Mundus Imaginalis

The imaginal world — Corbin’s translation of the Arabic ʿālam al-mithāl — names an ontologically real intermediate order of being that stands between the world of sense and the world of pure intellect. It is not the “imaginary” (fictional, unreal) and it is not allegory. It is the country in which theophanies occur and visions take place. Corbin insisted on the Latin neologism precisely because Western philosophical vocabulary had collapsed this third term into the merely fanciful (Corbin, Alone with the Alone 1969).

In ibn-arabi and Suhrawardī, the imaginal world has its own geography — hurqalya, the alternate Earth, “an Imaginative universe that stands between two worlds, our sensory Earth and the intelligible universe of the Angels” (Corbin 1969). It is the earth of the resurrection body. Its organ of perception in the human being is the heart, not the intellect and not the senses.

For archetypal-psychology-charter, the mundus imaginalis became load-bearing. Hillman’s formulation — that the aim of therapy is “the restoration of the patient to imaginal realities… the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology 1983) — is Corbin’s country rendered in therapeutic idiom. The divergence is that Hillman accented the pathologized and polytheistic face of the imaginal where Corbin held it in the register of theophany.

Relationships

Primary sources

corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)
corbin-man-light-iranian (Corbin 1971)
Hillman, Archetypal Psychology (1983)