Active Imagination
Four steps to being in conversation with your Mythic Ancestors
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A Chairde,
As we slowly make our descent into Samhain time, when the veil between worlds thins, it is the optimal season to connect with your mythic ancestors—the goddesses, gods and otherworldly beings of our tradition.
A reminder that you can find your 54-page (and growing) compendium of mythic ancestors for you to work with here. Seeing as it’s almost the Cailleach’s time, the ‘Veiled One’ in Old Irish or ‘witch’ in modern Irish, I've a sense she'll be making herself known and looking for her own profile in our collective book this month!
One accessible way you can connect with your mythic ancestors is through active imagination, which is literally like having a conversation with your unconscious, the part of your psyche where the mythic ancestors emerge from.
Active imagination acts as a bridge between two worlds. One world is your conscious reality, what you are aware of right now in your waking time as you read these words. The ‘Otherworld’ is the realm of the unconscious, the hidden parts of your psyche. These hidden parts contain contents personal to your own life, but also collective parts belonging to the human experience as a whole.
‘Active imagination is Jung’s method of holding the conscious and unconscious in dialogue around an image, theme, or cluster of ideas to gain further insight from the unconscious.’
Nora Swan-Foster, Jungian Art Therapy
The collective part is where archetypes, the ‘first patterns’ of humankind, emerge from. These are the images that float into our awareness when we think of ‘Great Mother’, ‘The Father’, ‘Wise Old Woman’, ‘Trickster’, etc. The stories and characters of Irish mythology can be seen as distinctive Irish expressions of these universal archetypes, emerging from the collective unconscious of the Irish people, shaped by our ancestral memory, landscape, history and culture.
As the land also holds soul in the Irish tradition, active imagination can be done directly with the land. I regularly converse with a young oak tree on the grounds of a castle near where I live. Only last week, I had a powerful experience with a hawthorn tree, a sceach gheal ‘bright thorn’, that provided profound guidance helping me to close a painful 2-year cycle that I struggled to make peace with. Today, we will focus more on mythic ancestors but there's so much to say here that I will likely create another piece on working with the land in this way.
Phew, a hefty introduction. Now let's get started…
Dreams and Active Imagination
One of the most important ways the unconscious or Otherworld communicates with us is through our dreams. Dreams are the royal messages from the unconscious, but their symbolic language can be challenging to understand. Often, dreams convey messages for our lives that we are not yet aware of, requiring a lot of effort and time to interpret them—or rather, to allow them to work on us.
This is where active imagination can be a wonderful support to dreamwork and to life in general. Although the practice existed before, active imagination was formally introduced to the field of psychology by Carl Jung. He described it as the closest encounter we can have with the reality of the unconscious that doesn’t require interpretation, unlike dreams.
A whole Otherworld exists within you. In a world that focuses on the outer, it’s a precious gift to remember that an entire inner world belongs to us. Here, we can recognise our fantasies as living fragments of our soul. Active imagination is less about interpretation and more about experiencing our inner life directly.
Virginia Woolf captured this beautifully when she wrote: ‘Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.’ This reminds us that every book is a reflection of its author’s inner world whether they were conscious of it or not while writing. That’s why creativity is such an ally to inner work.
