Mundus Imaginalis, or The imaginary and the Imaginal

by Henry Corbin, Ruth Horine (Translator)

English, French (translation)

Genres: Philosophy, Spirituality, Religion, Psychology, Islam

22 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Henry Corbin was a philosopher, theologian and professor of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. As a boy he revealed the profound sensitivity to music so evident in his work. Although he was Protestant by birth, he was educated in the Catholic tradition and at the age of 19 received a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris. Three years later he took his "licence de philosophie" under the great Thomist Étienne Gilson. In 1928 he encountered the formidable Louis Massignon, director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne, and it was he who introduced Corbin to the writings of Suhrawardi, the 12th century Persian mystic and philosopher whose work was to profoundly affect the course of Corbin’s life. The stage was then set for a personal drama that has deep significance for understanding those cultures whose roots lie in both ancient Greece and in the prophetic religions of the Near East reaching all the way back to Zoroaster. Years later Corbin said “through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny for the passage through this world was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path that I was seeking.”
Corbin is responsible for redirecting the study of Islamic philosophy as a whole. In his Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he disproved the common view that philosophy among the Muslims came to an end after Ibn Rushd, demonstrating rather that a lively philosophical activity persisted in the eastern Muslim world – especially Iran – and continues to our own day.

Reviews

[John Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry Corbin (1923 -1978): philosopher, anthropologist and Islamic expert penned this curious artifice of myth and Swedenborgian metaphysics years into his career, but it became the focus of his work--the idea of imaginal reality as an alternative to Western ways of thinking.

A mix of Oriental and Islamic thought, Corbin's synthesis of 12th century Persian poet Suhrawardi and translations of fables resulted in one of the most precise transcriptions of how poetry is actually made that one could come across.

Suhrawardi and his band of disciples probably wove these together. To quote Corbin's text: At the beginning of the tale that Sohravardi entitles “The Crimson Archangel,” the captive, who has just escaped the surveillance of his jailers, that is, has temporarily left the world of sensory experience, finds himself in the desert in the presence of a being whom he asks, since he sees in him all the charms of adolescence, “O Youth! where do you come from?” He receives this reply: “What? I am the first-born of the children of the Creator [in gnostic terms, the Protoktistos, the First-Created] and you call me a youth?” There, in this origin, is the mystery of the crimson color that clothes his appearance: that of a being of pure Light whose splendor the sensory world reduces to the crimson of twilight. “I come from beyond the mountain of Qaf… It is there that you were yourself at the beginning, and it is there that you will return when you are finally rid of your bonds.”

The mountain of Qaf is the cosmic mountain constituted from summit to summit, valley to valley, by the celestial Spheres that are enclosed one inside the other. What, then, is the road that leads out of it? How long is it? “No matter how long you walk,” he is told, “it is at the point of departure that you arrive there again,” like the point of the compass returning to the same place. Does this involve simply leaving oneself in order to attain oneself) Not exactly. Between the two, a great event will have changed everything; the self that is found there is the one that is beyond the mountain of Qaf a superior self, a self “in the second person.” It will have been necessary, like Khezr (or Khadir, the mysterious prophet, the eternal wanderer, Elijah or one like him) to bathe in the Spring of Life. “He who has found the meaning of True Reality has arrived at that Spring. When he emerges from the Spring, he has achieved the Aptitude that makes him like a balm, a drop of which you distill in the hollow of your hand by holding it facing the sun, and which then passes through to the back of your hand. If you are Khezr, you also may pass without difficulty through the mountain of Qaf.

Two other mystical tales give a name to that “beyond the mountain of Qaf and it is this name itself that marks the transformation from cosmic mountain to psychocosmic mountain, that is, the transition of the physical cosmos to what constitutes the first level of the spiritual universe. In the tale entitled “The Rustling of Gabriel’s Wings,” the figure again appears who, in the works of Avicenna, is named Hayy ibn Yaqzan (“the Living, son of the Watchman”) and who, just now, was designated as the Crimson Archangel. The question that must be asked is asked, and the reply is this: “I come from Na-koja-Abad.” Finally, in the tale entitled “Vade Mecum of the Faithful in Love” (Mu’nis al-‘oshshaq) which places on stage a cosmogonic triad whose dramatis personae are, respectively, Beauty, Love, and Sadness, Sadness appears to Ya’qab weeping for Joseph in the land of Canaan. To the question, “What horizon did you penetrate to come here?,” the same reply is given: “I come from Na-koja-Abad."

Na-koja-Abad is a strange term. It does not occur in any Persian dictionary, and it was coined, as far as I know, by Sohravardi himself, from the resources of the purest Persian language. Literally, as I mentioned a moment ago, it signifies the city, the country or land (abad) of No-where (Na-koja abad) That is why we are here in the presence of a term that, at first sight, may appear to us as the exact equivalent of the term ou-topia, which, for its part, does not occur in the classical Greek dictionaries, and was coined by Thomas More as an abstract noun to designate the absence of any localization, of any given situs in a space that is discoverable and verifiable by the experience of our senses. Etymologically and literally, it would perhaps be exact to translate Na-koja-Abad by outopia, utopia, and yet with regard to the concept, the intention, and the true meaning, I believe that we would be guilty of mistranslation. It seems to me, therefore, that it is of fundamental importance to try, at least, to determine why this would be a mistranslation.

It is even a matter of indispensable precision, if we want to understand the meaning and the real implication of manifold information concerning the topographies explored in the visionary state, the state intermediate between waking and sleep-information that, for example, among the spiritual individuals of Shi’ite Islam, concerns the “land of the hidden Imam” A matter of precision that, in making us attentive to a differential affecting an entire region of the soul, and thus an entire spiritual culture, would lead us to ask: what conditions make possible that which we ordinarily call a utopia, and consequently the type of utopian man? How and why does it make its appearance? I wonder, in fact, whether the equivalent would be found anywhere in Islamic thought in its traditional form. I do not believe, for example, that when Farabi, in the tenth century, describes the “Perfect City,” or when the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bajja (Avempace), in the twelfth century, takes up the same theme in his “Regime of the Solitary”. I do not believe that either one of them contemplated what we call today a social or political utopia. To understand them in this way would be, I am afraid, to withdraw them from their own presuppositions and perspectives, in order to impose our own, our own dimensions; above all, I am afraid that it would be certain to entail resigning ourselves to confusing the Spiritual City with an imaginary City."

Corbin's preoccupation with this crucial difference between the "imaginary" and "Spiritual" would have been natural to him, Catholic educated as he was and also so acutely aware of the world's other religions.

In this 1oo page volume, available on OpenLibrary, one hears Novalis, the voice of the early Romantics, the surrealists, and their process of creation as well. Like an odd blend of Henri Bergson and Proust himself; the tale and the process combined.

[Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond the darkness of the senses there is a realm that is not the same as nothingness. This realm cannot be located in any “where,” for it encompasses all possible “wheres.” It has extension, dimensionality, and even colors—but these qualities are beyond all empirical sense experience. They are not intrapstchic qualities, like when you imagine images in your minds eye; they are beyond the minds eye. They exist in the mundus imaginalis—the imaginal world—an intermediary world between the purely physical and the purely spiritual. Does that make sense? No??

Imagine that you are a goldminer deep inside your mine. You initially set out to start mining for gold ore. After arduous time spent chipping away at rock, you strike gold! However, you realize that once you collect the ore and put it in your pouch, it ceases to shine. You say to yourself, "most of this ore only shimmers while I'm looking at it, but once I put it in my pouch, it loses its luminosity. Where does this light come from? From which rock must I strike to break open the veil between this gold ore and the illuminating light within it?!" You decide to set your sights on only the gold ore that shines forever, even when placed within your pouch. Eventually, however, a particular piece of gold ore shines a ray of light directly into your eyes, causing you to flinch and accidentally jostle your headlamp. This causes you to realize that the light has been coming from your headlamp the whole time. You were never going to find the light located within the gold ore!

This analogy helps explain how the mundus imaginalis is not located in any "where," because it illuminates all "wheres." It is like the headlamp on our heads that we cannot see, but instead see "because of." There are only particular moments in the material, sensible world, where phenomenon are arranged in just a particular way as to reflect back the light of the imaginal. And just as the surface of the gold ore reflected back the light from the headlamp, this imaginal light is not contained within the material, sensible world. The way that our material world reflects back the mundus imaginalis is purely accidental. The material, sensible world, does not "contain" the imaginal in the same way our mind's eye "contains" an imaginary image of a chair. Instead, we, the world, and even our mind's eye, are all contained within the imaginal.

[Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Corbin was a philosopher and theologian whose work focused on the traditions of imagination and spiritual visions in Sufism. Corbin’s essay presents the key Sufi belief that dreams and imagination are an independent and intermediating reality between the material and spiritual worlds, and that the realities experienced through the visionary imagination are not imaginary in the sense of being made up, but are instead imaginal. This idea is crucial for understanding and working with dreams as an objective and magical reality. Corbin’s theory is drawn from work on the Sufi mystic Muhyīddīn Ibn ‘Arabī, whose writings on dreams in the Al-Futūhāt al-Makkīyya or Meccan Revelations can be further found in Corbin’s Alone with the Alone, and in William C. Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is the physical, sensible world encompassing both our terrestial world (governed by the human souls) and the sidereal universe (governed by the Souls of the Spheres). The sensible world is the world of the phenomenon (molk). There is also the supersensible world of the Soul or Angel Souls, the Malakût, in which the above mentioned mystical Cities are located, and which starts at the "convex surface of the ninth Sphere'. And there is the world of pure archangelic Intelligences. Each of these three worlds has its organ of perception: the senses, imagination, and the intellect, corresponding with the triad: body, soul and mind. The triads govern the threefold development of man extending from this world to his resurrections in the other worlds."
—
"Imagination is the cognitive function of this world. Ontologically, it ranks higher than the world of the senses and lower than the purely intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter. This approach to imagination, which had always been of prime importance for our mystical theosophers, provided them with a basis for demonstrating the validity of dreams and of the visionary reports describing and relating ‘events in Heaven’ as well as the validity of symbolic rites. It offered proof of the reality of the places that occur during intense meditation, the validity of inspired imaginative visions, of cosmogonies and theogonies and above all of the veracity of the spiritual meaning perceived in the imaginative information supplied by prophetic revelations."
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"We must avoid any confusion between the object of imaginative or imagining perception, on the one hand, and what we commonly qualify as imaginary, on the other. For the general tendency is to juxtapose the real and the imaginary as if the latter were unreal, Utopian, just as it is customary to confuse the symbol with allegory, or the exegesis of spiritual meaning with allegorical interpretation. Allegory, being harmless, is a cover, or rather a travesty of something that is already known or at least knowable in some other way; whereas, the appearance of an Image that can be qualified as a symbolis a primordial phenomenon (Urphaenomen). Its appearance is both unconditional and irreducible and it is something that cannot manifest itself in any other way in this world."
—
"We are no longer participants in a traditional culture. We are living in a scientific civilization, which is said to have gained mastery even over images. It is quite commonplace to refer to our present day civilization as the ‘civilization of the image' (to wit our magazines, motion pictures, and television). But one wonders whether — like all commonplaces — this one does not also harbor a radical misunderstanding, a complete misapprehension. For, instead of the image being raised to the level of the world to which it belongs, instead of being invested with a symbolic function that would lead to inner meaning, the image tends to be reduced simply to the level of sensible perception and thus to be definitely degraded. Might one not have to say then that the greater the success of this reduction, the more people lose their sense of the imaginal and the more they are condemned to producing nothing but fiction?"

[João Cirilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Livreto muito bom para a uma introdução do assunto. Mesmo em poucas páginas, dá para perceber a erudição do Corbin, autor inegavelmente interessante.

Por ser um "recorte", algumas partes ficam ligeiramente soltas, nada que atrapalhe de fato o conjunto e as idéias.

[Giulio]

Letto in versione italiana, da traduzione indipendente

[Joaco Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

fundacional para una metafísica de lo imaginal

[Lukas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won't pretend that I understand it completely but still it is interesting way of interpretation of Persian philosophy.