Wahm in this rhetorical discussion should not be reduced to the everyday sense “false belief.” It may designate an invented, quasi-sensory representation the mind constructs for something non-bodily.
The claws of death are not literal organs of death, yet the mental picture forcefully conveys death’s grip. The rhetorical efficacy of a representation must be distinguished from the physical truth of a bodily claim.
A figure can therefore have an intelligible imaginative content even when the imagined entity has no corresponding external anatomy.