“No; we have other ways of travelling.”
“The way you have,” Lyra said, “is it possible for us to learn?”
“Yes. You could learn to do it, as Will’s father did. It uses the faculty of what you call imagination. But that does not mean making things up. It is a form of seeing.”
“Not real travelling, then,” said Lyra. “Just pretend. . .”
“No,” said Xaphania, “nothing like pretend. Pretending is easy. This way is hard, but much truer.”
— ‘The Amber Spyglass’ (chapter 37)
The angel Xaphania in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (in the trilogy His Dark Materials) alludes to imagination in a way which anticipates much of the matter making up The Book of Dust trilogy. In The Secret Commonwealth Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon had become so estranged that Pan decided to undertake a journey to Central Asia to find what he called Lyra’s imagination, the culmination of which were the events in The Rose Field.
I owe it to several online sources to have discovered the significance of Xaphania’s name. As with an early modern literary demon called Xaphan, the angel Xaphania appears to derive their name from the Hebrew tsaphan; the verb’s several meanings include ‘to hide by covering over’, implying hoarding or reserving. On a figurative level it can allude to denial, protection, shadowing or stalking – it’s thus a fairt multivalent word.
Many of these meanings can be applied to the faculty of imagination: this form of seeing is something to treasure but not to lock away, deny, or lose. Lyra’s dæmon is trying to somehow reverse his human’s aphantasia, her inability to form mental images. Or rather, her loss of ability to form such images, because as an adult student she has learnt to only accept what seems reasonable.
Continue reading “The faculty of imagination: #TheBookOfDust”
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