The Cult of Tara

88 MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
This provocative surrealist model, however, gives only a limited
analogue for the total collapse of the boundary between the public
and private universes. What the surrealists call their "magic"
indeed increases the repertoire of awareness, adding the imaginary
to the objective at the same ontological level. But where the surrealist
image is thrust upon a reality already given in experience,
the Tibetan yogin sees the complete and absolute interpenetration
of the two unitary fields. His image and his object are not superimposed,
but rather are primordially one, and this is what makes
possible his magical ability to manipulate the universe.
Nevertheless, it was in the Western magical tradition that the
surrealists found one of their most fruitful sources of ideas. The
omnipotence of the controlled imagination is a central concept in
both magic and alchemy, where the boundaries blur even more
dramatically, and "the vis imaginative, is nearly always present, for
it is the fundamental, central force, and the others are usually used
only as aids to heightening it or ways of communicating it." 131
From
this tradition the concept of the vera imaginatio entered into the
occult "underground," to surface occasionally in such diverse persons
as Aleister Crowley ("the wickedest man in England"), William
Butler Yeats, and Andre Breton himself, who had read the thirteenth-century
alchemist Raymond Lulle and was deeply unfluenced
by Eliphas Levi, the 19th-century visionary and magus of "transcendental
magic": 132
Among the antinomies, the major one that Levi attacks is t
antithesis between spiritual and material: to him it is merely
matter of degree of opacity or of light; "Spiritual and corpor"
are simply terms which express the degrees of unity or densi
in substance." Man has in him the power to transform the opaq
into the translucent; Eliphas Levi defines this power as i
agination. "To imagine is to see" (Donner a voir will reiterate the
surrealist!), and to see is to crystallize, to render diaphane or
"transparent"; that is, imagination is not the creator of illusion,
but the illuminator of reality. "Imagination, in effect, is like t
soul's eye; therein forms are outlined and preserved; thereby
behold the reflections of the invisible world; it is the glass o
visions and the apparatus of magical life."
Levi is here rendering in its typically materialist terms a conce,
that had been molded by some of the major figures of the Renaissance.
To the magician Giordano Bruno, writes Frances Yates,
"this magically animated imagination is the 'sole gate to all internal