I have timed this such that tomorrow will be All Hallow’s Eve, and this a fitting third-to-last entry in this month’s series “On Spirit and the Imagination.” To remind the reader, we have touched upon the following ideas: “The Vehicle of the Soul,” the ontological and epistemological significance of the imagination in “Realms Imaginal,” the importance of dreams and active imagination in “Gates of Horn and Ivory,” and the communicatio idiomatum between magic, art, culture, and destiny in “Spirits, As in a Dream, All Bound Up.” In this entry, I wish to talk about one end of the imaginal spectrum from which we draw in all such endeavors—what in a conversation with Mackenzie Amara I once described as the end of a “Psychic Katabasis,” a descent into the underworld of the soul. In the next entry, scheduled for All Saints’ Day in two-days’ time, I will speak about the more heavenly side of the imaginal realm, which one may reach in turn by “Psychic Anabasis.”
I ended the last article by suggesting that each person has what we might call a “magical vocation,” or at least a magical faculty, of operating in the imaginal realm with agency, and representing what one finds there in art and ritual, in oratory under both definitions of that word (that is as public speech and as prayer), and thereby inscribing, as it were, almost runically, the spell of the future one imagines for one’s self and for the world at large into the zeitgeist. The ambiguity and danger of magic has always rested in public consciousness precisely in the capacity of this ability of the human soul, operating through its pneumatic chariot in the realm of phantasia, to commune not only with benevolent forces but also with malevolent ones: I suspect this is even what is at work in the public degradation of magic as so much hogwash and con-artistry. It surely can be, but if one describes it carefully, as I have sought to do, one can also see in this response to magic the sort of reactionary modernist impulse to preserve the mechanistic worldview of materialist science against the possibility that the human imagination offers access to a true realm of experience that can affect our own world in some way, as well as a fear of the things that might lurk there. I have written on such powers in the previous life of the dispatch as well as this month, in the paid-only posts for Thursdays. Be they dragons, monsters, or demons or Satan, or other malevolent minds, we will find these things if we descend into the underworld of our own consciousness, into the unconscious darkness of our souls; additionally, our traditions at least insist that we will also find them if we search the outer darkness or the waste and welter or the cavernous maw of hell with diligence. What we have to ask ourselves are the following questions. First, if, as I have contended numerous times in the past, Neoplatonist that I am, that the ultimate Source and Summit of reality is the Good itself, that the universal consciousness is nothing other than the Mind of God within which the imaginal realm is God’s knowledge of creatures, within which the Spirit of God is the universal soul, and all of the individual rational spirits or souls that are, so to speak, finite manifestations of it, subsist and engage in acts of intellection, imagination, and sensation, then how can there be such monstrosities afoot in the world of the imagination, or anywhere else? This is effectively to project the problem of evil onto the barzakh: why is it possible for the imagination and imaginal beings to err in the direction of evil? Why would it be pedagogically useful to do so? And, second—if there are such monsters, how do we possibly contend with them, when their reach appears to extend all the way to our own souls?
I will in my fashion begin to answer by a meandering method. It is first of all obvious that people encounter such creatures in the imaginal realm, bidden or unbidden, whatever we think the reality of such creatures is. For example, a commonly reported phenomenon across history and human societies is the experience of the Old Hag. This is a psychosomatic experience of sleep paralysis combined with the sensed presence, physically and/or imaginally, of some entity, typically malevolent, at one’s bedside. So writes Dale Allison: “We now know, thanks to Hufford and later investigators, that 20 percent or more of North Americans confront the Old Hag at least once in a lifetime. So the experience is common. It has, moreover, nothing to do with mental illness or psychosis. One researcher has commented: ‘it’s no more pathological than a case of the hiccups.’ We further know that the phenomenon is not peculiar to our time and place. It is rather attested cross-culturally and cross-temporally. The traditional folklore of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Alaska, and Sweden all have their own versions of the Old Hag.”1 The distribution of the data imply that “Behind the global folklore lies a real experience, however variously mythologized or understood. The Old Hag is not the product of unmoored storytelling. More than a cultural fiction, it reflects something that happens to some of us once in a while. The basic experience is ‘independent of cultural models” and not occasioned by prior beliefs. This generalization includes, one should note, the sense of a threatening spirit or evil incorporeal presence. This too cannot be condensed wholly to culture. However explained, it belongs to the phenomenology of the experience itself. This is why, as Hufford emphasizes, the Old Hag has moved some ‘psychologically normal, mainstream modern persons’ to believe in ‘spirits.’” And, indeed, that this should seem remarkable to any reader is in large part a matter of modernity’s enchantments, as the language around the phenomenon has been obscured precisely for the sake of attempting to reduce the experience’s meaning from something preternatural to something accountable in materialistic terms: “Western medicine and psychology, under the impulse of modern rationalism, did not, when [Hufford] began his work, recognize the phenomenon that the folklore of the Old Hag encodes. Centuries ago, by contrast, people knew about this thing, as evident from the old tales of being ridden by a witch or attacked at night by an evil spirit. In fact, ‘until the seventeenth century the primary referent of [the word] nightmare actually was what we call sleep paralysis, and it was consistently associated with supernatural assault.’” This, in turn, led to misdiagnosis and medical blindness to the phenomenon (a common enough error in the medical tradition, and a disturbing one): “Some experts knew that sleep paralysis—which is caused by the mechanism that prevents us from enacting movement during REM sleep—was real, but they grossly underestimated its frequency and associated it with narcolepsy. Most importantly, they failed to perceive its frequent connection with the other features of the Old Hag. When the rationalists threw away the mythology, they threw away the experience. In this way, our culture came to forget something important, dramatic, and common. So when, four decades ago, I awakened to paralysis and terror, I had no category for the event, no tradition by which to understand it.” So summarizes Hufford: “one of the most fascinating social issues here is that … these kinds of experiences were well known in Western tradition up to three or four hundred years ago. It’s not simply that Western culture never had a clue about these things. It’s more dramatic than that. We erased knowledge of these experiences from the cultural repertoire while the experiences were continuing to happen.… That’s a level of social control that’s very impressive.”2
Allison’s not the only person to have experienced the Old Hag: I have myself, on more than one occasion, the most spectacularly creepy instance being one night in college when I experienced both the physical sense of the presence of some…thing looming over my sleeping body and the simultaneous dreaming experience of being in a glade enclosed by a thicket in which a wild animal prowled and sought to eat me. I resisted by reciting the Jesus Prayer with the prayer rope tied around my wrist in my sleep until it left, and a creature of some light came to my aid (but we will not speak about that at the moment). Again, whether what I experienced is “objectively real” or merely perceptual is, I hope the reader will begin to see, a false distinction and a useless question. There are no “objective realities” in the sense of that which is measurable; the only objective realities are those we can arrive at cognitively, through contemplation, and the only way we arrive there are by dealing precisely with perceptions, images. This does not mean that there are not illusions, but it means that we need to take illusions more seriously than we typically do as an epistemic phenomenon.
The nocturnal and the nightmarish are arguably the principal and privileged places in which the adversarial aspects of the imaginal realm are laid open to our spiritual vision. Most of us can say, at some point or another, like Sir William Watson, In a false dream I saw the Foe prevail. / The war was ended; the last smoke had rolled / Away: and we, / erewhile the strong and bold, / Stood broken, humbled, withered, weak, and pale. The visage under which such hated enemies might appear can be more realistic or sublimely otherworldly: it can be the mocking laughter of a childhood bully or worse the cruelty of a parent or a spouse; or it can be the naked demon, the fiend beheld in the candlelit haze of dreaming. Perhaps the ghoul like Polyphemos comes after us into a cave we have wandered into, and dashes our companions on the rock to feast, our horror notwithstanding; perhaps like a dragon or a wyvern-woe lazing upon gold and swords in hoard, we find him sleeping in some great and forgotten hall. Or perhaps he comes to us like Mephistopheles with a deal in hand, or perhaps in some assault of more pungent aggression. St. Antony was after all beaten by the demons in the night: that they may resort to outright violence is not unheard of in the literature. Likewise common is the notion of seduction or bodily seizure of less voluntary kind: in the Middle Ages it was often feared that an incubus or succubus might parent a half-breed child with some poor, unwitting soul.
If there are uses of magic that we might line up in a kind of prioritized order, among the first and most persistent in human history has been protection from such entities. In Ancient Mesopotamia magicians were something like freelance public servants with the technical know-how to protect against evil or simply mischievous demonic beings; the relationship between apotropaic magic and medicine, contested in antiquity as today, was strong enough that some of our earliest medical texts from Ancient Egypt are also spell texts in which the ministering priest performs the appropriate magical ritual or applies the relevant potion to prevent an injury from causing spiritual or magical sickness as well as physical. When, in the Gospels, Jesus becomes publicly well-known for exorcism and healing, we need to keep in mind this ancient context in which people thought about daimones, impure spirits (pneumata), psychological illness, and physical sickness as elements in the same swirl of cognitive triggers. These are the conditions within which Jesus could simultaneously register for different people as prophet, miracle worker, holy man, and, indeed, magician. Nor were such associations totally foreign to the messianic, apocalyptic, and eschatological associations people drew with Jesus and that Jesus himself encouraged: by the Hellenistic period and later, many Jews thought of David and especially Solomon as talented exorcists, the former capable of driving out evil spirits like the one that tormented Saul with the power of music, the latter a learned magician capable of controlling demons by use of his magic ring. It may be such traditions that originally stood behind the “accusation” of Jesus as a magician: certainly, magicians roused suspicion, but in the context of Jesus’s Judaism, it may well be that the relevant comparison was to Solomon who could command spirits to perform wonders on his behalf rather than the suggestion that he was demon-possessed; nevertheless, of course, Jesus dismisses the charge in the strongest possible terms. And yet, in the Greco-Roman world generally, Jews and Egyptians were considered to produce the most talented wizards after the Magi themselves; Jesus’s name recurs in the Greek Magical Papyri as one invoked to abjure and bind demonic entities to the will of the magician; and a ring claimed to be Solomon’s was presented in Byzantine Jerusalem to pilgrims leaving the Edicule to encourage faith. Magic, to repeat an idea expressed previously in this series, is usually pejorative language for the epistemology and technics of whatever ritual discipline some individual or group dislikes. But when it’s our ritual tradition, it’s “religion,” or “science,” or “philosophy,” etc.
Anyway, the association of the wizard with the demonic is an association at once showing awe for the human being who can command divinities—an idea that also occurs in the Corpus Hermeticum’s elevation of the primordial Humanity above the celestial gods and daimones themselves, in the Hekhalot texts and their Second Temple precedents of the visionary ascent to heaven of human beings and their enthronement above angels, and that will much later be quite important to Kabbalah—and a sense of danger or suspicion about whether these arcane powers are in fact fully under the control of the magician, and even if they are under the control of the magician, this is no more inherently trustworthy. This is after all what the ancient world feared most deeply about witchcraft:3 witches, as women empowered by the Titanic and dark, chaotic forces of the cosmos, were beyond the reach of men and even in some sense of the regnant Olympian gods who had theoretically supplanted these forces, and so upended the social order of the cosmos ritually and therefore imaginatively. We see some of this concern already in Homer’s Odyssey, when our first witch in Western literature, the goddess Circe, transforms some of Odysseus’s men into swine before being swayed by his, well, “unsheathed sword.” (Lector intelligat.) But there is no more essential example of the witch in ancient literature than that of Medea, who in Greek and Latin literature is par excellence the woman literarily divinized by witchcraft, and whose agency will tolerate no hubris of men or the traditional gods to whom they are aligned. Medea is the granddaughter of Helios, the Titan presiding over the Sun, and princess of Colchis, on the far side of the Black Sea (in what is now Georgia). When Jason comes on the Argo to retrieve the Golden Fleece, it is Medea that aids him in his trials with her magic; it is Medea who kidnaps and amputates, bit by bit, her own brother to escape the pursuing forces of her father as they leave; it is Medea who tricks Jason’s uncle Pelias into death at the hands of his own daughters. And it is Medea who, when Jason divorces her and abandons their two young sons in her care to marry Creousa, kills them, horrifically poisons the girl and her father, and then flies away with their corpses on the chariot of the Sun god. By contrast, the sins of the unnamed necromancer of Endor seem remarkably tame.
Respect for Medea’s power was intermingled with a sense of her emotional instability and profound reactions to perceived slights on her or her honor, whether by proxy in attacks on Jason or by Jason on her directly. Yet these are also the things that registered her as a divine being by ancient standards. It is because she is a goddess that she will tolerate no hubris. And so Greek horror at the image of Medea, hair loose and cloth abandoned beneath the naked eye of Night, or brooding over the bubbling cauldron of immortality and everlasting death, or as filicide and regicide, is also a kind of fascination, however begrudging from the Ancient Greek perspective, with her power and her freedom, far beyond that not only of most ancient women but also of most ancient men. Medea’s madness was evidence of her divinity, and this was the danger of magic generally, that the mania it required in many instances to be performed disrupted the ordinary virtues of settled space within which most ancient people hoped to live their lives. Evil spirits caused madness in the ancient imagination and madness, or its conditions, also invited them, as did any other transgressive kind of behavior or social estate. Yet good spirits could also cause madness, and philosophical wisdom required a certain kind of enthousiasmos to achieve the true heights of contemplative vision. The spiritual world is itself an agora or forum or even city gate in which, to borrow briefly from Tolkein, “many paths and errands meet,” not all of them beneficent or malevolent, but many inscrutable to ordinary perception; caution is therefore advised. And so, too, better to avoid magic altogether than to risk the dangers of magic poorly performed or the wrath of a good witch (and goddess).
Such is the logic also behind why people generally throughout the ancient world and still today in the Mediterranean have engaged in everyday apotropaic magic like the Evil Eye: the danger of someone’s imaginal darkness being directed against one’s physical and psychological health is considered a very real threat by a large number of humans and has been for quite a bit of history. The imaginal calculus of evil is why people of high and low estate then and now have consulted horoscopes, divination, astrology, soothsayers, and the like to be able to navigate the currents of Fortune effectively and avoid premature demise; similarly, it’s why philosophers like the Stoics and the Middle and Late Platonists recommended cultivating apatheia as a way of maintaining sanity in the fragility of human existence and of transcending those bonds altogether as far as possible. It’s also why burial and cult to the dead were taken so seriously by ancient people: not only because leaving someone incapable of complete transition to the afterlife was considered deeply unethical, but it was also the case that the possibility of angry ghosts and infernal entities presented an existential threat to the community that is still felt by many modern people living in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. As Allison notes above, witches, hags, and aggressive spirits are the original referents for the word “nightmare.” We have desensitized ourselves to the extreme sympatheia that ancient people perceived between the natural world and the imagination, and both with the divine.
Perhaps, of course, doing so offers us the opportunity to live somewhat more normal lives. We here address then an aspect of the imaginal realm that Neoplatonic astral vehicles of the soul, Ibn Arabi’s barzakh, and Aeneas’s katabasis have not fully prepared us for, which is the distinct possibility that time spent in “there” (sensu Plotinio) can strike the person adrift in the aether with madness. In ancient thought this dolorous blow was dealt by the Moon, whose mutability and inconstancy was also responsible for the world of generation and decay itself (hence why it is “sublunary”), and that is why they were called selenites or lunatics. (Some of these are those whom Jesus heals in the Gospels, and it is the probable threat identified in Psalm 121, “the Sun shall not strike you by day,” that is, with punishment or plague, “nor the Moon by night,” that is, with madness.) But time spent beholding the bare archetypes in their divine bodies, or at least in corporeal forms less weighed down by gross matter, can easily overwhelm the soul unaccustomed to so much direct communion with nous or addicted to pleasure. I say this without judgment: there are people whose temperaments and responsibilities predispose them better to spend their time in the ordinary world of waking consciousness than in the special world of the dreaming. Liminal space is not a place for people who have to deal with paying off mortgages or raising children or keeping up with a career, at least not on a regular basis. Those things happen in orderly fashion around Apollo’s temenos, not at Bacchus’s convivium. It’s one thing to attend a bacchanal once in a while, and another thing entirely to go from party to party each night until one is so hungover that one would rather talk philosophy than drink, like the guests at Plato’s Symposium. But that’s part of the point too: they have the leisure to do both, where the working woman or man does not for the most part. (Let the reader understand; I wrote these words on September 30th knowing that October would afford me little rest for the sustained focus that drawing down the Muse, or in this case the Moon, requires to write articles such as those that I have composed this month, for that is the curse of all teachers this time of year.) I made a similar observation here when I suggested that enchantment by the nondual infinity of God, world, and self can certainly end up making someone a moral cretin. You want your prophets to be mad; you don’t necessarily want your postmen to be.
This is a somewhat shorter entry in this series, and I offer it by way of saying that while I think we all have an imaginal vocation to fulfill as human beings, that is something essential to our being human, we should all also be very mindful of the exact character of the isthmus we traverse. The barzakh is a place where the pure light of the divine infinity and the pure darkness of nothingness meet together in looming, tenebrous shades and degrees of daytime brilliance; it is a place where we meet God, gods, angels, daimones, ghosts, one another, monsters of our own making and of others, where the corporeal becomes conceptual and the conceptual becomes corporeal, where art and oratory and magic are born, where afterlives are held and their karmic merit dispensed before the next great turning of the wheel moves the soul (or spirit) along to its next adventure. The imaginal realm is a place where we can be stricken with madness divine or demonic, from which I wager real psychic if not physical damage can be accrued to us. It is not for nothing that the original liminal hero is the wild man: Moses, Enkidu, Herakles, Samson, and the younger David, Elijah, and, yes, Jesus; but it is also not for nothing that the Gerasene demoniac dwells out among the tombs. We must take care that whatever journeys we undertake we undertake with preparation, that whatever dips of our consciousness into the unconscious we desire to make are done with intention and purpose, and not haphazardly or with temerity. Virtually every spiritual tradition will advise us that such is folly of the highest degree and danger deeper still.
But most will also advise that it is in fact necessary to make the descent. Dante must, after all, go down through the Inferno before rising up through purgatory and paradise to the divine empyrean; katabasis, with all its threats and dangers, precedes anabasis (with all of its threats and dangers). I have suggested in previous writings that this is the real value I see in Allhallowmas as a triduum: that on All Hallow’s Eve, we descend with the dead to hell, and on All Saints, we rise to heaven with Christ and the saints, so that on All Souls’ Day we may pray for the souls betwixt and in process. It was not a celebration of the most ancient Christian community, and it is still not for the Christian East, which hosts All Saints on the Sunday after Pentecost; in part this is a climatic difference between Byzantine and Western Christianity, where Western Europe experiences Fall and Winter much more severely than, say, Greece or Turkey do. But nevertheless, I think this is a novum of genuine value in Western liturgics that is sadly not taken advantage of by many a contemporary Catholic, Anglican, or Lutheran who still otherwise acknowledge Halloween as a Christian holiday. It is an annual opportunity, as a community, to deal with the macabre and the mortifying, the dark corners of the psyche that correspond to the world of death, and to consider the grace of creation that sustains us even as we are unmade thereby, the serenity of God that preserves us in the madness of death.
Dale Allison, Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 38. (Nota bene: I’m using a Kindle version, the pages of which strike me as potentially incorrect.)
Allison, Encountering Mystery, 38-40.
See inter alia Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), especially 54-59.
Would you say that Lucretius, in his praise of Epicurean liberation from fear of death and the gods, is offering another apotropaic device? And when we come to modernity, mechanistic philosophy attempts to conjure the demons away once and for all -- but with an apotropaic device so caustic that it chases away the angels as well, and leaves us even more vulnerable to attack (now construed as depressions, anxieties, meaninglessness...).