Magical Dreams in the Soul and the Stars

In contrast to the ancient world, where it was believed that magical dreams were either sent from the gods or were the wanderings of the soul outside the body while asleep, in the esoteric tradition dreams are predominately discussed as a power within the soul to perceive spiritual realities. According to Neoplatonist Synesius of Cyrene in De insomniis, oneiromancy “comes from ourselves and from within, and is peculiar to each individual’s soul,” while Agrippa states that in dreams “our soul receiveth true oracles, and abundantly yieldeth prophecies to us.” The soul is described as being akin to a sense organ, as mystic Emanuel Swedenborg states in the Arcana Cœlestia: “it is his spirit that sees, not his eye… The same thing may be seen from dreams, in which a man sometimes sees as in the day… from a still more internal sight, which is that of the internal man.” Likewise, occultist Eliphas Lévi writes that “The soul can perceive objects on its own, without the intercession of the corporeal organs, through its own sensibility and its diaphane.” The occult way of seeing dreams is through the inward vision of our innermost spiritual selves.

 But what spiritual realities do we perceive in dreams? According to the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, divine dreams are the result of the soul being able to encompass existence, and that “it is then filled from the universals of total knowledge, so that…it arrives at conceptions of what goes on in the cosmos.” The Ghâyat al-Hakîm, a medieval Arabic grimoire translated as the Picatrix, concretizes this connection of dreams to the cosmos, stating that “The science of dreams is congruent to the science of astrology.” Because oneiromantic dreams are a “power present in the soul, by which the soul is linked to the spirits of heaven,” the Ghâyat argues that “these forms and figures are seen that correspond to the things that are possible on earth…and these are true dreams, by which we are given certain knowledge of things.” Occultist Cornelius Agrippa likewise links the dreaming soul to the heavens in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, stating that dreams are “caused by the celestial influences in the phantastic spirit,” while also explaining how earthly events can correspond to the stars: “there is a certain power put into inferior things, by which for the most part they agree with the superiors; whence also the tacit consents of animals seem to agree with divine bodies.” Events that happen astrologically are mirrored in the soul where they can be perceived in dreams.

One of the most significant discussions of the role of the heavens in dreaming comes from the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus in the section from the Astronomia Magna titled “Von dem dono divinationis” (Of the gift of divination). For Paracelsus, the Astrum or Star is the macrocosmic representation of all reality; it “reveals all future events; nothing is ever hidden, even in the past and present.” How dreaming works is that “man has a sidereal body within him that is united with the outer stars, and the two fabulize with each other,” which occurs when the physical body is asleep and the sidereal body is in operation. The sidereal body is not just our spiritual or oneiric double the way Paracelsus’s idea was taken up in the modern occult concept of the astral body; it is instead the microscopic representation of the heavens within us, which communicates with and can affect the outer stars. In dreams we are able to experience our personal aspect of the greater, astrological image of all reality because it is contained within us.

Earlier, astrological texts like the Ghâyat and Three Books of Occult Philosophy tied specific forms of magical dreaming to specific celestial bodies (for instance, both assign to Mercury the intellectual understanding of dreams). But with the increasing psychologization of magic toward the end of the 19th century, the ‘image of all reality’ we perceive in dreams shifted from a celestial to a mental model. For Lévi, the astral light is less connected to the stars than it is a medium that contains and transmits ideas between minds; it is “saturated with images or reflections of all kinds, which soul can evoke” and that are “always present in us and are only erased by the stronger imprint of the reality of the waking world… When we sleep, this spectacle presents itself to us, and it is thus that we produce reveries.” Poet and occultist William Butler Yeats takes this idea further in "Per Amica Silentia Lunae," with his theory that the images of spiritual dreams come from the Anima Mundi or World Soul, which he describes as “a great memory passing on from generation to generation,” in which persistent images or myths are created through “contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose.” Yeats’s idea that significant dreams depict the persistent, living images of a collective memory is functionally identical to Carl Jung’s theory that dreams can represent archetypal images from the collective unconscious, but set within a spiritual rather than psychological framework.