I keep forgetting, and then remembering, why this is one of the most important books in my library.

[sophiaserpentia]

In 1913 Carl Gustav Jung developed a procedure for inducing visions that he termed "active imagination." He combined hypnagogic states with visualization techniques in order to induce waking imaginations that were autonomous, as are dreams, and not consciously directed, as are daydreams. Jung's procedure has since had a variety of successors. ...

The significance of active imagination for the history of religion remains to be assessed. Several intriguing speculations have been offered. Jung alleged the use of active imagination in gnosticism, alchemy, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Henry Corbin made a case for active imagination in the Islamic gnosis of medieval Isma'ilism, Avicenna's Neo-Aristotelean mysticism, and theosophical Sufism. Antoine Favre has suggested that a blend of gnosis and active imagination has been part of Western esotericism since its systemization in the Italian Renaissance.

The present study is, to my knowledge, the first systematic history of active imagination in Western culture. ... It is my thesis that a paired use of visionary and unitive experiences, dependent for the most part on active imagination, constituted the gnosis, "knowledge," at the mystical core of the gnostic trajectory in Western esotericism from late antiquity to modern times.

from the Preface of Dan Merkur's Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions