For those who study comparative religion and traditional cosmologies it is quite clear that the three-fold division of the cosmos is an anthropological recurrence. We find it in Islam, in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Neoplatonism and in many other traditions. Some of the readers of The Symbolic World may be familiarized with this idea via the works of Dr. Wolfgang Smith. He writes about the tripartite cosmos in his books.¹ Dr. Smith says,

Tradition maintains that man and cosmos exemplify, so to speak, the same blueprint, the same master plan. This means, first of all, that even as man is trichotomous, consisting of corpus, anima and spiritus, so too does the cosmos prove to be tripartite, consisting of what Vedic tradition terms the tribhuvana, the “three worlds”. Man, according to this view, is by no means a stranger in a hostile or indifferent universe, but constitutes the very heart and center of the cosmos in its entirety. I would like from the start to call attention to the fact that the possibility of human knowing is predicated upon this claim; as Goethe has beautifully put it: if the eye were not kindred to the Sun (“wiire das Auge nicht sonnenhaft”), it could not behold its light. In the final count, man is able to know the cosmos precisely because he is in fact a microcosm.²

The analogues of the Vedic Tribhuvana are found in all the great traditions. Shihāb ad-Dīn Suhrawardī, the Sufi philosopher of the 12th century, says that “The ancient and modern philosophers differ only in their use of language and their divergent habits of openness and allusiveness. All speak of three worlds, agreeing on the unity of God. There is no dispute among them on fundamental questions.”³

So for him the three-worlds doctrine is not only an agreement among all ancient philosophers (and he included even Hermes Trismegistus and the hermeticists in this category⁴), but also a fundamental topic. In the Islamic tradition the three worlds are 'ālam al-jabarūt, 'ālam al-malakūt, and 'ālam al-mulk. Suhrawardī explains, “According to the sages, there are three worlds — the world of intellects, which is the world of dominion (Jabarūt); the world of souls, which is the world of the divine kingdom (Malakūt); and the world of Mulk, which is the world of bodies.”⁵

In Judaism we find a similar pattern expressed in the triad olam haberiyah (“world of creation”), olam hayetsirah (“world of formation”), and olam ha'asiyah (“world of reality”). The first, which is above, is the spiritual and prototypical world; the second, which is the intermediary, is the subtle manifestation and the dwelling-place of the souls; the third one, which is below, is the bodily and sensible world.⁶

The same pattern is found in Neoplatonism, and is expressed in terms of the noetic, the psychic, and the sensible realms.⁷ In the Christian tradition it is found as well, but in different formulations. One of them is particularly interesting (specially for the Roman Catholics). St. Bonaventure says in his Breviloquium:

From all we have said, we may gather that the created world is a kind of book reflecting, representing, and describing its Maker, the Trinity, at three different levels of expression: as a vestige, as an image, and as a likeness. The aspect of vestige (“footprint”) is found in every creature; the aspect of image, only in intelligent creatures or rational spirits; the aspect of likeness, only in those spirits that are God-conformed. Through these successive levels, comparable to steps, the human intellect is designed to ascend gradually to the supreme Principle, which is God.⁸

The likeness corresponds to what St. Augustine calls the “intellectual”; the image, to what he calls the “spiritual”; and the vestige, to what he calls the “sensorial”. Let us not be confused with the terminology here: the Augustinian triad intellectual-spiritual-sensorial corresponds to the triad Spiritus-Anima-Corpus of which St. Paul speaks in 1 Thessalonians 5:23. St. Augustine himself comments in his De Genesi ad litteram that he was using a different terminology to talk about the same realities: “Why I myself, on the other hand, have preferred to call spiritual and intellectual what they perhaps have called ‘soulish’ and spiritual, thus simply giving other names to the same realities, I have already explained at sufficient length in the first pages of this book.”⁹

I could show the same triadic pattern appearing in other eastern traditions as well, but what has been said so far is sufficient as an introduction of the topic. In this article I will propose a phenomenological reading of this traditional tripartition of the cosmos, and then I’ll show the deep resonance this model has with human nature itself.

Two Observations

The first observation I must bring about concerns the nature of speculative thought. We are always doing what Aquinas, following Aristotle, called the second operation of intelligence, i.e., the operation of “composition and division”. This operation consists in what the Peripatetics called judgment: the act by which we affirm or deny some predicate of a substance (a given thing, let’s say¹⁰).

We can say, for instance, that a particular stone is heavy. In doing so, we would be combining the universal notions of stone and heaviness, affirming that these two notions correspond to the reality of the particular stone we are referring to.¹¹ It would be a verbal expression of an act of judgment. We can also say that the stone has some extension, because it has a body with dimensions. So, again, we would be affirming the adequacy between the notions of stone and extension and the reality of that particular stone. We can, of course, think of the notions of weight and extension separately, but, in fact, we cannot find anything in the natural world which has extension but doesn’t have weight, or vice-versa. Thus, the separability of the notions does not always reflect a separability in the physical world. This is important to keep in mind because we are about to deal with rational divisions of the cosmos, and it is easy to take these divisions as real separations.¹² Maybe it is the case, but it is not a good idea to jump to that conclusion so readily. That’s my first observation.

The second observation concerns the fractal character of reality. We can, for instance, divide reality symbolically into two principles, such as Heaven and Earth, Purusha and Prakriti, T'ien and Ti, and so on, but these two principles would manifest themselves in multiple levels of reality, in a fractal fashion. We can say that the eidos (the structural functional organization) of a pen is its “heavenly” aspect while the plastic of which it is made is its “earthly” one; but we can also say that the pen in the hand of a man who writes a letter is the “earthly” condition of the act of writing, while the man who writes represents the “heavenly” pole; also, in the man himself we can discern an aspect of his being which moves him into action (his “heavenly pole”) and another one which is moved (his “earthly pole”); and we can go even further with this example, changing the scale of consideration. In Mário Ferreira dos Santos’s terminology, these multiple scales of consideration are tensional structures of being.¹³ Every tensional unity — save the supreme tension, which is above duality¹⁴ — has both an active and a passive aspect; therefore, in every scale of consideration we find a manifestation of what the Hindus call Purusha and Prakriti. That being said, it is important to keep in mind that if we divide the cosmos into two or three great realms, this binary or ternary pattern of the whole will be reflected in all its parts. So it would be possible to speak of a heavenly aspect of the Earthly Realm and an earthly aspect of the Heavenly Realm, and further subdivisions of each realm could be made. That’s my second observation.

The Vedic Tribhuvana and Our Embodied Experience

Now, let’s begin with the Vedic division of the cosmos. The Vedic doctrine of the Tribhuvana divides the universal manifestation into Earth (bhū), Air (bhuvas), and Heaven (svar). According to René Guénon — a great authority on these issues — bhū corresponds to the domain of corporeal or “gross” manifestation; bhuvas corresponds to the domain of psychic or “subtle” manifestation; and svar, in its turn, to the domain of intellectual or “supra-formal” manifestation.¹⁵ It is very common to see some of Guénon’s readers reifying these three domains, imagining them as separate dimensions. Such a gross interpretation would make Guénon facepalm himself. First of all, we should not understand these domains as places. How could the supra-formal domain of manifestation be a place if it is free from spatiality? No, we speak of “worlds” only metaphorically. But if they are not places, how are they to be understood?

Let’s imagine a man who is in front of a tree. He sees its leaves, its branches, its trunk; he can touch the tree, and he can hear the leaves rustling in the wind. These are sensorial experiences we all have. But the sum of these sensorial experiences is not sufficient to explain the fact that he discerns there a particular entity called tree. It is necessary to correlate all these sensorial data and report them to a singular object. How does he know, for example, that the sound of the leaves and the vision of them come from the same source? It is necessary for him to realize the converging point which bonds all the qualia he is experiencing. Otherwise, he would not be able to have a coherent experience of the object, but only a vast soup of disjointed data. The realization of this converging point as a being in itself, so to speak, is what the Peripatetics called the first intellective operation, the simple apprehension of the eidos.¹⁶ Now, since the eidos is what bonds the multiplicity of data we obtain from the senses, it is not reducible to any data. That’s the reason why the Peripatetics used to say that the apprehension of the eidos requires a supra-sensorial faculty. This faculty should not, however, be understood as though one can realize the eidos without seeing, hearing, touching, etc. The perception of the eidos still requires the mediation of the senses.¹⁷ The eidos, furthermore, has another peculiar characteristic: it is particular to the thing (the tree, in this case) and, at the same time, it has some universality (because it is, in some sense, common to different things). To try to make things more concrete: the particularity of the eidos corresponds to the structure of functional organization of that tree, while its universality corresponds to the being-tree, which is a common predicate of different trees.

This duplicity of aspects corresponds to the Peripatetic distinction between the substantia prima (first substance) and the substantia secunda (second substance). The substantia prima is a particular; the substantia secunda is a universal essence predicated properly of a given being.¹⁸ Let’s make it more concrete. When the man perceives the tree as a tensional unity irreducible to the multiple data he receives from the senses, he is doing that by means of the consideration of its substantia prima; when, on the other hand, he discerns the being-tree in that tensional unity, he is doing that by means of the substantia secunda.¹⁹ The being-tree is the aspect of that tensional unity which is recognizable in other entities. It is the universal aspect of the tree.

I propose here a distinction between two levels of being of the tree: the sensorial level and the noetic level. I’m not saying that there are two trees, but that the being of that one tree has at least two different modalities of manifestation.²⁰ At the sensorial level it has colors, a temperature, a texture, a smell,; at the noetic level it has an essential universality. The things of the sensorial level are always changing without necessarily changing the being-tree; the essential universality of the noetic level is fixed and, as such, immutable. I’m not saying that the tree is immutable, I’m rather saying that the aspect of its being that is essential and universal is immutable. The tree is a corruptible being, but we cannot say that the being-tree is corruptible. Let’s imagine a glass cup. It is obviously mutable and corruptible, but we cannot say that the pattern that makes this particular cup to be a cup is corruptible. The glass cup can be destroyed, but its form is a permanent possibility of being, and that’s why there are many entities which share this same form. In some sense, the being-cup cannot be destroyed with the glass. What is destroyed is the being-cup-in-that-glass.

Let’s say that the noetic level of the tree, i.e., the level of its intelligibility, pertains to the domain of svar, or the supra-formal domain of manifestation.²¹ Thus its sensorial level would pertain to the domain of bhū, the gross manifestation. We must now investigate what corresponds to the domain of bhuvas, the subtle manifestation, in this case. This intermediary domain is the connection between the other two, and it is associated with the platonic World Soul.

The substantia secunda of the tree, its “treeness”, has a universality, that is to say, it is not reducible to a particular image or figure. When we think the being-tree, we are not thinking in a particular image of tree, such as that of an apple tree or of a pine tree. The simple idea of the being-tree is undetermined in relation to the accidents found in these particulars.²² The data we receive through the five senses also cannot form a particular figure, because they must be integrated in a coherent whole whose unity was not threatened by the immense mutability of our sense activities — our eyes are always moving, the object is also moving, and so on. It is thus necessary for there to be a mode of knowledge of the figures or images (phantasmata), and that’s what Aristotle called the phantasia, or imagination, which is a power of the soul.²³ But if we accept the correspondence between the levels of cognition and the ontological levels, it is necessary that something be established as an imaginal domain. That’s what the Sufis called the alam al-mithal, translated by Henry Corbin as the imaginal world.²⁴ The imaginal world is closely related to the Vedic swapna-sthâna (dream state) which, in its turn, pertains to the pravivikta (subtle manifestation).

The tree has indeed an imaginal aspect; through light, for instance, it generates an image of itself which is communicated to our souls by means of our eyes. Light, in this sense, is the metaxy, the medium which unites our souls to the imaginal aspect of the objects of perception. It is not the only medium though. The Hindus, for example, say that the medium of the “hearing images” — i.e., the patterns expressed by sounds, such as the musical modes (ragas) — is the akasha (ether).²⁵ The imaginal world is similar to light, because it is the place where real images meet individual souls; but it is dissimilar to light in that its actuality is irreducible to a single external sense.

Now, the imaginal aspect of a being transcends its image (phantasma). The analogies between a given object and other realities are irreducible to the shape of the object. All evocativeness pertains in fact to the imaginal. The symbolicity of the tree consists in its capacity for being an icon which opens us for realities other than itself. In the relation between the trunk and the branches of a tree we can see, for instance, the relation between a given tradition and its multiple “branches”, or between the fathers and their descendants, and so on. The grammar of probable associations between the tree and other realities does not depend entirely on our cultural paradigms and idiosyncrasies; it has an intrinsic coherence of its own (and that’s why we find so many symbolic commonalities in different traditions). An example of that is shown by René Guénon in his book Symbolism of the Cross. After exploring the geometrical symbolism of the cross, associating it with some traditional symbols, he says:  

Another aspect of the symbolism of the cross identifies it with what various Traditions describe as the “Tree in the Midst” or some equivalent term. It has been shown elsewhere that this tree is one of the numerous symbols of the “World Axis”. It is therefore the vertical line of the cross, which represents this axis, that we must chiefly consider here: this line forms the trunk of the tree, whereas the horizontal line (or the two horizontal lines in the case of the three-dimensional cross) forms its branches. This tree stands at the centre of the world, or rather of a world, that is, of a domain in which a state of existence, such as the human state, is developed. In the Biblical symbolism for example, the Tree of Life, planted in the midst of the earthly Paradise, represents the centre of our world, as has been explained on other occasions.²⁶

I can also mention the Sacred Tree of the Sioux tradition, the flowering stick which is placed at the center of the sacred hoop (a sacred place that symbolizes the center of the world). The hoop is also a geometrical symbol: a circle inside which a cross is inscribed.²⁷ Here we find again the symbolic association between the tree and the cross. It is worth remembering that there are four rivers — forming the shape of a cross! — springing from the Tree of Life at the center of the Garden of Eden, according to the book of Genesis. Same pattern, different traditions.

We are, thus, allowed to speak of a realm of natural associations of similitudes. And that, I argue, is the imaginal realm.

The 13th-century Sufi Shahrazūrī, discussing Suhrawardī’s doctrine of the imaginal realm, says the following: 

It is known from what came before that none of the perceived forms are in the brain, in bodily faculties, or in mirrors. After all, impression of something big onto something small is not possible. Those forms are not existent in the sensory world, for otherwise everyone with sound sense perception would see them. Neither are they absolutely nonexistent, for [the absolutely non-existent] cannot be witnessed or imagined, while forms in mirrors and imagination are witnessed and are distinguished amongst each other and they can be judged with different judgments. Nothing that is absolutely non-existent is like this. Therefore, forms in the imagination and in dreams, as they are not absolutely non-existent, nor in a part of the brain, nor in something else, it remains that they are existent in a different world, called the world of image and imagination. It is above the world of sense in rank, and below the world of intellect, being in between them. All imagined shapes and magnitudes and bodies and the movements, rests, places, and states, etcetera, that belong to it are existent in the middle world, being an image. All the forms in mirrors exist on their own in this world, the mirrors being their places of manifestation, while they are suspended, not being in a place, nor in a locus.²⁸

All natural analogies between images pertain to the imaginal realm. They cannot be reduced to the sensory data, nor to our cultural paradigms, nor to the pure essences. When we see a red object and we associate it with intensity, virulence, anger, etc., the associations don’t come from the pure concept of redness. They come, instead, from the imaginal reverberance of the color red (its semiotic charge, let’s say). It resonates with a set of images: images of fire, of Mars, of a glowing iron, of blood; images of a warrior and of a bloody war; images of a chili pepper and its spicy flavor; the skin tone of a person who has become angry; a memory of a rough word, and so on.

The experience of seeing a tree is way richer now. Now the tree is not just “an object”, “a fact” or “a sensorial experience”. It has acquired a corporeal, an imaginal and a noetic dimension. The tree is now a being of a tripartite cosmos. I argue that this way of seeing the world was just natural for the pre-modern man. This explains the universality of such three-fold division of the world.

If this way of interacting with the world is so natural and universal, maybe it’s because, as an epistemological model, it just fits to the very nature of man. So why don’t we start doing it right now?

1.  See Wolfgang Smith, The Vertical Ascent: From Particles to the Tripartite Cosmos and Beyond (Philos-Sophia Initiative, 2021).

2.  Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology (The Foundation for Traditional Studies, 2004), p. 12.

3.  Suhrawardī, The Philosophy of Illumination (Brigham Young University Press, 1999), p. 2.

4.  Ibid.

5.  Suhrawardī, Creed of the Sages, in “Illuminationist Texts and Textual Studies”, ed. Ali Gheissari et al., Iran Studies, Vol. 16, pp. 81–82.

6.  See Leo Schaya, El Significado Universal de la Cábala (Editorial Dedalo, 1989), pp. 80–81.

7.  Of course, the Neoplatonists make further distinctions. We find, for example, the three Plotinian hypostases — One, Nous and Psyche — and the distinctions between the sensible realm and the material substrate (which is not a sensorial reality, but the mere potential for receiving forms). The One is beyond the tripartite cosmos; it is “metacosmic”, and the matter (hyle) is underneath it, because it is nothing but a condition of formal manifestation. Thus, we have the three worlds in between the One and the matter (the extremes of unity and multiplicity). See Pauliina Remes, Neoplatonism (Acumen, 2008), pp. 57–58.

8.  St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, in Bonaventure: Texts in Translation Series, Vol. IX, ed. Robert J. Karris, O.F.M. (The Franciscan Institute, 2005), p. 96.

9.  St. Augustine, On Genesis (New City Press, 2002), p. 506.

10.  I’m aware that the notions of substance (substantia) and thing (res) do not coincide, but it will help us to make this Scholastic terminology clearer for the readers.

11.  And here I’m using an Aristotelian jargon: these notions of stone and heaviness are universal inasmuch they are common to many things.

12.  I would argue that this confusion is the stumbling block of rationalism. That’s why I think it’s wrong to describe Aristotle as a “rationalist”. He was well aware of the implications of the misuse of abstractions.

13.  See my previous Symbolic World article “Egregores, Principalities and the General Theory of Tensions”.

14.  What Mário called “Potensão”, and is identified with Nicholas of Cusa’s Maximum-Minimum.

15.  René Guénon, The Great Triad (Quinta Essentia, 1991), p. 70.

16.  Regarding “a being in itself”, the reservation here is due to the Kantian “thing-in-itself” — I’m not talking about it in Kantian terms, it must be said. The eidos, meanwhile, as Dr. Vervaeke often says, is the through-line which connects the multiplicity of data we experience of a given entity.

17.  We can recall an old Peripatetic axiom which says that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses” (Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu).

18.  The substantia secunda is an adequate answer to the question quid sit (what is it?). If a kid points to a fig tree or to a mango tree, and then asks us what it is, the answer “it’s a tree”, despite its lack of detail, will work for both.

19.  With “being-tree” I’m using an Aristotelian language. We read in De Anima III.4, 429b: “Now size and to be size are not the same, nor water and to be water (and so with many other things, though not with all, as in some cases they are the same), and so we discern the being flesh and flesh either by something else or by something in a different state. For flesh, far from being without matter, is, like the snub[-nosed], a this in a that. It is then with the perceptive faculty [the senses] that we discern warmth and coldness and those things of which the flesh is the formula, but with something else that we discern being-flesh...”.

20.  By saying the being of a tree has at least two different modalities of manifestation, I’m here presupposing the correspondence between what Dr. Vervaeke would call the “levels of being” and the “levels of intelligibility”. If we deny that correspondence, any effort of describing reality will be useless.

21.  And I say intelligibility here in its proper sense, because the intellect only knows the universals.

22.  The word “accidents” here refers to the non-essential attributes of an entity. I’m using, again, the Peripatetic language.

23.  In fact, Aristotle called it a “sense”. He differentiates between the five external senses and the internal senses (among which is the phantasia).

24.  In Arab it means something like “the world of similitudes”, because it is the topos of all natural analogies.

25.  The connection between the words light, ether and akasha is very interesting, by the way. Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote about it in an article called “Windows of the Soul”, which became a chapter of his book What is Civilization?. It’s a good read.

26.  René Guénon, Symbolism of the Cross (Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1996), p. 46.

27.  Damian Costello, graduate thesis, “The sacred tree: Black Elk, colonialism and Lakota Catholicism” (University of Dayton, 2003), pp. 118–19. Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 2127. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/graduate_theses/2127.

28.  Shahrazūrī, Sharḥ Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, p. 509, as cited in L.W.C. van Lit, The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 87–88.