[mythistorian]

I welcome Robert Juliano to the choir! What wonderful voices have come to join and grace us with their insights! I am deeply grateful to you all, not only for allowing me the pleasure any writer feels at being “understood” by his audience but also at the way you have all helped me expand my own understanding of this topic! My sincere thanks to all!

I do find intriguing Robert’s reminder of the alchemical framework of interpretation with the good work of Veronica Goodchild. She developed this approach with her husband Robert Romanyshyn as what they called an “alchemical hermeneutics.” I still have a small unpublished monograph which was disseminated at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the first decade of the 2000s entiled: Doing Research with Soul in Mind: The Alchemical Hermeneutic Method.

And indeed, the ability to hover in this in-between psyche and matter takes place within the psyche itself as the total space of the symbolic order of the collective mind. This in-between space is where the play of imagination enters in, shaping and creating an individual order of creation. Let us recall Corbin’s own words from his famous essay on the Mundus Imaginalis where he uses the notion of “images in suspense” recalling in our context the hovering UFOs:

“Technically, again, our thinkers designate it as the world of “Images in suspense” (mothol mo’allaqa). Sohravardī and his school mean by this a mode of being proper to the realities of that intermediate world, which we designate as Imaginalia. The precise nature of this ontological status results from vision any spiritual experiences, on which Sohravardi asks that we rely fully, exactly as we rely in astronomy on the observations of Hipparchus or Ptolemy. It should be acknowledged that forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as empirical realities in the physical world; otherwise anyone could perceive them. It should also be noted that the) cannot subsist in the pure intelligible world, since they have extension and dimension, an “immaterial” materiality, certainly, in relation to that of the sensory world, but, in fact, their own “corporeality” and spatiality (one might think here of the expression used by Henry More, a Cambridge Platonist, spissitudo spiritualis, an expression that has its exact equivalent in the work of Sadra Shirazi, a Persian Platonist). For the same reason, that they could have only our thought as a substratum would be excluded, as it would, at the same time, that they might be unreal, nothing; otherwise, we could not discern them, classify them into hierarchies, or make judgments about them. The existence of this intermediate world, mundus imaginalis, thus appears metaphysically necessary; the cognitive function of the Imagination is ordered to it; it is a world whose ontological level is above the world of the senses and below the pure intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter.”