The Vehicle of the Soul

On Spirit and Imagination

“This discourse I shall also deliver to you in full, O Tat,” says Hermes Trismegistus in Corpus Hermeticum V.1,

lest you go uninitiated in the mysteries of the god who is greater than any name. You must understand how something that seems invisible to the multitude will become entirely visible to you. Actually, if it were <not> invisible, it would not <always> be. Everything seen has been begotten because at some point it came to be seen. But the invisible always is, and because it always is, it does not need to come to be seen. Also, while remaining invisible because it always is, it makes all other things visible. The very entity that makes visibility does not make itself visible; what <begets> is not itself begotten; what presents images of everything <is not> present to the imagination. For there is imagination only of things begotten. Coming to be is nothing but imagination. Clearly, the one who alone is unbegotten is also unimagined and invisible, but in presenting images of all things he is seen through all of them and in all of them; he is seen especially by those whom he wished to see him.

Hermes goes on later to suggest that the cosmic images through which God is imaged are in some sense inescapable emanations of the Godhead:

If you force me to say something still more daring, it is his essence to be pregnant with all things and to make them. As it is impossible for anything to be produced without a maker, so also is it impossible for this maker [not] to exist always unless he is always making everything in heaven, in the air, on earth, in the deep, in every part of the cosmos, in every part of the universe, in what is and in what is not. For there is nothing in all the cosmos that he is not. He is himself the things that are and those that are not. Those that are he has made visible; those that are not he holds within him. This is the god who is greater than any name; this is the god invisible and entirely visible. This god who is evident to the eyes may be seen in the mind. He is bodiless and many-bodied; or, rather, he is all-bodied. There is nothing that he is not, for he also is all that is, and this is why he has all names, because they are of one father, and this is why he has no name, because he is father of them all…All is within you; all comes from you. You give everything and take nothing. For you have it all, and there is nothing that you do not have…[The matter composed of the finest particles is air, but air is soul, soul is mind, and mind is god] (V.9-10).¹

God as the endlessly generative and creative one is a theme in the Corpus. In Discourse X, we are told that “‘God’s activity is will, and his essence is to will all things to be. For what are god the father and the good but the being of all things and, of things that are no longer, at least the very substance of their existence’” (X.2). Indeed, “god the father is the good in that he <wills> all things to be” (X.3). Now, primary among the things which God creates are rational souls, as Hermes explains while explaining deification: “In the General Discourses did you not hear that all the souls whirled about in all the cosmos,” he says,

portioned out, as it were—come from the one soul of the all? Many are the changes of these souls, then, some toward a happier lot, others the opposite. The snake-like change into water creatures; the watery change into things of dry land; the dry-land souls change into winged things; the aerial into humans; and human beings, changing into daemons, possess the beginning of immortality, and so then they enter the troop of gods, which is really two troops, one wandering, the other fixed. And this is soul’s most perfect glory” (X.7-10).

Human souls must find this path of ascent in part by realizing their own method of being in the world as embodied beings: “A human soul is carried in this way: the mind is in the reason; the reason is in the soul; the soul is in the spirit; the spirit, passing through veins and arteries and blood, moves the living thing and, in a manner of speaking, bears it up” (X.13). Likewise, “god holds the cosmos, but the cosmos holds the human” (X.14). With this in mind, the soul must be careful: its communion with cosmos and god is commensurate with its not being pulled down into the lower affairs of the body, and with its capacity to soar aloft in the heavenly aether: “When the soul rises up to itself, the spirit is drawn into the blood, the soul into the spirit, but the mind, since it is divine by nature, becomes purified of its garments and takes on a fiery body, ranging about everywhere, leaving the soul to judgment and the justice it deserves” (X.16). This initially confuses Asclepius and Tat, Hermes’s students, who question how it could be possible given that “soul is the garment of the mind and spirit the garment of the soul”; Hermes answers:

In an earthy body occurs the combining of these garments, my son, for the mind cannot seat itself alone and naked in an earthy body. The earthy body cannot support so great an immortality, nor can so great a dignity endure defiling contact with a body subject to passion. Mind, therefore, has taken the soul as as shroud, and the soul, which is itself something divine, uses the spirit as a sort of armoring-servant. The spirit governs the living being (X.16-17).

So,

when the mind has got free of the earthy body, it immediately puts on its own tunic, a tunic of fire, in which it could not stay when in the earthy body….Mind, which is the most penetrating of all the divine thoughts, has for its body fire, the most penetrating of all the elements. And since mind is the craftsman of all beings, it uses fire as an instrument in its craftwork. The mind of all is the craftsman of all beings; the human mind is the craftsman only of the things that exist on earth. Since it is stripped of fire, the mind in humans is powerless to craft divine things because it is human in its habitation. (X.17-18)

Follow the logic here: while incarnate in an earthy body, the mind’s natural sheath of fire is diminished to the state of soul (air), then spirit (fiery air mixed with vapor), and finally into the earthy body itself; and with this diminution comes a corresponding depreciation of co-creative ability, since the mind does not have its appropriate vehicle (ochēma in Greek) with which to operate in taking that which is contained within the divine mind and making it visible; in its diminished state, the human mind crafts on the basis of that which is already visible, of which it can now perceive only a limited portion. But fret not: “The human soul—not every soul, that is, but only the reverent—is in a sense demonic and divine. Such a soul becomes wholly mind after getting free of the body and fighting the fight of reverence” (X.19). By implication, such a soul also puts on the full fiery chariot and operates freely with it. “The irreverent soul, however,” he goes on, “stays in its own essence, punishing itself, seeking an earthy body to enter—a human body, to be sure” (X.19). After and in between incarnations, “the soul is punished in this way: the mind, once it has become a demon, is directed to acquire a fiery body in order to serve god, and, having entered into the most irreverent soul, mind afflicts that soul with scourges of wrongdoing” (X.21). Mind punishes soul for its misdeeds in subsequent incarnations, but with the ultimate goal of having mind re-ascend to its heavenly heights and its fiery body. Along the scale of the universe, those beings more fiery and ascended in character are in charge of those below: “There is a community of souls: the souls of the gods commune with souls of humans, those of humans with souls of unreasoning things. The greater take charge of the lesser: gods of humans, humans of living things without reason, and god takes charge of them all. For he is greater than all of them, and all are less than he” (X.22). Moreover, “energies are like rays from god, natural forces like rays from the cosmos and learning like rays from mankind. Energies work through the cosmos and upon mankind through the natural rays of the cosmos, but natural forces work through the elements, and humans work through the arts and through learning. And this is the government of the universe, dependent from the nature of the one and spreading through the one mind” (X.22-23).

All of this is so far just good Platonism of the Middle and Late sort, which is to say dogmatic (as opposed to skeptical) Platonism joined with Aristotle and with the best ideas of the Stoics and the Rationalist and Galenic medical traditions. Platonism after Antiochus of Ascalon, the schismatic student of Philo of Larissa, last of the great skeptic scholarchs of the Academy, is inherently eclectic. But in the eleventh discourse, of Mind to Hermes, we get something about the relationship between God as the infinite Mind within which cosmos and humans subsist, as the Mind of their minds, and of the soul’s appropriate fiery body, which adds a distinctly Hermetic twist to the importance of imagination in particular. We are told that “god’s work is one thing only: to bring all into being—those that are coming to be, those that have once come to be, those that shall come to be. This is life, my dearest friend. This is the beautiful; this is the good; this is god” (XI.13). This constant act of creation, projected into a world of generation and decay, does indeed make for beings that are always coming to be and passing away; but “The cosmos is omniform: it does not have forms inserted in it but changes within itself,” and so we should not think of God as “formless” in that sense of privation, but in the sense that he too is “omniform,” the one who “reveals all structures through bodies” (XI.16). Hermes is getting at the mystery of divine infinity here and the way that it crosses the boundaries between the corporeal and the incorporeal: “All things are in god but not as lying in a place (for place is also body, and body is immobile, and what is lying somewhere has no movement); in incorporeal imagination things are located differently. Consider what encompasses all things, that nothing bounds the incorporeal, that nothing is quicker nor more powerful. Of all things, the incorporeal is the unbounded, the quickest and most powerful” (XI.18). In other words, God is omniform in the sense that he is every form and no form, as the incorporeal “place” where all forms reside; but a consequence of that is that the mind, which is derived from God, has by its power of imagination a capacity of qualified omnipresence and agility that are godlike. “Consider this for yourself,” mind says to Hermes:

command your soul to travel to India, and it will be there faster than your command. Command it to cross over to the ocean, and again it will quickly be there, not as having passed from place to place but simply as being there. Command it even to fly up to heaven, and it will not lack wings. Nothing will hinder it, not the fire of the sun, nor the aether, nor the swirl nor the bodies of the other stars. Cutting through them all, it will fly to the utmost body. But if you wish to break through the universe itself and look upon the things outside (if, indeed, there is anything outside the cosmos), it is within your power (XI.19).

It would not be unreasonable to call this a sort of power of astral projection. This is a power of phantasia, of imagination, but it is coupled with a genuine presence: the capacity of the mind to instantaneously behold or indwell a specific place at will, to cast one’s consciousness as far afield as one prefers. And this is a power that is, really, a developed capacity for communion with the divine. Because God has “everything—the cosmos, himself, <the> universe—like thoughts within himself,” our own mental power to explore the universe and what may exceed it is, mirabile dictu, analogous to traversing the mind of God. “[U]nless you can make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god,” Mind says:

like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable immensity, outleap all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will understand god. Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. Go higher than every height and lower than every depth. Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made…be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once—times, places, things, qualities, quantities—then you can understand god.’ (XI.20)

That this is only possible by a mind that is already exercising the soul in preparation for the fiery chariot by lifting its contemplation higher in virtue is implied by the fact that it is the one who “shut[s] your soul up in the body and abase it and say, ‘I understand nothing, I can do nothing; I fear the sea, I cannot go up to heaven; I do not know what I was, I do not know what I will be’” that cannot claim to know “what have you to do with god” (XI.21). This is also a logical consequence of the Hermetic cosmology: if “the finest of matter is air, the finest air is soul, the finest soul is mind and the finest mind is god. And god surrounds everything and permeates everything, while mind surrounds soul, soul surrounds air and air surrounds matter” (XII.14). Indeed, to travel with the mind is to travel nowhere other than in God: there’s simply nowhere else to travel. Or, conversely, our sensation and intellection of the things around us—including phantasiai, which have some kind of root in our sense impressions, while also being communicative of intelligible ideas, however obscured or difficult to understand—are collectively divine communication:

Through mind, then, every living thing is immortal, but most of all mankind, who is capable of receiving god and fit to keep company with him. With this living thing alone does god converse, at night through dreams and through omens by day, and through all of them he foretells the future, through birds, through entrails, through inspiration, through the oak tree, whereby mankind also professes to know what has been, what is at hand and what will be (XII.19).

Mankind is not limited to any particular region or element of the cosmos: it “uses them all—earth, water, air, fire” (XII.20). And in doing so, humanity grasps God, “who is energy and power, surrounds everything and permeates everything” (XII.20). There “is nothing where god is not, nothing beyond him” (XII.21), neither matter nor activity; “this is god, the all. But in the all there is nothing that he is not. But in the all there is nothing that he is not. Hence, neither magnitude nor place nor quality nor figure nor time has any bearing on god. For god is all. And the all permeates everything and surrounds everything” (XII.23). Of course, we are not ordinarily conscious of this: it is an ordinary consciousness of this that the religion of the Corpus seeks to engender. “My child,” Hermes says to Tat, “would that you, without sleep, had also passed out of yourself like those who dream in sleep” (XIII.4). Tat achieves this when he undergoes the decadal purification from zodiacal defilement prescribed by Hermes, and declares: “Father, I see the universe and I see myself in mind” (XIII.13).

Imagination is in other words a non-negotiably essential element of the spiritual life. Rooted in our bodily sensations and flowering in our mental intellections (or the other way around, with the kabbalistic roots in the heavens and the leafing fronds stretching down to earth), imagination is the way that God makes himself manifest to us. We typically use imagination to refer to the intermediary realm of the fantastic as something between sense perception and intellection: that realm of dream, of faerie, and of mental wandering, where the things we “perceive” are in some sense objects that we are cognizing and are not rooted, per se, in physical bodies in front of us; or, if they are the product of bodies of some kind making impressions on us, they are not bodies of the sort we’re familiar with and they’re not making impressions on the organs we’re used to. Hermes Trismegistus also, importantly, thinks of dreams as divine communication: the mundus imaginalis, as a realm of experience accessed as though interposed between the sensible and the intelligible, is a real world, a world we can only traverse in the vehicle of the soul most appropriate to the mind, and in which we will find ourselves hereafter.

Spiritus/pneuma in this intellectual climate in fact is the physical body by which mind, suffused completely in soul, traverses the cosmos imaginatively. This is an idea—the union of the Aristotelian/Stoic pneumatology with the Platonic concept of the soul’s ochēma, or “chariot”—that would go on to have a very long pedigree in the history of Western and Near Eastern philosophy. It occurs in different forms in Porphyry, Iamblichus, Synesius, and Proclus. It occurs in Ibn Arabi’s barzakh, which is a kind of liminal space between the pure spiritual intellect of God and the material world. It occurs in the Renaissance philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and the other Christian Hermeticists of his time, particularly those of magical inclination.² And while the world of ordinary consciousness that we explore by, say, the sciences (natural and social) is transparent to the faculty of imagination which is appropriate to this vehicle of the soul, that faculty and that astral body are also more obviously keyed to what a certain tradition of German philosophy would call Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, “the hidden ‘nocturnal’ realm of the occult, dreams, symbols, visions, and the spirits of the dead. One could gain access to this world not just by normal dreaming, but also by specific techniques for trance induction or alterations of consciousness[.]”³

That is to say, the imaginal body, the astral body, the spiritual body, the fiery vehicle of the mind, whatever one wants to call it, is the chariot by which one makes the trips to the various hells, heavens, and otherworlds that populate apocalyptic, mystical, poetic, and other kinds of visionary literature, and it is necessary to do so in the soul’s path of return (reditus) to God. To have one’s soul so suffused with mind, and one’s spiritual vehicle returned to its state of absolute fire, in this way, is tantamount, as Wouter Hanegraaf describes, to a kind of mania, a madness that exceeds the ordinary possibilities of rational awareness and leads to discursive aporia so as to generate a comprehensive mystical vision of reality. Thus Plato himself acknowledges in the Phaedrus: “Standing aside from the busy doings of mankind, and drawing nigh to the divine, the philosopher is rebuked by the multitude as being deranged, for they do not realize that he is full of God” (enthousiazōn; Phaed. 249d). A spiritual imagination is more than simply the power of the fantastic, though indulgence in phantasia turns out to be an important exercise of the spiritual potency for divine communion: it is an inspired vision of reality all at once and altogether, in which all of space and time is available to the consciousness of the viewer. (So, avoid prelest here: unless or until one can exercise one’s consciousness in such a way, one has not arrived; the ability to view numerous realities in dreams and the wandering of the waking mind is significant, but it is immature until one can, with perfect clarity, be aware with an instantaneous and unimpeded awareness, which is the skill only of a fully initiated and seasoned gnostic, and is in most respects an impractical one for the demands of the everyday life of the householder or the tzaddik.)

I invite the reader to think about three main ideas in considering this tradition and to contemplate especially these possibilities in view of the series I now undertake. The first is that the imagination is not a “false” perspective of reality, the way that it is often thought of by moderns, as something silly that needs to be repented of to get on with the serious business of life, but that it is in fact the whole arena of knowing and being known, at its most concretized (but also therefore stagnant) in the material world as we can perceive and measure it, at its most fluid (but also therefore most powerfully alive) in the higher psychic and spiritual realms that exist within God. The second is that therefore all acts of imagination, whether in trying to picture things we have seen and that we “know” “do exist” (that is, that have manifestation in the material world) or in trying to picture things that we have not seen and that we “know” “do not exist” (that is, that do not have manifestation in the material world), are in facts act of co-creation, sub-creation, or even theurgy: we are participating in the divine act of creating those things, insofar as God simply creates by knowing, and we, by knowing, are able to become vessels and cooperants (synergoi) with God’s creative activity. To draw an analogy from quantum physics: if to observe something is to freeze it in place, to coagulate the quicksilver pluralism of something’s existence into a single state, and therefore in some sense to create it as the thing we perceive, then the same is true imaginatively. And so, third, our acts of imagination, individual and collective, social and traditional, “religious” and “scientific” and “magical,” are in some sense to traverse the divine Mind within which all such things reside and to creatively bring those worlds into being. In this sense fiction is a kind of midwifery, in which we do in fact create the worlds of our imagination, co-creating them with God. At my most radically speculative, I want to suggest that this is only possible from within the broader Platonic metaphysics outlined above if, in fact, these other worlds really subsist in God—which is not to say that there is no sincere effort involved in the creative act, nor to deny any authorial imprint of the author in the construction of the alternative world, nor that the fictive world does not provide a metaphorical reflection of the real world back to the reader, because all such things are true, and even the “point” of fiction for the most part. So as the world grows auburn in the gloaming of the year, as the nights grow longer and the shadowed forests evoke our ancient fear, it seems a good time to think on the imagination and the worlds it opens up—especially those worlds that we explore through dark phantasia and through horror.

1. There is some dispute in the scholarly literature about where this bracketed sentence belongs in the Corpus. See the translation I have used here and throughout, Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); see 142. M. David Litwa recently suggested that there is a forthcoming translation that will outmode Copenhaver.

2. But how “Hermetic” were they? See Wouter Hanegraaff, “How Hermetic Was Renaissance Hermetism?” Aries 15 (2015): 179-209.

3. See Wouter Hanegraff, “The Great War of the Soul: Divine and Human Madness in Carl Gustav Jung’s Liber Novus,” 101-135 in Religion and Madness around 1900: Between Pathology and Self-Empowerment, ed. Lutz Greisiger, Alexander van der Haven, & Sebastian Schuler (Wurzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2017); quote is from 110.