Up: [[Image]] Related: [[Jung's and Tolkien's Shared Gift to the World]] Created: 2022-02-08 Updated: 2026-04-12 Mundus Imaginalis means the imaginal world. It is a world that exists alongside our physical world. Jung called it the [[Collective Unconscious]]. The Celts referred to it as the [[Otherworld]]. Some indigenous peoples call it the Dreamtime. For J.R.R. Tolkien it was the realm of Faerie. This is the world where archetypes and myths have their own independent existence. We didn't dream those things up, they were already there. All images were before they arrived in your mind. The Mundus Imaginalis is also the source of [[synchronicity]], transcendent experiences, psychic experiences, and creative insights. The idea of the Mundus Imaginalis comes from Sufi mystics who believed that it existed between the physical world of our senses and the intellectual/spiritual world. It can only be perceived, according to Henri Corbin, a French philosopher who coined the term, through the act of imaging because imagination is how the soul perceives and the Mundus Imaginalis is the world of soul. Jung went further and said that [[image]] IS the soul, the foundation of the soul. He said that the soul is constituted of images and that soul making is primarily an act of imaging. See [[Images Are Imaginal Not Imaginary]] Think of the Mundus Imaginalis as your creative source. It speaks to you through the symbolic language of images, dreams, and creative inspiration. Through it, you can engage with the [[Anima Mundi]], the world's soul.