Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal

Author: Corbin, Henry Year: 1972 (lecture originally delivered 1964; first published in Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, 1972) Publisher: Spring Publications

Summary

This short essay — originally a lecture delivered in 1964 at the Eranos conference in Ascona, Switzerland — is Corbin's single most concentrated statement of the distinction between the imaginary (illusory, merely subjective, unreal) and the imaginal (a genuine intermediate ontological realm). Corbin coined the term mundus imaginalis (from the Latin for "imaginal world") as a translation of the Arabic 'alam al-mithal (world of similitudes, world of images) used in Islamic mystical philosophy, particularly by the Sufi theosophers of the Iranian school, to designate a realm of being that is neither sensory nor purely intellectual.

The essay's central philosophical move is to insist on the ontological reality of the imaginal realm against both materialist reductionism (which dismisses visionary experience as "merely imaginary") and rationalist intellectualism (which treats images as inferior representations of abstract truths). In the Islamic mystical geographies Corbin describes — the "invisible cities" of Jābalqā, Jābarṣā, and Hūrqalyā encountered by the mystic in vision — the imaginal realm has its own space, its own time, and its own causality, distinct from both physical and purely mental orders of being.

Relevance to Project

This essay is the most direct and accessible statement of a concept that the project uses implicitly throughout: that there is a mode of knowledge that is neither sensory perception nor abstract reasoning, but a third thing — visionary, symbolic, participatory — that the ancient initiatory traditions were deliberately cultivating. Corbin's mundus imaginalis gives this mode of knowledge a precise philosophical name and a rigorous ontological defense.

Key Arguments

• The "imaginary" and the "imaginal" must be rigorously distinguished: the former is unreal, the latter is a distinct mode of being
• The mundus imaginalis is the proper locus of prophetic vision, hierophany, and the post-mortem journey of the soul
• Its denial by Western modernity is a specific philosophical error with enormous consequences for how we understand religious and visionary experience
• The "visionary geography" of Islamic mysticism — the maps of inner worlds — is not allegory but literal description of the imaginal realm's topography

Agent Research Notes

This essay is short enough to read in a single sitting and is often the best entry point into Corbin's thought before tackling Alone with the Alone (LIB-0338). It was reprinted in various anthologies and is widely available online. The Eranos Yearbook context is important: Eranos was the annual Swiss symposium where Corbin, Jung, Eliade, and other major 20th-century thinkers on religion and psyche met annually, and Corbin's lecture was explicitly in dialogue with Jungian psychology's concept of the imagination.