DiotimosReading Desk

Matter, form and life

Manes, shadow and imagination

manes, manes; persistent affections or representations in this account; ombre, shadow; fantaisie, fantasy; imaginative faculty; imagination, imagination

The entry concerns images and affections that remain distinct from the body, natural spirit, and rational soul.

From the book

The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordThe entry concerns images and affections that remain distinct from the body, natural spirit, and rational soul.
  • In the bookThe writer uses poetic language about the dead but also rejects the inference that every returning shadow is the dead person’s soul.
  • TranslationManes is retained; shadow, fantasy, and imagination follow the source’s distinctions and qualifications.
  • A place to readRead scans 261–266 continuously, especially the explicit rejection of poetic ghost stories at 266.

Meaning

The manuscript’s manes are not simply another name for the immortal rational soul. In its explanatory prose they are representations, affections, and operations of fantasy. The imagination occupies an intermediate place between soul and senses, receives images, and retains something of bodily representations. An impression strongly fixed there can persist and affect happiness or suffering. This account makes the moral history of a person’s affections consequential beyond bodily death.

Ombre likewise names a representation rather than the represented body itself. A vegetable form drawn from ashes supplies an analogy: it resembles the former plant without simply being the whole living plant restored in every respect. The text’s distinctions are sometimes expressed in compressed or unstable syntax, but the recurring purpose is clear. Resemblance, persistence of form, and the return of an image are insufficient grounds for identifying that image with the rational soul.

Use in the book

At scan 261 a poetic fourfold division gives manes, flesh, spirit, and shadow different destinations. Flesh returns to earth, shadow remains near the tomb, manes descend below, and spirit returns to heaven. The writer uses the verses to introduce distinctions among renovation, regeneration, rectification, glorification, and resurrection. They are a starting point for analysis rather than an exhaustive doctrinal scheme adopted without further explanation.51

Scan 262 insists that the principle of renovation is not the body or shadow, and is not simply the immortal rational soul. The shadow is an image. Manes represent manners and inclinations of the soul, and their relation to the imagination becomes the subject of the following passage. One should therefore resist reading the opening poetic division as four independently complete persons within the human being. The prose asks what each term actually represents and how their operations differ.

Scan 263 explains why images matter morally. Strong impressions occupy the imagination after death, contributing to happiness if good and misery if bad. Tantalus, Midas, Sardanapalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion supply poetic examples of desires or affections that become punishments. The soul is imagined as oppressed by fantasy and the tyranny of passions. The writer’s focus is the persistence of an engraved character and its effects, not a catalogue of folklore about apparitions.

At scan 264 he names these affections and operations manes and directs the reader to Agrippa for diverse opinions about the human being after death. The reference acknowledges a field of disagreement. It should not be expanded into an exact quotation or a single doctrine of Agrippa without further evidence. The argument then compares representations of the soul with accidental individual forms remaining after the dissolution of a corpse. This introduces the physical explanation of an apparent returning shape.

By scan 266 an evaporated and coagulated form resembling a corpse is called a shadow, explicitly distinguished from the body. The text lists lemures, specters, manes, and Nemesis as names assigned to such shapes. It then dismisses poetic accounts of wandering souls around graves as frightening diversions and trifles, rather than incontestable arguments. That dismissal is as important as the strange phenomena described. The author accepts a distinction between a bodily representation and a rational soul precisely where a casual reading might identify them.52

The subsequent distinction between natural spirit and soul reinforces the point. Sensitive and vegetative spirits participate in subtle matter and serve as instruments; the rational soul has a different origin and intellectual operations. Persistent imagination and material form belong to the explanation of apparent continuities after death, but do not abolish that distinction. The entry therefore helps readers separate the manuscript’s account of a surviving image from its argument for personal immortality and resurrection.

Places to read

  1. Manuscript 113r · Scan 261The poetic division into manes, flesh, spirit, and shadow introduces the inquiry.
  2. Manuscript 113v · Scan 262A shadow or representation must not be mistaken for body or rational soul.
  3. Manuscript 114r · Scan 263Imaginative impressions and passions contribute to happiness or torment.
  4. Manuscript 114v · Scan 264Manes named as affections and operations of fantasy; Agrippa cited for differing opinions.
  5. Manuscript 115v · Scan 266Corpse-like shadows distinguished from bodies and poetic ghost stories rejected.
  6. Manuscript 116v · Scan 268Sensitive and vegetative spirits remain instruments distinct from the rational soul.

Translation

Manes is kept as a historical term because spirits of the dead would settle the question that the writer is disputing. Fantasy renders fantaisie where the faculty is at issue and is explained through the adjacent imagination. It need not mean a freely invented story; the faculty receives and retains images, including impressions experienced as forceful and involuntary.

Shadow remains shadow even when its physical formation is discussed. Specter and lemure follow the source’s list, while the writer’s rejection of their identification with wandering souls is translated in full. The edition does not convert the whole passage into an endorsement of apparitions, nor dismiss the author’s distinction between image and soul as an irrelevant aside.

manes

Attested: H001-S261; H001-S262; H001-S264; H001-S266. Poetic term reinterpreted through persistent affections and representations.

ombre

Attested: H001-S261; H001-S262; H001-S266. The represented bodily shape, distinguished from body and soul.

fantaisie

Attested: H001-S263; H001-S264. The faculty and operations in which strong images remain impressed.

imagination

Attested: H001-S263. The intermediary faculty receiving and retaining images.

Source note

Hogart Manuscript 3, scans 260–262. The verses are introduced under the names of Lucretius and Ovid, but the translation does not infer a secure attribution of every line in the composite sequence.

Hogart Manuscript 3, scan 266. The dismissal concerns poetic wandering-soul explanations as arguments; the preceding account of shadow-like forms is still part of the author’s natural explanation.