From the book
A Chymical Dictionary
Gerhard Dorn and John French · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordImagination described through human, celestial and supercelestial relations.
- In the bookIdea supplies one useful connection.
- A place to readThe historical definition below, 1650 dictionary, unnumbered definition page 27; facsimile PDF page 355.
Historical definition
Imaginatio is a star in a human being, a celestial and supercelestial body.
Meaning
The definition is striking because it gives bodily and stellar language rather than a description of a casual mental image. Imaginatio is a star in a person, and is further described as a celestial and supercelestial body. All three qualifications belong to the source and should remain visible.
The entry does not explain the anatomy of that star or identify it as a visible object. Its terms belong to the dictionary’s wider account of human correspondences and efficacies. A reader needs that setting to understand why imagination can be treated with a vocabulary also applied to bodies, stars and powers.
The definition also does not state that every desired image becomes an external reality. Such a claim would require further evidence from a particular author. The short gloss establishes a category and relation, rather than a universal rule about the effects of thinking.
Use in the book
Idea supplies one useful connection. It is a figure conceived in imagination as a perpetual being or a pattern of things of that nature. That entry concerns the conceived figure, while Imaginatio names the faculty or power within the human being in astral terms. Keeping them distinct helps a reader separate an image or pattern from the account of what conceives it.
Confirmamentum gives the body of a star in a person, or an astral body. Ilech magnum compares higher stars in the firmament with lower stars in human beings. Ileidus is elemental air that, in people, is a spirit passing through the members. These entries show a sustained vocabulary of correspondences between larger natural relations and human life. They provide a setting for Imaginatio without proving that all the terms describe one entity.
Imagines offers another important distinction: metallic figures or effigies in which celestial powers operate. There the subject is a figure in a material medium. Here it is imagination in a person. Similar language of celestial power does not erase the change in subject.
Formæ rerum defines forms through celestial influences received by lower bodies or through the virtues of things. That broader account of efficacy helps explain why the dictionary’s imagination vocabulary reaches beyond the everyday contrast between an internal picture and an external object.
Places to read
- ImaginatioRead the complete historical definition and its commentary.
- ConfirmamentumA body described through an internal or human astral relation.
- Formæ rerumForms explained through received celestial influences or active virtues.
- IdeaA conceived figure understood as an enduring pattern.
In this edition
The edition preserves the historical terms while explaining their relationships through the dictionary itself. It does not replace the star with a modern anatomical organ or claim that the gloss proves a particular contemporary psychological theory.
For reading a longer passage, distinguish the person who imagines, the figure conceived, and any effect the author attributes to that conception. The dictionary supplies different names relevant to those different questions. Its short definitions become more informative when those distinctions are kept available rather than compressed into a single modern sense of imagination.
Source note
Historical source. 1650 dictionary, unnumbered definition page 27; facsimile PDF page 355 — Facsimile