higher realms of intellect and spirit - and that it is possible to gain passage to that
realm or dimension.
There is in British tradition, for example, the idea of a transcendent intellect
called Sidhe, which was known to the Druids as the Web of the Wise (Gardner,
2000:32), and which became known as the Web of the Weird or Wyrd, a strange
netherworld fantasy dimension “ ... a dimension in which our notions of time, space
and causality are suspended” (Bates, 1983:10). I n the Kabbalistic tradition, the
Sefer Ha Bahir (The Book of Brilliance), a collection of mystical interpretations of the
Bible, introduces the concept of other realities of existence beyond the
comprehension of our physical senses (Zetter, 1999:48). Here, angels known as
Lipika are responsible for recording in the Anima Mundi or World Soul, all spiritual
events that occur upon the earth and the thoughts, words, feelings and deeds of
humans (Ovason, 1997:22). The Australian Aborigines also have, what is perhaps,
a much older tradition of another reality, the Dreamtime. The physicist Fred Allan
Wolf suggests that the Australian Aborigines claim to have a memory of the realm
of the dreaming spirit dating back nearly 150,000 years (Wolf, 1994:19). Wolf and
others, Poulter (1988), Sutton (1989) and Ellis (1991), suggest that in this
Dreamtime tradition reality is perceived in two aspects: firstly as a primary universe
far more extensive than the secondary physical world and the physical universe
which arose as a dream and, secondly, that in their view contains all of the past,
present and future, as Wolf explains it:
From this realm the world of mind, matter and energy continually
arises as a dream, not only long ago but even today, suggesting
that the universe or God is dreaming all of what we experience
into existence and that this dream overlaps into what we
experience as reality (Wolf, 1994:19).
Some researchers have accepted that the most important element here is
that this imaginal habitation or realm is a dimension that is ontologically real. Henri
Corbin recognized this potentially real elsewhere-place, as the I maginal Realm.
Corbin suggested that this strange other-dimensional place, the dimension accessed
by mystics (and I propose, shamans and mythopoeic writers and readers) is, in fact,
perfectly real. I ts reality, he averred, is more irrefutable and more coherent than
that of the empirical world where reality is perceived by the senses and that upon
returning, the beholders of this world are perfectly aware of having been elsewhere;
and that they were not schizophrenics who were seized by some terrifying and
uncontrollable aberration of consciousness (Corbin, 1972:17). Corbin was emphatic