Ebook: Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions

» [...] The significance of active imagination for the history of religion remains to be assessed. Several intriguing speculations have been offered. Jung alleged the use of active imagination in gnosticism, alchemy, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Henry Corbin made a case for active imagination in the Islamic gnosis of medieval Isma‘ilism, Avicenna’s Neo-Aristotelian mysticism, and theosophical Sufism. Antoine Faivre has suggested that a blend of gnosis and active imagination has been part of Western esotericism since its systematization in the Italian Renaissance.

The present study is, to my knowledge, the first systematic history of active imagination in Western culture. As I am not a Jungian, I have reconceptualized the topic in terms of both method and perspective. My historical findings remain exploratory. I hope to have identified the major trends of the history, but at this stage in the research all results must be considered provisional. I have cited the data that I have happened to find; there must be oversights, small and large.

It is my thesis that a paired use of visionary and unitive experiences, dependent for the most part on active imagination, constituted the gnosis, “knowledge,” at the mystical core of the gnostic trajectory in Western esotericism from late antiquity to modern times. No one has previously written a history of visionary practice in the West. Much less has anyone suggested that Western mystics, some of whom are known to have experienced both visions and unions, ever made a tradition of the dual practice. Evidence that scholars have often treated as marginal or peripheral to the general history of Western mysticism or, at best, have discussed as minor curiosities or oddities have here been presented as a discrete trajectory. My demonstration that there has been such a tradition is, in many ways, as significant as its identification as gnostic.

The gnostic uses of active imagination were transmitted, I argue, by much the same routes as Greek philosophy and science: through early Islam, where they were considerably developed before passing through medieval Judaism, which made important contributions before passing the tradition onward to the Latin West, where gnosis entered alchemy for the first time. [...]« (from the preface)