Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal

It is perhaps worth making this essay available here in spite of the fact that it can also be found online here in a different translation. This pdf version may be more readable and more easily printed. This is the essay as it first appeared in Spring 1972 (Zurich), in a translation by Ruth Horine.

Mundus Imaginalis
or
The Imaginary and the Imaginal

by

Henry Corbin
(Paris/Teheran)

Spring 1972 - Zürich

[This paper, delivered at the Colloquium on Symbolism in Paris in June 1964, appeared in the Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme 6, Brussels 1964, pp. 3—26. The version printed here has been condensed (with the permission of the author) by omitting paragraphs of a technical nature on pages 5 and 8 of the original, as well as an account (pp. 17—23) of the topography of the Eighth Clime. The complete text of this account has been published in H. Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome IV, livre 7, Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Other writings of Prof. Corbin have been published regularly in French in the Eranos Jahrbucher. His major works in English translation are: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Bollingen Series LXVI) N. Y. and London, 1960 and Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn'Arabi, Princeton and London, 1969. – Eds.]

MUNDUS IMAGINALIS

Blue Animal Skin Carpet - Konya; from Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of very Early Turkish Carpets. Oxford University Press, 1993.