tone. In Timaeus 70d-72d, it is the lowest, appetitive aspect of the soul that has a role to play in imagination, but it is also, not insignificantly, the liver which has the power of divination. Aristotle qualifies Plato’s attitude in De anima 429a1-2 by positing imagination as a natural consequence of sensation and the mediation between sensation and thought. We spoke a bit about imagination in Plotinus in the last issue, but one thing I failed to mention is that in Enneads 4.3.30 Plotinus makes a distinction between the lower imagination associated with sensation and the higher imagination associated with cognition; Porphyry does not reflect this but opts for an Aristotelian imagination in Sententiae 43.54.18-56.15. But Porphyry does think that “demons take shape by representing the imprints, or reflections, of their phantasia on their soul-vehicles.”12 Longinus, in On the Sublime 15.1, talks about phantasia in the sense of a power of speculative or creative imagination as a “recent” coinage; for Longinus, its chief use is its power to psychagogically enrapture the audience in the speech: “the orator who is most effective in moving his audience will be the one who has a good stock of what the Greeks call φαντασίαι and the Romans call visiones, by means of which we can see in our minds things which are not actually present.”13 So the ἐνάργεια, the “vividness” or veridical credibility of dreams, is to be found in the degree to which the astral body is well suited to the imagination, which is in turn related in some sense to the moral alignment of the soul (to draw an analogy from oratory, one might call this the ethos of the imagination as the rudder between its logos and its pathos). But it is in Synesius first that we get “phantasia as a special, ‘holier’ form of perception (ἱερώτερον…γένος αἰσθήσεως 134C),” since “it is by means of phantasia that we have contact with gods,” including by prophecy, of which dreams are the privileged mode of delivery.14 For Synesius, “dreams can open the way to the most perfect visions of reality (τὰς τελεώτατας τῶν ὄντων ἐποψίας) and conjunction with the intelligible (συνάψαι τῷ νοητῷ),” with different pneumata in the different parts of the body keyed to the imaginative exploration of different things, some intelligible, some material, some past, some present, and some future.15 Finally, for Synesius, the fantastic kind of consciousness represented by dreams can have both a physical effect on our bodies and a moral effect on our souls, and the experiences of dreams become in turn the material that we develop in rhetoric and the arts. Most interestingly, “By 145D he is starting to make some explicit connections between dream experiences and rhetorical education, suggesting that the fable or μῦθος, in which animals can talk, derives from the experience of dreams, and urging his readers to record their dreams not only in order to develop their power of prophecy but also to improve their writing style.”16
It is here that the deep ambivalence of dreams and dreamlike states of consciousness is rediscovered on the far side of trying to take them seriously as a genuine realm of awareness, accessed by the soul’s pneumatic or astral body and its imaginative faculty along the concurrent interconnections of the sympathetic cosmos. The divinatory power of dreams is a potency that, when unactualized or only partly actualized, can result in a reflection of the soul’s own state back to itself or of the soul’s experiences in the body, including the soul’s own hopes and aspirations, in a way that can be entrapping and delusional; and even if something of a possible future does make its psychic way along to impress upon the astral body, it can easily be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or misapplied by the soul. There is a sense in which the soul is co-creating the phantasia, the appearance itself, in the act of fantasizing: something is both appearing (in the active voice) and being perceived (in the passive), or rather imaging and being imagined, and this is not other than what poiesis, of the literary and artistic kind, is in a more disciplined setting. It is for that reason that the ivory gate of false dreams is one with ornate carvings upon it, that bears the marks of artisanship and therefore of poiesis: the implied ekphrasis is meant to suggest to us that poetry itself, myth itself, is the means by which the “false visions” of the glorious future ascend to the world of the living, such that what is not genuine divination of either the scrying or the prognosticative type may still find its place among the living through fiction. For Vergil, that false dream of the glorious future of the dead Trojans as the famous Romans culminating in the pax Augusta is a vision that can only live among the waking in the form of poetry, his poetry.
Carl Jung would have found much to appreciate in Synesius and the Middle and Late Platonic tradition that he operated from within, including but not limited to the notion that myth is narrativized dreamwork and that dreamwork itself is an ordinary and indispensable daily praxis of the would-be psychologist (who, for Jung, was in fact philosopher, priest, and wizard to boot), and the notion that dreams reflect at least in part the internal states of the dreamer in a projected, symbolic form that the dreamer must practice becoming more attuned to, more “conscious” of. Jung would also have found the connection between dreaming and day-dreaming, the latter of which is also invoked in art and oratory, to be a most pertinent observation, per his practice and advice about Active Imagination. In Synesian terms, all such phantasiai, bidden or unbidden, lucid or opaque, are nothing more or less than the travels of the soul in its astral chariot, and may indeed be thought some degree of exercise the more consciously and intentionally one engages in them. Likewise, for Jung, “individuation”—his term for the integration but not absorption of Self and ego with mediating archetypes—is really a kind of intentional discipline of the mind to reconnect with the unconscious and to sustain internal dialogue between the Self as the pure encompassing infinity of one’s consciousness, the archetypes as those forms which radiate from within the Self and make themselves known in fantasy and feeling, and the rationally discursive ego. But what is perhaps missing from Jung (and I say perhaps because Jung wavers between insisting that he is doing empirical science and more or less engaging in something like pure wizardry) is Synesius’s holistic cosmology in which the imagination is something like a realm where the intelligible takes on aspects that we associate with sensation and the sensible becomes cognizable, which is navigated by the use of the soul’s astral or pneumatic vehicle. To be clear, I think Jung does this kind of thing (especially in the Red Book), but I do not think that Jung intentionally supplies the metaphysical vocabulary necessary to be able to integrate such a thing into one’s actual worldview, which is arguably where it is more desperately needed.
We need a language of the imagination and of dreams that is less agonistic (and agonized) than what has become standard in the West. We are accustomed to dismissing the “imaginary” as false, less than real, and therefore without value, but in doing so we fail to qualify what we mean by real and forfeit also the deep value of the poetic and the artistic as a way of bringing to birth in the world that which is not corporeally present in nature but which can be imagined by those who are, as Synesius would say, close to the “most perfect visions of reality.” To cut Synesius with Ibn Arabi and our writers in the Corpus Hermeticum, I would say that art and poetry as seen from the perspective of Neoplatonism’s doctrines of the subtle body and the imagination are nothing less than a sacred calling (for Synesius, at least, imagination is itself a “holier” epistemic source), and even a kind of theurgy, a cooperation with the divine powers in the universe to bring about change both in the human soul and in the universe at large. Poetry is a kind of sympathetic magic at least to the degree that prayers are spells: human effort with words to change first the soul of the reader and then the reader’s actual experience of the world, or imagination, by means of those words. In antiquity this was called ψυχαγωγία, and it is the most basic form of magic there is, intrinsic to both the poetic gift of the Muse as well as to the oratorical gift inspired by Mercury, whom Lewis called “lord of language.” In Roman Comedy, this is the specialty of the servus callidens, the clever slave character who is often writing the play in real time as the comedy unfolds. Mercury, for example, says in the prologue of Plautus’s Amphitruo that he will change the tragedy into a comedy using all the same words by divine power (quid? contraxistis frontem, quia tragoediam / dixi futuram hanc? deus sum, commutavero. / eandem hanc, si voltis, faciam ex tragoedia / comoedia ut sit omnibus isdem vorsibus; Amph. 52-55), making the first tragicomedy (tragicomoedia; 59). Pseudolus, likewise, in the play that bears his name, says that “as though a poet, when he takes tablets to himself, / asks what is nowhere among people, nevertheless will find it, / makes that thing like the truth, which is a lie, / now I will become a poet,” “writing” so to speak the remainder of the play to fulfill his plot (sed quasi poeta, tabulas cum cepit sibi, / quaerit quod nusquamst gentium, reperit tamen, / facit illud veri simile, quod mendacium est, / nunc ego poeta fiam; Pseud. 401-404). And this is psychagogy insofar as what Pseudolus proceeds to do in the remainder of the play is quite a bit of talking, by which he changes minds and swindles the money he needs to win his bet with his master (and make a buck off him as well). The work of poetry is nothing less than the work of the magician: using language to help the mind imagine anew, sometimes for nefarious ends. This is surely at least part of why mageia, associated with phantasia, was in antiquity sometimes reduced to mere trickery, illusion whether of speech or sight; it is all but certainly why both messages, lying and truthful, as well as magic are under the purview of Mercury.
Yet as we all know well, the things we encounter in the imagination, whether inspired by the intentional poiesis of others or not, can in some sense be more true for their apparent, material falsehoods than can barren facts. Is this not the point of mythos as a genre: that if we take it ad litteram, it will lead us to believe logical and moral absurdities, but if we take it as the concealment of forms under sensory appearances that are less than literally or concretely true, we will find by allegory a path of ascent (anagogē)? Consider the complete emotional devastation that can come with the conclusion of a dream: I mean a genuinely veridical dream, the sort that one totally loses one’s self in and forgets all sense of its being a dream, unable even to disassociate from it at the level of its audiovisual and tactile qualities because of how lifelike they are. Consider now the enlightenment that follows when one can think through what such a dream might mean, especially in the psychological sense.
But what of the ontological sense? Several of the writers that we have here engaged believe in the imagination as in some way a genuine realm, a cosmic or transcosmic reality in which the soul by its astral body may travel to places both that are and are not. Hermetically we might say that in doing so the soul does nothing less than surf the waves of the endless ocean of God’s Mind, in which all the divine ideas swim like so many creatures of the abyss. So is what the psychonaut (literally, the psychonautēs, a “soul-sailor”) sees in this divine flux of archetypes and images and lives and worlds “real?” And how could we know?
I will save a full exploration of that question for the next and final post in this short series, but I might close this particular account by asking why we might wish or not wish our dreams to be real in the first place. It depends in every instance on the quality of one’s astral or imaginal vision, which Synesius would tell us is dependent on the quality of one’s soul; but this is assuming a one-to-one correspondence of good and evil that, I think, most of us would find a bit lacking in explanatory power for our experiences of the world. Good people suffer from bad dreams all the time. Many bad people, or at least vain people, experience amazing dreams. “Dreamer” can be a pejorative, as it is in Deuteronomy (Deut 13:1); as I have written before, it is perfectly possible to be so dreamstricken, to be so cosmically minded that one is no earthly good, absolutely deprived of the sensory vulnerability to the necessities of ordinary waking consciousness, consumed by that unconscious abyss of darkness that is the God’s mask, veiling the ocean of light like the tempest winds unleashed by Aeolus (Incubuere mari totumque a sedibus imis / una Eurusque Notusque ruunt creberque procellis / Africus et vastos volvunt ad litora fluctus; Aeneid I.84-86). And if we are not careful, like the Trojan sailors, we may find that what follows our setting out into the open waters of this Tyrrhenian barzakh is a great shouting of men and screeching of ropes (insequitur clamorque virum stridorque rudentum; l. 87). The underworld is a dangerous place, in which we cannot always trust what we see, and some things can only be taken back with us as poetry, not as divination: the ivory gate, on the one hand, should foster in us a sense of the inscrutability and incredibility of much of what we might experience in the otherworld, at least by the standards we use to know, but it should also inspire in us a poetic impulse to use that which we see in the construction of the soul’s imaginal chariot. We might not want all our dreams to be true in the sense of somewhere embodied, and we might not even want all our dreams to become parts of our own soul-ship on the astral sea, whether those ships are constructed from the Dodonian oak planks of prophecy like the Argo or the fingernails of the damned shades we behold flitting about the aetheric waters like the Naglfar. But we have no choice about whether or not to build such a ship, or such a chariot; it is happening all the time, awake and asleep, whether we wish it to or not, and it so we have a responsibility each of us to take active charge in its construction, to create by our moral inclinations and our intellective wills those imaginal bodies by which we know and are known in the world.
At the purely pragmatic level the necessity of doing so ought to be obvious to everyone who has ever had to perform menial labor for a living, especially if one has had to do a lot of it and in brutal conditions, as I and most of my family members have. In such conditions holding on to a cultivated humanity, a life of the heart and mind that is alive and well to the world of dreams and imagination, to the cosmic and even transcosmic reaches of the soul while the body digs a ditch or makes a calzone or cares for a dying patient, is a major priority. I do not mean to suggest that one cannot or should not find illumination in the practice of deep presence to the present moment and the current activity: again, infinity can become an idol when we treat it as the enemy of the finite. But I do mean to say that there is an inner wellspring of meaning that can only emerge from an imaginal spirituality and a spiritualized imagination that combats drudgery and makes itself especially known to us in dreams, daydreams, and poiesis of every kind. This is the real crime that is at the heart of the modern turn against the humanities and of the internal dissolution of the humanities as an integrated set of disciplines: the point of a liberal arts education, as Prospero knew, was that by coming to know the contours of the human spirit one then ascended thereby to the inner logic and laws that govern the cosmos, making one master not only of one’s self but of one’s world. This is the vocation of the true magician in the Hermeticist or Renaissance sense, which is to say, of a kind of call to Platonic ascent or transcendence. We willingly forfeit the reaches of the human experience, or restrict them to the luckiest-born among us, to our peril. And yet beyond this pragmatism there lingers a haunting question, once asked by Prospero of Miranda: “how is it / That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” (Tempest I.2.60-62).
Shadi Bartsch includes the following explanatory footnote on how to understand these lines, which follow Aeneas’s vision in the underworld of the souls of the dead Trojans who will by the metempsychotic wheel of time become the famous Romans of the future: “Aeneas’s departure through the gate of false visions, right after he has seen the glorious future of Rome, has yet to be explained to anyone’s satisfaction. One attempt to mitigate the shock value of this ending to Book 6 is to suggest that because Aeneas is not a shade (not dead), the gate’s falsity does not reflect on him. But why did Vergil choose this gate in the first place? What does it mean that this gate is a work of art, like the poem itself?” Vergil, Aeneid, trans. Shadi Bartsch (New York: Random House, 2021), 317. Bartsch is the English translator of Vergil par excellence at the moment, so distinguished by her desire to render Vergil’s Latin as literally as possible. For the interested, the Latin text reads: Sunt geminae Somni portae, quarum altera fertur / cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris, / altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto, / sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia manes. / His ibi tum natum Anchises unaque Sibyllam / prosequitur dictis portaque emittit eburna; / ille viam secat ad naves sociosque revisit. See also Urania Molyviati-Toptsis, “Sed Falsa Ad Caelum Mittunt Insomnia Manes (Aeneid 6.896),” The American Journal of Philology 116 (1995): 639-652.
Ti. 41d-e: συστήσας δὲ τὸ πᾶν διεῖλεν ψυχὰς ἰσαρίθμους τοῖς ἄστροις, ἔνειμέν θ’ ἑκάστην πρὸς ἕκαστον, καὶ ἐμβιβάσας ὡς ἐς ὄχημα τὴν τοῦ παντὸς φύσιν ἔδειξεν; Ti. 69c-d: τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο θνητὸν σῶμα αὐτη περιετόρνευσαν ὄχημα τε πᾶν τὸ σῶμα ἔδοσαν ἄλλο τε εἶδος ἐν αὐτῷ ψυχῆς προσῳκοδόμουν τὸ θνητόν, δεινὰ καὶ ἀναγκαῖα ἐν ἑαυτῷ παθήματα ἔχον; Phaedrus 247b also uses the language of ὄχημα. See Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler, “Synesius and the Pneumatic Vehicle of the Soul in Early Neoplatonism,” 125-156 in On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insomniis, ed. Donald A. Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
Tanaseanu-Döbler, “Synesius and the Pneumatic Vehicle of the Soul in Early Neoplatonism,” 125-126.
Tanaseanu-Döbler, “Synesius and the Pneumatic Vehicle of the Soul in Early Neoplatonism,” 128-129.
Tanaseanu-Döbler, “Synesius and the Pneumatic Vehicle of the Soul in Early Neoplatonism,” 129.
Ursula Bittrich, “Outline of a General History of Speculation about Dreams,” 71-96 in On Prophecy, Dreams, and Human Imagination.
Bittrich, “Outline of a General History of Speculation about Dreams,” 78.
Bittrich, “Outline of a General History of Speculation about Dreams,” 79.
Bittrich, “Outline of a General History of Speculation about Dreams,” 80.
Bittrich, “Outline of a General History of Speculation about Dreams,” 85.
Bittrich, “Outline of a General History of Speculation about Dreams,” 87.
See Anne Shepherd, “Phantasia in De insomniis,” in On Prophecy, Dreams, and Human Imagination, 101; all of the citations in this paragraph are from Shepherd.
Shepherd, “Phantasia in De insomniis,” 101.
Shepherd, “Phantasia in De insomniis,” 102.
Shepherd, “Phantasia in De insomniis,” 102ff.
Shepherd, “Phantasia in De insomniis,” 110.
Love hearing you talk about dreams . Do you think that In some dreams, we are genuinely traveling to other real spiritual realms? That all of them are actually among the infinite existing worlds? I hope I’m not grossly misunderstanding you here because it sounds very cool haha.
David, I know this comment is off-topic, but I hope you'll forgive me. I'm looking for a tutor to work with my daughter on her Ancient Greek. Do you offer private tutoring? Or do you have a colleague who might interested in doing so? She's a high-school junior with five years of Latin, but who has just started Ancient Greek.