^* The thought is indebted to Calvin Martin : “One of the great insights of hunter societies is that words and artifice of specific place and place-beings (animal and plant) constitute humanity’s primary instruments of self-location, the computation of where, in the deepest sense, one is in the biosphere, using words and artifice that have accurately touched the place and these elder beings. For mankind is fundamentally an echo-locator, like our distant relatives the porpoise and the bat” (In the Spirit of the Earth, 103).

^† My use of the term imaginal, here and throughout, follows James Hillman’s proposal that we “read all the documents and fragments of myth left from antiquity … as accounts or witnesses of the imaginal” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 30). The imaginal is distinct from imagination (a faculty) and the imaginary (a product of that faculty) in that it names a realm superseding individual volition. Hillman remarks, “My so-called personality is a persona through which soul speaks” (51), soul being an event of creative imagination (“soul-making can be most succinctly defined as the individuation of imaginal reality” [Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27]). Hillman’s perspective on the imaginal ultimately derives from Henry Corbin, whose essay “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal” Hillman published in Spring 1972. In Creative Imagination in the Sufism of lbn ‘Arabi, Corbin provides a succinct evocation of the terrain (although imaginal is not in his vocabulary): “We wish to stress on the one hand the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action, or of all action as such, but especially of creative action; and, on the other hand, the notion of the image as a body (a magical body, a mental body), in which are incarnated the thought and will of the soul” (179); and, to return to Hillman, “we too are ultimately a composition of images, our person the personification of their life in the soul” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 41).