Hillman is not describing a technique here so much as a cosmology — or rather, he is insisting that any technique worth the name already assumes one. The figures met in active imagination are not symptoms wearing masks, not the ego's projections come home to roost. They arrive with their own gravity. To treat them as "parts of the personality" is to have already decided, before the encounter begins, that nothing genuinely other can show up in the interior. That is the pneumatic reflex: the self remains sovereign, the figures become material it processes.

What Corbin's *himma* names — and what Paracelsus reached for with *vera imaginatio* — is something closer to receptivity as a cognitive act. The heart that imagines does not project outward and retrieve; it perceives in a register neither literal nor metaphorical, neither purely inner nor cosmologically external. The *metaxy* is that register. When Hillman places the aims of therapy there — living in the company of ghosts, familiars, ancestors, guides — he is proposing that psychic health has something to do with being porous enough to be accompanied. Not healed, not unified, not ascended. Accompanied. The populace is not a means to something beyond itself. It is what there is to inhabit.