Istanbul in the Mundus Imaginalis
By Leon Sandler
For centuries, visitors to Istanbul were awestruck by the city’s sumptuous gardens. Far from today’s bland urban “green spaces,” Ottoman gardens were places of sensual rapture boarding on otherworldly beauty. Upon touring the sultan’s summer houses and the lavender fields of Üsküdar in 1555, Austrian ambassador Ogier Busbecq remarked that these were “homes for the Nymphs” and “abodes of the Muses” 175 years later, during the height of the empire’s tulip craze, flower pavilions became so popular among the royal court that the Ottoman poet Nedim compared Istanbul itself to the gardens of Cennet:
Holy Paradise! Is it under or above the city of Istanbul?
My Lord, how nice its atmosphere, its water and weather!
Each of its gardens is a pleasing meadow,
Each corner is fertile, a blossoming assembly of joy.
It is not proper to exchange this city for the whole world.
From a purely historical perspective, these magnificent gardens were manifestations of imperial power. At Topkapi Palace, the sultans established pavilions to celebrate successful conquests, filling them with flora and fauna from the farthest reaches of the empire to show that were capable of building Paradise on Earth.. Walled off from the common world, these artificial paradises became the favored setting of the Ottoman elite, who solidified their social bonds with courtly rituals of music, wine, and poetry.
Yet from another perspective--perhaps in the eyes of a poet searching the city’s streets for his lost beloved -- Istanbul can indeed become an image of the whole world, with the garden of Paradise at its heart. Such a view of the city is not reached by a purely geographical or temporal location. This is Istanbul as seen in what the philosopher Henry Corbin called the Mundus Imaginalis -- the Imaginal World. Drawing on the philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi (1165 - 1240), Corbin describes the Mundus Imaginalis as an “intermediate universe” between the empirical world grasped by the senses and the world of abstract ideas apprehended by the intellect. Through active imagination, we encounter the objects of the exterior world as archetypal images, which affect us on an interior level.
In his Tezkiret-ül Bünyan, for example, the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan claims that the goal of architecture must be to guide people from the present, material world to Paradise.Thus, the physical characteristics of a building must evoke the archetypal images of Paradise within the soul. As one scholar notes: “Architecture becomes like a poem where each architectural feature, be it columns, fountains, domes, vaults or other elements, act in a similar way to words in a poem. Each element in space incites imaginative faculties and encourages the individual to pursue his quest for divine knowledge.” In this sense, someone standing in Istanbul’s Süleymaniye Mosque, for example, can encounter it not only in empirical space but also in the inner realm of the Mundus Imaginalis where the faculty of imagination--if properly developed--allows them to “read” the the mosque as tangible poem rather than merely see it as a structure of lifeless stone.
Like the temple, the city is another traditional image common to the Imaginal World of mystical poetry. Already in the 15th century, the Turkish Sufi poet Hacı Bayram-ı Veli (1352 - 1430) describes the process of coming to know his divine Lord as a journey into a foreign city.
My Lord created a city between the two worlds.
If you look you’ll see His face at the edge of that city.
At once I went to that city and saw that it was built.
I too was built together with it, in the midst of stone and mortar.
Arrows are shot from that city and penetrate the heart.
The words of mystics are sold in that city’s marketplace.
Apprentice masons carve stones and present them to the master.
On every piece of stone, they carve the Lord’s name.
Mystics understand these words; fools are bewildered by them.
Hacı Bayram himself gives the call to prayer in that city’s minaret.
Certainly, this does not mean that Hacı Bayram travelled some literal, geographical distance to a new city. Rather, he felt that his inner transformation as the archetypal image of a journey, with the image of a city as its destination. Having arrived at the imaginal city, he finds himself remade through this inner space, “built together with it.”
In the 16th century, Ottoman poets began producing a new genre called the Şehrengiz. The goal of Şehrengiz poetry was to describe various cities throughout the empire, praising their monuments, listing their guilds, and depicting daily life in their neighborhoods. The Şehrengiz of Istanbul, Vize, and Çorlu (1513) by Davud Katib takes the form of a mystical love poem. Katib, the scribe, travels from one city to the next in search of his beloved. Arriving in Istanbul, he marvels at the crowds of people in its streets, describes the beautiful youths of Galata, and visits the Fatih and Beyazid Mosques. Upon entering the Hagia Sophia, he exclaims:
There is nothing comparable to account for it
There is nothing similar to it in this universe
Those who see it say this it is the second Paradise
It smiles as if it is alive.
See the fountain of Paradise flowing in its courtyard
Thus the rivers of Paradise are flowing together with this water.
On one hand, this kind of exaggerated praise is common to Şehrengiz poems. Yet according to Ibn ‘Arabi, earthly fountains and gardens are, in fact, reflections of Paradise because they contain the “idea-images” of Paradise. In the Mundus Imaginalis, the multiplicity of the natural world is reduced to its handful of archetypes. Encountering the Hagia Sophia in its imaginal form, Katib sees the original waters of Paradise standing before him. Similarly, any garden can become a metonym for the garden of Paradise, if the poet’s active imagination is skilled enough to enter it this way.
Although the Mundus Imaginalis is populated with images from the physical world, the imaginal form of a city does not need to be a literal representation of its physical form. In his Şehrengiz of Istanbul (1534), Kalkandelenli Fakiri describes Istanbul as a circle -- the shape of a Mevlevi semahane.
Such a city with a beautiful view like a bride
The throne of the Sultan of the seven worlds
Its darkness (gardens, vineyards, meadows, fields) is a land to seek refuge.
Its brightness is where the two seas converge
With a circular wall, the city of the Sultan
Captured all the months within
Regarding the invitations of the Heavens or the Angels
Drawing a circle upon the ground
Either this city is a lover with a silver belt
That all its citizens are addicted to
Or a lover this bejeweled city is
That the sea rubs its face upon his feet.
Just as, for its members, the Sufi lodge is a miniature universe, the poet sees the city itself as a cosmos. As the site of the Ottoman throne, Topkapi Palace becomes the center of this imaginal Istanbul. At the interior of this symbolic center, hidden from common view, is the facsimile of Paradise: the royal garden. The Şehrengiz poets thus possessed an imaginative vision that allowed them to experience Istanbul a series of worlds within worlds, where eternal archetypes are found in temporal space.
Of course, Istanbul has changed considerably in the centuries since Ottoman poets described it as an earthly Paradise. Wandering through the streets today, among the advertisements, office spaces, and tourist traps, we are not likely to be seized by the presence of the archetypal. But all of us possess the faculty of imagination, which we use every day to navigate between the sensible world and our own inner world. Corbin writes that “Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out.” Realizing the connection between inner and outer universe, we can begin to understand how experiencing this city shapes our understanding of ourselves. Perhaps, among our moments riding down the Bosphorus or passing through the Golden Horn, we may even feel traces of that lost Paradise are still here, somewhere, if only we had eyes to see it.