Visualizations and the Games of Imagination

It is well known that one of the principal practices of pagan magic with Celtic roots is the art of visualization, or, as it is often called, “illumination“.

One distinguishes “passive“, “receptive“, and “active“, “incantatory” visualization. In the first case the operator perceives the pictures that rise in his mind; in the second he forms them actively. The images perceived in passive visualization are often vague, resembling dreams.

Passive visualizations may be unintentional or deliberate. Unintentional passive visualizations arise with a weakening of consciousness (for example, under the influence of psychotropic substances), in psychoses, in the disorganization of psychic activity, and in semi-drowsy and sleeping states. In deliberate passive visualization a person voluntarily forms images without a clear idea of them, merely to “daydream”.

In active visualization the clarity of the image increases as the ritual progresses, and when the ritual reaches its climax it becomes impossible to distinguish the reality of the visualized object or event from the surrounding environment. In other words, when visualization reaches its maximum, the object departs from the practitioner’s mind, acquiring independent existence.

As is often the case, modern “Magi”, following psychologists, find it appropriate to say that visualization is a “technique of communicating with the unconscious.” And, as usual, they are partly right. But the magical myth confidently asserts that a person is both a creation of their surrounding environment and its creator. We not only perceive the world around us, but we actively create it, and that is precisely the active function of our mind.

The leading mechanism of creative imagination, whose aim is the creation of something new, an object that did not yet exist, consists of importing some property of objects from another domain.

From this point of view, active visualization is not simply a “game of imagination“; it is the work of creating a new object or changing the state of an existing one. For the Druids, visualization exercises were one of the primary tasks of training. The art of translating objects and situations from potential existence into actuality by applying the operator’s will was regarded as a key to achieving Power and Wisdom.

The ability to sustain the desired image in the mind, to endow it with vitality, differs substantially from ordinary perception. It is genuinely a magical practice because, first, it directly depends on the practitioner’s level of power, and second, it shapes reality according to the practitioner’s will.

However, as with everything in the magical world, the art of visualization has analogues in ordinary life. Imagination is the key to Power even for ordinary people. People with a richly developed imagination attain considerable Power without any magic; the point is that they usually cannot control their power, so in the complex struggle they often lose.