Imaginal Renaissance
On Sowing Seeds, & Cultures of Soul
“The soul of our civilisation depends on the civilisation of our soul.
The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination”
— James Hillman
Images and voices are “invading the emptied cities of reason”, cities which have been thoroughly de-imaginalised and forced to conform to the metaphysical tyranny of Literalism and Realism.
Physicalist propaganda streams from the public speakers and the mouths of compliant parents.
Imaginal persons and archetypal myths have been rounded up and banished from the harsh daylight of collective consciousness. The monasteries of the soul have been ransacked. The Gods have long been exiled.
Systematically, the Imagination was censored — and driven underground.
But the ocean of the unconscious is crashing at the city walls, and the waters of the imaginal realm are seeping through the Gates of Reason, now bulging and groaning under the pressure.
The caverns below the city are rumbling with foment. With festival. With fire.
By evening, sweetly sedated walkers-home hear songs and chants rising from the black vacuum of the gutters, portals to an unseen world below.
A world of underground rivers. Transparent liquids from aeons past.
The blood of the earth is drunk, the bodies are drunk, and the gathering minds are drunk. Giddy and gleeful with unreasonable love.
A new insanity wipes clean the slate of the dead and lifeless program we call “Modern Culture”.
Children’s fingers grip chalk in soft fists, fiercely scrawling on the blackness, the lions and leopards of their uninhibited imaginings.
New circles gather.
New vessels form and wait in devotional patience to receive: symbols from the beyond. Containers for divine influx: ready, fertile, trembling.
Receivers for the lightning of theophany. Revelation. Resurrection.
New rumours spread like hungry fire: dragon eggs are hatching in the mountains.
New speeches are spoken on the steps of the Pantheon. New blueprints for revolution, only this time they are written in the geometric dreamspeak of erotic-symbolic fantasy.
From a longing for imaginal communion, new designs are drawn: for arenas, circuses, forums and processions. Ampitheatres for collective soulmaking. Ornate wooden temples, sleephouses for collective dreaming. Gardens for midnight reverie.
In the bereft and emptied cities, people are starting to pray again. To Gods never described in books. To imaginal persons newly kindled, as candles conjured from darkness.
First alone, and then together.
Hearing their own hearts speak, the soul confirms herself to herself.
I want something more than this.
And I’ll get it.
Because I can see it.
I’ll create it,
because I can imagine it.
The seeds are planted.
They have been waiting in the soil of the psyche for millenia.
And now, visible in the morning light of consciousness:
green buds.
The daring skybound shoots of an unprecedented culture:
An Imaginal Civilisation.
A culture fully cognisant of her own non-reality,
her boundless imaginal nature,
her context within the heart of the infinite.
Thoroughly empty, resting on nothing,
this civilisation is groundless and glad of it.
It is flying,
an angel in an open sky,
a cloud-castle,
a temple of dreams.
Day
and night.
For we are fast leaving the safety of the Halls of the Literal:
that which is or isn’t.
We are gathering on the street corners of “as if” and “could be”.
Sleeping out in the forests of make-believe.
Working in the offices of lovemaking (and her relentlessly demanding directives). We draft design and scribe with the devotion of hopeful saints.
Tilling seeds in the fields of soul.
And here the intentions of the working raking bodies are are lifted to a beckoning image: a horizon.
A harvest.
A feast.
A fiery celebration replete with poetry, myth, prayer and song.
With a roaring abandonment to Life.
With a juice-spilling jig of joy upon the tables.
Plus flute, and fiddle, and folk-wrote lyric. Plus a cello summoning violet waves from the void.
The seeds are sprouting.
An imaginal civilisation
waiting in the wings of the theatre of the cosmos
for untold aeons.
Now she steps gingerly
out of the curtain-red shadow
and into the unblinking light of collective vision:
naked,
revealed in her outrageous audacity,
her noncompliance to ANY existing pattern of ideation, causation or story-sequence,
in her unvanquishable devotion to pure creation
as murder
and sacred rebellion.
And she sits him down,
the tottering old civilisation of the Real and True,
and gives him a glass of water.
An imaginal offering. And an invitation:
Purify those thoughts of impossibility, if you will, old man.
Wash them clean in the rivers of your inner vision.
Give your bag of stones back to the ocean, to the rolling crashing chaos inside you which is leaping for joy in an undulating rhythm, a heartbeat, a breath-cycle.
Your soul, old man, is locked in a lunar massage. And from your useless rocks of reason, She is grinding the sands of time.
Running a cosmos takes work you know! And should you want to get involved, I’ve found you just the job:
Seven days a century at the loom of the Timespace Continuum.
Will you show up? Will you weave with us? We need you, old man.
We need your stories: the cities, the bosses, the engines, the bombs.
All of it.
So bring it, and we’ll find a place for it in the Tapestry.
She rises, puffs the holy pipe, turns to the audience, and speaks in prayer:
None of what you have seen until now
was real.
None of what you have been until now
was true.
Are you willing to entertain
an entirely new myth
about the myths you have been living?
Are you willing to write that myth
together with your loved ones,
huddled round candlelit tables, sitting on park benches on winter mornings, rolling through forest valleys in rickety old trucks?
Are you willing to speak that myth
that new myth of divine participation in the song of the world,
in the love of the soul,
naked on the stage of your life
without a prompt or script or plan?
Are you ready to improvise entire symphonies of identity, ideation and imagination?
Nobody is going to do this for you.
And yet
the inner door is always open.
The show goes on!
Tune your instruments, O makers of soul!
The orchestra is assembling!
The stage is being set,
in your heart
and on the platforms and pedestals of the world.
The theatre of the imaginal is breaking through
into this rotten airless library of reality,
is ransacking her ancient tomes for images and allusions to a prehistoric past, an archetypal age when men and women spoke in tongues of angel-song, and Gods burst through their breasts without warning, and spirits wove nets from their words in which to catch the airborne seeds of a civilisation not-yet-made.
Citizens of Gaia’s seething belly!
declares a fiery youth from a table strewn with books, a ghost-writer from Arcturus with a bright-blue deer at his side.
How do you expect to prosper
without the blood and juices of Fantasy?
Your cells need image as much as they do water, and sugar, and heat!
A universe lost in a boundless expanse
needs her Goddesses for guidance!
Answer the bloody door, you old sod!
Come!
Why do you refuse to drink from the spring?
She is pure,
just as are you.
Know this!
See this!
Imagine it!
Rise and dance,
ground and imagine,
return,
and begin again!
A human on two feet is a being of the sky.
A soul with two wings is a seeing of the soil’s prosperity. Potentiality. Possibility.
Bird’s eye view of an infinite forest.
And now the Imaginal Goddess
is on the steps
of a dead man’s world,
carrying a map of directions
to the fires
now lit,
recklessly ignited
in the waking heaven
of earthen wilderness.
Don’t you get it?
she sighs, hands on holy hips, addressing the folorn crowds of streetfolk.
Imaginal seeds are the seeds that you call “real”.
Plant them, you fools, everywhere you go!
How else will you revive your ravaged and mono-cultured soul?
Real seeds are imaginal,
and so are the trees, fruits and medicines they produce. The rainforests of soul in ecstatic pulsing climax.
The fabrics you weave from their buds. The instruments you craft from their croaking trunks. The bodies you move with their sunbound energy.
The “Real World”
is a Play of Imagination
and Imagination is dancing on the grave of your notion of “unreality”!
What is happening is utterly beyond your limiting conceptions of “real” and “unreal”.
Give them up! Let them go!
To everything, turn, turn, turn!
We are offering you a middle way, fine as a tightrope at a sell-out circus. A backstage pass to reality’s writing room. It’s smoky in there, but you might just find your way…
What you are now witnessing,
here in the heaving backstreets
of a cancerous collapsing zeitgeist
is the formation of a Theatre troupe
exiled from paradise for the sheer creative audacity of their ideas.
Universes flung from eyeballs at the stroke of midnight, dogs speaking Italian, crystalline messages between dimensions, symphonies of light encoded in quantum fields. Lovers at midnight writing poems to their makers.
It was all too much for the Rationatum to take.
And so, convening here in the hidden broils of a farflung cosmos (one that most of us Deities had forgotten even to check in on, so dismal was its gaseous slumber), they set up camp, and continued their Work.
Acting. Experimenting. Researching. Creating.
Cooking soul in the cauldrons of the known:
elixirs powerful enough to summon the Gods for assistance
to melt the governer’s gold into nothing
to dissolve the walls of Certainty’s cavern
and leave a gaping open wound in the group-mind:
a portal to soft unknowns,
an opening where the flower-feasting insects may gather to roost, and lay their eggs.
Writhing squirming seeds
of an imaginal civilisation.
Honey in the hearts of the free
who speak in the language of Dawn.
Interface and exchange
with an infinite unknown.
A black bee.
A white bee.
A dance at the end of a world.
