The imaginal realm

The imaginal realm is an ontologically real intermediate order of being — neither the physical world of sense perception nor the purely intellectual world of abstract concepts, but a third domain that stands between them and makes both intelligible. It is not the imaginary in the Western philosophical sense: not the fictive, not the merely mental, not the unreal. The distinction is precise and consequential. Corbin coined the Latin neologism mundus imaginalis — translating the Arabic ʿālam al-mithāl — precisely because no existing European term could carry the metaphysical weight without collapsing the realm into fantasy or allegory.

The philosophical genealogy runs through Iranian Sufi theosophy. Suhrawardī, the twelfth-century founder of Ishrāqī philosophy, described an intermediate world possessing its own geography — Hūrqalyā, the mystical Earth with emerald cities, situated at the summit of the cosmic mountain — accessible not through reason or the senses but through the trained creative imagination. Ibn ʿArabī elaborated the same structure through his doctrine of the khayāl munfaṣil, the separable, autonomous Imagination that subsists independently of any individual imagining subject:

The Imagination separable from the subject has an autonomous and subsisting reality sui generis on the plane of the intermediary world, the world of Idea-Images. "Exterior" to the imagining subject, it can be seen by others in the outside world, but in practice these others must be mystics.

This is the crucial move: the imaginal is not a projection of the human psyche outward onto a blank screen. The images subsist in their own right, on their own plane, with their own authority. The disorder of the imagination, Ibn ʿArabī argues, at least presupposes the imagination's existence — and what the rational theoreticians miss is precisely its intermediary character, "which places it at once in the sensible and the intelligible, in the senses and in the intellect, in the possible, the necessary and the impossible, so that it is a 'pillar' (rukn) of true knowledge."

Corbin's recovery of this structure was the decisive philosophical gift to twentieth-century depth psychology. Hillman received it and transformed it. Where Corbin's imaginal is theophanic — the Imagination is the cosmological organ through which God discloses Himself, and its figures (the Angel, the Temple, the Form of Light) are guaranteed by that sacral operation — Hillman psychologized the same ontological claim, insisting on the pathologized dimension of imaginal life rather than its hieratic ascent. The debt was permanent; the divergence was irreducible. Hillman acknowledged both at the 1974 Eranos gathering. As he put it in Archetypal Psychology, Corbin's double move was foundational: first, that the archetype is accessible to imagination before anything else and presents itself first as image; second, that the entire procedure of depth psychology as a method is therefore imaginative — its exposition rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, its therapeutic aim "a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities" (Hillman, 1983).

The organ of imaginal cognition, in both Corbin and Hillman, is the heart — not the anatomical organ but what Ibn ʿArabī calls the qalb, the subtle center that produces gnosis (maʿrifa), comprehensive intuition, the intimate taste (dhawq) of divine mysteries. Corbin attributes the recognition that imagination is not merely a human faculty but an activity of soul — "it is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined" — to the awakened heart as locus of imagining, a locus Hillman connects to Michelangelo's l'immagine del cuor. The heart thinks in images; the imaginal is where that thinking has its proper domain.

What the imaginal realm refuses, then, is the pneumatic preference that has structured Western philosophy since Plato: the preference for ascent, for the abstract, for the concept over the image, for the intelligible over the sensible. The imaginal is not a higher world in that sense. It is a middle world — soul's world, the tertium between body and spirit that Neoplatonic writers called the metaxy. Without it, as Hillman observes, the psyche becomes indistinguishable either from bodily life or from the life of spirit, and there can be no true psychology. The imaginal is the ontological ground that makes depth work possible: the plane on which images are encountered rather than invented, where figures have authority rather than merely meaning, where the soul's speech can be heard as something other than symptom or symbol to be decoded.

The hermeneutic proper to this realm is taʾwīl — not allegory, which moves a surface meaning toward a fixed doctrinal referent, but a carrying-back of the image to its originating source within the intermediate world itself. To allegorize the imaginal is to annihilate it by terminological negligence.

  • Henry Corbin — portrait of the French Islamicist whose recovery of the mundus imaginalis became the ontological foundation of archetypal psychology
  • mundus imaginalis — glossary entry on the intermediate realm between sense and intellect
  • James Hillman — portrait of the psychologist who received Corbin's imaginal and pathologized it downward into soul-making
  • soul-making — Hillman's term for the psyche's deepening through image, suffering, and imaginal encounter

Sources Cited

  • Corbin, Henry, 1969, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman
  • Armstrong, Karen, 1993, A History of God