Imaginal

Description

Michael Martin:

"An imaginal realm is not simply “an invented world,” a work of fiction; and both Blake and Tolkien believed the worlds of their works to be as real as any other. On the other hand, every world, including that we take to be “reality,” is a product of invention. The question is: Who is doing the inventing? It is not a welcome realization, is it? As Rilke so wisely observes, “already the knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in / our interpreted world.”[1] My claim: the imaginal world is just as substantial as any world, including those we think we inhabit. Another name for the imaginal realm, or at least an aspect of it, is the Otherworld.

The great French scholar and philosopher of religion Henri Corbin explains the characteristics of the imaginal realm:

“Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of idea-images, of archetypal figures, or subtle substances, of ‘immaterial’ matter. This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensibly worlds; it is an intermediate universe ‘where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,’ a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtle and immaterial. The organ of the universe is the active imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality.”

(https://druidstaresback.substack.com/p/the-imaginal-realm-the-otherworld)