Fourth, I have a problem with the ways that Corbin seems to imply—by the very content of the books he published—that the imaginal is somehow reserved for traditional symbols and historical mystics, that the imaginal cannot appear, as it were, in popular or nontraditional sources and “ordinary” people. I think this preference for the historical and the established is simply mistaken, both historically and morally. Indeed, I have insisted on this elite-popular collapse. I would insist that the very same imaginal or unconscious processes that Corbin treated in his Shi‘i, Ismaili, and Zoroastrian
...more
