Imaginatio Vera

Imaginatio vera — the true imagination — names the operative faculty of Paracelsian alchemy: the active mental power by which the artifex participates in the transformation of his matter. It is imagination as a natural force, not as private fancy. In the Paracelsist tradition, as Jung reconstructs it from Ruland’s Lexicon and the contemporary commentaries, “imaginatio is the active power of the astrum (star) or corpus coeleste sive supracoeleste, that is, of the higher man within. Here we encounter the psychic factor in alchemy: the artifex accompanies his chemical work with a simultaneous mental operation which is performed by means of the imagination. Its purpose is to cleanse away the impure admixture and at the same time to bring about the ‘confirmation’ of the mind” (Jung 1967, CW 13, ¶173).

The alchemist does not merely manipulate substances. He imagines them. The imagination is the medium in which the opus proceeds; it is simultaneously the faculty and the field. This is the hinge on which the Lineage turns: without Paracelsus’s insistence that the imagination is real, a natural power operating in matter, the later Jungian recovery of the imaginal — and Corbin’s formalization of the mundus imaginalis — would have had no native Western vocabulary to inherit.

The imaginatio vera is the Renaissance ancestor of active-imagination. Where Jung would later teach that an image held long enough in disciplined attention becomes autonomous and begins to speak, Paracelsus already assumed that the imagination of the adept was efficax — efficacious, producing effects in the work.

Relationships

• paracelsus
• lumen-naturae
• active-imagination
• mundus-imaginalis

Primary sources

• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967, CW 13, ¶173)