Myers was also thinking of the science of entomology when he wrote of the imaginal. An imago is the final adult form of an insect’s metamorphosis, during which it, for example, develops wings and becomes sexually mature. This final stage is called the imaginal stage. The insect’s immature or adolescent feeding form is called the larval stage. Just as the larval stage of an insect looks nothing like the imago of its adult form (which indeed appears “bizarre” or alien-like in comparison to the larval slug), so too the functioning of the human imagination can metamorphize into extremely strange
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