The Imaginal Tradition

Across cultures and centuries, a recurring insight has been articulated, recovered, forgotten, and recovered again: the imagination is not a faculty for producing fictions. It is an organ of perception for a real order of being. From the Neoplatonists of late antiquity to the Islamic illuminationists of medieval Persia, from the Romantic poets of early nineteenth-century England to the depth psychologists of the twentieth century, a lineage of thinkers has insisted that there is a realm between pure intellect and pure matter — a realm of living images, archetypal presences, and genuine vision — that requires the imagination to perceive it, and that modernity has systematically disabled.

Core Ideas

The imaginal tradition begins, for Western purposes, with the Neoplatonists. Plotinus (204–270 CE), the founder of Neoplatonism, developed a hierarchical account of reality in which everything that exists flows from the One — the transcendent source that is beyond all predication. Between the One and the material world lies the realm of Intellect (Nous) and the realm of Soul (Psyche). The soul’s return to the One — the great theme of Neoplatonic spiritual practice — is not purely intellectual; it involves the imagination as a vehicle of ascent through the intermediate realms. Proclus, Iamblichus, and the later Neoplatonists developed elaborate accounts of the soul’s journey through imaginal realms that were genuinely ontological — real levels of being, not mere metaphors for psychological processes.

The Islamic illuminationist tradition takes up and deepens this inheritance. Suhrawardi (1154–1191), the founder of the Ishrāqī (illuminationist) school, synthesized Neoplatonism, Zoroastrian angelology, and Islamic mysticism into a metaphysics of light in which the imaginal world — the ‘ālam al-mithāl — is the intermediate realm between the world of pure intelligences and the material world. This realm is not subjective; it is the site of genuine vision, of the prophetic imagination, of the soul’s encounter with its celestial archetype. Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) — the greatest of the Islamic mystics — developed the most comprehensive account of the imaginal, arguing that the imagination is the faculty through which the divine manifests itself in particular forms, and that the world itself is the divine imagination made visible.

Henry Corbin’s recovery of this tradition in the twentieth century is the most important contemporary event in the imaginal lineage. Corbin argued that the West had lost the imaginal world — not by refuting it but by losing the faculty and the vocabulary for perceiving it. His concept of the mundus imaginalis — coined specifically to distinguish the ontologically real imaginal from the merely psychological “imaginary” — is the most precise modern statement of the tradition’s central claim.

The Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century were, in Corbin’s retrospective reading, defenders of the imaginal tradition against the Enlightenment’s epistemic reduction. When Coleridge distinguished the Primary Imagination (the living power of perception that apprehends the world as alive) from mere Fancy (mechanical recombination of stored images), he was articulating the same distinction Corbin would later develop philosophically. When Blake insisted that “the imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself,” and when he located his visionary world — the fourfold world of Albion, the angels in trees, the grain of sand that contains eternity — as ontologically real (not metaphorical, not merely internal), he was doing exactly what the Ishrāqī tradition had done in a different language.

In the twentieth century, Jung’s concept of active imagination — a therapeutic practice in which the conscious ego enters into dialogue with autonomous figures arising from the unconscious — is the closest Western psychology came to recovering the imaginal faculty as a practice. Jung was explicit that the figures encountered in active imagination are not merely subjective; they have an objective character, their own agency and intelligence. James Hillman, who developed “archetypal psychology” in explicit dialogue with Corbin (they met and corresponded through the Eranos conferences), went further: the archetypes are genuinely imaginal presences, and the soul’s health depends on maintaining a living relationship with them. Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) is the most sustained application of the imaginal tradition to clinical psychology.

Tom Cheetham’s work — particularly All the World an Icon (2012) and Green Man, Earth Angel (2004) — has done more than any other contemporary writing to make Corbin’s thought accessible and to draw out its implications for how we might live now. Cheetham’s central concern is the recovery of the imagination as an organ of perception in daily life — not as an esoteric practice but as a restoration of a basic human capacity that modernity has impaired.

Key Works

• Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī (1958, English 1969) — The central Corbin text; the introduction is essential.
• Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon (2012) — Best contemporary introduction; start here.
• James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) — The application of the imaginal tradition to depth psychology.
• William Blake, Selected Poems (various editions) — The Romantic expression of the imaginal; read alongside Cheetham’s commentary.
• Plotinus, Enneads (various translations) — The Neoplatonic source; Elmer O’Brien’s anthology The Essential Plotinus is a good entry.

Connections

• The Imaginal — The central concept; this tradition is its lineage and elaboration.
• Henry Corbin — The key modern figure whose recovery of the tradition makes it available to contemporary thought.
• Meaning Crisis — The loss of the imaginal is one of the central dimensions of the meaning crisis; recovering it is part of any adequate response.
• Existentialism — Corbin engaged deeply with Heidegger; the imaginal tradition can be read as a response to the question of Being that goes beyond Heidegger.

Quotes

“The active imagination is not a faculty for producing fictions. It is an organ of perception for a real order of being.” — Henry Corbin, paraphrased

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” — William Blake

“What we call the imaginary is, for the Islamic philosophers, the most real — the realm where the spirit becomes corporeal and the body becomes spiritual.” — Henry Corbin

“The angels are not metaphors. They are presences — as real as anything that happens to you.” — Tom Cheetham, paraphrased