Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth 01 (Contents & Preface) by Henry Corbin

Spiritual Body and Celestial EarthFrom Mazdean lran

to Shi'ite Iran

Henry Cr;rbinTRANSLATED BY NANCY PEARSON

With a ncr*. Prclude to thc

Seeonrj Edition bv thc Author

HENRY CORBIN

Spiritual Bodyand

Celestial Earth

From Mazdean lran to Sh|'ite lran

Translated from the French bg

NANCY PEARSON

BOLLINGEN SERIES XCI:2

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENTS

Prelude to the Second Edition

Prologue

Publisher's Note

Note on Illustrations

PART ONE

SPIRITUAL BODY AND CELESTIAL EARTH

Chapter I. The Mazdean Imago Terrael.6The Earth Is an Angel"2. The Earth of the Seven Keshvans3. Visionary Geography4. Geosophy and the Feminine Angels of the Earth

Chapter II. The Mystical Earth of Horqalynl. Progrewio hannonicoz Figima, Daughter of the Prophet'

and the Celestial Earth2. The "Eighth Climate"3. Horqalyn, Earth of Visions4. Hurqalyn, Earth of Resurrection

PART TWO

SELECTIONS FROM TRADITIONAL TEXTS

Introduction: The Texts and Their Authors

I. Shihebuddtn Ya[yi Suhrawardl (d. 587lrr9r)Huryalya, the World of Autonomous Images andImaginative Perception

II. Mu[ryrddtn ibn 'Arabl (d. 638/1240)The Earth Which Was Created from WhatRemained of the ClaY of Adam

III. Da'nd Qay-sail (d.75L/r35O)Mundus ArchetgtPut

IV.'Abd al-Karlm Jtlt (d. 805/f403)l. Al-A'ref, the Earth of the Warchers2. The Journey of the Stranger and the Conversation

with Khisr

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Copyright @ 1977 by Princeton University PressPublished by Princeton University Press,

Princeton, New Jersey

All Rights Reserved

THIS TS PART TWO OF THE NINETY-FIRST IN A SERIES OF WORKS

SPONSORED BY

BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION

Published in French asTerre cdleste et corps de r1surrection:

de I'Iran mazdden a l,Iran ehl,ite(Collection 'La Barque du Soleil"),

Buchet-Chastel, Paris, 1960.

Part One was originally published in French (in slightlydifrerent form ) in Eronos-Jahrbuch XXll ( f 953 ) bv

Rhein-Verlag, Zurich.

The translation of the preludeto the second edition is

reprinted courtesy ofEditions Buche-Chastel.

Fifth printing, with Prelude n the Second Edition, l9B9

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data willbe found on the last printed page of this book

Printed in the United States of Americaby Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

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Contents

V. Shamsuddrn Muhammad Lahrji (d. 869/1465)Jabalqa and JiLbarsa

VI. $adruddrn Muhammad Shrrazr (Mulla Sadrn)(d. 1050/1640)Spis situd o Spirituolis

VII. 'Abd al-Frazzeiql,ahtjl (d. 1072/1662)Oriental Theosophists and Peripatetic Philosophers

VIII. Muhsin Fayz Kishinl (d. r09f/f 680)A World in Which Spirits Are Corporealized and inWhich Bodies Are Spiritualized

IX. The Shaikht School: Shaikh A[rmad Ahse'I(d. t24r/L826)l. Physiology of the Resurrection Body2. On the Esoteric Meaning of the Tomb3. The Heavens and Elements of Hurqalyn4. Alchemy and the Resurrection Body5. The Active Imagination and the Resurrection Body

X. Shaikh $ajj Mulrammad Karlm Khnn Kirmanl, SecondSuccessor of Shaikh Ahmad Ahsi'r (d. I288lr820)l. In What Sense the Bodv of the Faithful Believer is

the Earth of His Paradise2. A World in Ascent, Not in Evolution

Xl. Shaikh Abu'l-Qasim Khen Ibrahlmi (Sarkir Agha),Fifth Successor of Shaikh A[rmad A!rs6"I(b. 13r4l18e6)The Celestial Earth of Hurqalya and the Shr.ite Faith

Notes

List of Works Cited

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TOWARDS A CHART OF THE IMAGINALPrelude to the Second Edition of

CORPS SPIRITUEL ET TERRE Cf,LESTE

de l'lran MazdCen d l'lran Shf ite

HENRT CORBIN

It is a long time--and we shall say this again below-since west-ern philosophy, let us call it "official philosophy," drawn along inthe wake of the positive sciences, has admitted only two sourcesof Knowledge (Connaitre). There is sense perception which givesthe data we call empirical. And there are the concepts of under-standing (entendcment), the world of the laws governing theseempirical data. Certainly, Phenomenology has modified and over-taken this simplificatory epistemology (gnosCologie). Yet the factremains that between the sense perceptions and the intuitions orcategories of the intellect there has remained a void. That whichought to have taken its place between the two, and which in othertimes and places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to saythe Active Imagination, has been left to the poets. The very thingthat a rational and reasonable.scientific philosophy cannot envis-age is that this Active Imagination in man (one ought to sayrather "agent imagination" in the way that medieval philosophyspoke of "intellectus agens") should have its own noetic or cogni-tive function, that is to say it gives us access to a region and areality of Being which without that function remains closed andforbidden to us. For such a science it was understood that theImagination secretes nothing but the imaginary, that is, the un-real, the mythic, the marvellous, the fictive, etc.

On this account there remains no hope of recovering the realitysui generis of a suprasensible world which is neither the empiricalworld of the senses nor the abstract world of the intellect. It hasfurthermore for a long time now seemed to us radically impossibleto rediscover the actual reality-we would say the realitg in act-proper to the "Angelic World," a reality prescribed in Being it-self, not in any way a myth dependent on socio-political or socio-economic infrastructures. It is impossible to penetrate, in the way

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in which one penetrates into a real world, into the universe of theZoroastrian angelology of which the first chapter of this book de-scribes certain aspects. We would say as much of the angeloph-anies of the Bible. For a long period I have been $earching, like ayoung philosopher, for the key to this world as a real world,which is neither the sensible world nor the world of abstract con-cepts. It was in Iran itself that I had to find it, in the two ages ofthe spiritual world of Iran. This is why the two parts of this bookare strictly binding on one another and interdependent. A con-trast due essentially to the fact that their epistemology, foreign tothis dualism, gives room, as for the necessary mediating power,for this agent Imagination which is imaginatrice. It is a cognitivepower in its own right. Its mediating faculty is to make us able toknow without any reservation that region of Being which, with-out this mediation, would remain forbidden ground, and whosedisappearance brings on a catastrophe of the Spirit, where wehave by no means yet taken the measure of all the consequences.It is essentially a median and mediating power, in the same waythat the universe to which it is regulated and to which it givestccess, is a median and mediating universe, an intermediate worldbetween the sensible and the intellectual (intetligible). an inter-mediate world without which articulation between sensible andfntellectual (intelligible) is definitely blocked. And then pseudo-dllemmas pullulate in the shadows, every escape or resolutionclosed to them.

Neither the active nor the agent Imagination is thus in anytcnse an organ for the secretion of the imaginary, the unreal, themythic, or the fictive. For this reason we absolutely had to find aterm to differentiate radically the intermediate world of the Imag-ination, such as we find it presented to the minds of our Iranianmetaphysicians, from the merely imaginary. The Latin languagecame to our assistance, and the expression mundus imaginalis isthe literal equivalent of the Arabic 'dlam al-mithdl, aFdlam al-mithdlt, in French the "monde imaginalr" a key-term over whichwe hesitated at the time of the first edition of this book. (TheLatin terme have the advantage of fixing the thematic forms andguarding them from hrzardous or arbitrary translations. We shallmake plentiful ure of thenr here,) In so far as it has not been


named and specified, a world cannot rise into Being and Knowl-edge (Connnitre). This key-term, mundus imaginalis, commandsthe complete network of notions appropriate to the precise levelof Being and Knowlqdge which it connotes: imaginative percep-tion, imaginative knowledge, imaginative consciousness. Whilewe encounter in other philosophies or systems a distrust of theImage, a degradation of all that properly belongs to the Imagina-tion, the mundus imaginalis is its exaltation, because it is the linkin whose absence the schema of the worlds is put out ofjoint.

Our authors tell us again and again that there are three worlds:l. The pure intellectual world ('dlam'aqlt), denoted in their the-osophy as J aharht or world of pure cherubic Intelligences. 2. Theimaginal world ('6lammithilll) known also in their theosophy asMalahfrt,the world of the Soul and of souls. 3. The sensible world('Alam lrissi) which is the "domain" (molk) of materialthings. Cor-relatively the Forms of Being and Knowledge respectively properto these three worlds are denoted technically as: l. The Intellec-tual Forms (sowar'aglfuo).2. The Imaginal Forms (sowar mith-AWa).3. The Sensible Forms (soutar hissiya), those which fallunder sense perception. The French vocabulary to be foundthroughout this book is thus of a rigorous precision and ('sticks"

closely to the Arabic technical terms as also used constantly inPersian.

As for the function of the mundus imaginalis and the ImaginalForms, it is defined by their median and mediating situation be-tween the intellectual and sensible worlds. On the one hand itimmaterialises the Sensible Forms, on the other it "imaginalises"the Intellectual Forms to which it gives shape and dimension.The Imaginal world creates symbols on the one hand from theSensible Forms, on the other from the Intellectual Forms. It is thismedian situation which imposes on the imaginative faculty a dis-cipline which would be unthinkable where it had been degradedinto "fantasy," secreting only the imaginary, the unreal, and ca-pable of every kind of extravagance. Here there is the same totaldifference already recognised and clearly remarked by Paracelsusbetween the imaginatio aera (Imagination in the true sense) and"Phanlacy,"

In order that the former should not degenerate into the latter,

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precisely this discipline, which is inconceivable if the imaginativepower, the active Imagination, is exiled from the scheme of Beingand Knowledge, is required. Such a discipline would not be ca-pable of involving the interest of an imaginhtion reduced to ther6le of folle du logis or inspired fool, but it is inherent in a medianand mediating faculty whose ambiguity consists of its being ableto put itself at the service of that Intellect whose supreme degreeour philosophers denote as the intellectus sanctus ('aql qodsi), il-Iuminated by the intelligentia agens ('aql fa"al) who is the Angelof the Holy Spirit. The seriousness of the role of the Imaginationis stressed by our philosophers when they state that it can be "theTree of Blessedness" or on the contrary "the Accursed Tree" ofwhich the Quran speaks,r that which means Angel or Demon inpower. The imaginary can be innocuous; the imaginal never canbe so.

One takes the decisive step in the metaphysic of the imaginaland the Imagination when one admits with MollA SadrA Shirdzithat the imaginative power is a purely spiritual faculty indepen-dent of the physical organism and consequently surviving it. Weshall see in the course of the texts translated here that it is theformative power of the subtle body or imaginal body $ismmithdlt), indeed this subtle body itself, forever inseparable fromthe soul, that is from the moi-esprit, from the spiritual individual-ity. It is thus as well to forget all that the Peripatetic philosophersor others have been able to say about it, when they speak of it asbeing like a bodily faculty and perishing with the organic bodywhose ordinance it follows.

The immateriality of the imaginative power was already fullyaffirmed by Ibn'Arabi when he differentiated between the abso-lute imaginal Forms, that is to say such as subsist inthe Malahhqand the "captive" imaginal Forms, that is, those immanent in theimaginative consciousness of man in this world. The former arein the world of the Soul (dme) or Malahilt, epiphanies or theoph-anies, that is to say, imaginal manifestations of the pure Intellec-tual Forms of the JabarAt, The latter are in their turn manifesta-tions of the imaginal Forms of the Malahr2l or world of the Soul toman's imaginative consciousness. It is therefore perfectly exacthere to speak of metaphysical Images. Now these csnnot be re-


ceived unless by a spiritual organ. The solidarity and interdepen-dence between the active Imagination defined as a spiritual fac-ulty and the necessity of the mundus imaginalis as an intermediateworld respond to the need of a conception which considers theworlds and the forms of Being as so many theophanies (njallig,AtilAhiya).

We thus find ourselves in the presence of a number of philoso-phers who refuse indifferently a philosophy or a theology whichlacks the element of theophany. Sohravardi and all the IshrAqui-y0n who follow him have always considered the "Perfect Sage" asbeing the Sage who gathers to himself equally the highest philo-sophical knowledge and the mystical experience modelled on thevisionary experience of the Prophet, the night of the Mfraj.Nowthe organ of visions, of whatever degree they may be, whether inthe case ofthe philosophers or ofthe prophets, is neither the in-tellect nor the fleshly eyes, but the fire of that imaginatio aera ofwhich the Burning Bush is for Sohravardl the type. In the sensi-ble form it is then the Imaginal Form itself which is from the veryfirst and at one and the same time the perceived form and theorgan of visionary perception. The Theophanic Forms are in theiressence Imaginal Forms.

This is to say that the mundus imaginalis is the place, and con-sequently the world, where not only the visions of the prophets,the visions of the mystics, the visionary events which each humansoul traverses at the time of his exitus from this world, the eventsof the lesser Resurrection and of the Greater Resurrection "takeplace" a-ird have their "place," but also the gestes of the mysticalepics, the symbolic acts of all the rituals of initiation, liturgies ingeneral with all their symbols, the "composition of the ground"in various methods of prayer (oraison), the spiritual filiationswhose authenticity is not within the competence of documentsand archives, and equally the esoteric p rocessus of the AlchemicalWork, in connection with which the First ImAm of the Shi'iteswas able to say "Alchemy is the sister of Prophecy." Finally,the"Biogaphies of Archangels" are by their nature imaginal history,since everything in them happens in the Malak0t. Thus, if onedeprives all this of its proper place which is the mundus imagin-alis, and of its proper organ of perception which is the active

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Imagination, nothing of it has a "place" any more, and conse-quently no longer "takes place." It is no longer anything butimaginary and fictive.

With the loss of the imaginatio aera and of. the mundus imagin-a/fs nihilism and agnosticism begin. This is why we said a fewlines above that we ought to forget here all that the Aristoteliansand similar philosophers have said of the Imagination when theytreat it as a bodily faculty. It is just this that makes the efforts ofcertain among the Jewish and Islamic philosophers to construct aphilosophic theory of Prophecy pathetic. In truth, they do not ex-tricate themselves from the difficulty. Either the prophet is assim-ilated to the philosopher or the philosopher does not know whatto make of Prophecy. On the other hand the conjunction is ef-fected without difficulty by those of our philosophers who werepersuaded that their confrires, starting with the ancient GreekSages as well as those of ancient Persia, derived their higherknowledge from the Niche aux lumilres of Prophecy (Mishhdt al-nobowwat), It is precisely here that Philosopher and Prophetunite in one single vocation.

The Prophet is not a diviner of future events but the spokesmanof the invisible and of the Invisible Ones, and it is this that givesits sense to a "prophetic philosophy" (hihmat nabaulya). A pro-phetic philosophy is thus a "narrative philosophy," absolved of thedilemma which obsesses those who ask: is it myth or is it history?In other words: is it real or is it unreal? Is it fiction or is it true? Aprophetic philosophy is a liberation from this pseudo-dilemma.The events which it describes are neither myth nor history in theordinary sense of the words. It is the history of the Malaktt-what we shall call irnaginal history-in the same way as the coun-tries and the places of this history constitute an imaginal geogra-phyrthat of the "celestial earth."

Access to this imaginal history is opened up for us by that her-meneutic par excellence which is denoted by the word ta'wil,which literally means to "reconduct something to its sourcer" toitr archetype, to its true reality. Twelve-Imtm Shi'ites as well asIrmaili Shfitee have excelled in this art, since u'wtl is at once theprovince and the incentive of their esotericiem as the "seventhdry" completing the six daya of thc Creation. To the straight-

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forward exoteric reader what appears to be the true sense is theliteral reading. What one proposes to him as the spiritual senseappears to him as the metaphoric sense, as "allegory" which heconfuses with "symbol." For the esoteric it is the opposite: the so-called literal sense is only a metaphor (majdzl, The true sense(haqiqat) is the event which this metaphor conceals.

Just as for the Kabbalists, true events are the eternal relationsbetween the ten Sephiroth, concealed beneath the accounts oftheexterior happenings related by the Bible, so for the Shi'ite esoter-ics two-thirds of the Qur6n are to be read in their hidden and truesense (haqiqat) as narration of the drama which is played out be-tween the Holy Imfims and their antagonists from before the cre-ation of this world. This is not allegory: it consists of true events.Hegel said that philosophy consists in turning the world insideout. [,et us say rather that this world is here and now inside out.The ta'wtl and the prophetic philosophy consist in putting it rightside out once more.

As the name of Hegel has just been uttered, now is the right mo-ment in our preface to give the actual meaning of our leitmotifsfor western philosophy. When the mystical theosophists repre-sented in this book experience and affirm the necessity of the in-termediate world, of an intermediary between the sensory and theintellectual, their position is exactly that of Jacob Boehme. Be-tween the intellectual and the sensible, or expressed more pre-cisely still, between the transcendent and hidden Deity, theDeinsabscondita,and the world of man, Boehme places an intermediarywhich he calls the sacred Element, a "spiritual corpxireity" whichrepresents the Dwelling, the Divine Presence, for our world. ThisDwelling is Wisdom itself, Sophia. This Prbsence is the Shekhinaof the Kabbalists. It is the imaginal locus of an entirely spiritualincarnation, for all eternity anterior to that Incarnation which ex-oteric religion places in history, that history which for Shi'ites,theosophists and Ismailis is nothing but the metaphor of the TrueReality.

Either way it is the idea of Theophany which is dominant,making itself evident by its own nature and of necessity betweenthe Intellectual and the sensible, and what is denoted as Sophia,

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as the "Soul of the World," is at the same time the imaginal locusand the organ of this Theophany. It is at once the necessary me-diatrix, the Deus revelatus, between pure Divinity, for ever con-cealed, beyond our reach, and man's world. This is what we havein another place called the "paradox of monotheism" and it is aconstant theme in all those doctrines in the "religions of the book"which are in one way or another related to the Kabbala. Equallyin Jewish mysticism the Hassidim have established a triple differ-entiation: there is the unknowable God, there is the place of theemanation of the Glory, which is the "countenance on high" andwhich even the Angels do not know; lastly there is the manifestedGlory, the "countenance beneathrt'the only one we can contem-plate. This ('countenance beneath" is the Angel Metatron as

"Angel of the Countenance" who is equally the Presence, theSophia, the Soul of the World.

Now every kind of dualism which has in one way or anothercome out of Cartesianism or which is closely related to it has re-jected the necessity of just this spiritual mediating entity. Ourwestern philosophy has been the theatre of what we may call the

"battle for the Soul of the World." On the one hand, like "stainlessknights" protecting this Soul, the Cambridge Platonists (HenryMore, Ralph Cudworth); Jacob Boehme and his school with allthose related to them; the "Boehmian" Newton; the ChristianKabbalists like F. C. Oetinger in whom currents of thought com-ing from Boehme and Swedenborg intersect. On the other, theyfind their antagonists: Descartes, Fr. Mersenne, Malebranche,Bayle, indubitably also Leibniz and Christian Wolff, and the listextends on down to our own days. Is it a matter of a battle thathas finally been lost, the world having lost its soul, a defeat whoseconsequences weigh upon our modern visions of the world with-out compensation? If there has been a defeat, a defeat is still not arefutation. We know a certain number of young philosophersalive today who are deeply concerned with the wish to turn thescales once more in this struggle. This is why we spoke above ofthe actuality of the themes of this book; an actuality which rangesour "Platonists of Persia" at the side of the Cambridge Platonists.

The necessity for the mundus imaginalia, cxpcrienced and af-firmed by our lshrAquly0n, is precirely thn nceemlty for that me-


diation of which Jacob Boehme and his followers have just re-minded us. More exactly still: this mundus imaginalis, world ofH0rqalyfr, world of Malaktt or world of Soul, is the "CelestialEarth" and the "Celestial Corporeity." Just as the Sophia is oth-erwise the imaginal place of the Divine Presence in our world, sothe celestial Earth, present to the secret nostalgia in men's hearts,is typified in the Shi'ite gnosis by the person of FAtima the Re-splendent, the daughter of the Prophet. Ffltima is the Sophia ofthe Shl'ite theosophy and cosmogony.

We will now introduce here the Shi'ite concept of the First Em-anation (first theophany) of that Principle which is beyond everyName and every Attribute. This First Emanation is typified bythe primordial Muhammadic Light (Nfir mohammedi), consti-tuted by certain figures of light, that is to say, the respective meta-physical entities known as the Fourteen Immaculate Ones. Theeternal succession of their births brings with it the birth of theworlds. Their Pleroma is the Dwelling, the necessary mediationbetween the transcendent God, concealed and inaccessible, andthe world of men. The Fourteen Immaculate Ones are collectively"the Angel of the Countenance." A metaphysical narrative willshow us in the course of this book, how the eternal person ofFAtima-Sophia constitutes the Sophianity of the pleroma of theFourteen Immaculate Ones, and how by the cosmogonic virtue ofthis pleroma, the Sophianitg becomes the Presence in our world.Our authors coined a term to express this: fdtimiga, an abstractnoun which literally translated gives something like "fAtimianit€"but which the term Sophianity expresses more directly still oncewe have recognised in the eternal mediating person of Ffrtima theResplendent, Her who is elsewhere known as Sophia.

And the ancient Mazdean texts propose to us all the more ofthe Sophianity. Of the six Archangels who surround Ohrmazd,the God of Pure Light, from whom they emanate and whosename itself means "Lord Wisdom" (Ahura Mazda in the Avesta),three are masculine and three feminine. The first of these feminineArchangels bears in the Avesta the name Spenta Armaiti (inPahlavi, that is in Middle Persian, Spandarmat; in Modern Per-sian, Sfandarmoz). The texts will show us the remarkable prece-dent Inhercnt here. She ir the "I)aughter of Ohrmazd." She is

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indeed the Sophia of Mazdaism and the typification of CelestialEarth. Spandarmat-sophia is the "Mistress of the Dwelling'" Sheis the Dwelling itself, as feminine Archangel of the Earth whichis Earth of Light. Building on her name'in Pahlavi, the abstractterm spandarmatihth has been formed which we cannot translatebetter than by the very term "Sophianity." This term denotes acertain mode of being prescribed for the Zoroastrian faithful.There is also an appeal, a striking correspondence, between thetermsfdtimiya and spandannattkth, which both denote a "Sophi-anity'l typified on the one hand in the person of the feminineArchangel holy Armaiti and on the other in that of FAtima-So-phia. To assume this Sophianity is for the human being to accedehere and now to the Celestial Earth, to the world of H0rqalyi,world of "celestial corporeity," which is that of the subtle Bodiesof Light. Presented thus in a few lines, the intention of the sub-title of the book, "From Mazdean to Shl'ite Iran," will no doubtappear to the reader in more precise contours.

Obviously, the passage from one manifestation of Sophianity toanother does not involve the material filiation of any historiccausality because here plainly both manifestations are acts of theMalak0t which occur in the imaginal world. We prefer to speakhere of the epochs of a spiritual world rather than of constants orofrecurring factors ofthe Iranian consciousness. Now the succes-sion of the epochs.of a spiritual world does not consist of a historywhich one can perceive and demonstrate in the way in which doc-uments permit us to speak of the campaigns of Julius Caesar or ofNapoleon. The epochs of the spiritual world are totally differentfrom the epochs of the exterior world of geology or of sociopoliti-cal history. The epochs of a spiritual world make up a history szigenerisrwhich is in its very essence imaginal history. We are deal-ing here with a "history" of the same nature as that which is wit-nessed when our Shl'ite philosophers identify their Twelfth Imamnow with the Saoshyant or Zoroastrian eschatological Saviour,now with the Paraclete announced in St. John's Gospel. We havealready said that this history is neither myth nor history as under-stood in curent parlance, but that it does not involve any the lessa hirtory ofrtal €vents, or a reality proper to these events' a realitysituated at a lcvel other than that of the cxterior cvcntt of the ma-


terial world, which esoteric hermeneutic considers as being themetaphor of true events.

These true events together with the links which unite them oneto another come to pass in the subtle world of the Soul, the worldof Malak0t, mundus imaginalis. Others have spoken of the

"Chronicle of Akasha" (this term denoting the subtle world).What we have in view here postulates simply the term "imaginalhistory." Every philosophy which loses the sense of the imaginalworld closes to itself all access to the events of which it is the locus,and comes to be the prey of pseudo-dilemmas.

We therefore need a vocabulary other than that of history in theempirical sense of this word in order to deal with the "Chroniclesof Malakfit," just as Boehme needed a terminology different fromthat of the Peripatetic philosophers and expressed himself in thevocabulary of alchemy. To describe the link between the two agesrespectively of Sophianity and of Celestial Earth, we have had re-course here to a musical terminology, and we turn to the soundeflect produced on the organ by the playing ofthe progressio har'monica,

Penetration into the world of HtrqalyA, into the AngelicWorld, thus becomes an aspect of the experience which the pro'gressio harmonica offers to our hearing. And as we utter thesewords we again perceive certain consonances with "actualitytt inthe sense in which we spoke before of the actuality of the "battle

. for the soul of the world." Several important recent publicationstestify to the actuality of the Angelic World for and in the work ofa number of philosophers in every age. The search for traces ofthis world even involves the feelings, not only by reason of thesarcasms which a defiant ignorance throws at it, but also becauseof all that this research is in duty bound to bring back painfully

into the light. For it involves the whole of a forgotten tradition(indeed, deformed and altered out of recognition), whose multi-farious texts alone can at once nourish research and lead to a com-plete renewal of angelology. Thus it has been our wish to present

a few ofthese texts here.We do not pretend that mental habits that have been engrained

for generations lessen the difficulty of access for our contemporar-ier into thir world which for them is like a world long since lost.

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All the more significant then has been the welcome given to arecent study which treats the "life after life" and presents the man-ifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, eventhough they had not crossed it never to return, had none the lessreally found themselves on the 'threshold," for their deaths hadalready been clinically confirmed.2 There is no reason to be sur-prised that such a book should meet with a moving approval fromsome, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeededin snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason forsurprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Cer-tainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with thetestimonies reported in this book. But how many people knewthem? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained letalone understood except on the condition of having at one's im-mediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a me-taphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the souland regulated in its own right to the world of "subtle corporeity."We have made here an attempt at just this. Many more will beneeded, necessitating rigorous study and exorcising every "fan-tasy" which could spoil the legitimacy of imaginative understand-ing.

In this connection, we wish to give a caution. We have come tosee for ourself, with pleasure though not unmixed with some anx-iety, that the word "imaginal" as used specifically in our re-searches has been spreading and even gaining ground. We wishto make the following statement. If this term is used to apply toanything other than the mundus imaginalis and the imaginalForms as they are located in the schema of the worlds which ne-cessitate them and legitimise them, there is a great danger thatthe term will be degraded and its meaning be lost. By the sametoken we would remind the reader that the schema in which theimaginal world is by its essence the intermediate world, and thearticulation between the intellectual and the sensible, in whichthe active Imagination as imaginatio aera is an organ of under-standing mediating between intellect and sense and as legitimateas these latter and that world itself. If one transfers its usage out-side this precisely defined schema one sets out on a false trail andstrays far from the intention which our Iranian philooophers have

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induced us to restore in our use of this word. It is superfluous toadd*the reader will already have understood this-thatthemun-dus imaginalis has nothing to do with what the fashion of our timecalls "the civilisation of the image."

We concede that access to the world of H0rqalyA, to the An-gelic World, undoubtedly continues to be difficult. More thanonce since the publication of the first edition we have heard read-ers regretting the special difficulty of the first chapter-that onthe angelology of the Avesta. We would like to suggest here-and this could apply to the whole of the book-that a single read-ing cannot be sufhcient.

One does not penetrate into the Angelic World by housebreak-ing, one does not move around mentally in the world of H0rqalyAby the assistance of a formal logic or of a dialectic which leadsfrom one concept to the next by deduction. Passage from one ima-ginal Form to another does not obey any conceptual dialectic. Thefigures of the God-Angels of the Avesta, for exarnple, overlappingone with another as they often do, can only be grasped by gener-ating in oneself, on the indications of the texts, a minimum ofmentbl vision. What then does this involve? One should resorthere to the exemplary practice which Ibn 'Arabi himself has ledus to design as the "theophanic method of discourse" (oraison).

It could be that this itself is nothing other than a form or anappeal of the progressio harmonica. But is it not frequent in theBible for the Prophets to demand the assistance of a harp-player

, in order to open the eyes oftheir inner vision?

Translated by Peter Russell

Notes

l. Zaqgilm, Quran, xvii,6O; xxxvii,62-68; xliv,43-46; lvi,52.(N. of Tr.)2. Dr. RaymondMoody, Life afnr Life,l,andon, Corgi, 1977.

xlx

PROLOGUE

It may be that the world which our authors here describe insymbolic language as the "eighth climate" will be seen by West-ern people as the "lost continent.'Should some of them be search-ing for it, the Spiritual Masters whom the present book seeks tointerpret will perhaps serve as their guides.

The spatial distances between humans are being more andmore reduced in our day, at least if measured in terms of time;concurrently we hear talk of an 'acceleration of history." Onthe other hand, the real universes-those by which and forwhich men live and die, which can never be reduced to empiricaldata because their secret reality exists before all our projects andpredetermines thpm-those universes, it would seem, have neverbeen so far from being able to communicate with each other,from being penetrable by one another. It may be that the firstand last reason for this impenetrability is to be sought in the lossof the intenuorld, in the vanished consciousness of this assemblyof universes which our authors call the "world of Horqalya.'

How does the cultured man of today represent to himself thespirituality of Islam? What picture can he form of the spiritualworld of lran on the two poles of which, before and after Islam,we will try here to apply our attention? People are generallyabsorbed in political or sociological considerations and lose sightof the essential. We ask questions without even ascertainingwhat meaning, if any, they have for the man addressed and, forthe same reason, the sense or non-sense of his answers for our-selves.

It is a great and formidable adventure to be the guest of aculture to the point of communicating in its language and par-ticipating in its problems. But he who remains on the shore willnever foretaste the secrets of the high seas. How can he know,for example, what it might be to read the Qur'ln as a Bible (like

that Biblc from which the Qur'ln partially stems) unless, likethore whoro Bible it ie, hc pcrceives the opiritual meaning that

xxi

Prologue

they perceive in it, and as they perceive it in the traditions whichunfold it. But how can we keep company with the $nfis andSpiritual Masters of Islam if we ourselves have forgotten thelanguage of symbols, if we are blind and deaf to the spiritualmeaning of the ancient writings, while, on the other hand, wetake such pride in showing how favorably they compare withother historical or archeological documents?

Among other symptoms indicative of a "lost continent," weshould note the unusual insistence with which certain contem-porary theologians have taken the "immortality of the soul" asopposed to the "resunection of the dead," as though it were agreat triumph to abandon the philosophers, the impenitent Pla-tonists, to their vain pretensions, while they themselves, as per-fect realists, stand ready to condone the concessions necessary inorder to "keep up with the times." For in truth there has beena great destruction of hopes in the West, and there is no tellingwhere this will end. Its most alarming symptom is the piousagnosticism that is paralyzing excellent minds and inspiring inthem a panic terror before everything with the suspect aroma ofttgnosis."

Let us be clear about one thing: the dilemma we have justmentioned is utterly and justifiably foreign to the thoughts andthe thinkers assembled here in this book. There is no question of"demonstrating" something such as the immortality of the soulor resurrection of the dead, and above all not to someone who isdenying them or rejecting the idea. If it is true that rationaldemonstration fails to support either the thesis or the antithesis,it is for a fundamental reason that emerges from our.texts them-selves. Neither the rejection nor the hope that challenges it isa matter of theoretical proof. It has to do with the judgment

which each one bears in himself of himself and thanks to whichhe takes on the entire responsibility for himself. This is why itwould be inefrective to try to impose immortality or resurrectionon anyone who does not want it-the more so in that there couldbe no "resurrection of bodies" without a "resurrection of souls,"that is, without having overcome the peril of the "second death,"so clearly discerned by the most ancient Hermetiam, and which

Prologue

postulates the "descent to Hell." For it is from the soul itself,from the celestial Earth of the soul, that the 'spiritual flesh" isconstituted-the suprasensory and at the same time perfectlyconcrete caro spiritualis. A "dead soulr" in the sense that a soulcan die, could not be its substance. This connection will be thecentral thought of the texts and of the authors studied in thisbook.

These texts together form a progression from one octave tothe other of the Iranian spiritual universe, repeating and ampli-fying the same theme. Here exactly lay the difficulty of the task

to which we felt called, because, until now, very little has beenwritten in an attempt to open up a view of the unity of thisuniverse and to show how its component Parts are connected.First of all, we had to outline a phenomenology of Mazdeanconsciousness or, more exactly, of Mazdean angelology, with thepersonal Figures and archetypes that are its hierophanies. Then,

by means of the theme studied here, we had to clear the wayleading from Mazdean Iran to Islamic Iran.

Finally, in the second part of the book, in allowing certainauthors, whose names and works have remained until now al'

most totally unknown in the West, to speak for themselves' ourintention was to show how certain problems could be shared anda common terminology established. Without such participation,we could not hope for much even from exchanges undertakenwith the best will in the world. The pages that have been trans-

lated here, both from Persian and Arabic, are extracts from

eleven authors, who together cover the period from the twelfth

century up to the Present day. Their names are well known in

Iran, but what can be said for our knowledge of man, of horno

sapiens, so long as we know nothing of the invisible regions that

have been explored nor of the explorers themselves?Normally, the work of "diffusion" would be preceded by a

preliminary study of the material, but unfortunately, in view of

the rarity of works in this field, the philosopherorientalist will in

fact be bound for some time to come to take these two tasks on

himrclf. Thrt ir why it is impossible to construct an investiga'

tion of thlr nrture without furniahing what are commonly called

xxt l xxi i l

Prologue

'fnotes" and which are, in fact, the commentaries without whichthe whole structure would remain hanging in the air. Neverthe-less, we wished to write a book that would be of general interest

-that is, to the prepared seeker, who will find in it manythemes to study in depth, as well as to him who in eighteenth-century France was called the "honn6te homme," the open-minded man to whom the scholar owes consideration, the moreso in that his kind is perhaps doomed, owing to contemporaryconditions, to disappear.

In what follows there will be a constant recurrence of certainterms that to one reader or another will be a source of irritation;they may be assured that their irritation is shared. However,this irritation has no longer any foundation if we take the termsin question with the genuine simplicity of the texts from whichthey are translated. The word "theosophy," for example, is atranslation of the Arabic hikma ilahtya and the Persian hhada-danl, which themselves are the exact equivalent of the Greektheosophia. The terms "esotericism" and "initiation" do notimply any exclusive claim to teach by some self-instituted author-ity. They refer, respectively, to hidden, suprasensory things, tothe discretion which the words themselves suggest in regard tothose who, not understanding, scorn them, and to the spiritualbirth that causes the perception of those hidden things to open.These terms may have been abused, but we shall be remindedof their rightful use in the context of what follows.

As for the word "Imamr" meaning "spiritual guide," this worddominates the form of Islam which will especially concern ushere, namely, Shfism (also called Imamism) and, above all,Shfite lran. If it is already true to say that cultivated people inthe West usually have only an approximate idea of Islamictheology in general, when it comes to Shfism, it is to be fearedthat we are speaking of, terra incognita. Some pages in thepresent book (Ch. rr, $ l), as well as the hanslated texts, maysuggest what constitutes its essence. But we could not includehere an outline of the history of Sht'ism or explain how and whyit became the form of Iranian Islam.

Prologue

Actuallyr Iranian Islam belies the opinion according to whichIslam is too often identified with an ethnic concept, with the pasthistory of a race. Islam is primarily a religious concept. Forcenturies, and from his youth up, the Iranian has known hisnational epic poem contained in the "Book of Kings" by Firdawsl.He is aware that there were great kings and even a prophet,Zarathustra-Zoroaster, before Islam. Yet the Shfite Im6mologyprofessed by Iran represents the supreme homage that can bepaid to the Arabic Prophet and to the members of his Household.The question is one neither of race nor of nation but of religiousvision. Again, that is why we would have liked to stress (but can-not do so here) how the relationship between Shfism and theprincipal phenomenon of spiritual Islam, known under the nameof $ofism, is regarded in Iran. In any case, suffice it to say thatthe conditions of the dialogue between Christianity and Islamchange completely as soon as the interlocutor represents notlegalistic Islam but this spiritual Islam, whether it be that of

$ufism or of Shi'ite gnosis.Even so, the difficulties of approach remain considerable. A

Westerner usually takes the terms muslirn and, mu'min as synon-ymous. They are, however, by no means synonymous for aSht'ite: one can be a rnuslitn and profess Islam without yet (norfor that reason alone) ircing a rnu'min,, that is, a true believer, anadept of the holy Imlms and their doctrine. On his side, thetnu'min will find it hard to understand immediately the reasonsfor and import of religious terminology current in the West,where we speak, for example, of the "difficulties of belief'-using the phrase, almost always, with a confessional connota-tion. This is because the "difficulties" in question depend ona certain concept of philosophy and theology that has accruedduring several centuries and, ultimately, on an opposition thatis not experienced at all in a milieu where such terms as'd.ifand'irfdn are in current use. The latter can be translated re-gpectively as "mystical theosophy" and "mystical gnosisr" butthcse tcchnical equivalents do not exactly preserve the familiarohade of meaning in Arabic of these words, which connote a

xxvxxiv

Prologue

specific type of spiritual knowledge. But does not the very factthat we have no adequate terminology reveal that we are deal-ing with something which, for us, is not current?

And this, among other thingp, is what motivates the use ofthe term "esotericism" because, in this perspective, the polemicsbetween Western believers and unbelievers are seen to havetaken place on a plane of knowledge above which neither sidewas able to rise. For example, there have been arguments aboutthe miracles described in the New Testament. One side acknowl-edges, the other rejects the possibility of a "breach of naturallaws." Belief and unbelief become locked in the dilemma-his-tory or myth? The only way out is to realize that the first andgreatest miracle is the irruption of another world into ourknowledge, an irruption that rends the fabric of our categoriesand their necessities, of our evidences and their norms. But itshould be understood that the other world in question is one thatcannot be perceived by the organ of ordinary knowledge; that itcan be neither proven nor disputed by means of ordinary argu-mentation; that it is a world so different that it can neither beseen nor perceived except by the organ of "Hurqalytrn" p"t-ception.

This other world, with the mode of knowledge it implies, isthe one which, as we shall see, has been meditated upontirelessly throughout the centuries as the "world of Hurqaly[."It is the "Earth of visions," the Earth which confers on visionaryapperceptions their truth, the world through which resurrectioncomes to pass. This is what will be re-echoed by all our authors.Indeed, this is the world in which real spiritual events "takeplacer" real, however, not in the sense that the physical world isreal, nor yet in the sense that events chronologically recorded to"make history" are real, because here the event transcends everyhistorical materialization.

It is an "external world," and yet it is not the physical world.It is a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge frommeasurable space without emerging from extent, and that wemust abandon homogeneous chronological time in order to enterthat qualitative time which is the history of the soul. Finally, it

Prologue

is the world in which we perceive the spiritual sense of the writ'ten word and of beings-that is, their suprasensory dimension,that meaning which most often seems to us an arbitrary extraPo-lation, because we confuse it with allegory. 'We cannot penetratethe "Earth of Horqalya" by rational abstraction nor yet by em-pirical materialization; it is the place where spirit and body areone, the place where spirit, taking on a body, becomes the carospiritualisr "spiritual corporeity." Everything suggested here byour authors goes, perhaps, very much against the current ofcontemporary thinking and may well be entirely misunderstood.We might find their brothers in soul, however, among those whohave been called the Protestant Spirituales, such as Schwenck-fcld, Boehme, the Berleburg circle, Oetinger, and others, whoseIine has been continued to the present day.

But there is a further point to make clear: it was not ourintention here, in studying the two complementary aspects, Maz'

dean Iran and Sht'ite lran (more exactly, uP to the Shaikhtschool ), to treat this theme from a historical point of view. Weshall do no more here than indicate it as a possibility' since wehope later to make it the subject of the fuller study it calls for.If we try to consider what is suggested to us in the followingexffacts in the light of our accustomed historical dimension, weshali, with the best intentions in the world, be bound to falsifythe perspective. For our historical, evolutionary, and linear

viewpoint is the result of a onedimensional mental structure,

which serves for determining causes inherent in this level alone,

which explains things by reducing them all to this same level; it

is limited to a homogeneous time and space in which it places

events.Our authors see things from a difrerent point of view. They

postulate several planes of projection. The Passage of time is

viewed as a cycle; beings and events themselves qualitativelysituate their time and space. This being so' we should Pay Par-tlcular attention to stru,ctures and homologies of structure; what

has to emerg€ is the law of their isornorphisrn In comparison,

discurcionr conducted on the level of pure historicism are almost

alwryr irrltating and eterile, for invariably one comes up against

xxvl xxvli

Prologue

a possible "counterexplanation." For example, the question issometimes raised as to whether Shfism is or is not an Iranianphenomenon. There is in any case a Sht.ism with a specificallylranian structure. We are not concerned to label objects in ashowcase or to identify photographs, but to search for a modeof understanding that we have described as a progressio har-rnonica. Any musician, any Gestaltist, will immediately graspwhat we mean.

For example, in Mazdaism there is the uar of yima, the ,,hy-

perborean paradise," and in $ofism and Shl.ism there is the Earthof Hurqalya, also in the celestial "Far North." In Mazdaismthere are traces of a mystical physiology and the same, vastlyamplified, in Shaikhism. Both in Mazdaism and in Suhrawardl'stheosophy there are Angels of the Earth, Spenta Armaiti andDa€n6, Figures respectively representing the eternal Sophia; inSht'ite glnosis we find Fatima, person of Light, Daughter of theProphet, who is also a Figure representing Sophia and the supra-celestial Earth. In Mazdaism there is the Saoshyant, or Savior-to-come, surrounded by his companions, while in Sht.ism there isthe hidden ImEm, surrounded by a mystical body of knights,whose parousia will herald the completion of our .Aean. This se-quence of themes is already an outline of the curve described bythe present book. However, this should not be taken to mean thatthe one version and the other are purely and simply identical.The terms are not identical, but there is an analogy of relation-ships. Because the Figures exemplify the same archetypes, theiridentity lies in the function they assume in the midst of homolo-gous wholes.

To pass from one octave to a higher octave is not the sameas to pass from one date in time to another, but is a progressionto a height or pitch that is qualitatively difrerent. All the ele-ments are changedr /et the form of the melody is the same.Something in the nature of harmonic perception is needed in or-der to perceive a world of many dimensions.

A philosopher, to whom we were explaining the concept andfunction of the world of Hurqalya according to our authors,remarked: "Finally, then, all phenomenology of the spirit takes

Prologue

place in Hiirqalya?" It seems certainly that it must be somethinglike that. But we should still add one more remark: as a rule,when discussing past events, we fix them in the dimension of thepast and are unable to agree on their nature or their significance.Our authors suggest that if the past were really what we believeit to be, that is, completed and closed, it would not be the groundsof such vehement discussions. They suggest that all our acts ofunderstanding arc so many recommencements, re-iterations of.events still unconcluded. Each one of us, willy-nilly, is theinitiator of events in "Hnrqalyt," whether they abort in its hellor bear fruit in its paradise. While we believe that we arelooking at what is past and unchangeable, rile are in fact con-summating our own future. Our authors will show us how awhole region in Horqalya is peopled, post mortem, by our im-peratives and wishes-that is to say, by that which directs ouracts of understanding as well as our behavior. It follows that thewhole of the underlying metaphysics is that of an unceasing re-currence of the Creation (taiaddud); not a metaphysics of theens and the asse, but of the esto, of being in the imperative. Butthe event is put, or put again, in the imperative only becauseit is itself the iteratiae form of being by which it is raised to thereality of an event. Perhaps, then, we shall glimpse the full grav-ity of a spiritual event and of the spiritual sense of events "per-ceived in Horqalya," when at last consciousness rediscovers theGiver of what is given. Everything is strange, say our authors,when one sets foot on that Earth where the Impossible is in factaccomplished. For all our mental constructions, all our impera-tives, all our wishes, even the love which is the most consubstan-tial with our being-all that would be nothing bnt metaphorwithout the interworld of Hurqalya, the world in which oursymbols are, so to speak, taken literally.

March 1960

xxviii xxtx

Publisher's Note

The system of transliteration in this volume conforms to thestyle of the Library of Congress catalogue, and differs from thatused in the other two volumes by Henry Corbin published in thisseries.

NOTE ON ILLUSTRATIONS

The design of the Frontispiece is reproduced from a silk textilein the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, purchasedfrom the J. H. Wade Fund. It also appears in a book byGaston Wiet entitled Soieries persanes (Mdmoires de I'Institutd'Egypte, Vol. 52, Cairo, 1947, Pl. XI and pp. 55-63).Theoriginal figure on silk was discovered in 1925, together withmany other extraordinary pieces, when certain graves acciden-tally came to light in the hills adjoining the sanctuary of Shahr-Ban[, not far from Ray (the Rhages of the Book of Tobias), afew miles to the south of Teheran.

It can be inferred from the place of the discovery that thiswas a precious material ofrered by friends or relatives for wrap-ping the body of a deceased person (cf. Issa Behnam, in Revuede la Facultd des Lettres de I'Unhtersitd de Tdh|ran, Octoberf956). It is said to date from the fifth century (eleventh centuryc.n. ) and was found in a state of perfect preservation. Icono-graphically, it is interesting as a motif in the Sasanid style onmaterial dating from the great Islamic period. The site of thediscovery makes it even more interesting, for, according toIranian tradition, the princess Shahr-Banu, daughter of the lastSasenid ruler, Yazdgard III, became the wife of r.{usayn ibn'AlI, the Third Imtrm of the Shfites, and here we find an expres-sion, iconographic and topographic, of this union of MazdeanIran and Shfite Iran.

Beyond doubt the design represents the theme of the ascent toHeaven: a youth, with a royal head of hair as a halo, is carriedoff into space by a great, fantastic bird that holds him enclosedin its breast. Certain stylized details suggest that this bird beidentified, not merely as a two-headed eagle, but as the'anqd'(thc phoenix) or slmurgh which, already in the Avesta as in theldter Persian mystical epics, assumes so many symbolic func-tlonr, even becoming the emblem of the Holy Spirit. It would be"urelem to multiply cxampleo based on outer analogies (which

xxx xxxl

Note on lllustrations

would lead us far afield, even to the abduction of Ganymede, forinstance). But it is of direct interest to draw attention to anepisode in the heroic epic of lran, namely, the abduction of. Zal,son of Sam, who was nurtured and reared by the bird Srmurgh.Suhrawardr developed at great length in one of his mysticalromances the spiritual meaning of this episode. And in this senseit comes finally into full accord with the l.radath which, withoutfurther reference, can best lead us to meditation on the symbol-ism of this image. The hadith in question alludes to the green

Bird whose breast ofiers sheltef, in the other world, to the spiritsof the "witnesses of truth." As interpreted by Simnanl, one of theIranian $uft masters, this is an allusion to the formation and the

birth of the "resurrection body." Thus the hieratic movement ofbeing taken up to Heaven, which the Iranian artist has rePre-sented here, reveals the meaning of what Wiet so rightly callsits'triumphant gravity."

We should not omit pointing out that exactly the same motif'

with all the features justifying reference to the l.tadtth interpreted

by Simnenl, figures among the paintings adorning the ceiling of

the Palatine chapel at Palermo (cf. Ugo Monneret de Villard,Le Pitture musulmane aJ softto della Cappella Palatina in Pa-

lermo, pp. 4748 and figs. 52-55,245). Whether or not the

Palermo painters came from Fa$mid EgyPt, it is known that

they were inspired by themes originating for the most part in

Iran, and often, as in the present case, did no mofe than repro-

duce them.

the plate facing page 32 is from a Persian anthology, a manu'

script dated Shiraz ,1.n. 1398 in the Tiirk ve Islam Miizesi, Is-

tanbul, and is reproduced from Basil Gray, Persian Painting(Geneva: Skira, 1956) by permission of the publisher. It is

discussed on p. 31.

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Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth 01 (Contents & Preface) by Henry Corbin

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