Beyond Imaginal Privatism pt. 1

Henry Corbin (1903-1978)

I am deeply appreciative of Henry Corbin, to whom the increasingly widespread use of the term imaginal can essentially be attributed. I sense that Corbin’s influence on contemporary culture is only just beginning to ripen.

I also think there is an element in his way of thinking about the imaginal that we must participate in surpassing.

I call this imaginal privatism.

Understanding Imaginal Privatism

Corbin was a committed scholar and practitioner of Sufi mysticism. The distinctly Persian inflection of Neoplatonism informing Sufi thought gives the imagination a far more dignified status than one finds at the headwaters of the Neoplatonic tradition in Plotinus.

Sufi mysticism generally regards the imagination as the sole faculty capable of mediating theophany (divine revelation), and for this reason places a premium value on imaginal practice.

Sufi imaginal practices rest on a paradigm Corbin called angelology.

This is a subtle and sophisticated worldview that is not easy to elaborate in simple or linear terms, positing a dynamic and inseparable bond between the human soul, the world, and an infinitely ramifying God.

Your innate potential is traceable an archetypal blueprint—call it your angel. Your angel is a completely unique version of a universal pattern, the spiritually-determined origin of your singular personality emanating from the divine Absolute. Your angel exists beyond time. However, from your mortal standpoint it acts as a strange attractor impelling your development through time. For this reason, Corbin spoke of the “angel out ahead.” The angel is at once your origin and your everlasting goal. You can contact your angel through imaginal practice, and in doing so you will discover that you love your angel, and that your angel loves you. The more you tend your relationship with your angel and feed the Erotic channel of love that connects you, the more you will be lured to live in such a way that you will increasingly resemble the image of your angel in this life—though never perfectly: your angel will remain forever out ahead.

Everything coming from your angel through imaginal practice is meant for you, and no other. Your connection to the imaginal is yours, and yours alone.

The final sentences of this regrettably crude summary point us toward imaginal privatism. True to Shi’ite mystical doctrine, Corbin understood theophany to be a strictly individual experience. Whenever genuine theophany takes place, so it is maintained, it is always and necessarily yours and yours alone.

“And this always individually, in an ‘alone to alone,’ which is something very different from universal logic or from a collective participation, because only the knowledge which the fedeli has of his Lord is the knowledge which this personal Lord has of him.”

In other words:

For every person, there is an angelic guide. This angel is not purely universal because it bears a stamp of uniqueness. It is not something that can be experienced collectively because the encounter is an irreducibly private affair.

The aim of imaginal practice, from an angelological standpoint, is to sustain contact with what carries relevance for your individual unfoldment. The imaginal mediates the function of individuation, the innate drive toward attaining singularity of personality issuing from a transpersonal source.

“The individual,” Corbin claimed, “is the first and final reality.”

Two Modalities of Privatism: Content and Locus

Jung had famously been visited twice by the same vision in the events leading up to WWI: a horrible flood covered northern Europe, surrounding the Alps which rose higher to keep above water as the sea turned to blood.

Jung initially suspected an impending psychosis: the Alps respresenting his own assailed ego, defensively rising to avoid total submersion by a volatile upheaval of unconscious and autonomous psychic content symbolized by the encroaching sea.

Upon the outbreak of the war, with its geopolitical mirroring of the dream, collective catastrophe was ironically coupled with personal relief as Jung was compelled to venture an alternate interpretation.

“Now my task was clear; I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general.”

The very idea of a collective unconscious runs against the notion that imaginally accessible content abides by any strict privatism.

I don’t presume Corbin would have denied this.

He was no stranger to the prophetic tradition at the headwaters of the Abrahamic “religions of the book” (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that he sought to reconcile and integrate through his Neoplatonic imaginal mysticism. The Hebrew prophets transmitted visions of profoundly collective relevance.

Visions and dreams of collective import are ancient and ubiquitous, and the modern mind is anomalous in its tendency to ignore and repress this.8

What I’m more pointedly addressing here, rather, is less concerned with the content than the locus of imaginal revelation.

Jung’s vision occurred to him alone. As did those of the prophets. Those who went to see the Pythia, the Apollonic oracle at Delphi, sought insight from dreams and visions that she, alone, received. Sufistic Theophany is a private occurrence.

Laying aside questions concerning the more-than-personal relevance of imaginal material, Jung’s approach to active imagination traditionally assumes this individual locus of imaginal revelation. It is the individual, even when being guided or facilitated in some way by an analyst or companion, that is typically assumed to be the proper locus of imaginal revelation.

Jung and Corbin are, in this regard, “angels of a feather” in their legacy, which has been indispensable toward keeping imaginal practice alive in much of the post-Enlightenment western world.

Collectivity and its Complications

Few are unacquainted with the madness of crowds, the ease with which collective equilibrium rushes to the lowest common denominator where large masses of human bodies congregate under duress, genuine or illusory. Also, cult dynamics, where far more modest sums of people adhere to a value system surrounding a charismatic figure, cohering around an inflexible power structure while remaining sundered from their full sovereignty.

Jung was outspokenly wary of mass consciousness, the regressive loss of our precarious individuality amidst the intoxicating pull of herd mentality:

“The inevitable psychological regression within the group is partially counteracted by ritual, that is to say through a cult ceremony which makes the solemn performance of sacred events the centre of group activity and prevents the crowd from relapsing into unconscious instinctuality. By engaging the individual’s interest and attention, the ritual makes it possible for him to have a comparatively individual experience even within the group and so to remain more or less conscious. But if there is no relation to a centre which expresses the unconscious through its symbolism, the mass psyche inevitably becomes the hypnotic focus of fascination, drawing everyone under its spell. That is why masses are always breeding-grounds of psychic epidemics, the events in Germany being a classic example of this.”

As both Jung and Corbin (and others) have stressed, part of the great value in achieving a high degree of individuation is found precisely in a strengthened capacity to resist the otherwise magnetizing power of these “psychic epidemics.”

Considering these dangers, and the value of individual sovereignty toward resisting them, why lay stress upon non-individual loci of imaginal revelation?

Collectivity and Individuality in Cosmogenesis

Imaginal influx has not always and everywhere taken place in an unequivocally private locus, and there are instances suggesting creative, rather than destructive, potentials. One example shows agreement with Jung’s emphasis on the importance of ritual as a conductor of shared attention among the group.

Let us first assume that the imagination, understood in its fullest sense, concerns not only dreams, imagery, and visions, but also the animating energy behind creative impulses.

Malidoma Somé gives the following account of a group of Dagara women engaged in pottery crafting—an instance of what he calls indigenous technology:

“They are seated in a circle, and they chant until they are in some sort of ecstatic place, and it is from that place that they begin modeling clay. It is as if the knowledge of how to make pots is not in their brains, but in their collective energy. The product becomes an extension of the collective energy of the circle of women . . . they are acknowledging that their ability to create is a part of nature’s design, a part of their purpose.”11

Here we have an example of the group as a conduit for creative imaginal influx. By invoking collectively distributed energies through established ritual norms with a clear purpose, a generative communal coherence is established.

If we follow Jung’s thinking from the quote above, the ritual form serves as a center of collective attention that sustains a viable degree of individual experience among the participants, even as deeper energies pour through from the unconscious.

There is another important sense, however, in which the individual creative potential of the women involved in this art making remains diminished in service of the transmission of cultural expression. If we can speak at all of a “creative subject” at work crafting the pots, it would most appropriately be The Dagara. The aesthetic signature and aesthetic form of the pots bear the stamp of Dagara culture, while the individual makers remain stylistically anonymous.

Taken a level deeper, however, the true creative subject would be the earth. In the birth of cultures expressing distinctive aesthetic signatures, artistic forms, ritual structures, and mythological and symbolic patterns, the “dreaming of the earth” is at work.

“The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.’ In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking.”13

This is not eliminated in the highly individuated artist. Take this evocative statement by Cézanne, who spoke of creative process as an act of abandoning oneself to “the torrent of the world”:

“For my part, I want to lose myself in nature, and grow again with her, like her . . . In a patch of green, my entire brain will flow with the sap-like tide of the tree . . .”14

And deeper still, the unfolding creative intelligence of comsogensis is the paramount creative subject. At every level of creation, the artist’s signature gestures to the creative influx from this hidden co-conspirator.

Cézanne likewise spoke of the creative urge as a “cosmic obsession that devours us.”

The creative unfolding of cosmogenesis surges through the dreaming of the earth, differentiating into a manifold of biological species, further branching off into aesthetically distinctive cultures before ramifying into individuals with irreducibly unique styles.

Rudolf Steiner remarked that one finds an equivalent degree of differentiation among human individuals (assuming the unfoldment of their individuation has attained a sufficient degree) as between species in the animal kingdom.

Cézanne would not be conflated with O’Keefe or Picasso or Kahlo or van Gogh. Rilke has a very distinct flavor from Keats, as Keats does from Oliver. Chopin isn’t Coltrane isn’t Hendrix isn’t Abasi isn’t…

Individuation expresses a cosmogenic drive toward a uniqueness of creative potential, realizable only through the singular person.

Threading the Needle

An important note: a culture structured upon ideals of individualism is by no means a guarantor of genuine individuation among its members. The alienating and atomizing social structures of late capitalism are exactly that: culture. Consumable signifiers of “individuality” generally express cultural trends, not the degree to which the individuals partaking in them have answered the call of their own ensoulment—their angel out ahead.

Neither is it inevitable that participating in earth-based and energetically-sourced practices of creative cohesion, as gestured toward in the Dagara example, should necessarily entail a suppression or inhibition of individuation.

Threading this needle toward an authentically individuated basis for deep communion—coursing between the Scylla of alienating and destructive individualism on the one hand, and the Charybdis of sovereignty-negating collectivism on the other—poses a persistent problem.

All too frequently collectives lapse into holding patterns of stagnant conformity or turn into reruns of tired cult shenanigans. The collective cultural baseline, however, lies on the other extreme: habitual dissociation from the profoundly deep-reaching levels of intimacy and communion that lie within our potential to realize. This will be the subject of posts to follow.

The realization of an earth-attuned, transpersonally sensitive, and emergent co-creativity amongst groups of participants capable of maintaining and expressing a high degree of individuation remains an extreme rarity.

While acknowledging the value of individuation toward safeguarding against the perils of destructive varieties of collective possession, we must also add another, counterbalancing, value—one that I would argue is indispensable to the disorienting historical interval we find ourselves navigating:

The irreducible singularity of ensouled creativity toward which the process of individuation drives stands in service of a collectively enacted, cosmogenic creative potential that would otherwise remain impossible.

Cohering with a Cosmological Imperative

In the essays to come, I will suggest that this cosmogenic potential will unfold through a mutative leap in consciousness whereby sovereignty and communion are reconciled, held in dynamic equipoise.

So, too, are volition and surrender.

For, in one sense, we must take this leap. In another, we must allow ourselves to be leapt by the deeper forces at work through the unfolding mystery of cosmogenesis. We must realize that we have the capacity to make ourselves available for this process of cosmogenic participation.

There is an imaginal dimension to this participatory orientation, and engaging with it will be crucial. And yes, it will entail surpassing imaginal privatism.

I want to be clear here: this leap beyond imaginal privatism implies a supersession, not a regression. The individual must come along, intact.

It would be simplistic, then, to claim that Corbin’s emphasis on the private dimension of imaginal communion is simply incorrect or obsolete and must be left behind. No, it is far from incorrect and by no means obsolete. It is profoundly necessary, though incomplete in itself.

The leap into individuation had once been a prime cosmological imperative, and Corbin’s imaginal privatism reflects the imaginal background of this imperative and its enduring relevance in the ongoing unfolding of cosmogenesis.

The leap beyond imaginal privatism, as I presently see it, gives expression to a new cosmological imperative emerging amid the historical juncture we find ourselves in. This emerging cosmological imperative and its imaginal background must add itself to and persist alongside the private dimension of imaginal influx and the individuating impulse to which it corresponds.

I hold this to be an essential feature of a Second Axial Age.