The great French scholar and philosopher of religion Henri Corbin explains the characteristics of the imaginal realm:
"Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of idea-images, of archetypal figures, or subtle substances, of ‘immaterial’ matter. This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensibly worlds; it is an intermediate universe ‘where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,’ a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtle and immaterial. The organ of the universe is the active imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality."