How does magical imagination differ from fiction or fantasy?
Good question. Let’s put it this way: the imaginal power of constructing alternative realities is much the same, but the reader or fiction writer is engaged in a different quality of relationship to the created world. The writer or reader of fiction and fantasy believes in the world through what the poet Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” That is, readers compartmentalize their belief in the mundane world away from their belief in the fantasy world. The wizard or mage doesn’t suspend disbelief, but rather knows how reality is woven and asserts him or herself into the weft and warp of the world. Both the writer of fantasy and the mage use words to create a new reality, but the one enters into that reality only while writing (or reading), while the other walks continuously in that world. Put another way, the “fantasy” of the mage is not fantasy: or the mage relates to that “fantasy” as reality. One of the major differences between, say, believing in the world of Harr
