imaginal discs // extinction events

"The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay" - but not quite entirely.

Imaginal Discs

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a classic children's book about a caterpillar who eats and eats and eats and eats. Then he wraps himself up in a chrysalis, emerges as a butterfly, and we're done.

But what goes on inside that chrysalis?

I use the metaphor of the imago (adult form of an insect) quite often, especially for talking about imaginal practice, but I'm not sure I've ever really explained a key part of that metaphor — imaginal discs, and their role across the stages of an insect's life.

I'll let Pat Barker set the stage for what goes on inside the cocoon:

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly… No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

The caterpillar rots, it turns into goo. That's when all of its hunger and eating finally become useful. All that energy the caterpillar was storing up is now broken down into food for its imaginal discs.

Each imaginal disc lies dormant in the larva (the caterpillar) as just a small blob of cells. But once the caterpillar has dissolved most of its body in the chrysalis, those imaginal cells begin to grow, to extend from the middle outward, forming parts of the new body of the imago (the butterfly) and then knitting those parts together.

These few small discs of cells “eat” the rest of the body, so they can grow a new one.

The larva essentially exists as a carrier for these imaginal discs — for the latent body of the imago. The purpose of the larva is to get bigger and bigger until it has stored enough energy to build its own imago, to create its own adulthood from the latent potency of its own body.

Imagine: as a baby, a child, a teen, you eat and eat and eat, getting bigger and bigger for years. Then, somewhere around 16 or 17, you lock yourself in your room, and over the course of a couple months, most of your body dissolves into goop, except for your brain, spine, heart, liver, and pancreas. Those parts start to "eat" the goop that was the rest of your body; they begin to grow, twist, and reshape themselves into a new body.

A couple months later, you emerge from your room as a 7-foot tall blue-skinned cat-person, mostly remembering your previous life in a dreamy, happened-to-someone-else kind of way.

That's a fair enough approximation of what insect larvae go through when they enter the cocoon and emerge as the imago.

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Following the Metaphors

The metaphorical ground for cocoons and personal transformation seems fairly obvious and well-trod; "the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay."

What feels less well-trod is the other half of the metaphor, those imaginal discs. What is latent inside you, waiting for its moment to transform? What parts of you have a hidden destiny, just waiting for the moment when the metabolic process is ready to go?

I've half-joked before that "chakras are the imaginal discs of the angels we long to become," but I do think there's something to the idea. (You'll have to give me a lot of leeway on the terms "chakra" and "angel.")

I suspect that Values/Virtues are very closely related to the "imaginal discs" of the creature each of us could potentially be. We each have certain values, certain narratives, certain vows and questions that are trying to live through us, and each of our unique clusters of values have the potential to knit together into something new.

Anyway, that's all very half-baked and feels like a lifetime of work to clarify.

What's been on my mind lately, for whatever reason, is some question about planetary extinction events.

Something in the back of my mind thinks that there's some clue in there, if we can examine each extinction event as something like a chrysalis, where there's a transformation taking place that consists almost entirely of decay (mass extinction of Earth's species) — if we can look at which "imaginal cells" survived each one and thrived afterwards, there would be some clue about the planetary body that's trying to emerge; about the planetary psychosphere that's trying to emerge. If we can see more clearly the trajectory behind us, we could see more clearly where we are.

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Imaginal Foundations

As for my own attempts at finding and cultivating imaginal discs, I released my first volume of my Imaginal Literacy course this week.

This one focuses mainly on imaginal journeying, with an emphasis on dreamwork. It's a foundational course, much less directed at the whole "CULTIVATE THE EMERGENCE OF THE ANGEL" thing, and more aimed at "can you start to notice the ecology and dynamics of your inner landscape?"

I hope some of you enjoy it, and more than anything I hope it's the first step towards a whole bunch of us being able to share practices, ideas, and insights from the imaginal a few years from now. It would be really great to expand the pool of people interested in and capable with this stuff.