Imaginal

Definition

The "imaginal" is Henry Corbin's carefully crafted English coinage to designate a specific ontological category that the Western philosophical tradition lacks: the intermediate world between the purely intelligible (concepts, ideas, abstractions) and the purely sensible (physical matter as grasped by the senses). Corbin introduces the term in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (1960) and develops it most fully in Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi (1958). The need for a new word is itself the argument: by saying "imaginary," the English (or French) speaker inevitably connotes "unreal," "fictional," "merely subjective" — the full weight of post-Enlightenment epistemology in which the imagination is productive of pleasant fictions but not of genuine knowledge. By saying "imaginal," Corbin marks a claim: this is a real world, not a private fantasy, accessed through a specific cognitive faculty (himma, active imagination) that has its own discipline, its own training, and its own epistemological standards.

The ontological claim is that there exists, between the world of pure intellect and the world of physical sensation, an intermediate world (mundus imaginalis, the Latin rendering of the Arabic 'alam al-mithal, the world of images or similitudes) in which spiritual realities take on perceptible form and material events take on spiritual significance. This is the world of the Platonic Forms as they appear to the visionary, the world in which the prophets receive their revelations, the world in which the souls of the dead inhabit their posthumous states, and the world in which the great mythological events — Persephone's descent, Osiris's dismemberment, the Prophet's night journey — are genuinely real without being physical events in the Newtonian-Cartesian sense.

Corbin derived the concept from his study of the Islamic mystical philosopher Suhrawardi (1154–1191, Shaikh al-Ishraq, the master of Illuminationist philosophy) and Ibn 'Arabi (1165–1240, the "Greatest Master" of Sufi metaphysics). For Suhrawardi, the intermediate world is populated by the Archangels of Earth — not symbolic figures but genuine spiritual realities that mediate between the abstract divine intellects and the physical cosmos. For Ibn 'Arabi, the 'alam al-khayal (world of imagination) is the most ontologically dense level of reality — denser than both the abstract and the physical because it contains the fullness of divine self-revelation in perceivable form.

Tradition by Tradition

Islamic Theosophy (Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi)

Suhrawardi's Illuminationist philosophy (ishraqiyya) describes the intermediate world as the domain of archetypal images — images that are real, not invented, and that appear to the purified intellect in visions and dreams. The clairvoyant in Suhrawardi's tradition does not hallucinate; they perceive a genuine intermediate level of reality that is always present but normally invisible to the unprepared consciousness. Ibn 'Arabi's concept of the barzakh (the isthmus or barrier between two things) develops this: the imaginal world is the barzakh between the spiritual and the material, the intermediate state in which all the contradictions and polarities that tear apart the physical world are held in creative tension. The visionary who inhabits the barzakh does not resolve these tensions but participates in the living dynamic of their coincidence.

Shi'a Philosophical Tradition (Mulla Sadra)

The Safavid philosopher Mulla Sadra (1572–1640) systematized the imaginal world concept within a metaphysics of the "intensification of being" (tashkik al-wujud): being is not uniformly distributed but has degrees of intensity, and the imaginal world occupies an intermediate degree between the intensity of the divine and the attenuation of matter. Sadra's concept of "imaginal embodiment" — the idea that the resurrection body is an imaginal body, not a resuscitated physical body — is one of the most philosophically sophisticated treatments of how spiritual reality can be genuinely embodied without being physically material.

Depth Psychology (Jung and Hillman)

Corbin's explicit dialogue with C.G. Jung — reflected in their shared participation at the Eranos conferences — produced a mutual recognition: Jung's "active imagination" and the mundus imaginalis are related concepts that approach the same intermediate territory from different directions. For Jung, active imagination is the disciplined engagement with unconscious contents that allows them to take form — it is the psyche's approach to the imaginal world from within depth psychology's framework. James Hillman's post-Jungian "archetypal psychology" (Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975; The Dream and the Underworld, 1979) developed the Corbinian-Jungian encounter further, arguing that the soul's natural mode is imaginal — that psychic life is inherently image-making and image-dwelling, not idea-processing.

Project Role

The imaginal/imaginary distinction is the project's most precise philosophical instrument for defending the epistemological status of esoteric experience. When a critic says that the vision of Persephone seen by an Eleusinian initiate was "just their imagination," they are making a claim that the imaginal concept contests: the distinction between the imaginal (a perception of a real intermediate world) and the imaginary (a private fantasy without cognitive import) requires a metaphysical framework that the critic has not established. The project uses Corbin's concept not to claim that every reported mystical vision is veridical but to show that the category of "merely imaginary" depends on a metaphysical framework that is itself contestable.

Distinctions

Imaginal vs. Imaginary: The distinction is Corbin's primary point. Imaginary = unreal, private, fantasy. Imaginal = a genuine intermediate ontological domain, real in its own mode, accessible through specific cognitive disciplines. The conflation of these two concepts is the specific epistemic error that the modern West makes about esoteric experience.

Imaginal world vs. Astral plane: The Theosophical "astral plane" covers similar ontological territory but with different philosophical grounding and different associations. The imaginal world is specifically grounded in the Islamic philosophical tradition's epistemology; the astral plane carries Theosophical cosmological claims that the project need not import.

Active imagination vs. Passive fantasy: Active imagination (Jung's term, close to Corbin's himma) involves the ego's disciplined engagement — it is not passive reception but a skilled, attentive encounter with what arises. Passive fantasy is the mind's undisciplined wandering without cognitive discipline or accountability. The imaginal world is accessible through active imagination, not passive fantasy.

Primary Sources

• Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (1960): The most sustained treatment of the imaginal world in the Islamic philosophical tradition, with extended studies of Suhrawardi and the Ishraqiyya.
• Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi (1958): The foundational analysis of the imaginal in Ibn 'Arabi's theosophical system.
• Henry Corbin, "Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal" (1964): The essay that coined the term "imaginal" and made the philosophical argument for why a new word was needed.
• James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975): The depth-psychological development of the imaginal concept, placing it at the center of a thorough revision of psychological theory.
• Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (2012): The most accessible scholarly introduction to Corbin's concept of the imaginal for readers without background in Islamic philosophy.

Agent Research Notes

[AGENT: perplexity | DATE: 2026-03-22] The imaginal concept has had growing influence beyond its original Corbinian context — in consciousness studies (Jeffrey Kripal's work on the "super natural"), in anthropology (with the concept of "ontological turn" that takes seriously indigenous claims about non-physical realities), and in philosophy of mind (Thomas Nagel's "what is it like to be X" question points toward the imaginal as the domain of irreducibly perspectival experience). The project should note this growing interdisciplinary convergence without overextending the concept.