When the French scholar Antoine Faivre (1934–2021), one of the founders of the academic study of Western esotericism, tried to identify what was characteristic of esoteric thought, he did not define it by a particular doctrine, secret teaching or occult practice. Instead, he described a recurring form of thought. His model became highly influential in the emerging scholarly study of Western esotericism. Faivre distinguished four characteristics that he regarded as intrinsic: correspondences, living nature, imagination and mediations, and the experience of transmutation. He also described two further, less essential characteristics: concordance between traditions and the transmission of knowledge through an initiatory chain.

Of these characteristics, “imagination and mediations” may be the most interesting if we want to understand esoteric practice from the perspective of consciousness.

Imagination and Mediation

Faivre’s formulation is more specific than the simple idea that esoteric traditions contain a great deal of imagery. Imagination, in this context, allows correspondences and relationships between different levels of reality to become experientially accessible. Mediations are the forms through which such relationships can be approached: symbols, rituals, images, mandalas, intermediary beings and other structures that connect domains that would otherwise remain separated.

Imagination therefore means considerably more than fantasy. It functions as a mode through which hidden or inaccessible relationships acquire perceptible form.

This idea has a long history, but one of its most sophisticated twentieth-century formulations was developed by the French philosopher, theologian and Iranologist Henry Corbin (1903–1978). Corbin devoted much of his scholarly career to Iranian Islamic philosophy and mysticism, especially thinkers such as Suhrawardi and Ibn ʿArabi, and became one of the most important Western interpreters of the philosophical traditions of Iranian Islam.

Corbin was particularly interested in a problem that remains highly relevant today: what exactly do we mean when somebody sees something that is not physically present?

From the Imaginary to the Imaginal

Modern Western thinking has often left us with a rather poor choice. Either something exists in the external material world and is therefore real, or it is imagined and therefore unreal.

Corbin regarded this opposition as fundamentally inadequate.

To overcome it, he introduced the term mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. He deliberately distinguished the imaginal from the merely imaginary. The imaginary is what we usually mean when we say that something has been invented or made up. The imaginal, in Corbin’s terminology, referred to an intermediate order between ordinary sensory reality and purely intellectual or spiritual reality.

This imaginal domain could contain forms, beings, landscapes, colours and events, without these being physical objects occupying ordinary geographical space.

The faculty corresponding to this domain was imagination, but again not imagination in the everyday sense of producing fantasies. Corbin understood active or creative imagination as a genuine cognitive faculty through which otherwise inaccessible realities could acquire form.

Whatever one thinks of Corbin’s metaphysical interpretation, the phenomenological observation behind it is difficult to dismiss. Human beings can enter states in which internally generated images no longer resemble casual daydreams. They may become stable, spatial, immersive and unexpectedly autonomous.

This brings us remarkably close to what we have called the ultrasubjective hyperspace.

Entering the Ultrasubjective Hyperspace

The ultrasubjective hyperspace, or USH, is our term for an experiential domain that may become increasingly apparent as ordinary sensory engagement is reduced and attention turns inward. Such states may arise during meditation, visionary practices or other altered states of consciousness.

Initially the phenomena may remain simple: light, colour, motion or geometric structures. Under some conditions, however, the inner field becomes much more elaborate. Landscapes may appear. Architectural spaces can unfold. Figures or apparently autonomous entities may emerge. A person may experience distance, direction and movement while the physical body remains still and the eyes are closed.

From the outside, nothing spatial is occurring.

From the inside, an experiential space has developed.

Anyone familiar with such states immediately encounters the problem that concerned Corbin. Calling the experience “imaginary” adds very little. It simply tells us that ordinary external sensory input is not sufficient to explain what is being experienced.

The more interesting question is how an internally generated process acquires perceptible form.

Imagination as an Interface

A feeling can become a landscape. An unresolved tension may emerge as a figure. An amorphous bodily state may acquire colour, movement or pressure. Something that exists initially without language or representation can suddenly appear as an image with which consciousness can interact.

This suggests a different way of understanding imagination.

Instead of regarding it merely as a faculty that produces fictional images, we can regard it as an interface through which processes that are normally implicit become available to conscious perception.

A complex internal state that cannot easily be grasped conceptually may appear as an image, an object, a landscape or an apparently autonomous being. Once the process has acquired such a form, it can be observed and sometimes interacted with.

This is where Faivre’s idea of mediation becomes particularly relevant.

Western esoteric traditions have always been populated by mediating forms. Angels, planetary intelligences, elemental beings, sigils, sacred names, ritual objects, mandalas and visualisations all occupy this intermediate territory. Historically, they were often understood as links between the human world and other cosmic or divine levels of reality.

We do not need to accept that metaphysical explanation in order to recognise the phenomenological structure involved.

A symbolic figure can mediate between ordinary conscious awareness and processes that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

The Interface Works Both Ways

Once this is recognised, another possibility emerges.

An internal state may generate an image, but deliberately introducing an image may also alter the state.

That reciprocal relationship may help explain why visualisation, ritual imagery and sigils can become operative rather than remaining merely decorative.

A symbolic image can become a means of interacting with processes that are difficult to approach directly. In that sense, the image becomes something like a control surface.

The old esoteric vocabulary spoke of influencing forces, contacting intelligences or activating correspondences. A contemporary phenomenological description does not need to decide in advance whether such explanations are literally correct. What matters initially is that particular symbolic operations may produce reproducible changes in attention, affect, bodily experience or the structure of the inner field.

This is also where trained imagination begins to differ from ordinary fantasy.

From Fantasy to Trained Imagination

Fantasy tends to follow association. One image evokes another, a narrative develops, attention wanders and the person becomes absorbed in the resulting stream.

Trained imaginative practice behaves differently.

Attention remains comparatively stable. An image can be sustained without continually manipulating it. Unexpected developments can be observed. The practitioner does not need to identify with every image or immediately interpret everything that appears.

At that point, imagination becomes experimentally interesting.

Does an image change spontaneously? Does it return on another occasion? Do particular forms recur? Does interaction with a specific symbol reliably alter emotional or bodily experience? Do similar structures arise in different practitioners who have not been told in advance what they should expect?

These questions are not fundamentally different from those asked in phenomenological investigation.

The important point is that none of them requires us first to decide what the experience ultimately is.

Bracketing the Metaphysics

Here the ultrasubjective hyperspace differs significantly from Corbin’s mundus imaginalis.

Corbin made an ontological claim. For him, the imaginal world was a genuine mode of reality, not merely an individual psychological construction. Within the traditions he studied, this was also a domain in which angels and other subtle forms could genuinely be encountered.

The USH model does not need to begin with that assumption.

We can bracket the ontology.

If an apparently autonomous entity appears during a profound altered state, we do not have to decide immediately whether it is an independent spiritual being, an archetypal structure, a manifestation of dissociated cognitive processing, a predictive construction of the brain or something for which our present conceptual vocabulary is inadequate.

The first task is description.

How did the experience arise? What was its perceptual structure? Did the figure behave predictably or unexpectedly? Was there a sense of agency? Did interaction alter the state? Could something similar be induced again?

That methodological choice allows us to take unusual subjective experience seriously without prematurely converting it into either metaphysics or pathology.

From Esoteric Doctrine to Cognitive Architecture

Seen from this perspective, Faivre’s category of “imagination and mediations” becomes unexpectedly contemporary.

It may describe more than a characteristic belief found in Western esoteric traditions. It may point toward something about the architecture of consciousness itself.

Human consciousness appears capable of translating processes that normally remain outside explicit awareness into images, figures, environments and encounters. Once such forms arise, they can become objects of attention and, under some circumstances, instruments through which the underlying state can be modified.

The esoteric traditions developed elaborate maps for navigating this territory. Their interpretations were expressed in the cosmologies available to them: angels, spirits, planetary forces, astral worlds, subtle bodies and divine intermediaries.

We are free to question those interpretations.

What we should be much more cautious about discarding are the experiences from which they arose.

The concept of the ultrasubjective hyperspace offers another route. We can enter the same territory phenomenologically, take the experience seriously and postpone the question of ultimate ontology.

Imagination, viewed in this way, is no longer simply the opposite of reality. It may be one of the principal interfaces through which otherwise inaccessible dimensions of human experience become perceptible.

References

Corbin, H. (1964). Mundus imaginalis ou l’imaginaire et l’imaginal. Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme, 6.

Corbin, H. (1972). En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques (Vol. 4). Paris: Gallimard.

Faivre, A. (1994). Access to Western Esotericism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Faivre, A. (2010). Western Esotericism: A Concise History (C. Rhone, Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Shariat, A. (1991). Henry Corbin and the imaginal: A look at the concept and function of the creative imagination in Iranian philosophy. Diogenes, 39(156), 83–114.