The Eternal Body of Man

GOD THE IMAGINATION
by Paul Levy

There is an age-old imagination that there exists a miraculous substance that enlightens the universe, which is exemplified in the alchemists’ idea of the philosophers’ stone. This imagination does not come from the personal unconscious, but is transpersonal in origin, as it arises out of the collective unconscious of humanity itself. This imagination has a numinous, archetypal quality to it, which is to say it is an expression of something beyond ourselves. This imagination of a substance which liberates the universe is a symbolic out-picturing of a transformative potential that exists within all of us and which is the goal of the alchemical opus. Our imagination, through symbols such as the philosophers’ stone, is revealing something to us of great significance.

Jung says, “The concept of imagination is perhaps the most important key to the understanding of the opus.” Accomplished alchemists realized that the God that they were projecting onto the philosophers’ stone was an imaginary God, a God of the Imagination. This is not to devalue their God, or imagination, in any way, as if to say “their God is only imagination.” The alchemists knew that their God was a creation of the cosmic imagination, and this is why they venerated, revered, and prayed to it. For the alchemists, the imagination is the Divine Body in every person, a refined, rarefied and “subtle body” that is not humanly constructed but divinely implanted in us from a source beyond ourselves.

To the alchemists, the figure of Christ, for example, as the incarnation of the Logos, became pneuma-tically impregnated with the substantiality of, in Jung’s words, “the world-creating imagination of God,” which is why artist and poet William Blake refers to Jesus as “Jesus the Imagination.” Christ, from the alchemical point of view, is the revelation of the divine imagination itself, referred to as the “imagined God,” which, alchemically speaking, is the highest praise. Blake comments, “The Eternal body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God himself.”

When the alchemists had a living experience of God through their relationship with the imaginatively created philosophers’ stone, they realized that the whole experience was nothing other than an experience of the divine imagination, which is to say that they were realizing that they themselves were living inspirations of the divine, creative imagination itself. Jung says, “I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality.” Being the “only immediate reality,” the divine, creative imagination is the primordial ground of “reality” itself. Paradoxically, at the same time that the philosophers’ stone revealed itself as a product of the alchemists’ imagination, the alchemists realized that they themselves -- and everyone for that matter -- were the imagination of the philosophers’ stone!

-cont.