BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

Michelangelo’s Creation, from the Sistine Chapel.

PART I

I MAGI NI NG THE REAL

Between the world of pure spiritual Lights (Luces victoriales, the

world of the “Mothers” in the terminology of I shraq) and the

sensory universe, at the boundary of the ninth Sphere (the Sphere

of the Spheres) there opens a mundus imaginalis which is a

concrete spiritual world of archetype-Figures, apparitional Forms,

Angels of species and of individuals ... vision of it in actuality is

vouchedsafed to the visionary apperception of the Active

I magination (Corbin, 1978:42-43).

When the Australian author and Nobel Laureate Patrick White addressed a
meeting of writers in 1986 he told them that a writer’s purpose was to “ ... imagine
the real” in their writings (Brennan, 1989:177). Lecturer and Anglican priest
Michael Giffin has suggested that White meant by this that the writer is to embody
in their fictional characters aspects of the meta-historical imagination of Western
civilization and also to clearly reflect varieties of religious experience (Giffin,
1996:6).
There are three interesting corollaries to this. Firstly, that there is an
imaginative tradition, a dimension of the psyche that is accessible but that
transcends the meta-historical imagination of Western civilization that, indeed,
extends beyond recorded history. I use the word ‘psyche’ in the sense in which
Jung understood it, as an a priori entelechy and hence it is based on a teleological
hypothesis which describes the psyche as consisting of essentially three aspects or
dimensions. I t is first of all everything that is conscious, that is, everything in us
that is associated with the so-called ego complex. I n addition, the psyche consists
of the so-called unconscious, that is, that which in the psyche is unknown but
which, when it crosses the threshold of consciousness, immediately assimilates itself
to the conscious contents. I t is worth noting here that consciousness primarily