VISIONS, DREAMS, REALITIES:
The Problem of Imaginal Revelation
Also found in the Mayfair trilogy is the clairvoyant dream. This experience reveals hidden truths about the present. Dreaming, Ryan Mayfair encounters his departed wife, Gifford. She tells him the identity of the father of Mona Mayfair's unborn child, Morrigan. This dream also symbolically hints that the child is no ordinary human, but a member of the mysterious and powerful Taltos species.
The telepathic dream is another form of nocturnal revelation. "Telepathy" refers to the direct exchange of knowledge between minds, and Anne Rice portrays it occurring among the living as well as across the divide of death. In the case of Mona and Morrigan, the child's memories of an ancient Taltos existence leak into her mother's dreams even before she is born.
The waking state is also suffused with visions in the Mayfair trilogy. Take apparitions, for example. An apparition is a sensory (typically visual) appearance of a being or an object that is not physically present, at least in the ordinary manner. Lasher appears and vanishes in a typically apparitional fashion. Ghosts of the departed pop up on occasion in the Mayfair saga. Stuart Townsend's shade is observed by Arthur Langtry, who infers that Stuart's corpse is somewhere in the house. Julien Mayfair seems to have a knack for apparitional appearances - his first ghostly visit (to Evelyn Mayfair) happens even before his death. Postmortem, he shows himself to Michael Curry and to Mona Mayfair. Indeed, his ghostly matchmaking brings them together.
Julien's visionary tour de force is the creation of a totally apparitional environment for the couple's love nest - a house interior of a bygone era, complete with period furniture, velvet draperies, carpets, candle-decked chandelier, and the fragrance of the candle wax. (Encounters with total visionary environments are known technically as metachoric experiences).
The near-death experience, or NDE, lies between the states of waking and unconsciousness. In the world of the Mayfairs, the NDE is linked with visionary awareness. After Michael Curry almost drowns in the Pacific Ocean, his visionary eye is opened, and he develops the abihty to practice psychometry - the gaining of knowledge about an object and its owner by touching it. In Michael's psychometrizing, the information from an object comes to him as images. The out-of-body experience, or OBE, consists of the feeling (usually accompanied by a visual awareness) that one is
somehow outside of one's skin. It is often, although by no means always, associated with the NDE, as in Michael Curry's case.
Given the power and knowledge available through visions, it is unsurprising that characters in the Mayfair novels would deliberately seek them out. Ashlar the Taltos, for instance, consumes a weird brew and waits alone in the Witches' Cave for a vision of his lost love, Janet. Several Mayfairs - Julien, Cortland, and Mary Beth - demonstrate the ability to induce OBEs at will.
But the possibility is also raised in Rice's work that visions can be false or even hazardous. When visions are used as a channel to connect the living and the "beyond," there are no guarantees that the intentions of everyone - or everything - involved are strictly benign. Whether the experiences that follow Michael Curry's NDE are truth or are Lasher's diabolical illusions long remains a nagging question for him. And, even when knowledge gained through visions is accurate, Michael senses the harmful effects of occult knowledge on the mortal personality. He says of visionary powers, "They destroy the human in us."1
The conventional world view of today - built and maintained by the scientific, legal, and mental-health professions - is untroubled by the allure and danger of the realm of visions. The official map of the cosmos has a province marked off for such things as spirit encounters, voices from beyond, out-of-body journeys, and near-death glimpses of other worlds. The name of this region is imagination. The associated adjective is imaginary, which connotes "unreal."
Modern culture is thus marked by an underlying tension at the boundary between sensory and visionary experience. As no amount of education or discouragement seems able to bar the intrusion of these haunting "figments," eventually the illicit question begs asking: Is the imagination, at least sometimes, a doorway to the Real?
The question is openly addressed only in the margins of our culture - by devotees of New Age and other occult movements, Jungian therapists, parapsychologists, and, occasionally, by philosophers. More commonly, the tension surrounding the possibility of "real imagination" is probed in the safe guise of fiction - including, as we've seen, in the novels of Anne Rice.
Who decided to mark the mental divide between real and unreal where it currently lies? Has it always been there, or has its location altered over time? The answers lie in the remote past, at the roots of Western civilization. In the following pages, let's review the drama of how the imagination came to be merely "imaginary." (Instead of this prejudicial adjective, I will use the word imaginal to refer to the experiences now included under "imagination" - dreams, visions, voices, apparitions, out-of-body awareness, as well as everyday fantasies and "mental images.") This drama has five acts.
ACT ONE: TRUE MYTHS
In the beginning was . . . the Image, not the Word. The earliest surviving traces of imaginal activity are depictions of things that could never have been perceived with the senses. Deep in the caves of southwestern Europe, artists painted the forms of the creatures with which they shared the Ice Age landscape. There is no evidence that carcasses of bison or horses - and certainly not woolly mammoths - were hauled into the murky depths to serve as models for the paleo-painters. A number of the images are located in such cramped nooks that the artist could not have viewed an animal corpse no matter where it was placed. But there are signs that the creatures on the cave walls were not entirely based on memories of animals seen above ground, either. Although they are clearly intended to be seen as animate - and appear to move when viewed under the original lighting conditions, a flickering torch - the feet of many of the beasts are portrayed in such a way that they seem to be floating in the air. Researchers say that such foot positioning would never have been seen in a living animal, even during the leaping frenzy of the hunt. Animate creatures, floating through the air. . . The eye with which the artist spied such things was not of the flesh, scanning the forests and plains of the surface world. It was the eye of vision, surveying an imaginal ground where dwelled the spirits of the animals that were so central to the life and death of early humanity.
And what are we to make of one of the oldest artifacts of our species, a sculpture in mammoth ivory from the German site of Hohlenstein-Stadel, dating back nearly thirty thousand years? Clearly portrayed is a being with the body of a man and the head of a lion. The feline head seems too close fitting to have been severed from a lion and worn as a mask. Again, the model can only have been a visitor from the realm of imagination.
The exact meaning of the old Stone Age images, and the uses to which they were put, are still debated by scholars. It is certain that they were not purely decorative. Scholars guess that the images were used in initiation rites, hunting magic, or divination. Evidently, the imaginal domain was not stamped "unreal" on the cosmic maps of the Paleolithic age; rather, it was a spirit land, populated by entities that had great consequence for the course of human life.
This impression is confirmed by the tradition that most directly links today with those primordial times. Shamanism has been practiced in hunter-gatherer societies around the globe. The shaman is a specialist in contacting the spirit land and harnessing its might and wisdom for human benefit. Generally, this contact is made in an altered state of consciousness. The experience may be triggered by taking psychedelic drugs, drumming, singing, dancing, or severely stressing the body. Such manipulations produce vivid visual displays called "entoptic phenomena." Brilliant flashes of colour, spirals, and glowing geometric shapes are most common. In the mind of a shaman, these striking sensations unfold into a sequence of visions depicting a voyage through the world of ghosts. No impotent fantasy, the shamanic journey yields precious gifts - stories and songs from the other side, and confidence in being part of the cosmic Whole that often brings healing and tenacious survival despite adversity.
The first literate civilizations- Egypt and Mesopotamia - inherited the belief in "real imagination." For them, myths were not entertainments or allegories but living truths. Prior to the unification of Egypt around 3100 B.C., the Nile Valley was a chain of independent societies, each with its own divine pantheon and cosmology. When Narmer, the first pharaoh, conquered the valley, one might have expected him to impose the world-view of his town on the entire valley. Instead, it appears that all the diverse reality models of the regions were officially embraced; none was discarded or suppressed. For more than thirty centuries of ancient Egyptian culture, this acceptance endured unbroken. Novel gods and rites did not supplant the old, but simply formed a new layer of imagery that served to access and celebrate the lushness of Reality. This tolerance of contradiction is hard for us to understand; Western culture is geared, philosophically and scientifically, to discern the One Truth about the world; but, for the Egyptians, Truth is Many. Historian Henri Frankfort summarized the Egyptian view thus:
The ancients did not attempt to solve the ultimate problems confronting man by a single coherent theory;. . . Ancient thought - mythopoeic, "myth-making" thought - admitted side by side certain limited insights, which were held to be simultaneously valid, each in its own proper context, each corresponding to a definite avenue of approach.2
The Egyptian attitude is reflected in their Book of the Dead. Unlike the scriptures of the Jews, Christians, and Moslems, this text does not tell a story of revelation, from beginning to end; rather, it is a patchwork of spells and prayers, accreted over the centuries, referring to diverse afterworlds, souls, and deities, without any effort to create a linear order or narrative. Indeed, in some copies of the book, if the scribe ran out of room at the edge of the papyrus, the text simply ends in midsentence. Reality, the book's structure implies, is like that. In such an interpenetrating universe, there would seem no place for zones of absolute unreality ("mere imagination"); the sensory and the imaginal worlds are two sides of the same cosmic coin.
ACT TWO: MISTRUSTING THE MIND
Among antique Mediterranean societies, the concepts of "imagination" and "fantasy" as we define them today were unknown. There was a broad understanding that dreams and visions are types of perception - glimpses beyond the veil of the senses, into an alternate reality. But in two of these cultures, mythmakers and thinkers sensed a negative side to the imaginal; over time, the imagination became the object of mistrust, and even of banishment from the camp of the Real. These two exceptional societies happened to be those that laid the foundations of the Western world-view - the Greeks and the Hebrews.
The story of Prometheus was the central Greek myth of cultural origins. Prometheus conveyed to humanity the fire he stole from the gods. He was also esteemed as the one who taught us how to create everything that distinguishes us from other animals. In other words, Prometheus led the human race from nature to culture. But this act outraged Zeus. The fire of creation was the exclusive property of the gods - its wielding by humans was a pathetic mockery. Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, where an eagle eternally tears at his liver. The crime of Prometheus thus had a double-edged result: It endowed humanity with a power of creation, but it also alienated us from harmony with the divine.
Who - or what - is Prometheus? His identity lies in his name: In the Greek tongue, pro-metheus literally means "fore sight"; or, as philosopher Richard Kearney put it, "the power to anticipate the future by projecting an horizon of imaginary possibilities."3 It was the imagination that evoked such ambivalence in the Greek mythic mind.
This primordial tension around the imaginal became more clearly manifest among the great philosophers of classical Greece. Foremost among these was Plato. His early life was one of turmoil, in which Athens was defeated in war, and his beloved friend Socrates was executed by his own people. Confronted with the injustices of the world around him, Plato felt that perfection belonged to another domain - the realm of the Ideal, of Being. The things of the ordinary world are but crude copies of their Ideal Forms, which can only be grasped by abstract reason.
Plato admitted that mental images can accompany thinking. They are by no means necessary for thought, however, and their presence signals that the thinking is imperfect; the thoughts that carry us in the direction of the Ideal are entirely cleansed of imagery. Dreams fared little better in Plato's account; he had them originating in the vicinity of the navel, from the part of the soul that is "bound down like a wild animal "4
Plato had a generally dim view of the artistic products of imagination. While art connoisseurs today marvel at the naturalism of classical Greek sculpture, Plato was contemptuous - if a body in the realm of the senses was an imperfect copy of an Ideal Form, then a marble imitation of that body was even further removed from perfection, "a poor child of a foster parent."5 Artificial images, he thought, could be down-right dangerous - their power to excite the viewer drew the soul down into the blindness of passion, rather than up to the serene, imageless domain of Truth.
Plato was the leader of the cognitive elite of his time. But most ordinary folk still believed that the imaginal was a gateway to the Otherworld, and eagerly studied dreams and visions for signs of divine and daemonic will. Plato could not entirely escape this heritage of belief. Grudgingly, he admitted that images entering the mind unbidden can sometimes be sent by gods, and contain truths. But human reason was still needed to sort the revelation from the imaginal spoor of our animal nature.
The other giant of Greek thought was Aristotle. His world-view differed from Plato's in many ways. Unable to solve the puzzle of how the radically different realms of Being and physicality could be related at all, he rejected the notion of a world of Forms separate from the world of sense. He also held that purely abstract thinking is impossible; every thought - and every perception - is accompanied by a mental image. But, if anything, he was even harsher in his verdict concerning dreams and visions than was Plato. Aristotle taught that, for the most part, involuntary images arise from bodily states rather than divine inspiration, a sort of mental flatulence. In any case, whether waking or sleeping, the imagination must not serve as a guide; rather, the image must kneel for judgment before its lord - Reason.
The central myth of origin for the Jewish people was the account of creation in Genesis. In this myth, too, an Original harmony between Holy and human is upset by a human gesture - the eating of the forbidden fruit. But this act had a consciousness-expanding effect on Adam and Eve. They became aware of ethics (the choice of good or evil), and of time, indeed being exiled from the eternally static Garden into the cascade of past, present, future.
What aspect of the first man enabled him to make his fateful choice, leading to the curse/blessing of alienation/consciousness? In Hebrew tradition, when God created Adam "in His own image ,"6 He installed a faculty called the yetser. This Hebrew term, closely related to yotser ("creator"), refers to the human ability to imitate God by creating forms - and is customarily translated into English as "imagination." The serpent tempted the first couple by inviting them to imagine what the banned fruit might reveal. In the Genesis account, the Lord is not amused by the use to which the gift of yetser had been put:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great. . . and that every imagination (yetser) of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at his Heart.7
As in the myth of Prometheus, here, too, our capacity to imagine disobeying God lifts us above brute animality - but also away from the divine embrace.
Not surprisingly, the human feature that led to the Fall was in for rough treatment in later Jewish tradition. Many commentaries declare the imagination to be an enemy: "To him who kills his yetser. . . it is as if he would have honoured the Holy One"8; "one who obeys his yetser practices idolatry."9 One text suggests that the custom of circumcision symbolizes the righteous desire to amputate the imagination. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides went so far as to equate the imagination with the satanic snake itself.The imaginal was not consistently damned by the ancient Hebrews. Indeed, many of the Old Testament prophets received revelations via dreams, visions, and voices, usually while "the hand of the Lord was upon me" - thought by some scholars to refer to an altered state like the shaman's trance. And a number of Hebrew writings hint that the yetser, defiled since the first sin, would one day be redeemed. But the tilt of opinion is definitely toward suspicion, if not outright hostility, of the imaginal. The Hebrews were struggling to retain their monotheism in a sea of pagan cultures that practiced visionary contact with their "false gods"; in this context, worries about the idolatrous possibilities of a free imagination make sense.
ACT THREE
THE IMAGE STRIKES BACK
Alexander the Great, a pupil of Aristotle, conquered the vast region from Macedonia to Egypt to India, seeding the world-view of the Greeks throughout. The Romans in turn conquered much of this "Hellenistic" territory; but the newly captured Greek culture proved to be a sort of "Trojan Horse," as it converted the Roman civilization to its own patterns of thought. The Promethean tension surrounding the imagination thus became a general feature of the Roman reality map.
The followers of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the followers of the other important school of thought, Stoicism, agreed that the imagination could not be trusted and that it was vastly inferior to reason as a path to Truth. The intellectual elite had become somewhat united in its belittling of the imaginal; but, deep in the collective soul, a response was brewing.
By the first century before Christ, around the Mediterranean, there were signs of a widespread eruption of fascination with visions and dreams. This imaginal renaissance continued for the next few centuries. In fact, among the common people, this interest had never fully departed; the denizens of the ivory tower have always overestimated their impact on popular thought. But now, it seemed, people from every level of society were reporting encounters with visitors from hidden dimensions of the cosmos. As one ancient inscription attests, "the gods have been appearing in visitations as never before, to the girls and women, but also, too, to men and children. What does such a thing mean?"10
Imaginal experiences were not only arising uninvited but were being pursued, and with renewed intensity, during this time. In the mid-second century A.D., a father and son, both named Julian (rumoured to be from Chaldaea, a Mesopotamian region associated in the Roman mind with magic and mystery), wrote a text known as the Chaldaean Oracles. The work claimed to provide a direct revelation of the gods through the power of special ceremonies, in a process that today we would call "channeling." The immense popularity of the Oracles throughout the Empire fueled the idea that the divine world, and even the Platonic realm of Being, was accessible through mind-altering rituals.
Their visions were not a passive escape but a positive search for knowledge. People wanted to know the secrets of higher theology . . . because the schools and philosophers had raised so many more questions than they had been able to answer.13
The status of the imaginal was also rising among the Hebrews around this time. Again, scholarly fingers have pointed at the Babylonians as a possible triggering influence. Around the third century B.C., a new type of literature, known as "apocalyptic" or "pseudepigraphic," appeared in Jewish communities. These texts featured descriptions of bizarre visions and out-of-body journeys, often attributed to famous Old Testament figures (hence the term pseudepigrapha, or "false writings," as the authorities viewed the authorship claims as spurious). In many of these writings the author recounts trips to otherworldly planes; he describes the layers of heaven and the angels he met along the way. The only text of this visionary period to be accepted as scripture was the Book of Daniel. The rest, although officially rejected, remained very popular, and gave rise to a host of beliefs that later found their way into Christianity; most significant was the tale of the Fallen Angels.
ACT FOUR:
WAR FOR THE IMAGINATION
The various Christian schools, along with their pagan and Hebrew contemporaries, did have something in common - a fascination with visions. The New Testament itself features several visionary tales: Christ's Transfiguration in front of three of his disciples; Jesus' postmortem appearances to his followers; the conversion of Paul (when he encountered "a light from heaven, brighter than the sun"14); Paul's ascent to the third heaven ("whether in the body or out of the body, I know not, God knows"15 ); and the psychedelic experiences recorded in Revelation (classic apocalyptic writing with a Christian twist), among others.
Unexceptionally, the early Catholics were enamoured of visions. One of their favorite texts was the Shepherd, composed by Hermas toward the middle of the second century. Hermas recounts his trance experiences, in which he journeyed to a spiritual land and took instruction from a mysterious woman, who symbolized the Catholic Church. Catholic communities revered traveling "prophets" - who were visionaries as well as teachers - and offered them the best wines and oils when they visited. And Catholic martyrs often received waking visions and dreams of the heaven to which they would shortly depart.
The strongest Christian competition to the Catholics came from a religious movement known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics were so called for their belief that salvation is reached through a type of knowledge called gnosis. Unlike the knowledge of ordinary things - books, birds, bodies - gnosis is an awareness of one's own true nature. The core of the self, said the Gnostics, is a spark of divine light. Dazzled by the spectacle of the physical world, we have lost sight of this inner glow, and forgotten who we really are. When we reawaken to our identity as light - in other words, when we attain gnosis - we are freed from all evil, and have no further need of religious guidance. As the Gnostic Gospel of Philip puts it, the enlightened Gnostic "is no longer a Christian, but a Christ."16
How is this divine self-recognition achieved? The Gnostics themselves were divided on this question. Advice from elders and study of scriptures were often recommended. But centrally important in many accounts were visionary revelations. Unlike the tradition of apostolic succession, Gnosticism held that Christians could receive the salvific instruction from Christ directly - through visionary visitations, just like the first apostles. Or the devotee could connect with Jesus at His place, via an OBE. What need, then, for bishops and priests? Why support a church with tithes? And why "bear witness" for the faith through martyrdom, when you could be chatting with the Lord?
In the hands of the Gnostics, personal visions undermined the development of an institution of Christianity by removing its reason for existence - as an ark for preserving God's once-only revelation to Jesus' followers in the early first century. In Catholic circles, it was clear - the subversive potential of visions was too great. The imaginal had to be discredited, or controlled; if possible, even harnessed against their Gnostic competitors with their tempting offer of "becoming a Christ." Catholic spokesmen needed to resurrect the negative, untrustworthy connotations of imagination from their Hebrew and Greek heritage.
Around 180, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, issued the first Catholic theology text. In it, he attacked the Gnostics and mocked their revelations. According to Irenaeus, there are only four authentic gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But Gnostics, through their visions, were proclaiming new gospels every week. How could eternal Truth be found in the ever-shifting fantasies of the Gnostics, which contradicted one another as well as the "Faith once delivered to the saints"17 (and forever after preserved and monopolized by the Catholic Church)?
This opening salvo was followed by other Catholic attacks. In the early third century, Cyprian of Carthage urged the Church to adopt the structure of an authoritarian government. Power was vested in the bishops; the role of the laypeople was to obey. For the believing Catholic, it would be foolish not to - after all, the bishops had inherited, by apostolic succession, the only keys to the gates of heaven.
The Catholic Church, with its strict chains of command, proved an effective recruiting machine. It gradually attracted more important citizens of the Roman Empire. With prestige came power; and with power came the chance for the Church to back up its written assaults on visionary "heretics" with fist, sword, and firebrand. After the proclamation of Theodosius, Catholic thugs could attack unorthodox Christians, as well as pagans such as the Theurgists, with relative impunity. Some Catholics were still reporting visions - but their content was in strict accord with the opinions of the bishops.
By the early fifth century, the Gnostics were a fading memory in the Mediterranean world. This was the era of Augustine of Hippo, whose writings formed the basis of the Catholic world-view of the Middle Ages. He revived, in Christian philosophical guise, the subjugation of imaginal to
rational that had dominated classical Greek thought. But for Augustine, reason was itself not free; rather, it was governed by the dogmas of the Catholic Church. The priestly conquest of the Christian imagination was officially complete. The imaginal revival that had bloomed in ancient pagan and Jewish society was over.
ACT FIVE: THE LEGACY
The Western ambivalence about the imaginal, built into the foundation of our culture from Jewish and Greek sources, has continued ever since. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, some visionaries (Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross) were so respected - and so unveeringly obedient to the Church - that they were declared saints. But others - most notably, the religious genius Meister Eckhart - were judged to have strayed beyond the fence of dogma and into the devilish domain of imaginary falsehood. These errant imaginers were lucky to get off with only their writings condemned, as did Eckhart. Heretics preaching a freer imagination more commonly ended up in bonfires.
The rise of modern science was connected to the idea that reason and observation are the best ways to comprehend reality. The imagination was at best a source of ideas to be investigated by the more reliable methods of knowing, and at worst a morass of "hallucinations" and "delusions." But the uninvited guests - the visions and dreams and weird visitations - have refused to stay away. The visionary adventures of the Mayfair witches, and other creations of Anne Rice, are but the latest expressions of a primordial need - the attempt to compass this mystery in human terms. These interlopers from the "unreal" intrude, more and more, into our favourite fiction and our lives. As the old inscription asks, "What could such a thing mean?" Are the borders of the Real on our received maps of the cosmos about to shift? It's happened before. Imagine what might happen next. Just imagine. .
NOTES
FURTHER READING