Henry Corbin

Henry Corbin was a 20th-century French philosopher, theologian, and scholar of Islamic mysticism whose work transformed how the West understands the imagination.

As the leading interpreter of Ibn ʿArabī and Suhrawardī and of Persian Shiite theosophy, Corbin recovered and named in Latin the concept of the mundus imaginalis—the “imaginal world.” His key move was to insist that this realm of images is neither subjective fantasy nor abstract idea but an ontologically real intermediate world, possessing its own geography and inhabitants, perceived by a distinct cognitive faculty he called the “active” or creative imagination.

To capture its reality he coined the term imaginal precisely to rescue it from the dismissive connotations of “imaginary.” Corbin is the crucial modern conduit through which the Sufi metaphysics of imagination re-entered Western intellectual life, and his importance to the mind-power lineage is conceptual rather than devotional.

By establishing that imagination can be a mode of perception of the real rather than mere invention, he gave philosophical dignity to the claim—central to manifestation and esoteric traditions—that the imaginal act participates in reality rather than fleeing it.

His work directly shaped James Hillman’s archetypal psychology and the wider imaginal and active-imagination currents in depth psychology, and it stands behind serious attempts to distinguish disciplined visionary imagination from idle daydream.

Corbin thus functions as the scholarly keystone linking classical Sufi imagination-metaphysics to modern psychology of consciousness.