Hesiod as Genealogist of the Imaginal

The Muses’ famous statement at Theogony 27–28 — that they know how to speak many false things resembling true things, and how, when they will, to speak true things — has been read as a disclaimer, as a warning, as an early epistemology. Detienne’s reading, on which this thread builds, takes it as a charter for the master of truth: the poet whose vocation comes from Mnemosyne is the one in whom remembrance overcomes Lethe (Detienne 1996).

The imaginative act, in Hesiod, is therefore not opposed to truth. It is the precondition of a particular kind of truth — the aletheia that the depth tradition will later name as the unconcealing proper to image, dream, vision. The poet who is investitured by the Muses is at the same moment investitured into the heroic genealogy he is composing (Nagy 1979). Imagination is not decoration on a real order; it is the act by which the real order becomes speakable.

This is why Corbin’s later category of mundus imaginalis — the imaginal as an order of reality between sense and intellect — has, despite its Iranian-Sufi provenance, a Greek headwater in Hesiod. The thread runs: Mnemosyne authorizes the poet’s vision → the vision is the genealogy of the gods → the gods so genealogized are forms of being → the imaginal is therefore an order of reality, not a faculty of fiction. The Hesiodic prologue is the first articulation of that thread in the West.

Sources

• hesiod: the Muses’ charter, the Dichterweihe, the genealogy as imagined-and-real
• marcel-detienne: aletheia/Lethe in the masters of truth
• gregory-nagy: poet as therapôn of the Muses, investitured into the heroic order