Insight Editions · No. 170
Temple and Contemplation
Henry Corbin · Translated by Philip Sherrard and Liadain Sherrard; editorial note translated by James W. Morris
Henry Corbin's essays examine the temple as a locus of spiritual vision, linking Sufi and Ismaili cosmologies, imaginal reality, sacred architecture, and contemplative practice.
A study guide to Temple and Contemplation by Henry Corbin, translated by Philip Sherrard and Liadain Sherrard; editorial note translated by James W. Morris. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Henry Corbin's Temple and Contemplation (French collection Temple et Contemplation, Flammarion, Paris 1980; the English edition's front matter presents The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, and an editorial note by Christian Jambet translated by James W. Morris) gathers five lectures given at the Eranos Conferences in Ascona between 1950 and 1974. Corbin planned the book himself. Its title names a common centre: the Temple as the place, and the organ, of vision.
In one sentence: for Corbin, every visible form has an invisible counterpart that is no less real, the imaginal world is where the two meet, and the Temple (celestial archetype, cubic Ka'bah, Temple of Light built of persons, Grail Temple, Nova Hierosolyma) is the form in which that meeting becomes visible, so that whoever builds the Temple within himself regains the power to see, and the modern world, which has lost the Temple, has lost contemplation with it.
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
The epigraph
The book opens with a line Corbin later attributes to Vladimir Maximov: "All is mere ashes and dust — all, except the Temple within us. It is ours, and with us for ever." Corbin returns to it in the last study, where the Grail king Titurel, four hundred years old, keeps the face of a man of thirty because "every man is always as old as his temple."
The argument
The book's own presentation explains why two lectures that seem foreign to the Temple open the book: Shiite hermeneutics leads necessarily to a theosophy of the Temple, and the Temple has no meaning without the method and ontology that lead to it. The book therefore moves in three steps.
| Step | Lectures | Question answered |
|---|---|---|
| Method and ontology | 1. Colours (1972); 2. The Balance (1973) | How can a sensible thing (a colour, a number, a figure) be read as the appearance of a spiritual reality, without reducing either to the other? |
| The Temple of persons | 3. Sabian Temple and Ismailism (1950) | How does a temple built of stone in the image of a star become a Temple of Light built of persons? |
| The Temple as form and as Image | 4. The Ka'bah (1965); 5. The Imago Templi (1974) | How does meditation on the form of a temple configure the inner man, and why does the Image of the Temple recur across Judaism, Christianity and Islam? |
Five convictions run through all five lectures:
- Spiritual realities have form. The opposite of matter is not formlessness but subtle form; the "body of light" is a body.
- There are three worlds, not two. Between the intelligible and the sensible lies the mundus imaginalis, perceived by the active Imagination, which is not the imaginary.
- Correspondence is not causality. The Balance links visible and invisible by homology; ta'wil leads a thing back to its archetype without dissolving it.
- Sacred history happens in its own time. Hierohistory, "subtle history", cannot be measured by archives; its events become parables.
- The modern world has destroyed the crypt as well as the Temple. Agnosticism, historicism and sociology leave man "outside himself", and the Temple within is the only answer.
Chapter map
| # | Lecture (printed pages) | Main source | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Realism and Symbolism of Colours in Shiite Cosmology (1-54) | Karim-Khan Kirmani, "Book of the red hyacinth" | Colour has real existence at every level; red read on five levels leads to the Imam within. |
| 2 | The Science of the Balance and the Correspondences between Worlds (55-125) | Haydar Amuli's diagrams | The Balance of 7 and 12, of 19 and of 28 links cosmos, man, prophets and Imams. |
| 3 | Sabian Temple and Ismailism (132-182) | Shahrastani, Brothers of Purity, Ismaili texts | From the star-temple of Harran to the Temple of Light of the Imamate. |
| 4 | The Configuration of the Temple of the Ka'bah (183-262) | Qadi Sa'id Qummi | The cube of the Ka'bah, the Black Stone and the stations of pilgrimage as the shape of the spiritual life. |
| 5 | The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms (263-390) | Suhravardi, Ezekiel, Qumran, Grail, Swedenborg | The recurring Image of the Temple and the man-temple as a reply to the desacralized world. |
Reading notes
- The lectures were written over twenty-four years and were not revised into one book, so ideas recur (the twelve Imams as the cube's edges appear in chapters 4 and 5) and cross-references point "above" to other lectures.
- Chapter 3 is the oldest (1950) and is placed third by Corbin's own plan.
- Corbin's technical vocabulary is kept: imaginal, hierohistory, ta'wil, malakut. The glossary (Part 8) gives the book's own glosses.
Chapter maps
1. Colours. The prologue asks what colour is for authors who explain it by what they perceive. Kirmani's treatise of 1851 answers in stages: the existence of colour is distinct from its manifestation; light is the spirituality of colour; four qualities give four source colours, with green in place of black in the subtle worlds; the Throne of Mercy rests on four pillars of coloured light. The hermeneutic of red then rises through five levels to the Muhammadan Reality, and the epilogue ends with Prometheus, Persepolis and heraldry: the knight who wears his lord's colours.
2. The Balance. Corbin first clears away a misunderstanding (the Balance is not an early exact science), then introduces Haydar Amuli's twenty-eight diagrams and the hierarchy of the Friends of God, with its pole of poles. Four applications follow: the Balance of the Seven and the Twelve (prophets, Imams, planets, signs); time and balance (ZaMaN and MiZaN); the Balance of the Nineteen (Basmallah, guardians of hell, seventy thousand Veils); the Balance of the Twenty-Eight (lunar mansions and letters). The "horsemen of the Invisible" close the lecture.
3. Sabian Temple. The lecture moves from Mas'udi's temple on the borders of China and its echoes in Suhravardi and Nizami to the Sabian ritual and its angels, Shahrastani's dialogue of Hunafa' and Sabians, the angelology of the Ismaili esoteric Heavens and the Adam who "broke the fast", the three rituals of the Brothers of Purity, liturgical time, the ram of Abraham, and the vision of Person-archetypes.
4. The Ka'bah. Balzac read on two floors opens a meditation on form: Qadi Sa'id Qummi's three universes and three times, the proof of the Throne, the plan of the Ka'bah and its corners, the celestial archetype, Gabriel, Abraham and the Thrones, the procession in Heaven, the Black Stone and the Pearl, the stations of the pilgrimage, and finally the potestas clavium, the power of the keys, set against the collective norms Corbin rejects.
5. The Imago Templi. From the meeting-place of the two seas and the world as the crypt of the Temple, Corbin passes through hierohistory against history, Ezekiel and the New Temple, Philo, Eckhart and Fludd, Qumran's temple of men, the Church and the Temple, the Templar filiations, the Temple of the Grail, Zacharias Werner's Sons of the Valley and Swedenborg's Nova Hierosolyma, ending with templum as the place of vision.
How the parts of this guide are built
Each chapter part opens with a lede giving the Eranos year and printed pages, then a box of key points, then sections that follow Corbin's order. Figures redraw what Corbin describes; tables collect lists he gives in prose. Parts 6 to 8 give the slips, the synthesis and the glossary.
The editor's key to the book
Christian Jambet's editorial note explains why five lectures given between 1950 and 1974 form one book. Corbin himself outlined the plan, and the title suggests that "these diverse studies converge on a common spiritual centre". The last three studies ask about the heavenly Temple in the Religions of the Book; the first two supply the method. Jambet puts it plainly: the "science of the Balance" is "a general theory of ta'wil", a spiritual exegesis that interprets numbers and dimensions and builds diagrams "in which intelligible proportions become visible".
Jambet also states the turn that runs through the Sabian and Ka'bah lectures. The Temple is not only the esoteric aspect of the cosmos: "The Temple becomes the inner form of the person". The colours lecture belongs here too, since "Light is the Angel of colour", as the spiritual Temple is the angelic form of the material one. The note closes on the union of the two words of the title, temple and contemplation, quoting Corbin's last line: "When man is thus, man is truly the Temple" (p. 387).
Notes on sources and conventions
Where the scan of the book was too damaged to verify a phrase, the passage is given in reported speech rather than in quotation marks. Transliteration follows the book without diacritics. The slips list records only problems that can be seen from inside the book: a date given two ways, a cross-reference that points to the wrong note, a name printed in two forms. Where Corbin himself notes a discrepancy in his sources, that is reported in the chapter and not counted as a slip. Page numbers refer to the printed pages of the English edition.
1. The Realism and Symbolism of Colours in Shiite Cosmology
Eranos 1972 (printed pages 1-54). Corbin analyses an unedited Arabic treatise of 1851, the "Book of the red hyacinth" by Shaykh Muhammad Karim-Khan Kirmani of the Shaykhi school, and follows it from a physics of colour to a hermeneutics of colour that runs step by step parallel to the esoteric hermeneutics of the Koran, ending in the "Imam within" and in a chivalric bond between lord and knight.
- Distinguish the existence (wujud) of colour from its manifestation (zuhur); the philosophers failed by confusing them.
- Everything here descends from archetypes, the "treasures" of Koran 15:21.
- Every composite, sensible or supra-sensible, has its own colour: "if the composite belongs to the subtle world (latif), the colour is likewise subtle".
- Light is not colourless: it is the spirituality of colour, and colour is light in a materialized state.
- Invisibility can come from excess of light, not only from darkness.
- Four qualitative modalities (Fire, Air, Water, Earth) give four source colours; in the subtle worlds green replaces black.
- The cosmic Throne of Mercy rests on four pillars of coloured light, each typified by an archangel.
- The colour red is read through five hermeneutic levels: Nature, the Imam Husayn, the angel Gabriel, the Imam within, and the eternal Muhammadan Reality.
- Lord (rabb) and vassal (marbub) need each other as light and colour do; the knight "wears the colours" of his lord.
The question and the treatise
Corbin had earlier studied colour in the subtle physiology of the fourteenth-century mystic 'Alauddawlah Simnani, where each subtle centre is a "prophet of your being" with its own aura, and he notes the long Hermetic tradition of alchemical colour. The question is phenomenological: what is the phenomenon of colour for these authors, whose interpretation seeks to "preserve its appearance"?
His answer is a treatise by Shaykh Muhammad Karim-Khan Kirmani (d. 1870), second in succession to Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (d. 1826), founder of the Shaykhi school. Kirmani left about three hundred titles and is called a sort of "Iranian Goethe". The treatise, Risalat al-yaqutat al-hamra', was written in Arabic in 1851, in two days, about sixty pages, provoked by "the question of a tiresome person". Corbin used a photocopy of the autograph. Book I (eight chapters) treats the concept and reality of colour; Book II (nine chapters) treats red and its hermeneutics.
The philosophers are a foil. Corbin surveys the theory of colour from Aristotle through Farabi, Avicenna and Ibn al-Haytham, singles out Avempace (Ibn Bajjah) as the greatest advance, since for him light is already "a sort of colour (aliquis color)" and colours exist in potentia in darkness, and notes Averroes found this valde difficilis. Yet there is "a basic divergence, possibly an abyss," between such philosopher-opticians and a theosophist like Kirmani.
- Existence and manifestation of colour are distinct; "Colour may exist, yet not be manifested."
- The relation of light and colour cannot be settled at the physical level alone; phenomena are explained by a "descent of archetypes".
- The notion of the composite (murakkab) applies to all levels of the universe, so colour exists in supra-sensible worlds too, and its hermeneutic is "not an abstract symbolism, but a symbolics founded on an integral spiritual realism."
Existence versus manifestation
Avicenna, says the shaykh, got no further than a hesitant potential existence of colour. Against the postulate that colour where it exists must be visible, Kirmani sets a physics of "subtle matter", the latifah. It sorts things into three kinds: where it predominates, the thing is a light-source that shows itself and others; where it is equal to the other components, the thing is visible of itself (red light, perhaps phosphorescence) but lights nothing else; where it is weaker, the thing needs another light to be seen. Even then the body has its colour: light brings colour's manifestation, not its existence.
Darkness is itself a manifestation. Following 6:1, "He has established Darkness and Light", darkness manifests itself as darkness. Hence one may speak of a "manifestation in potentia" but not of an existence in potentia. Of the philosophers the shaykh says: "All these great men" "remained in a state of perplexity. They had no knowledge of the meaning and concept of colour."
His first premiss: "The truth is" "that every composite possesses a colour in itself", whether a body of this world, a subtle body of the barzakh, a body of the world of the Soul (Malakut), or a composite of the Jabarut.
Corbin draws three consequences. The banal dualism of spirit and flesh disappears: the body is sublimated up to the "divine body" (jism ilahi) of Mulla Sadra and the subtle bodies of Ahsa'i, linked to the okhema of Proclus. The concept of tajarrud (separation from matter) is applied only to the creative Principle, so even the cherubic Intelligences have matter and form: Light is their being and Mercy (Rahmah) their quiddity. Hence a phenomenology of colour is needed that unveils (kashf) its reality at every level, and symbolism takes on "the quality of a visionary realism."
The Koranic testimonies (30:22, 35:27, 16:13, 18:31, 3:106) show colours are objectively real, not subjective admixtures of air and light; in Corbin's phrase they are called upon "to witness against Newton." The sixth Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, in his conversation with Mufaddal al-Ju'fi, a kind of De sensu et sensato, speaks of light as what manifests colour, not what produces it. Mulla Sadra had held that only the Shiites bridged the gap between revelation and opinion, because their Imams unveiled the esoteric and the exoteric. To save the phenomenon of colour "philosophy is not enough. What is needed is a divine wisdom, a theosophia."
Light as the angel of colour
Bodies of different composition can share one colour, so colour is not produced as the philosophers say. Whoever denies colour where there is no light is like a man who says that if no one looks at the sky the sky does not exist. The shaykh's formula: "inna'l-bariq yuzhiru'l-lawn wa-la yujiduh", brightness manifests colour but does not make it exist.
| # | The five premisses (chapter V) |
|---|---|
| 1 | The archetype that imprints (mu'aththir) differs in mode of being from the signature it imprints (athar); it stays "henadic", the Unific of all that is unique, "more epiphanic than all its epiphanies." |
| 2 | The Book of the world and the revealed Book take one hermeneutic (ta'wil), but the epiphany of being has no opposite and includes light and darkness, while the epiphany of the Book shows the exoteric and hides the esoteric, a manifestation that includes an absence. |
| 3 | Conditions on the side of the subject: your own body may be the screen; the soul's gates must be opened. |
| 4 | Conditions on the side of the object: the latifah is the signature of the archetype; when strong enough, the Image-archetype unfolds (inbisat) into the receptacle. |
| 5 | Either the latifah is too weak and the thing stays hidden until it is strengthened, or it is strong and occultation ceases. |
An object is manifest only so far as the superior agent imprints its signature in it; intensification of the latifah is explained as the archetype's remoteness giving way to proximity. Nearest its Principle colour is called light and brilliance (daw'); furthest, it exists but is occulted, as the esoteric sense is occulted in the Book.
The second proposition comes with a warning: "Firmly grasp what I tell you, for it is extremely subtle." Then: "Light" "is the spirituality [the spiritual element or angel] of colour (ruhdniyat al-lawn), that is to say, colour in the spiritual state or spiritualized", while colour is the corporeity of light, light in a materialized state. Light and colour are two in individual and species but one in genus, like spirit and body. The alchemists called spirit "light in fusion" and body "light solidified".
"All light is manifested colour, whether it be the brilliance of celestial luminaries or that of fire. Where would you look for the idea of a light to illumine crystal, without that light being itself a colour?"
Moonlight is white, sunlight and lamplight yellow, and a sapphire garment turns from blue to green by lamplight, "like the enamelled cupolas of the mosques of Isfahan". Light is the supreme hikayah (story, imitation, parable) of the Principle. As the Sky near the Principle is alive while the Earth far from it is inert, colours near the Principle show unaided (the blue of Saturn, white of Jupiter, red of Mars, yellow of the Sun), and colours far off need excess light.
The four modalities and the marriage of the Elements
The signature's movement away from its giver yields hot and dry (toward the agent) and cold and dry (in itself). Kirmani refuses to unite them in a common dryness: fiery dryness is supple and takes all forms, earthly dryness resists them. "Fire is seventy thousand times more supple than Earth, seven hundred times quicker than Water to assume a form". So, against peripatetic physics, Fire is humidity, Fire is Water: the alchemists' paradox, backed by 21:30 and the hadith that water was the first thing created.
The arbiters of 4:35. As two arbiters are chosen from the families of quarrelling spouses, so Air (hot and humid) arbitrates for the husband Fire, and Water (cold and humid) for the wife Earth. Zayd and Zaynab become a couple only when each falls into the other's shadow: the two become four. Corbin sees here an anticipation of Jung's quaternity: Air as Animus of Earth, Water as Anima of Fire.
The third proposition: a signature becomes real only through the four modalities, in increasing distance from the Principle. At Earth the superior world shows itself only by veiling itself: "The degrees of light are three in number, whereas the degree of darkness is unique. Hence, the sources of light are three, while the sources of colour are four." The scale of colour is not between white and black; greys are not colours. The four sources in our world are white, yellow, red and black.
Perception works by impression, by embodiment (of the imprinted by what imprints it) or by unitive union (of a being with itself); the world above can be perceived below only by its manifestation, a theophany. Nothing is seen without the tinctura of Earth: the Spheres are transparent and invisible; stars are condensed sidereal matter, like water visible as foam. Fourth proposition: transparent bodies have light and colour, "But lack of visibility is not due to the fact that light and colour do not exist; it is due rather to the proximity of the Principle." So colour makes light manifest, as body makes spirit manifest: "Light is the Orient made visible (al-mashriq al-mar'iy)".
Lord and vassal, and the hidden Treasure
The signature has two dimensions: toward its Lord (rububiyah) and toward itself (marbubiyah). The rabb is not the hidden deity but "the God created in faith and revealed in the love of each being", bound to his vassal in a chivalric solidarity. Ibn 'Arabi: "If he has given us life and existence through his being, I, too, give him life through knowing him in my heart." Angelus Silesius: "God does not live without me".
Kirmani draws the relation as two interpenetrating triangles, one with its base near the Principle, the other with its base at the lowest limit, each touching the other's base; a similar figure appears in Robert Fludd. The manifestation of the lordly dimension subsists through the human; the reality of the human subsists through the lordly. Such is "the whole secret of the Imago at the heart of man".
The hadith of the hidden Treasure ("I was a hidden Treasure. I desired to be known; that is why I created creatures") is read through colour: the Treasure is hidden not by darkness but by excess of light, and must take the tincture of creatures to be seen. Hence the "theophany within limits" (al-tajalli fi'l-hudud) and the formula "Eum talem vidi qualem capere potui".
The six limits (time, space, situs, rank, quantity, quality) are the "six days of Creation". For the creatural dimension, Fire gives colour, Air sound, Water touch, Earth taste. Every composite has a fiery nature and so some light; the hidden lord is seen through the elemental Fire of things by an eye made of the same Fire. "Like alone knows like" holds for Najmuddin Kubra's coloured photisms and for Goethe.
| Level | Seven-level scale (p. 25) | Eight-level scale (pp. 36-37) |
|---|---|---|
| Summit | World of the intimate depths and light of God: colours in henadic union, beyond the Intelligences | |
| Intelligence | white | Four pillars, cherubic Intelligences: inner, ideal plurality (white) |
| Spirit | yellow | Spirits, subtle Forms: intermediate plurality (yellow) |
| Soul | green | Malakut: differentiated by exterior form (green) |
| Nature | red | Nature: by nature and genus (red) |
| Matter / Cloud | ashen | World of Cloud ('alam al-haba'): material difference (ashen) |
| Image | dark green | Mundus imaginalis: individual differences, like mirror images (dark green) |
| Body | black | Material bodies (black) |
The Throne of Mercy and its four lights
A hadith in Kulayni attributed to the first Imam: "God created the throne out of four lights: a red light whereby the colour red becomes red; a green light whereby the colour green becomes green; a yellow light whereby the colour yellow becomes yellow; a white light whence whiteness is derived."
Gabriel, at the red pillar, is the demiurge of our world, the Holy Spirit of the Koran, identified by the philosophers with the Tenth Intelligence, angel of knowledge and of revelation. Corbin had found in Qadi Sa'id Qummi that the theme of the Throne is that of the heavenly Temple, so "it is in fact possible to substitute the word Temple for Throne." He links it to the Cabbalah and to the interiorized Temple of the eighteenth-century Willermoz. The fourth Imam calls white the "Light of Lights". Two variant readings of the hadith split opinion on whether white is a colour at all (note 19).
The colours of the four modalities in Nature: Fire red (Gestalt: the upright alif, the Pen, the flame, the cypress); if red grows intense in dense parts it turns verdigris (zangar). Air yellow (the pine-cone, the upward triangle), a barzakh-like mediating colour. Water white (the sphere). Earth black, toothed and angular, a screen; by contrast the celestial Earth of Hurqalya is green. The red fire we see is that of Ahriman, which ravages; the subtle fire of Ormazd does not. "Take all this in with care, for you will not find it in any book, neither will anyone speak to you of it."
Anamnesis and the perfect Shiites
Our world is the last of many: "God created millions of universes and millions of Adams, and you are in the last of these universes". For correspondence Kirmani uses dhikr, anamnesis: in every universe each thing has something that calls it to mind; there can be no hiatus. The law of existence versus manifestation is applied by the Shaykhis to the "perfect Shiites" (Kamilan-i shi'ah): their existence is necessary as the mystical pillars of the world, but their occultation is equally necessary; if they manifested what they are they would cease to be such. Corbin compares the hidden just men of Jewish tradition and the knights of the Grail. Each higher world is seventy times brighter than the one below. At the top, the seventy Veils: "If these Veils were to be lifted, the splendours of his Face would set on fire all that met his gaze." Asked to say more, the shaykh answers that "the Moon would disappear before we had completed our elucidation".
The five levels of the ta'wil of red
The ta'wil is "consisting in referring the literal appearance back to one of the archetypes", which matches the Ismaili definition, to lead a thing back to its principle. It is an anagogical hermeneutic, and every level has its own esoteric. The worked example is 13:17: the sky is the divine Will (mashi'ah), the water is delimited being, the torrent-beds are the empty vessels of being. Only one who knows the tanzil and the correspondences may practise it. Because the world is a Book (genera, species, categories, individuals), red is a letter, a word and a verse at once: "the colour red contains a ta'wil as the Book contains a ta'wil."
1. Ta'wil of the exoteric. Red goes back to Nature, the lower left pillar of the Throne. Its four modalities: Fire, the nature of being; Air, its Image; Water, its matter; Earth, its body. In a legend God made a red hyacinth, gazed at it, and it melted into water; from the foam came the Earth and from the vapour the Heaven. A marginal note lists other possible ta'wils of red: violence, anger, bile, Mars, political power, the Turks, the sword, copper; Corbin judges this inventory haphazard.
2. Esoteric of the exoteric. The Throne of the walayah, borne by four of the Twelve Imams: the twelfth Imam (white), 'Ali (yellow), Hasan (green), Husayn (red). The walayah is "the esoteric dimension of prophecy" and turns the religion of the Law into the religion of love. In a legend two white robes come down for the child-Imams; Hasan's is dyed emerald, Husayn's the colour of the red hyacinth, and Gabriel weeps foreseeing poison and assassination. Another tradition says the Prophet clothed Husayn in a garment woven of the archangel's hair, linking the red pillar of one Throne to the red pillar of the other.
3. Esoteric of the ta'wil. The esoteric of Nature is its angel, Gabriel. "The red rose is an effusion of the archangel Gabriel". Other readings are allowed (the Imam of the Resurrection, love as a Fire that consumes all but the beloved), but this one holds across all levels. The shaykh warns that the ignorant use the ta'wil to bend laws to their desires, while the fuqaha' deny it; the Imam Ja'far: "there is no exoteric faith save through an esoteric, and vice versa, no esoteric faith save through an exoteric." Corbin adds: "One can never say to symbols: "Vanish, you have been explained!""
4. Ta'wil of the esoteric. The Imam within. There is an Imam Husayn in each man, his intellect, besieged by the powers of the carnal soul: "In the Karbala of his heart, it may happen that the powers of the carnal soul kill the intellect and the angelic companions who assist it". God has two witnesses: the outer Imam and "the inner Imam (or witness) {Hujjah batinah)", each intellect being a ray of the outer Imam.
5. Esoteric of the esoteric. Of this "Neither is it permitted to reveal plainly the esoteric dimension of the esoteric." Pharaoh's troops who kill the sons and spare the wives are the exotericists who kill the esoteric. The direction is toward the eternal Muhammadan Reality, the pleroma of the Fourteen Immaculate Ones, and toward the Throne of the divine Names, whose four pillars are al-Qabid (who seizes), al-badi' (who inaugurates), al-mumit (who brings death) and al-ba'ith (who resuscitates); al-Qabid sustains red. The last word: the esoteric of the esoteric "is occulted because of the intensity of its Manifestation, and veiled because of the sublimity of its Light."
The "Seal of the book" returns to the provocation: a red carpet from Kirman on which the questioners sat. The shaykh notes that dyers argue about tinting with shellac and gives the recipe away. The autograph is dated Thursday 27 Dhu'l-Hijjah 1267 A.H. (September 1851).
Epilogue: Prometheus, Persepolis and heraldry
At Persepolis in 1971, during the twenty-fifth centenary of the Persian Empire, a work by Xenakis alluding to Prometheus drew indignation from Iranian friends. For Iranian cosmology, Zoroastrian or Shiite, fire and light are a gift, and celestials and terrestrials are allies against Ahriman; Ormazd is not the "Almighty" and needs the Fravartis. A "Sound and Light" show evoking the burning of Persepolis provoked similar protest: there are two fires, Ormazd's that illuminates without consuming (the burning Bush) and Ahriman's that ravages with smoke.
The marbub literally "wears the colours" of his lord, which may be the source of heraldry as a sacred science. The lord is the superior Self, the Imago agens, the Imago Dei projected into each being, which sends each person on a mission: "myself sent to myself by Myself." Corbin closes with Ibn al-Farid: "I was a prophet sent to myself from Myself, And it is myself who, by my own Signs, was guided towards Myself."
Corbin's tasks for the future: consequences for alchemy, comparison with Swedenborg, new eyes for Persian miniatures and cathedral windows, and alignment with Simnani's seven "prophets of your being", since the futuwwah tradition sees each prophet's mission, from Abraham on, as knightly service.
2. The Science of the Balance and the Correspondences between Worlds
Eranos 1973 (printed pages 55-125). Through the work of the fourteenth-century Shiite master Haydar Amuli, and especially the twenty-eight diagrams of his "Text of Texts", Corbin presents the "science of the Balance" ('ilm al-Mizan) as the metaphysical basis of all correspondences: the Balance of the Seven and the Twelve, of the Nineteen, and of the Twenty-Eight, and finally the "horsemen of the Invisible" who make such a science possible.
- The Balance is qualitative, not quantitative; to confuse it with modern measure is to confuse the chemist with the alchemist.
- Every visible being is equilibrated by an invisible counterpart: zahir by batin.
- Haydar Amuli's circular diagrams turn temporal succession into spatial simultaneity, so figures in different cycles become homologues.
- The esoteric hierarchy of the Friends of God (awliya') is headed by the pole of poles, for Shiism the hidden twelfth Imam.
- Seven planets and twelve signs order the outer Heaven; seven prophets and twelve Imams order the inner Heaven.
- ZaMaN (time) and MiZaN (balance) share their consonants: the Balance gives time its cyclical form.
- Cosmos, man and Koran each have a structure of nineteen, read in the nineteen letters of the Basmallah.
- The nineteen guardians of hell are inner habitus; the 70,000 Veils are worked out as 70.
- The world of Night and of Day is a bridge; the "horsemen of the Invisible" cross it in the hermeneutic of correspondences.
What the Balance is not
The science of the Balance is associated with Jabir ibn Hayyan and practised above all by the alchemists. For Jabir, "the idea of the Balance comprises a number of aspects": there are balances for the Intellect, the Soul of the World, Nature, the Spheres, the natural kingdoms, "and lastly there is the Balance of letters, which is the most perfect of all." If the Balance measures the Soul's desire during its descent through Matter, Corbin thinks it "both exaggerated and improper" to read it as reducing knowledge to quantity in the manner of an exact science.
Precursor-hunting distorts. The numbers of the Balance have a qualitative value. To measure the desire of the World Soul is, with the alchemist Jaldaki, to transfer gold from its natural mine to the mine of the philosophers, extrahere cognitionem. The interest of this forgotten science lies in the recourse it offers "against so-called "modern" ideologies". The Balance is a metaphysical principle, "the cause of all determinations and the object of none." It joins equilibrium and divine equity ('adl), an eschatological symbol (21:49). In Ismaili gnosis (Hamiduddin Kirmani) the Balance of things religious matches the earthly esoteric hierarchy with the celestial angelic one.
The visible aspect of a being presupposes an invisible celestial counterpart. "Modern agnostic dissent, by ignoring this law of integral being, simply mutilates the integrality of each being." Analogical knowledge is therefore always an anaphora, an anagoge: it follows the hierarchy of beings upward.
Haydar Amuli and his diagrams
Haydar Amuli (born 720/1320, died after 787/1385) was a disciple of Ibn 'Arabi in spirit, keeping critical freedom toward Ibn 'Arabi's Imamology; his work matters for the relation of Shiism and Sufism. Corbin analyses his "Text of Texts" (Nass al-Nusus), the prolegomena to a commentary on the Fusus al-hikam, which contains twenty-eight diagrams. They make the structure of the spiritual worlds perceptible at the level of the imaginal, "experimental verification sui generis of metaphysical exploration", as the "Book of Figures" does in Joachim of Fiore.
Circles, not lines. The diagrams' circles or "cupolas" (a Nusayri term) set figures as homologues of each other, not as causes of one another. Amuli weighs three books: the "Book of Horizons" (macrocosm), the "Book of Souls" (microcosm), from 41:53, and the revealed Koran, comparable to Paracelsus' "exterior" and "interior" Heaven.
The Friends of God
A hadith qudsi governs the theme: "My Friends are beneath my tabernacles (or beneath my cupolas). No one knows them, other than myself." One may speak only of categories, never of named individuals. Wali, usually rendered "saint", means Friend (Persian dust), from tawalla, to take as a friend: the wali is "he whose case God takes up in friendship". As beloved (mahbub) his walayah is a pre-eternal gift: the first Imam said "I was already a wall (a beloved of God) when Adam was still between water and clay". As lover (muhibb) he must "model the whole pattern of his behaviour (his ethos) on the divine pattern". Corbin hears a Johannine echo: jam non dicam vos servos sed amicos.
The prophet (nabi) is at the summit in each period. Prophecy of instruction initiates into gnosis; legislative prophecy adds a Law. Hence the nabi, the nabi-mursal (sent to a people or town) and the nabi-rasul who brings a new shari'ah. The walayah is the presupposition of prophecy and marks the difference between the Sunni Caliph, a temporal successor, and the Shiite Imam, a sacral pole independent of human choice and impeccable. The Imam is the Imam even if confined to secrecy.
The pole (qutb) is where God's gaze rests on the world; Ruzbihan Baqli calls the awliya' the eyes through which God looks at the world. If the pole ceased for one instant to exist, the world would crumble; it is homologous with Seraphiel. "the pole is the cause of life—life in the true sense—for the men who people this world". The major polarity is the esoteric of prophecy and belongs to the Imam; now to the twelfth Imam. Sunni Sufism, says Corbin, founded "an Imamology without an Imam", like a Christology without Christ; the ghawth and his two Imams are best read as subordinated to the pole of poles.
The four Awtad correspond to the archangels Seraphiel, Michael, Gabriel and Azrael, to the hearts of Adam, Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad, and to the four corners of the Ka'bah. The Abdal are "substitutes" for several reasons, including that they can leave their physical bodies unnoticed. Hamuyah's correspondences: the Pole to the First Intelligence; the triad to Nature, Materia Prima and body; the five to Jabarut, Malakut, Mulk, mundus imaginalis and Perfect Man; the Abdal to the seven stars; the forty to the "forty dawns during which the clay of Adam was fermenting"; the three hundred to the remaining degrees.
The Balance of the Seven and the Twelve
Amuli prefers to reduce the hierarchy to seven (the great prophets) and twelve (the Imams). As the outer Heaven rests on seven planets and twelve zodiacal "castles" (burj), the inner Heaven rests on seven prophets and twelve Friends: "the very "balance" of being." At the origin of the Seven are the "seven Angels ecstatic with love" of the eighth Heaven; at the origin of the Twelve, twelve Angels of the ninth, unconstellated Heaven.
The divine Essence has infinite perfections, each with an Attribute, a Name, an Operation, a theophanic form, a secret, a science, a wisdom and a statute "known to the divine Essence alone." The seven Attributes (Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Speech, Hearing, Sight) give the "seven Imams of the divine Names".
| Prophet | Divine Name manifested (main list) | Heaven | Name manifested by that Heaven |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam | the Living | Saturn | the Provident |
| Noah | the Willing | Jupiter | the Knowing |
| Abraham | the Powerful | Mars | the Triumphant |
| Moses | the Speaking | Sun | the Light |
| David | the Hearing | Venus | the Configurator |
| Jesus | the Seeing | Mercury | the Shaper |
| Muhammad | the Knowing | Moon | the Creator |
Adam manifests the Living because "he is the first individuality of the human species to be made manifest in visible existence". Amuli thinks no one before him built so complete a system, though Corbin notes the Ismailis excelled at it. Ibn 'Arabi's alternative schema rests on the seven Abdal, each guarding a clime, assisted by the angel of a Heaven and fed by the prophet who dwells there in the Mi'raj; Corbin likens it to an esoteric hourbook.
The Twelve. Twelve is the number of the leaders of Israel's tribes and of the springs from Horeb's rock, and each legislative prophet had twelve heirs (awsiya'), a list already in Mas'udi. The names other than the Muhammadan ones are disfigured by copyists, but some can be identified "Bible in hand", which suggests a Judaeo-Christian gnostic inheritance. "The Book is a silent Imam; the Imam is the Book speaking".
Ibn 'Arabi's angelologic astronomy: the Cherub chamberlain, the Angel Nun (68:1), passes divine science to the Angel Pen or Scribe, who writes the Book of being on the sacrosanct Tablet (related to him as Eve to Adam). Below are twelve governors in the zodiacal castles, twenty-eight chamberlains in the lunar mansions, seven nuqaba' in the Heavens, the "templars" (sadanah), and twelve Koranic categories of angels: those who repulse, recite, distribute, are sent, disperse, seize, extract gently, precede, swim, deliver the word, conduct affairs, and are ranged in order. Ibn 'Arabi thus systematized Koranic angelology "for the first time."
Time and balance
The eternal Muhammadan Reality pre-exists as Logos: "I was already a prophet when Adam was still between water and clay". A first cycle under the Name "the Hidden" has the Muhammadan Reality secretly present in all earlier prophets (the Verus Propheta motif); then time reverses into a cycle under "the Manifested". The Prophet said time has a cyclical form (istidarat al-zaman).
ZaMaN and MiZaN. By the science of letters the consonants of time and of balance are the same. "Every cycle of time ends in the Balance". In fig. 2 Muhammad stands at the centre because in spiritual circles "the centre has the virtue of being the circumference as well".
Spengler's cycles are not enough: if each cycle is self-contained, how can one cycle understand another? The Balance "spatializes the succession of time by substituting for the order of succession the order of simultaneity". It reverses time, so nothing is "irreversible" ("that word which has been so abused in our day!"). It permits "a historiosophy which is eo ipso a gnosis", visionary rather than agnostic.
The Balance of the Nineteen
A. Horizons and Souls. Amuli cites the Pythagoreanism of the Ikhwan al-Safa': "Know," "that the wise Pythagoras was the first to discourse on the nature of number." The One is the cause of number (Ens et Unum convertuntur). Two is the First Intelligence, three the Soul, four Nature, five Materia prima, six body, seven Sphere, eight Elements, nine the three kingdoms. "every number contains in itself an esoteric secret which is not to be found in any other number." The world is ordered by nineteen because it is in the image of God: "God created Adam in His image" means the cosmos, the Homo Maximus, balanced by man the microcosm.
Amuli's first-person gloss on 41:53 concludes that "the Other does not possess being in reality", and quotes two quatrains; Massignon gave one to Hallaj, which neither Ruzbihan nor Amuli confirms.
| Book | The nineteen |
|---|---|
| Horizons (cosmos) | Intelligence, Soul, 9 Spheres, 4 Elements, 3 kingdoms, Man; or 7 planets + 12 signs |
| Souls (man) | intellect, soul, 10 senses (5 outer, 5 inner), 4 souls (commanding, censuring, inspired, pacified), 3 spirits (vegetative, vital, psychic) |
| Spiritual world | 7 prophets + 12 Imams (or 7 poles + 12 Friends) |
| Koran | 14 undotted letters (Malakut) + 5 grades of the opening sigils; the 19 letters of the Basmallah |
| Being (KWN) | 9 Spheres + 9 moving Angels = 18 (18,000 worlds), + Perfect Man = 19 |
Verse 13:2, Heavens raised "without pillars that you can see", fits the inner Heaven too: the invisible pillars are the Perfect Man in his levels. The first Imam: "Know that the human Form is the greatest token (hujjah) of God before his creatures. It is the Book which he wrote with his hand. It is the Temple which he built with his Wisdom."
On the hexaemeron, Amuli answers the objector who adds 2 + 4 + 2 days from 41:9-12 and gets eight: the four days concern material substances only. A "day of lordship" is a thousand years (22:47), a "day of divinity" 50,000 (70:4).
B. The Book of the Koran. The Basmallah, BSM ALLH AL-RHMN AL-RHIM, has nineteen letters and recapitulates the Koran. "He who desires immunity from the 19 henchmen of Hell needs to recite the Basmallah; for on the day of the Resurrection, God will make a paradise out of each of its constituent letters." The hundred and four books are stored in four, these in the Koran, the Koran in the Mufassal, that in the Fatihah, and that in the ba'. The first Imam: "I am the dot beneath the letter ba'." The alif, a lone vertical stroke, is the Essence; the ba' is the First Intelligence. Corbin flags a serious problem: Ahsa'i makes the alif itself the First Determination.
| Letter | Manifested world | Spiritual world |
|---|---|---|
| 1 B | First Intelligence | Muhammad |
| 2 S | Soul of the universe | Adam |
| 3 M | Throne (9th Sphere) | Noah |
| 4 A | Firmament (8th) | Abraham |
| 5-6 L L | Saturn, Jupiter | David, Moses |
| 7 H | Mars | Jesus |
| 8-11 A L R H | Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon | Imams 1-4 ('Ali, Hasan, Husayn, al-Sajjad) |
| 12-15 M N A L | Fire, Air, Water, Earth | Imams 5-8 (al-Baqir, al-Sadiq, al-Kazim, al-Rida) |
| 16-18 R H I | animal, vegetal, mineral | Imams 9-11 (al-Jawad, al-Naqi, al-'Askari) |
| 19 M | Man, who recapitulates the Whole | Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi |
Paracelsus is quoted: "the bodies of the firmament are contained in the body of the microcosm." Three alifs hidden in the spelling of bism, Allah and Rahman stand for Essence, Attributes and Operations, and for Unitude (ahadiyah), Unity (wahidiyah) and lordship, where the "God created in the faiths" meets his vassal. As the alif shows itself in all other letters by bending and stretching, divine Being shows itself in all forms of the world.
C. Inner paradise and hell. Above Gehenna stand nineteen (74:30). Every attachment engenders a habitus (malakah) that possesses (milk) the soul; good habitus are Angels of Ridvan, vicious ones the henchmen (zabaniyah). "Paradise and hell are closer to each one of you than the clasp of his sandals." The nineteen are the twelve signs and seven stars of one's attachments; the prophets' mission is to break them. Hence "Die before you die" and "Human beings are asleep; it is when they die that they awaken." The martyrs of 3:169-170 are read as those who die the mystical death, which Corbin likens to the alchemist Zosimus's nigredo.
18 unities of the universe, each with outer and inner aspect = 36. Man, who made the 19th, must now be extracted from his chains: 36 - 1 = 35. Counted in both the Book of Horizons and the Book of Souls: 70 worlds, veils, chains; in detail, 70,000. Corbin admits in a note that it is hard to see how man can be subtracted from a sum he was never included in.
The Balance of the Twenty-Eight
There were 124,000 prophets, each with a wali heir. Muhammad's ancestry back to Adam is a chain of 51 links: 17 prophets, 17 kings, 17 awliya' (51 = 17 x 3, Jabir's number of the corporeal world), though only 46 names are actually listed. The Muhammadan Light passed through pure loins, so Azar of 6:75 must be Abraham's uncle, Terah his father.
The Koran names 28 prophets. Ibn 'Arabi divides hell into 4 categories (Iblis attacks from before, behind, right and left, 7:17) times 7 gates = 28, each of a hundred levels = 2,800, balanced by 2,800 dwellings of paradise (2:261: 700 x 4 categories of the blessed). Asin Palacios compared this with Dante.
Twelve is fixed by the twelve letters of each half of the double shahadah, by the Prophet's choice of twelve leaders at 'Aqabah, by Israel's tribes, and by ZaMaN/MiZaN: each hour of day and night is under one of the Twelve. Liturgical time returns rather than flows away. Amuli's conclusion: the light of the Sun and Moon moves through twelve signs, the light of the Imamate through twelve Imams: "We offer these parables to men; only the Wise understand them" (29:43).
Why twelve, and the dream within the dream
Haydar Amuli gives four reasons why the Imams are limited to twelve. Corbin lists them in order, and they show how the Balance argues: by letters, by history, by scriptural prototype, and by cosmology.
| Aspect | The ground for twelve |
|---|---|
| a) Letters | each half of the double profession of faith (La ilaha illa Allah; Muhammad rasul Allah) is written with 12 letters |
| b) History | the Prophet chose twelve leaders on the night of the 'Aqabah and announced twelve Imams after him |
| c) Prototype | the twelve leaders of the tribes of Israel; the twelve springs from the rock of Horeb |
| d) Cosmology | ZaMaN and MiZaN: the twelve months and hours regulate the stars' benefits, as the Twelve regulate the spiritual world |
The second diagram mirrors the first. Where the first had the Prophet at the centre among his fourteen Qurayshites, the second has Fatimah, called "mother of her father" (Umm abiha), at the centre of the twelve Imams, since she is the origin of both the ancestors and the descendants. The top of its ring no longer joins Adam and the Seal of the Prophets, but Adam and the Seal of the Awliya', the twelfth Imam. Two notes add colour. Corbin warns that the al-Nadr of this lineage must not be confused with al-Nadr ibn al-Harth, who came back from Persia offering the story of Rustam and Isfandyar against the Koran's 'Ad and Thamud, and found an audience so charmed they stopped listening to the Koran. And he notes that in II Enoch the first Melchizedek is preceded by 12 priests and the second begins a line of 12.
Amuli closes on light: the light of the Imamate guides the eyes of inner vision as Sun and Moon guide outer sight, and each light has twelve stations of migration, the Signs from Aries to Pisces and the twelve Imams. His last citation is Koran 29:43: "We offer these parables to men; only the Wise understand them".
That verse raises Corbin's final question: what is this science of correspondences, and who is capable of it? Ibn 'Arabi's answer goes through sleep. Koran 30:23 names among God's Signs "your sleep during the night and during the day" and never mentions waking. So Day perceptions and Night visions are alike in needing a hermeneutic, and this world is a bridge. The root 'br gives ta'bir, crossing and interpreting at once, and ta'bir al-ru'ya, the interpretation of visions, is one of the main uses of the Balance. Ibn 'Arabi's image is a dream within a dream: a man dreams he has woken and tells his dream to someone who is part of the dream, then truly wakes and sees he never stopped sleeping. The man whose inner eyes open before his death realizes he has always been dreaming, and thanks God for the sleep and for the interpretations he made in it. Corbin applies this to Amuli's great diagrams themselves.
The Appendix explains the diagrams. In the first, each of the twelve Signs is paired with one of twelve Koranic categories of Angel: Aries with those who repulse (37:2), Taurus with those who recite (37:3), Gemini with those who distribute (51:4), Cancer with those who are sent (77:1), and so on round the ring.
The horsemen of the Invisible
Ibn 'Arabi (Futuhat, chapters 30-32) names the Rukban, the horsemen, an incognito knighthood. The first category, the Afrad (the Peerless), ride on great contemplations, correspond to the Angels ecstatic with love, are free even of the Pole, malamatiyah when needed, and Fityan (members of the futuwwah). They "move without movement", carried by their mounts: "When you shoot the arrow, it is not you, but God who shoots it." Like Abraham they see the Malakut directly and need no "hermeneutical rides".
The second category rides on great actions. Its verse is 30:23, which counts among God's Signs "your sleep during the night and during the day" and mentions no waking. Night visions and day perceptions both happen in sleep and both need interpretation. The root 'br gives ta'bir: to cross a river or bridge, and to interpret. This world is a bridge, not a dwelling. A man may dream he wakes, tells his dream, interprets it, and then wake to find he never stopped sleeping. (97:1-5), the continually recurring descent of the Invisible, when the horsemen ride to meet the Angels and the Spirit.
Corbin's target is any model that treats the hidden side of a thing as optional. His working rule is that a correspondence must rest on a principle that makes it necessary, or it stays a metaphor. Perhaps, he writes, building great diagrams of worlds is what we do in our sleep, yet that is the blessing of 30:23: "Could there, indeed, be any undertaking greater than to dedicate oneself to the search for the correspondences between what we see in this world and the Invisible"?
The Appendix describes Amuli's six diagrams in detail: the angel classes and months of fig. 1; the Adamic, Mosaic, Christic and Muhammadan Imams of fig. 2 (names "mutilated and disfigured", not tallying with the text); the Basmallah wheels of figs. 3-4, where an isolated epicycle and the relegation of Saturn to nineteenth place are left unexplained; and the ancestor and Imam wheels of figs. 5-6, whose corner circles pair Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus with the four Caliphs, and the four Imams with Pole, ghawth, fard and watad.
3. Sabian Temple and Ismailism
Eranos 1950 (printed pages 132-182), the oldest lecture in the book. Corbin follows the passage from the Sabian temple built in the image of a star to the Ismaili "Temple of Light" built of persons: through Shahrastani's dialogue of Sabians and Hunafa', the angelology of the Ismailis, the three rituals of the Brothers of Purity, and the vision of Person-archetypes in which every festival is a Person.
- The Sabian Temple is a Temple-archetype: a threshold between the celestial Temple and the Temple of the soul.
- Its motto, read by Mas'udi at Harran: "He who knows himself is deified."
- The anthropomorphosis of the Temple is matched by an angelomorphosis of man.
- Ismaili gnosis builds a third world, a mesocosm: the esoteric heavens of the Temple of the Imam.
- Adam of our Cycle was a young Imam who "broke the fast" by revealing the secret; hence the Cycle of Occultation.
- The Brothers of Purity know three rituals: religious, philosophical (Sabian) and their own, in which the festivals are Persons.
- The ram sacrificed in place of Ishmael is Isaac, the veil of the Letter: to sacrifice the Law's bondage takes a lifetime.
- Ta'wil does not reduce figures to abstract ideas; it discloses the Person-archetype behind every fact.
The Temple on the borders of China
Mas'udi (tenth century) describes, on the borders of China, a Temple with seven gates and a seven-tiered dome crowned by a stone whose brilliance kills anyone within ten cubits. Inside is a heptagonal well leading to the Treasury of all sciences: "No one may enter here or draw on these treasures," "save he who is our equal in knowledge, power and wisdom." China, in mystical texts, marks the limit of the world explorable by ordinary awareness. Another Temple has seven oratories, seven windows and seven statues of the planets in matching stones. Suhravardi's Recital of the Occidental Exile uses the same form: the dark well is "the Day of common awareness."
What matters is the ideal configuration, into which the soul projects her imago mundi and which she interiorizes to build her own microcosm. The Temple-archetype supports ta'wil, "an exegesis which at the same time constitutes an exodus, a going-out of the soul towards the Soul." Corbin notes that Barbier de Maynard rendered the Harran motto as "he who knows God is in dread of him", and finds this hard to understand.
Corbin uses "Sabianism" without historians' caveats. It covers the Harranians (an extension of Syro-Babylonian cults reread through Neoplatonism, and an intermediary to the Nusayris), the Koranic Sabians (Mandeans), and a South Arabian religion of Saba. The Nusayris are the unique case of a community won to Islam directly in its esoteric, Ismaili form. Ismaili ta'wil presupposes the Imam as guardian of its secret and an Order whose ranks match the celestial hierarchies; its rhythm is septenary.
The Brothers of Purity's invitation: "Will you not choose, oh my brother, to enter the Temple of Agathodaimon, in order to contemplate the heavens of which Plato spoke", the spiritual Heavens, not those of the astronomers.
Echoes of the seven-domed temple
Corbin notes how far the architecture of the second Sabian temple described by Mas'udi travels: seven oratories lit by seven windows, each with a statue of a planet made of a substance and colour suited to it (ruby, cornelian, emerald). Every mystical and alchemical representation of the Sabian Temple keeps this form. Suhravardi's exile is thrown into a dark well beneath a castle whose storeys rise into Heaven, and must invert the norms of Day and Night, since the depths of the well are the Day of common awareness. In Nizami's Haft Paykar (535/1140-606/1209, as the book prints), King Bahram Gor visits on each day of the week a dome consecrated to that day's planet, in a robe of its colour, and hears a recital of initiation from one of the daughters of the kings of the seven climes.
Corbin is explicit that he uses "Sabianism" without the reservations of historical criticism. Arabic and Persian authors used the word for the Sabians of Harran, for the Koranic Sabians now identified with the Mandeans, and even for a religion of Saba in South Arabia; one scholar he cites concludes that the name signifies simply "gnostics". Massignon saw in the "syncretistic story of the Sabians" a creative myth which, in the ninth-century East, apparently did for the spread of the Carmathian movement what Johann Valentin Andreae's Rosicrucian myth (1616) did in the West; and Corbin adds that Shahrastani, who reported the dialogue so "faithfully", played a role like Andreae's. Thabit ibn Qurrah (221/836-288/901), the Sabian scholar, wrote works on the planetary liturgies that Barhebraeus could still see.
Sabian ritual and its angels
For both Sabians and Ismailis the Deus innominatus cannot be known directly; mediators are the beings of pure Light, Intelligences to philosophers and Angels to religion. For the Sabians mediators could not be men, not even prophets, since a prophet is made of Elements and Darkness. Each of the Seven Angels has its Temple (haykal), the star, as a spirit has a body but with full mastery over it. Earthly and angelic worlds face each other "like a person and his shadow"; the soul's task is concordance with its Angel, and the most direct way is to conform to its star: alicui stellae conformari (Agrippa).
| Planet | Temple shape | Liturgy in the Ghayat al-Hakim | Angel invoked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saturn | hexagon | black robe and mantle (the Philosophers' garment), iron ring | Ishbal |
| Jupiter | triangle | yellow and white robe, white mantle, rock-crystal ring | Rufiyael |
| Mars | rectangle | red garments, copper ring | Rubiyael |
| Sun | square | brocade, diadem, gold ring (royal dress for the Queen) | (the Sun herself addressed) |
| Venus | triangle in a square | sumptuous white robe, gold ring | Bitael |
| Mercury | triangle in a rectangle | colour not indicated | Haraqiel |
| Moon | octagon | white, like a youth's garment | Siliyael |
The first injunction: "If you wish to converse in private with one of the Seven Stars, purify your heart of all corrupt beliefs and your vestments of all stain; render your soul limpid and clear." To the Sun: "Hail to you, oh Sun, blessed Queen . . . resplendent, illuminating". Corbin insists one must distinguish the conjuration of a star (talismanic practice) from the invocation of its Angel by name.
The dialogue of Hunafa' and Sabians
Shahrastani stages a dialogue between two archetypal parties who seem to have agreed their arguments beforehand. The Hunafa' hold the pure religion of Abraham, which the Imam of the Resurrection will restore; ideal Sabianism is the first religion of historical humanity, the religion of Seth's Period. The Sabians accept only spiritual mediators, yet invoke Agathodaimon and Hermes (Seth and Idris) as prophets, and worship stars as material figures. The central difficulty: "for the Sabians, perfection resided in stripping off humanity, whereas for the Hunafa', perfection was to be achieved by putting on the human form."
Ta'wil resolves it: the Sabians descend from spiritual beings to their stellar Temples; the Hunafa' see the Temples of divine beings in human Persons. "the anthropomorphosis of the Temple of the divinity is in reality made possible by an angelomorphosis of anthropology." The Harranians say: "Just as the Seven (stellar) Temples are the Seven members of divinity, so our Seven human members are the Seven Temples of God". Corbin even suggests Shahrastani, who reports the dialogue so "faithfully", played a role like Johann Valentin Andreae.
Angelology of the esoteric Heavens
The Ismailis raise the hierarchy: Ten Archangels emanate one from another, the First (Sabiq) being so wholly the epiphany of the hidden Ipseity that all statements about God refer to him. Term for term, they match the Angels of the physical heavens and the ten grades of the religious hierarchy, from the Annunciator (Natiq) and the Imam down to the new initiate (Mustajib). The dignitaries (hudud, "limits") can thus be called Angels; together they form the Temple of Light of the Imamate, heavens infolded from the "limited Heaven" (mahdud) to the "Heaven as limit" (hadd). Each hierarch brings into being the Angel of the grade after him. The Fatimid Imam al-Mu'izz: "A believer is not a true believer as long as he has not raised up (or 'resurrected') another believer like himself".
Man is a potential angel or a potential demon. Each ascent is a qiyamah, a resurrection. The Brothers: the souls of gnostics "are Angels in potentiality; when they separate themselves from their bodies, they become Angels in actuality." So the Angel acquires an anthropological meaning: "the Angel is the term and the fulfilment of the Anthropos."
Adam who broke the fast
At the end of the previous Cycle of Unveiling, the last Imam reimposed the discipline of the Arcane and gave the Imamate to the young Adam. The "Angels" of 2:30 are the terrestrial Angels, dignitaries of that Cycle; one survivor, al-Harith ibn Murrah, made of fire (direct gnosis), refused to bow to Adam, made of clay (a hermeneutic of symbols). He led Adam to seek the knowledge reserved for the Imam of the Resurrection. Adam "breaks the fast", the vow of silence, and stands naked before his appalled dignitaries. Through a pre-recognition of the Imam to come he establishes the "potential Paradise", the da'wah. "the fall of man is the Fall of the human Angel, while the fall of the Angels is the fall of the angelic man."
The secret Epistle looks to the "Child of Ishmael" and the day "when the Sun rises in its West", the Imam of the Resurrection; Corbin allows an allusion to the rising of the Fatimids in Africa but says there is much more. The text ends: "when the Soul of the World manifests itself, and when the epiphany of individual souls outside their bodies of flesh is consummated."
Three rituals
Islam is submission and the five practices; Iman is inner assent. The Brothers identify Iman with the "divine service of the Philosophers" but insist on the order: "as long as you remain imperfect in the cult of positive religion, it is in no way proper for you to take up the philosophical cult, for you could die by doing so."
The philosophers' month has three holy nights (new moon, middle, end), each in three nocturns: meditation in the oratory, so that there may be "purity upon purity and light upon light"; meditation on the cosmic text facing the Pole Star; and a philosophical hymn ("Prayer of Plato", "Orison of Idris", "Secret Psalm of Aristotle"), followed by agapae. Their year has three festivals at the sun's entry into Aries, Cancer and Libra, and a winter fast in the Cave.
| Season | Religious festival | Philosophers' festival | Brothers' festival (a Person) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring (Aries) | Breaking of the fast | Renewal, a "resurrection"; gnosis proclaimed | Appearance of the First Qa'im (the Natiq) |
| Summer (Cancer) | 'Id al-Adha (sacrifices) | Day begins to retreat | Resurrection of the Second (Wasi, Asas) |
| Autumn (Libra) | Ghadir Khumm, investiture of the Imam (Shiite) | Short homily; Night of esotericism begins | Resurrection of the Third (first silent Imam) |
| Winter | Departure of the Prophet; mourning | Strict fast in the Cave | Return to the Cave of taqiyah |
On the Brothers' own level,
"Our festivals, oh my brother, are Persons who Announce (ashkhas natiqah)". The winter of desolation recalls the hadith of exile:
"Islam began in exile and will be in exile again; happy are those who exile themselves."This links the Brothers with Salman the Persian, the Stranger.
Faith that transmutes
Before the Ismaili section begins, Corbin says what kind of faith these festivals assume. Iman, as the Brothers mean it, "is a faith which transmutes; it does not commemorate, but effects and promotes the Event." It does not go back to the fact to reduce it to its causes; "it takes the fact along with it to that which the fact indicates." At a still higher level of ta'wil the festivals are no longer kept in the temples of the Sabian theosophers at all. The soul itself becomes the presence of the Event, and the Person-archetypes "will be the Festivals themselves", the Time and the Temple of the festivals.
The Brothers claim both cults for themselves. They are, they say, of all men the most fitted for the cult of religion and also "the most fitted for the philosophical cult, the most able to maintain it and to renew whatever may have degenerated in it." This, for Corbin, is the hinge from the Sabian temple built in the image of a star to the Ismaili human Temple, veil and sanctuary of a celestial Person of light (haykal al-nur). In a note he adds that the Prophets and Imams are the Temples of Light, and all the hudud are oratories in that temple, as the seven stars were the temples of the divinity revealed in them.
The Strangers and the two Cycles
The Brothers' fourth day, of sadness, is a return to the Cave of taqiyah and Occultation. They apply the condition to themselves: "This, precisely, is what we are subjected to in our time, until the hour comes of the Appearance, of free exit, of the Return after the Departure", as the Sun returns into Aries after winter. Corbin links this to Salman, the Stranger guided from far lands by his own effort, and to Jabir's mystical figure of the Glorious One, allied to the Strangers whose condition is that of the Sethian Gnostics.
He will not let the ritual be read as a coded note on current politics. One cannot ignore what it may say about imminent events, but "it would be a mistake to suppose that these events are able, by and as themselves, to exhaust the significance of what is involved here." The drama is played on two levels, and so the four days can be read against a Cycle of Unveiling as well as a Cycle of Occultation like ours. The autumn festival then becomes the moment when Night prevails over Day at the end of a paradisal Cycle, when the dignitaries impose the discipline of the arcane again, and the winter is the catastrophe after the adolescent Adam broke the "fast".
| Brothers' grade | Age | Vocative used in the treatises |
|---|---|---|
| First | fifteen | "Our merciful and candid Brothers" |
| Second | thirty | "Our virtuous and excellent Brothers" |
| Third | after forty | "Our eminent and noble Brothers" |
| Fourth | after fifty | the angelic faculty; addressed by Koran 89:27-28 |
The same note corrects the printed text of the Rasa'il: kharuf (sheep) should be read kharif (autumn), so the ram grazed forty autumns, forty years. And a further note draws the consequence for time itself: here "it is the soul that is the measure of its time." The same reversal, Corbin says, lies behind a chronology that puts 6,000 years between Zarathustra and Plato; the Periods of Ismaili historiosophy cannot be reduced to the homogeneous time of the profane calendar.
Liturgical time
Each Period is homologous to its Cycle, each partial resurrection to the Great Resurrection, and each member's rise from grade to grade to both. The three Persons at the head of a Cycle of Occultation typify the First and Second Archangels and the third, the Angelos-Anthropos, who by his tardiness in recognizing the divine Unitude fell to tenth rank; our world's history is the time of his reconquest. The individual case is an archetypal case every time. Hence the festival does not simply commemorate an event: "It is that very event, and the Event is the Person who enacts the geste of the archetype." In the Mazdean calendar each day bears an Angel's name; the day passes, but the Angel remains.
The ram of Abraham
The Brothers' sacrifice gathers the religious and philosophical ones: the ram "that was obtained for him as ransom for his son", which had grazed forty autumns on the Earth of Paradise. In Ismaili exegesis Abraham had meant to give his heritage to Isaac; God redirected it to Ishmael, the Imam of gnosis, and the "great victim" of 37:107 is Isaac himself, the veil of the Letter, like a depositary Imam (mustawda') before the permanent Imam (mustaqarr). To sacrifice the ram is to sacrifice literal faith and the Law's bondage, after growing it a lifetime on the Earth of Paradise, the da'wah. 'Attar tells whoever professes the religion of Abraham that "the sacrifice of the son is a teaching which is addressed to you."
The sacrifice renounces the child of flesh to ransom "the child of the Soul", so that man himself becomes the Puer aeternus. The Brothers: "Then the angelic Form (al-surah al-malakiyah) will be perfected for you". Corbin's summary, quoted in the Editorial Note: "The ritual celebrated by man in the Temple of his being is his own metamorphosis, the bringing to birth within himself of that Form of himself which conforms to the angelic archetype."
The vision of Person-archetypes
This mysticism differs both from annihilation in an undifferentiated absolute and from a rationalist esotericism that swaps figures for abstract ideas; both "unpeople" heaven. Ismaili ta'wil starts from a fact (physical, historical, ritual) and discloses the Person who gives it stability: "the Person-archetype is not the symbol, but that which is symbolized." Hence the Fatimid initiate keeps the observances.
| Ritual element | What mental vision perceives |
|---|---|
| The mosque | The Imam or a higher dignitary |
| 15 words of the Call to Prayer | the Wasi, 6 + 7 Imams of two heptads, the Qa'im |
| 4 words of the bismillah | Sabiq and Tali, Natiq and Asas |
| Ablution | Return to knowledge of the Imam; water is gnosis |
| Five canonical Hours | Two archangels and three dignitaries (Natiq, Wasi, Imam) |
| Fast | Keeping the secret of your Imam |
| Almsgiving | Communicating gnosis to the worthy |
| Pilgrimage | Exodus from literal belief, from Mustajib to Hujjah |
| Prayer for the dead | Reviving a disciple slain by false doctrine |
Sijistani even finds in the Cross the "crossing" of the negative and positive halves of the shahadah and of the celestial and terrestrial hierarchies. A Nusayri ritual: "Ramadan neither goes nor comes; it has no double"; its Person is 'Abdallah, the Prophet's father; its thirty days and nights have masculine and feminine Persons. The Night of Destiny "It is the typification of our suzeraine, Fatimah." A Nusayri canticle glorifies Fatimah as Initiation in person, al-Zahra' and Fatir.
Salman the Pure is the earthly typification of Gabriel and of the Angel of exegesis: "Salman proceeds from me, and I from Salman." The soul at the end of its pilgrimage becomes the "Salman of the microcosm". "If the soul of Paradise is a human being, then certainly the Person of Paradise (shakhs-i Bihisht) is by the same token a human being." The future world has the human Form; in it "the stones and the clods of earth will be granted the gift of speech".
The discipline of the arcane is not snobbery: betrayed to the "false light of day", the image of Paradise provokes fury and mockery, or boredom. "it was harder for it to survive its triumphs than to recover from its setbacks." Nasir-i Khusraw's rendering of 82:19 closes the lecture: "There will come a day when no soul will have command over any other soul, and on that day, yes, the Order will belong to God."
4. The Configuration of the Temple of the Ka'bah as the Secret of the Spiritual Life
Eranos 1965 (printed pages 183-262). Through the seventeenth-century Shiite philosopher Qadi Sa'id Qummi (1049/1639-1103/1691), Corbin shows how meditation on the cubic form of the Ka'bah, its corners, its celestial archetype, its Black Stone and the stations of pilgrimage becomes the configuration of man's own "body of light". The lecture opens with Balzac and closes with the Grand Inquisitor turned sociologist.
- A form can be grasped whole only if there is a space beyond the sensible into which it can be projected: the mundus imaginalis.
- Spiritual Forms subsist as such; spirit is not the formless opposite of matter.
- Three universes (mulk, malakut, Jabarut) have three times: dense, subtle and absolutely subtle.
- Each being's malakut is its inner man and guardian; the "tomb" of eschatology is the body of light the soul has configured.
- The "proof of the Throne": the cube's 12 edges are the 12 Imams, its 8 corners the 8 bearers, its 6 faces the 6 names of the Imams.
- The four corners of the Ka'bah correspond to Intelligence, Soul, Matter and Nature, and to Water, Fire, Earth and Air.
- In spiritual circles the centre also surrounds; the Ka'bah is both the surrounded centre and the surrounding Temple of eternal religion.
- The Black Stone was an Angel who swallowed the pact; it is the Angel, the Imamate, within man.
- Each pilgrimage station is a stage of the heart's pilgrimage; the potestas clavium is ardent desire.
Balzac on two floors
Two new books on Balzac framed Corbin's winter. One keeps him on the ground floor of the "Studies of Manners", a clerk his society could do without; the other enters the Human Comedy as a walled town that "opens onto Heaven". Balzac himself: "I do not share the belief in the indefinite progress of societies. I believe in the progress of man over himself." For Corbin the contrast is exemplary: Western man has for generations "exercised inexhaustible ingenuity in enclosing himself within his experience of this earthly world", and refuses to see that his own philosophies did it. Religious fact postulates the upper storeys. One cannot find in a fact what one has begun by denying it has; "evolution" became "the fact of evolution" when the real fact was evolutionism.
Corbin cites the Swedenborgian Chauncey Giles: "We must admit that there is a spiritual substance, and that this substance has form, or we must deny the existence of spirit altogether. No other conclusion is possible." Swedenborg: spaces in the spiritual world are measured by inner states. This is a qualitative space, as Euclid's perspectiva naturalis gave each region its own horizon, whereas the perspectiva artificialis of the Renaissance unified space and opened the way to trompe l'oeil. The spiritual hermeneut, like the painter, must make a third dimension appear: "how, aided by the letter of the text or by sensible objects, is he to suggest their suprasensible—their "polar"—dimension"?
Kazantzakis saw a Byzantine icon with the hero fighting the monster, and above him a second, transparent St. George on the same horse: "It was a more real St. George than the real one, the astral body of the action, the pale and immaterial flower of matter." Dematerializing forms does not abolish them; it restores them to archetypal purity. "For what would a world without face or features—without, that is to say, a look—actually be?"
The three floors and the eschatological space
Corbin's Balzac image has three levels, not two, and he takes the names from Balzac's own plan. The first interpreter will not rise above the ground floor of the "Studies of Manners", where the archives are stored. He never climbs to the first floor of the "Philosophical Studies", "where one can discover a hidden order of things", still less to the second floor of the "Analytical Studies", where one can "meditate on natural principles, and to see in what ways societies fall away from or approach the eternal laws of truth and goodness." The note names the two books: Andre Wurmser's La Comedie inhumaine and Maurice Bardeche's Une lecture de Balzac.
| Floor | Balzac's series | What is found there |
|---|---|---|
| Ground | Studies of Manners | the archives, facts as facts |
| First | Philosophical Studies | a hidden order of things |
| Second | Analytical Studies | principles, and the eternal laws societies leave or approach |
For the first reader Balzac is the prisoner of his century, created by it and so superfluous. For the second he is the creator who embraces in his work the society of his own century and of others: "Society is his creation. It cannot do without him." Balzac called on Seraphita as his witness, "the actualization of the doctrine of the Christian Buddha", that is, of Swedenborg.
Corbin then names the reduction he resists. Religious fact is "explained" sociologically by the conditions of production and consumption, or psychologically by the misfortunes of childhood, and "What is striking about our time is that so many people accept these explanations without noticing their ludicrous inadequacy as regards the object being explained." A visible biography shows only a tiny part of a being's potential. To speak with full meaning of form as a task of the Spirit, the theme of that Eranos year, one needs a space into which the whole form can be projected. The science of religions and the old theologies knew that space as the eschatological dimension, "in which the spring of the arch is achieved".
That space is the mundus imaginalis, the eighth clime, the limit "where spirit takes on body and where the body is spiritualized". Without it, Corbin argues, subsistent spiritual Forms are unthinkable, and the common opinion that what is spiritual has no form wins by default. Swedenborg supplies the key: in the spiritual world there are spaces, but everything is assessed by states. This gives an existential space, which stands to physico-mathematical space as existential time stands to the time of chronology. The comparison with painting follows: in a Pompeian fresco each section has its own horizon, and the physics that goes with it has its "natural place", which links to "existential place", as in the levels of pater extaticus and pater profundus at the end of Faust II.
You cannot find in a fact what you began by denying it has. Corbin turns this against the sciences of religion, but it is a general rule of inquiry: the frame you choose before you look decides what can appear.
Three universes, three times
| Universe | Organ of perception | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Phenomenal world ('alam al-shahadah, mulk) | the senses | dense, obscure time (zaman kathif) |
| Suprasensible world of Souls (malakut), place of the mundus imaginalis | cognitive imagination | subtle time (zaman latif) |
| Intelligible world of Intelligences (Jabarut) | intuitive intellect | absolutely subtle time (zaman altaf) |
All spaces derive from an initial energy, the Breath of the Merciful One (Nafas al-Rahman) or the primordial Cloud. Each higher universe causes, contains and is the esoteric (batin) of those below; each being has "a res divina {amr rabbani), a divine Word {Kalimah ilahiyah) that is its own malakut", its inner Man and its Guardian. The 'alam al-mithal is perceived by imagination but "it has nothing imaginary (amr khayali) about it."
The tomb is a body. The spacious or narrow "tomb" of eschatology is the subtle body, the malakut within man, the imaginal body of light (jism mithali), formed by the soul's habits, affections, knowledge, desires and nostalgias: "a garden among the gardens of Paradise or a pit among the pits of Hell." When tradition says the bodies of prophets and Imams stay "three days" in the tomb and are taken up, the Heaven meant "is not the astronomical heaven over our heads". Where a sociologist sees men in procession around a stone temple, "our theosophers see Angels in procession from Heaven to Heaven" around the archetypal Temples. Swedenborg's Stockholm in the mundus spirituum has dark, shuttered houses, because their owners are spiritually dead.
Circles whose centre is the circumference
Corbin asks what space the spiritual hermeneut needs so that the "polar dimension" does not turn out to be trompe l'oeil, which is what many contemporaries, "given over defencelessly" to an agnostic reflex, take any suprasensible world to be. His diagnosis is historical: apart from the school of Jacob Boehme and the Cambridge Platonists, Western philosophy has lost sight of the intermediate world. Islamic theosophers, by contrast, always knew states of matter rising to a "spiritual matter", the Breath of the Merciful, and spoke of imaginal corporeity (jismiyah mithaliyah) and spiritual matter (maddah ruhaniyah), equivalents of the spissitudo spiritualis of the Cambridge Platonists and Oetinger's Geistleiblichkeit. So they found it easy to grant spiritual forms a face and a look. Where that world is missing, one feels a need to be freed from forms, and the object starts to seem coercive.
Qummi answers with spiritual circles, which differ from material ones because their centre is also the circumference. Corbin calls this the secret of spiritual forms and of the stability of their configuration. Swedenborg says that each Angel carries its Heaven within itself; Qummi speaks of the Throne stabilized upon the Water which also stabilizes the Water. There are as many such centres as there are spiritual individuals. The perspective is hermeneutical, and the medieval science of perspective becomes a science of correspondences between homologous levels. To go "beyond" forms would be to pass into chaos, against the Koranic word that all things perish except their Face (28:88).
The St. George icon then shows the gain: the figure, far from coercing, frees the one who contemplates it, opening the space that matches a higher state. Once form becomes symbol it becomes transparent, as if it now contains its universe, "a world in which our symbols are . . . taken literally".
Born in Qumm, 140 kilometres south of Tehran, in 1049/1639; taught there most of his life and died there in 1103/1691. His masters were Muhsin Fayd, pupil and son-in-law of Sadra Shirazi, and Mulla Rajab 'Ali. About fifteen works, few edited; also trained in medicine. Called Hakim-i Kuchak, Philosophus junior, to tell him from his elder brother. His themes here come from his commentary on Ibn Babuyah's Kitab al-Tawhid, to which Corbin gave a full year of courses.
Corbin adds in a note that Qummi's categories of time recall, while differing from, those of Proclus, which passed to Nasir-i Khusraw and correspond exactly to the cosmology of ancient Iran. The three worlds are also invested in man: the Jabarut and the malakut are his real inner being, so that knowing a human being in his integral form, against the mutilated Balzac, means knowing all three.
The proof of the Throne
Corbin wants to apply a phenomenology of form (Gestalt) to the science of correspondences. Premisses: form is a vis configuratrix; it applies beyond sensory experience; forms transpose between levels like a melody between keys; the relationships are functional. Qummi, a Twelver, sets out to show from the structure of the cosmos why the Imams must be twelve.
The first emanation is the Light of lights: Throne, Intelligence, Muhammadan Light. The first emanation in the lower world is the primordial Water, the contents of the Intelligence's intellection. Since spiritual orbs have a centre that surrounds, the Intelligence is both centre and periphery: "the Throne rests on the Water". Four limits divide the circle (first, last, inner, outer); projected downward they double to eight bearers (69:17: "On that day, eight bear the Throne of your Lord.").
The cube is a single Emanation, the Anthropos, God's vicar. In the prophetology, the Muhammadan Light is a bi-unity, Prophet turned toward men and Imam turned toward God. The walayah is both centre and circumference: "there is no nabi who is not first a wall". Four limits mark the prior cycle of prophecy (Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus) and four the cycle of the Imamate (the Prophet and the first three Imams): eight bearers again. The twelve Imams are the twelve edges, and "It is impossible to add or to take away anything from these twelve." The supreme Heaven distributes its energies through twelve zodiacal "strongholds"; the Sun of final prophecy goes through twelve Imams as twelve lunar months, "because the Imamate is the night of esotericism".
Qummi's method, step by step
Corbin is careful to show how Qummi argues, because the argument itself is a lesson in the science of correspondences. The steps of the "proof of the Throne" can be set out in order:
- Start from the first emanation. The Light of lights is at once the Throne, the first Intelligence and the Muhammadan Light.
- Find its first effect below. The primordial Water is the content of the Intelligence's intellection; the Throne "rests on the Water" because the Intelligence both envelops and is enveloped.
- Divide by the four limits. Every circle has a first and a last, an inner and an outer; these are the four supports of the Throne.
- Project downward. When the circle descends into the world of bodies, each limit doubles into a visible and an invisible aspect (ghayb and shahadah), giving eight corners: the eight bearers of 69:17.
- Count the figure. The cube so generated has twelve edges and six faces, and these numbers are not arbitrary: the twelve edges are the twelve Imams, the six faces the six names Muhammad, 'Ali, Hasan, Husayn, Ja'far and Musa, which recur among the twelve.
- Confirm by homology. The supreme Heaven distributes its energies through twelve zodiacal "strongholds" and the solar year through twelve lunar months; the Imamate is the "night of esotericism" through which the Sun of final prophecy passes.
This is the Gestalt principle of transposition at work: a figure keeps its relationships when it passes from one level to another, as a melody keeps its identity when transposed into another key. The proof does not claim that geometry causes the Imamate; it claims that the same form appears on every level, so that meditation on one level gives access to another.
The plan of the Ka'bah
On the plane of Reality-archetypes stand four limits: universal Intelligence, Soul, Nature and Matter. Intelligence and Soul are the Orient where "the Sun of the esoteric spiritual senses (shams al-asrar) arises"; Nature and Matter the Occident: "the Lord of the two orients and the two Occidents" (55:17). Corbin asks us to picture the Temple as a person facing the pilgrim who comes from the north: "Meet my face (istaqbil wajhi)."
| Corner | Side | Links Nature with | Element | Foundation stone and prophet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iraqi (Black Stone, "God's right hand") | oriental, north | Intelligence | Water (zamzam beneath) | Abu Qubays; Muhammad, completion of the Temple |
| Yemenite ("right of the Throne") | oriental, south | Soul (Spirit) | Fire | Salem (with Kufah); Jesus and the first Imam |
| Syrian | occidental | universal Matter | Earth | Safa; Abraham |
| Occidental | occidental, back | itself as universal Nature | Air | Sinai; Moses |
The three corners of meeting
Qummi's commentary on the corners is also a commentary on the relationships between them. Each corner is defined by the connection of universal Nature with another limit, so that Nature appears four times: with Intelligence at the Iraqi corner, with Soul at the Yemenite, with Matter at the Syrian, and alone at the Occidental. The wind that the tradition says blows from the Syrian corner, and the vibration of that corner in winter and summer, come from the Breath of the Merciful One, the primordial energy from which all spaces derive. The zamzam spring beneath the Iraqi corner is the Water on which the Throne rests.
| Station on Qummi's plan | Letter | Position | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gabriel | G | Threshold, oriental side, near the Black Stone | Receives the pilgrims and brings them into the presence of the Master of the house; Holy Spirit and Angel of humanity |
| Abraham | A | Before the Syrian corner, occidental side | Subsistence and growth, like Michael; the Friend whose love is mixed with his being |
| Hijr of Ishmael | H | Marked on the same small plan | Named by Corbin as part of the plan; no further reading is given |
The celestial archetype
Two motifs represent the archetype. A tradition from the fifth Imam: when Adam fell and complained of solitude, God sent down a tent from Paradise; Gabriel pitched it on the site of the Ka'bah. From the sixth Imam: a white Cloud overshadowed Adam and Gabriel, and Adam traced its shadow with his foot as the perimeter. Qummi: "In all this" "there are mystical secrets, access to which is denied to the best-trained intelligences, let alone to those minds which delight in placid torpor."
| Part of the Tent | Colour | Meaning | In the earthly Ka'bah |
|---|---|---|---|
| Central pillar, rod of red hyacinth | red | The first Intelligence, divine light mixed with creatural darkness (white with black) | Black Stone |
| Four pegs of gold | yellow | Universal Nature, near the Lights yet resting on the Earth of materiality | Four corner-stones; four lights of the walayah |
| Ropes woven fine as hair | violet | Irradiations of the Soul (yellow with red) | Walls and veils |
The double homology: as surrounded centre, the Ka'bah answers to the Throne of sovereign Unity around which the angelic Intelligences process; as surrounding centre, the Glorious Throne contains the astronomical Spheres and the Sublime Throne the intelligible ones. Qummi: "All this contains a mystery about which no one up till now has, to my knowledge, said more than I have just said"; Corbin admits sharing the opinion, so abstruse is the text. Passing from material to spiritual form is like turning a glove inside out.
The Bayt al-Ma'mur disappeared from human eyes at the Flood "(like the Holy Grail)". The four corner-stones carry the lights of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Qummi cites a tradition that Corbin identifies as an Arabized rendering of Deuteronomy 33:2: the Light came from Sinai (Moses), rose over Seir (Jesus) and shone from Paran (Muhammad). Of the Yemenite corner Corbin notes that 'Ali stands to Jesus as the twelfth Imam to all the prophets, and "the plan of the heavenly Jerusalem with its twelve gates corresponds to that of the Temple with its twelve Imams." The eighth Imam: "The divine Religion will never perish so long as the Temple of the Ka'bah endures".
Gabriel, Abraham and the Thrones
Qummi's little plan marks the station of Gabriel (G) by the threshold on the oriental side, the station of Abraham (A) before the Syrian corner, and the hijr of Ishmael (H). Gabriel receives the pilgrims and "brings them into the presence of the Master of the house."
| Throne | Supports |
|---|---|
| 'Arsh al-Sarir (8th Heaven, firmament) | 4: Man, Lion, Eagle, Ox (Ezekiel's figures, via Mulla Sadra) |
| 'Arsh al-Mulk (supreme Sphere) | 8: Adam and Seraphiel (forms), Muhammad and Gabriel (spirits), Abraham and Michael (subsistence), the Imam 'Ali and Azrael (final level) |
| 'Arsh al-'Ilm wa'l-Din (Knowledge and Religion) | 8: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus; Muhammad, 'Ali, Hasan, Husayn |
| 'Arsh al-wahdaniyah (sovereign Unity) | 4: Intelligence, Soul, Nature, Matter |
Abraham on the occidental side. Like Michael he oversees subsistence and growth, and nutrition goes by the left side, the side of the heart. He is Khalil, the intimate Friend, because his love for God is mixed with his being as food with the body. The root gh-r-b joins the setting star and the exile. "Islam began in exile and will once more be in exile as at the beginning. Happy are the exiles!" The exile becomes the Occident where the divine Light sets in order to dwell in this world.
Adam and Abraham, two exiles
The contrast between Adam and Abraham organizes the second half of the lecture, and Corbin returns to it at 'Arafat. Abraham is the Occident of the divine Light because the violence of his love exiled him from himself; spiritually exiled from this world, he is exiled by the Light to himself, so that the Light is occulted and dwells invisible in him. Adam was exiled into this world because he loved himself; it is no longer the Light that is exiled into him, but he who is exiled from the Light, until the dawn at Muzdalifah. The hadith of the exiles (gh-r-b) joins the two: the setting star and the stranger are the same root, and the exiles are "happy" because the Light hides in them.
The procession in Heaven
There are two pilgrimages: that of the community to the Holy Places, and that of the initiates, "the desire for the Face of the divine Friend." The material Temple is the Ka'bah the pilgrims circle; the Ka'bah of the heart is where the divine graces process. In the fifth Imam's recital, the Angels of the physical universe, alarmed at the announcement of a vicar on Earth (2:30), took refuge at the Throne and circled it for seven days or seven thousand years. Only the number matters: seven is the "lost time of eternity" redeemed by the seven millennia of prophecy; hence seven circumambulations.
The Black Stone and the Pearl
The sixth Imam's recital: "The Stone," "was once an Angel among the princes of the Angels before God." The Angel was the first to accept the pact; God made him swallow it and placed him with Adam in Paradise to remind him. After the betrayal, God gave the Angel the form of a white pearl and cast it to Adam on the Earth of India. Adam does not recognize it until it speaks: "Oh Adam! do you recognize me?" It resumes its angelic form; Adam weeps and kisses it. It then takes the form of the Stone, and Adam carries it to Arabia; when he tires, Gabriel carries it: "only another Angel can momentarily relieve man of the burden of the Angel".
The pact is the triple attestation (the Unique, the prophets, the Imams), joined in Shiite hermeneutics to 7:172 and to the Trust of 33:72. The recital unfolds on three levels: Intelligence, the subtle "Earth of light", and our world, where the pearl puts on the robe of darkness. Qummi: "To all that is inner and esoteric pertains authority over what is outer and exoteric, to educate and direct it". In Shiite terms the centre is the Imamate within man. Corbin compares the Song of the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas: there the pearl is the soul or its gnosis; here it is man's Angel, both what memory must find and what prompts memory. On earth the drama starts over with each man, "that all begins again from the beginning".
The stations of the pilgrimage
The drama of Adam is the drama of Knowledge: he wanted knowledge whose object was not yet manifest at his level, so to eat of the Tree was eo ipso to descend. To naturalize the things of the spirit is to repeat it, and the failure turns into agnostic doubt. Gabriel, angel of Knowledge, is "the help of souls, their instructor, he who bears God's messages to their destination, the guide who leads back to Paradise".
1. Mina is read as desire (root mna): "in following the road that leads to God, the first thing to manifest itself in the heart—God's 'greatest Temple' (Bayt Allahi'l-akbar, Domus Dei Maxima)—is ardent desire." 2. At al-'Arafat at sunset Adam is told to acknowledge his fault: he is estranged because "you considered that you yourself were yourself". 3. At al-Muzdalifah (Jam', "reunion") the pilgrims join the sunset and night prayers and keep vigil for "the Morning of the Presence"; each of seven confessions removes a veil, until the pilgrim sees that the one epiphanized, the one to whom he is epiphanized and the theophanic Form are one reality. This Form, the Angel within, is what the Shiite mystic contemplates as the Imam. 4. Back at Mina the stoning of Iblis means refusing the last temptation, to contemplate one's annihilation and so exalt the self: "the salik, or mystical pilgrim, must annihilate even his annihilation", or he would need only to say with Hallaj, "I am God!" 5. The seven circuits are "the journey from God in the company of God towards created beings." The pilgrim now puts the seven veils back on: creation begins again as if Adam had never left Paradise, a new creation visible only to the heart.
The Ayam al-tashriq and the five unions
Two details Corbin places in notes complete the pilgrimage. The three days called Ayam al-tashriq take their name from tashriq, turning towards the Orient, and Qummi reads them as the nights in which Adam conducts the darkness of ego-ness to its permanent place of setting while the spiritual Sun rises over him. And at the end of the pilgrimage of initiation Adam's wife is once more permitted to him: the "nuptial unions" between the primordial archetypes, from the Principle of Principles to the universe in becoming, are again legitimate. These are the five great cosmogonic acts, and they mark the new creation that the seven circuits begin.
Corbin also places Qummi's two journeys within Mulla Sadra's scheme of the four spiritual journeys: from the created world toward God; from God toward God with God; from God toward the created world with God; and from the created world toward the created world with God. The descent from 'Arafat to Muzdalifah is the second journey; the seven circuits are the third.
The Pearl compared
The comparison with the Song of the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas is carefully limited. Corbin notes that several episodes of the Gnostic hymn have exact equivalents in Suhravardi's "Recital of the Occidental Exile", and that a detailed comparison would reveal what is peculiar to the Shiite motif. In the Acts of Thomas the pearl is the soul and the gnosis that saves it; in the hadith of Ja'far it is man's Angel, the centre that both must be remembered and prompts remembrance. The common element is that recovering the pearl is an act of remembering, and the Shiite text names what is remembered: the pact, the triple Attestation, whose figure is the Temple with the Black Stone as its corner-stone.
Potestas clavium
The way described converges with the Grail tradition's "secret Church" of the soul. Like the communion of saints, the walayah is a corpus mysticum without offices or registers: its "bodies of light" form an invisible brotherhood known to God alone. The hidden Imam, guardian of the Temple, is concealed as the Grail since Sarras, and for the same reason: men became unworthy to see it.
Our sciences aim at unlimited exploitation of a Nature that "descended" with man, and so the forces of collectivization meet no opposition. Weigel and Swedenborg taught that every believer holds the keys, since faith from ardent desire opens the kingdom. But now the Inquisitor speaks "like a sociologist and a technocrat, in the name of collective norms, limiting all finality to this world." The question: "How can the man disarmed by agnosticism fight against a Grand Inquisitor who is both secularized and a sociologist?"
Corbin closes with Hans Schmid-Guisan's Comme le jour et la nuit: an island split by a wall into Collectivopolis and Individua, with secret doors behind a chapel altar and in a hospital room; he who is free in one is a slave in the other. On the summit of Individua a man steps toward the volcano's furnace and finds "a miraculous bridge thrown over the furnace." Corbin sees the Chinvat Bridge. If the discovery of the unconscious gives man the keys, he asks, how can the same discovery then say the keys open no door? Oetinger's prayer ends the lecture: "My God, grant me the boldness to change what it is in my power to change, and grant me the modesty to bear what it is not within my power to change."
Individua and Collectivopolis
Corbin's last witness is Hans Schmid-Guisan's Comme le jour et la nuit, with a foreword by Jung, a book that cannot be summarized and must be given by a friend. Most of the island's people lead a double life between the two provinces, passing through secret doors in the wall. On the approaches to the crater lie the exhausted, who could not bear Collectivopolis but did not win freedom in Individua. One man throws himself in and is swallowed; another, after a dialogue with the voice of the Invisible that shows "supreme renouncement and of a supreme act of love", finds the bridge. The narrator may not follow: "It is forbidden to anyone who—like you, and like the gentle reader—has only followed this road as a disinterested observer, to go any further along it."
For Corbin, Individua with its shade and rivers, oratories and secret temples is one of the most perfect symbols of the unconscious, and the bridge shows that the discovery of the unconscious can give man back his potestas clavium. The danger is the agnosticism "which dares not pronounce its name", which says the keys open no door or the bridge leads nowhere. Our theosophers, he adds, never confuse the correlation between a theophany and the one who receives it with a causality that would make the form a product of the subject, any more than Swedenborg's correspondences abolish the higher level.
5. The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms
Eranos 1974 (printed pages 263-390), the longest study in the book and nearly half its length. Corbin follows one image, the Temple, across Suhravardi, Ezekiel, the intertestamental literature, Philo, Qumran, the Johannine community, the Templar traditions, the Grail Temple of Montsalvat, Zacharias Werner and Swedenborg, and ends with the man-temple as the only answer to a world in which "there is no longer either temple or contemplation".
- The Imago Templi shows itself only at "the meeting-place of the two seas", the imaginal world between the intelligible and the sensible.
- It is "tautegorical", not allegorical: it is itself the thing it expresses.
- Its recurrences belong to a discontinuous time; they cannot be traced through archives and need no historical filiation.
- For Suhravardi this world is not the Temple but its crypt; modern thought destroyed the crypt itself.
- The destruction of the Temple is our birth into exile; its rebuilding can only be a cosmic restoration.
- Ezekiel gives the perfect Imago: ruin, God himself as Temple in exile, return of the Glory, the New Temple on the high mountain.
- Qumran lived itself as a "temple of men" and realized eschatology in an angelic liturgy.
- When Christianity declared "All is finished", the longing for the Temple went underground as Christian esotericism and Templar tradition.
- The Grail Temple of Titurel, the Sons of the Valley and Swedenborg's Nova Hierosolyma are further hierophanies of the same Image.
- Templum means a place of vision: when man is the temple, contemplator, contemplation and temple are one.
The two laments
Corbin opens with two epigraphs he met by chance. From the Talmud, via Elie Wiesel: "If peoples and nations had known the evil they were inflicting on themselves by destroying the Temple of Jerusalem, they would have wept more than the children of Israel." From Dollinger, on the day Philip the Fair ordered the mass arrest of the French Templars: "If I were asked to name the dies nefastus in the history of the world, the day that would come to my mind would be none other than October 13, 1307". Then a legend from Gavarnie in the Pyrenees: each year a Templar appears in the chapel and cries "'Who will defend the holy Temple? Who will deliver the tomb of Christ?'"; six entombed knights rise and answer three times: "'No one! No one! No one! The Temple is destroyed.'"
Against this despair stands the opposite Image, the rebuilding of the Temple, which "assumes the dimensions of a cosmic restoration." The two images are inseparable. Corbin keeps the Latin Imago Templi "in a Latin form ne varietur", to avoid the vicissitudes of translation.
The meeting-place of the two seas
Visionary theosophers, unlike philosophers of History, always have a personal messenger. Asked where he comes from, Avicenna's Angel in Hayy ibn Yaqzan replies "I come from the TEMPLE", from Bayt al-Maqdis, the celestial Temple of which the earthly Jerusalem is the image. Where does this meeting take place? In the world between the intelligible and the sensible, the 'alam al-mithal, which for Westerners "has for some centuries been a lost continent."
| Faculty (Suhravardi) | Function | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Passive imagination (khayal) | Storehouse of images from the sensorium | Re-presentation |
| Active Imagination under the estimative faculty (wahmiyah) | Serves the rational animal | Deliriums and monstrous inventions of the imaginary |
| Active Imagination serving the intellect (mufakkira) | Serves the intellectus sanctus of philosophers and prophets | Intelligible realities reflected in the sensorium as vision |
The vision of the Angel "does not emerge from the negativity of an unconscious, but descends from a level of a positively differentiated supra-consciousness." Ibn 'Arabi calls this world by the Koranic phrase majma' al-bahrayn, the place Moses reached before meeting Khezr, where the fish escapes back to the sea.
Temenology and tautegory. Corbin calls his method a "temenology" (from temenos). The situation is "speculative": two mirrors facing each other, reflecting the same Image. The Image precedes and governs empirical sources and is the criterion by which they are tested. It is not allegorical but tautegorical, to be understood in its identity with the Other whose form it is. At the meeting-place one stands outside historical causality: "In the Malakut, the only documents are the testimonials of the soul."
When Nebuchadnezzar burned Solomon's Temple, the priests went onto the roof and cried: "Lord of the world, since from now on we can no longer perform our office in this Temple, take back the keys into your hand". A hand appeared and took them. In the Grail cycle a hand from Heaven takes the Grail at Sarras. Yet the Imago survives: whoever shapes his inner being so that it appears is at the meeting-place, and only there can the keys be restored to him in person.
Each manifestation of the Imago belongs to the tempus discretum of angelology, a discontinuous time; each is "a re-assumption by the soul, a decision, a reconquest." Through this rupture "history is liberated and transmuted into parable." So the Templar filiation, a parte ante back to the Essenes and a parte post forward to Willermoz, Werner and Swedenborg, cannot be traced in archives, and historical criticism cannot explain it.
The world as the crypt of the Temple
Pre-Christian antiquity prayed in a cosmic temple: Manilius, Plutarch's "the world is a most holy temple", Cleanthes, and Aristotle on the awe of Eleusis. Suhravardi's Angel, coming "from the Temple", changes everything: "This visible world is no longer itself the temple; it is the crypt of the Temple, or cosmic crypt." Initiation means leaving the crypt. Some see the heavens as beasts do; astronomers see them "with the eyes of the heavens"; others with the eyes of inner vision, through an Imago caeli that precedes perception.
The celestial Temple is ordered by Suhravardi's angelology. From the triple contemplation of the First Intelligence, Bahman, come an Intelligence, a heaven and its moving Soul, down to the Tenth: the active Intelligence of the philosophers, the Holy Spirit of the theologians, Gabriel, Angel of humanity. Suhravardi pictures the hierarchy as an Order of futuwwah: each Intelligence is the pir of the next, enrols it in its register and invests it with the khirqah. Ascent to the God of Gods is impossible without first uniting with one's own Angel.
Human souls are "Temples of Light" (haykal). At the heart of each is a sanctuary, the khangah, where the meeting with the Angel takes place and where lasting illumination becomes Sakinah, the Arabic equivalent of the Shekhinah.
Two catastrophes. The first, descent into exile, is the premise of salvation. The second may be irremediable: the world ceases to be felt as the crypt. "The destruction of the Temple begins with the dispeopling of the crypt." The split between angelology and astronomy "is not just an episode in the history of science". Averroes, wishing to be strict Aristotelian, abolished the Animae caelestes, threshold of the imaginal; in anthropology the triad spirit, soul and body collapsed into dualism. "Without the world of the Soul there is no Imago." The world becomes "disorientated": there is no longer an Orient.
The double hierarchy and the astral liturgies
Corbin dwells on the structure of Suhravardi's celestial Temple because it is the model for everything that follows. Each heaven, or Temple of heaven, has three parts: the cherubic Intelligence from which it emanates, the Soul that moves it out of nostalgia for that Intelligence, and the heaven itself whose subtle matter condenses into its star. The relationship between the two hierarchies is pictured three ways: as a love that dominates (qahr) and a love that obeys (mahabbah), so that the Angeli caelestes are "celestial faithful of love"; as parent and child; and as teacher and pupil.
Suhravardi's astral liturgies, Corbin notes, should be compared with those of the Sabian temples of chapter 3. They name the Intelligence that rules each heaven, invoke its moving Soul and praise the heaven's beauty, but the hymn is not addressed to the "astral mass". The star is a person only because it has a Soul, and the liturgy is consummated in the malakut. The Anima caelestis lacks sense perception but has the active Imagination in its pure state, and so never falls into the delirium that besets human souls: "The image that it possesses of its heaven is an Imago Templi in all its purity."
| Level | Temple | Sanctuary | Presence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Each heaven | Intelligence, moving Soul, sphere and star | The Soul's pure Imago of its heaven | Love that obeys the Intelligence |
| Humanity | Gabriel, Angel of the human race, and the souls emanating from him | Temples of Light (haykal) | Theurgy of the Angel |
| The individual | The microcosm as Temple of Light | The khangah, at the meeting-place of the two seas | Sakinah, the lasting presence of lights |
| The community | Ancient Persian sages and Ishraqiyun (7:159) | The Great Rock of the mystical Sinai | Xvarnah, the Light of Glory |
The word haykal names the outer building that contains the Light and whose destruction sets it free; the Twelve Imams are called "temples of the tawhid". Corbin notes in passing that the Stoics and Philo already knew the idea of man as temple, a point he takes up again in the section on Philo.
Pre-existence. Suhravardi's exoteric treatises reject the pre-existence of the soul; his esoteric recitals presuppose it. His Epistle of the high towers (L'Epitre des hautes tours) says return implies prior presence: one does not tell someone who has never been to Egypt to return there. Corbin thinks distinguishing the two kinds of treatise resolves an ambiguity that already troubled Mulla Sadra.
Hierohistory against history
Weinreb gives Corbin a second image: the Word as "on a boat connecting the different worlds", a Logos present on several levels at once, so that the images it produces on one level are symbols and parables of those on another. To understand the Imago Templi is to reach the meeting-place of the two seas, and the question "who will reach it?" is answered by Moses in the ark.
In a long note Corbin states the contrast in his own words. Profane history sees mankind as it has created itself; History is the creation man regards as his own, and of which he is the result. Sacred history reascends to events prior to the world and prior to the destruction of the Temple, "because it is by this Temple that I was created, and its Imago exists within me." He calls this the key to his hermeneutics.
He also raises the question that a desacralized language poses: if History is the profanation of the sacred, in the sense that the profane has taken possession of the Word, how can one speak of the sacred with a Word that is itself desacralized? A consciousness that is purely theoretical and for which no hierophany has reality cannot perceive a hierophany at all. Only Moses, "every Moses who is saved from the waters of History", can speak of the sacred.
The Image in later Jewish literature
Corbin's survey of the two centuries before the Christian era is brief but systematic, and it shows how the Image divides according to one question: who will build the final Temple?
| Answer | Root text | Image | Witnesses |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Messiah of David's line | Zechariah 6:12 | Solomon's Temple restored in magnificence | Tobit, Psalms of Solomon |
| God himself | Ezekiel 40-48 | A transcendent Temple, infinitely more glorious; the new Jerusalem descends from Heaven | I Enoch, Testament of Benjamin, Qumran |
The plant of justice. Ezekiel's "young branch" on the Temple mount becomes the righteous as "plants of justice" in the Psalms of Solomon, I Enoch, Jubilees and the Testaments. Abraham was the first such plant; the eschatological Israel will be "like God", and a Qumran fragment calls Melchizedek one of the Elohim. Corbin sets beside this the Islamic maxim takhallaqu bi-akhlaq Allah. The plants are watered by knowledge, a gnosis whose plan is written on the "celestial tablets" that Angels reveal gradually.
The celestial Temple. In the Testament of Levi the great Glory dwells in the Holy of Holies of the highest heaven, the Angels of the Presence serve in the sixth, and lower Angels carry prayers in the fourth and fifth. Corbin refuses the "too facile" explanation that this is the earthly Temple projected into Heaven: to see what the visionaries see is to see that the earthly Temple is always the projection of the celestial one. In I Enoch the archangel Michael shows Enoch seven mountains; the central one is God's throne when He descends, and beside it stands the tree of Life, to be transplanted beside the Temple at the judgement. Entry into the new Temple is therefore both eschatological and liturgical.
Hellenistic Judaism idealizes the existing Temple rather than awaiting a new one. The Septuagint avoids tying God to a building and changes Ezekiel's last verse; the Letter of Aristeas gives an ideal Temple as pious Jews imagined it; II Maccabees is a drama in two symmetrical acts (Heliodorus, Antiochus, Judas; Lysias, Nicanor, God) in which, Corbin notes, the archetype of the event matters more than the event; Onias IV built a copy of the Temple at Leontopolis in Egypt; the Sibylline Oracles make the Temple the symbol of the returning Golden Age. Corbin's comment on the whole debate: the opposition between a localized Temple and an ideal one is somewhat artificial, since the Imago Templi as such is always perceived on the imaginal level.
Exile, Moses and Pharaoh
Corbin finds the same hermeneutic in the Kabbalist Friedrich Weinreb: the destruction of the Temple is our birth into this world. The Neshamah, asked to descend, is told by its Angel that it will find him again at the end of exile; all it knew will be forgotten, "like a temple destroyed." The Shekhinah in exile is "the totality of all the suffering of all time and of the suffering of all creatures in all the worlds".
Pharaoh wants every male child to drown in "the waters of secular, onedimensional history." The little ark that saved Moses was the divine Word. Pharaoh wants only "normal man" to survive, the man who conforms to a world that "does not wish to know that it is in exile." Corbin's verdict on the sociologies of the sacred: their content is "of an alarming poverty", and "Sociologists and philosophers of History, on the other hand, are the docile followers of Pharoah." The Revelation on Sinai is not an event of the year 2449 after Creation only; it dwells within every Moses saved from the waters.
The goal of Suhravardi's "Recital of the Occidental Exile" is a mystical Sinai merged with Mount Qaf, where the Great Rock (sakhrah) is the oratory of the Angel of humanity. The same word names the Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Sakhrah, and Jewish tradition makes the rock the starting-point of Creation, where Jacob dreamed of the ladder. Suhravardi extends "Temples of Light" to a community: the Koranic "community which is guided by the Truth" (7:159) becomes the ancient Persian sages, linking the Khusruvaniyun to his Ishraqiyun. All the catastrophes (586 B.C., 70 A.D., the temple of Shiz) are "only so many episodes in the history of the exile."
Ezekiel and the New Temple
Guided by Shozo Fujita's unpublished dissertation, Corbin sets out Ezekiel's Temple theology in four phases.
Ruin. Israel's sin was a sin against the Temple. The real catastrophe is not the burning but the departure of the Shekhinah, which makes the Temple the representative of God's kingdom: "I no longer have a dwelling upon earth". God as Temple. The promise of the New Temple comes "not from a theology of the death of God, but from a theology of exile"; for the remnant marked on the forehead, God says "yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come" (11:16). Return. The Glory re-enters by the eastern gate, which is then shut forever; water flows from beneath the threshold toward the east and heals the desert, an image Corbin sets beside the Spring of Life at the foot of Suhravardi's Sinai. The New Temple stands "upon a very high mountain", a mountain Genesis never places in Eden, and the city's name is "the Lord is there", Dominus ibidem. It is "described as pre-existing in the supra-terrestrial world."
From Ezekiel to Philo, Eckhart and Fludd
| Source | Image of the Temple |
|---|---|
| Ecclesiasticus | Sophia, identified with Torah, dwells in the Tabernacle; she officiates like an Angel of the Presence |
| Daniel, Tobit, Targums, Midrash | Glorified earthly Temple; restoration of Solomon's Temple; external splendour |
| I Enoch, Testament of Benjamin, Qumran | God is the builder; new Jerusalem descends from Heaven |
| Psalms of Solomon, Jubilees, Testaments | The righteous as "plants of justice"; celestial tablets |
| Testament of Levi | Holy of Holies in the highest heaven; Angels of the Presence in the sixth |
| Septuagint, Aristeas, II Maccabees, Leontopolis, Sibyllines | Idealized Temple; Temple as sign of the people; the Golden Age |
| Philo | Two temples, cosmos and soul; triple Logos-priest |
| Bahir, Meister Eckhart | Temple as divine Thought; "The temple of God is the Intellect" |
| Robert Fludd (1574-1637) | Triple Temple: Solomon's, the soul, the palace on the mountain of initiation |
Corbin's rule throughout: the celestial Temple is not an idealized projection of the earthly one. "it is the celestial Temple which is the original, of which the earthly Temple is merely a copy." Hierohistory confers on events a parabolic dimension; eschatology cannot be just an event that one fine day ends the rectilinear line of secular history, whose caricature is "a social messianism or popularized eschatology."
Philo. There are two temples of God: the cosmos, whose high priest is the First-born Logos, and the spiritual soul, whose priest is the true man (Homo verus, al-Insan al-haqiqi). "the dwelling of the invisible God is the invisible soul"; "God delights in altars without fire, on which the virtues dance in unison." The Logos says: "I am a hostage for both". Is Philo's Temple "dematerialized"? Corbin says no: material and immaterial Temples symbolize only when lifted to the level "where bodies are spiritualized and where spirits take on body" (Muhsin Fayd).
Philo's correspondences
Philo's double temple is matched by a double worship, cosmic and of the soul. Sophia in Ecclesiasticus already officiates like an Angel of the Presence, close to a Logos-priest. Philo goes further: the First-born Logos is high priest of the cosmos; Aaron, high priest of Jerusalem, is "the Logos of Moses and the Logos of God"; and there is an "Aaron of the soul", an expression Corbin compares to Simnani's "Jesus of your being". The soul's liturgy consists in "engendering Abel", who belongs to God, and rejecting Cain, the spirit of possession.
The high priest's vestment, on which the whole of Heaven is reproduced, expresses the purpose: that the cosmos may concelebrate with man and man with the universe. Corbin reads all of Philo this way, as a "syn-hierurgy" in which rites, vestments, colours, the seven-branched candlestick and the ark each have a spiritual meaning, and he notes that Philo's system of correspondences, like Swedenborg's, is unending.
Eckhart read with Scholem: "The temple of God is the Intellect." In the sermon on the merchants driven out: "God wants to have this temple empty, so that He alone may dwell in it." Corbin insists on translating Vernunft as intellect: the temple of God is not the temple of the goddess Reason.
Qumran: the temple of men
The Community condemned the second Temple (a usurping "wicked priest", a different calendar, broken Zadokite lineage) and took itself to be the New Temple. Its pesher made Ezekiel's events archetypes of recurring events; the Teacher of Righteousness was a "new Ezekiel", priest, prophet and visionary at once. Corbin compares him to the Imam: his new revelation was "not of a new Book, but of the true hermeneutic of the Book."
| Ezekiel's Temple | At Qumran |
|---|---|
| Holy of Holies and sanctuary | Priestly circle (Aaron) and community (Israel) |
| Corner-stone in Zion (Isa. 28:16) | "Tried stones": the members; the foundation is the truths of hermeneutics |
| Sacrifices | Observance of Torah; hymns joined to the angelic liturgy |
| Young branch on the mountain | "Eternal planting" of righteousness |
| Water from beneath the threshold | Revelation to the Teacher; Torah; "fountain of Mystery" |
| Very high mountain | Qumran is already a mountain as high as heaven |
Miqdash adam means a temple "consisting of men". To live there meant "that the laity always behaved as though they were in the Temple, and that the priests always thought of themselves as being in the Holy of Holies". "Spiritualization" never means less reality: "the "spiritual" represents a degree of reality that is preeminent."
Realized eschatology. Qumran lived five eschatological acts "in the present": resurrection, new creation, communion with the Angels, deliverance from death and anticipated transfer to the holy City. The fragmentary angelic liturgy re-enacts Ezekiel's Merkabah: "The Cherubim above the heavens bless the likeness of the Throne of the Chariot". Strugnell saw that this is "an earthly liturgy to which the Angels are summoned". Corbin's point is the time involved: the jam and nondum, already and not yet, are unintelligible in chronological time, and Western theology stays at the level of dense time (zaman kathif) when it needs Qummi's subtle and hyper-subtle times. Zechariah's "Ecce vir, Oriens nomen ejus" lets Corbin link the Angel's knowledge, the cognitio matutina, with Suhravardi's 'ilm ishraqi.
Qumran in more detail
Why the Community seceded. Corbin lists four motives: the presence of a "wicked priest" who had usurped the priesthood and enriched himself by plunder; a disagreement over the calendar, fundamental because on it depended the synchronism between the celestial and the earthly liturgy; "Halachic" disagreements; and the dispossession of the faithful Sons of Zadok by the Hasmonean priest-kings. The Damascus Document reads the Babylonian catastrophe as an archetype of its own time, so that the Community could trace its origin to the exile: "for whoever perceives the hidden reality of hierohistory or "subtle history" as it was perceived by the Community of Qumran, this origin is true in a literal sense."
Three senses of preparing the way. To study the Torah was to prepare the way of God, understood as the exodus to the desert of Judah, the perfect observance of the Torah, and preparation for the age to come. The Teacher of Righteousness was a "final prophet", and Corbin compares his function to that of the Imam who will reveal the batin of all the Revelations rather than a new Book.
Water and mountain. The "fountain of Mystery" (Raziel is the Angel who initiated Adam) feeds the eternal planting; a Qumran hymn speaks of springs becoming a torrent that goes down to the fathomless seas, as in Ezekiel 47. The Community is already a high mountain in the spiritual sense, and a text says it shall be "as an Angel of the Face for the glory of Elohim of hosts".
The seven Princes. Another part of the angelic liturgy gives the blessings of the seven archangelic Chief Princes, each with seven words. Corbin links this heptadic structure to the Revelation of John and suggests that the hymns of the Apocalypse may share Qumran's liturgical realization of the kingdom.
Scholars debate whether Qumran's salvation was present or future and whether its gnosis was an eschatological gift. Corbin answers that the debate stays in "dense and opaque time". Only a time in which the already and the not yet coexist, the subtle time of the imaginal, makes sense of a Community that experienced itself as "the unique sanctuary where, in an intimately synchronized liturgy, the worship of men and the worship of Angels conjoin". To call that juxtaposition merely historical "is simply to relapse into historicism."
The four questions
Before turning to the Templars, Corbin poses four questions that organize the rest of the lecture:
- What do the new Temple of Qumran and that of the Johannine community share, and what separates them?
- What does this difference say about time and history? Has hierohistory been closed?
- Can the shared eschatological experience explain the paracletic movements and the idea of an Ecclesia Johannis, the third reign of the Spirit?
- Is it through the common purpose of the paracletic idea and the recurrences of the Imago Templi that the two laments of the opening (Talmud and Gavarnie) receive their answer?
The Johannine answer is liturgical. The Gospel does not preserve a historical memory of the earthly Jesus; it imparts another "history" whose seat is the spiritual knowledge of the community, "even more real" than outward history. Jesus's mission is not interrupted by his death but widened through the gift of the Paraclete, his Alter Ego, and the "comings" of John 14 refer first to the recurring liturgical coming in the visio Christi. "The Johannine scheme of things remains open: all is not finished."
Joshua and the man called Orient
Corbin gives a whole paragraph to Zechariah 3, because there the subtle time of visionary events is plain. The high priest Joshua is defended against Satan by the Angel of Yahveh; Angels remove his soiled clothes and dress him in festal garments; and the Angel promises that the rebuilt Temple will again be filled with the divine Presence and the company of Angels, since there is no gap between the celestial and earthly Temples. Corbin keeps the Vulgate, Ecce vir, Oriens nomen ejus, rather than the usual translation "branch", for its echo of Ishraq. Joshua's companions are "men who serve as signs or portents", the same expression used for the companions of the Qumran psalmist.
The Angels are the knowers par excellence, and their knowledge is "oriental" in the metaphysical sense: the cognitio matutina, the exact equivalent of Suhravardi's 'ilm ishraqi. Josephus reports that the Essenes swore not to reveal the names of the Angels. Annie Jaubert describes the new member entering "an immense ecclesia, both of Angels and of men", more celestial than earthly; Corbin would simply call it the Temple.
"All is finished": the Church and the Temple
Qumran and the primitive Christians shared a critique of the Temple, a sense that the last days had begun, and the conviction that God dwelt in them. The difference is faith in Jesus. Between the Community-temple of Qumran and the historical Christology of the Great Church lay a middle way, the Christology of Christos Angelos and the Verus Propheta; "The fact that this was not the way followed by official Christology is doubtless the inner and decisive tragedy of Christianity".
For Qumran, liturgical time is reversible and lived eschatology means being "always in readiness". For a Christianity "that, no longer eschatological, has lapsed into History", the events are past. Annie Jaubert: "There is no higher teaching to be expected, no other liberator." Corbin draws the parallel with Islam: denying the closure of hierohistory is all that separates Shiite from Sunni Islam, for the twelfth Imam is still awaited. And if nothing is to come, what of "Therefore speak I to them in parables"?
The Johannine community lived the same liturgical eschatology: its central moment was the visio Christi (John 1:51), "the sort of event that the Johannine community experienced spiritually (pneumatically) in the context of the worshipping community." The Paraclete's outpouring is jam et nondum, renewed each year for the knights of the Grail. Corbin reverses the historians' question: perhaps the Parousia was not awaited because it was delayed; perhaps it was delayed because it ceased to be awaited.
The interval that changed everything
Corbin's account of the turn from eschatological to historical Christianity is compressed but sharp:
- Qumran saw the Community itself as the new Temple.
- The canonical Gospels replace the Temple by a person, Jesus as Messiah.
- Paul and the Epistles return to the community as Temple, but as founded on Jesus.
- Judaeo-Christian Christology offered a middle way: Christos Angelos, the Verus Propheta, revelation by celestial assumption rather than earthly incarnation (Enoch, Metatron, the Son of Man).
- The Great Church made the community-temple into the corpus mysticum of Christ and, after the Montanist crisis, entered History.
The interval between these steps is short, but it is enough, Corbin says, to differentiate "the spirit of the Temple from the spirit of the official Church", and to explain why a theology of the Temple persists as the esoteric aspect of the theology of the Church. To treat the sacred as the immediate given from which man frees himself by becoming historical may be "to consent to the satanic inversion of the primordial order of things."
Esotericism and knighthood. Qumran's war of the sons of Light beside the angelic powers is a perfect example of Templar knighthood, close to the Zoroastrian ethic in which Ormazd needs the Fravartis: "The battle fought by the beings of Light is eschatology itself in the process of being accomplished." Against the claim that Christian esotericism is doomed, Corbin answers that "Gnosis and palingenesis are inseparable". A man who decides to affiliate himself to a tradition becomes the lawful heir of his predecessors, however long the gap, as Suhravardi was heir to the ancient Persian sages.
The Templar filiations
St. Bernard told the first knights the Temple must first be built in the heart. Baudoin II gave them the Dome of the Rock as Templum Domini; its octagon became the model of Templar churches and the seal of the Grand Master. Philostorgius reports workmen at the Temple site finding, on a column rising out of a well, a book wrapped in linen: the Gospel of John. "It would be impossible to find a more concise and arresting symbol" of the link between Solomon's Temple and Johannism.
| A parte ante (before the Order) | A parte post (after 1314) |
|---|---|
| A. Canons of the Holy Sepulchre, heirs of the Essenes, initiate Hugh de Payens | A. Pierre d'Aumont flees to Scotland, fights at Bannockburn (1314); Robert the Bruce restores the Royal Order of Scotland |
| B. Chapter of Clermont: Esdras's stone with three dishes (salt, sulphur, mercury); four Scottish brothers; seven periods from Adam | B. Aumont and nine companions disguised as masons on Mull |
| C. Starck's Clerici Templi: canons of the Temple, seven hermits, prophecy of Sophia aeterna | C. Beaujeu, Molay's nephew, saves the treasures in Cyprus; Swedish version |
| D. Knights of the Morning and of Palestine (cf. Ishraq), Thebaid Solitaries | D. Eliphas Levi: four lodges, Naples, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Paris |
| E. Twelve Chosen Masters guarding Solomon's Temple | E. Larmenius; F. the Jacobites; G. the English Order of the Temple and Holy Sepulchre |
Seals and stones
Two hierological details show how Corbin reads Templar material. The Dome of the Rock, wrongly called the Mosque of 'Umar, stands on the rock that tradition places in the Holy of Holies; given to the knights by Baudoin II, it became Templum Domini, its octagon the prototype of Templar churches, and its dome the seal of the Grand Master. And in version B the alchemical key is a quadrangular stone with three hollows holding salt, sulphur and mercury, set by Esdras in the foundations of the second Temple and carried to Scotland by four brothers whom David II made Knights of St. Andrew. Corbin connects the rock with the Black Stone of the Ka'bah and its role in alchemical symbolism.
The seven periods of the Clermont "Historia Ordinis" (Adam, Noah, Nimrod, the two Temples, the Templars, the persecutions, the eighteenth-century resurgence) are, he notes, analogous to the septenary cycles of the Verus Propheta in Judaeo-Christianity and Ismailism: same starting point, same rhythm, different content.
Behind the claim of Essene descent Corbin sees the presentiment of a Christianity that vanished too soon: the Church of James fled to Pella, survived as the Ebionites, and was then condemned by the Fathers as heresy. So the Templar tradition "configurates a history that is "more true" than the official history of external facts." Willermoz understood that one does not restore the historic Order materially but takes one's place in its tradition.
The Celtic line and Heredom
On the Celtic side Corbin sets the Culdees (Irish ceile de, Latin Coli Dei, "men of God"), groups of hermit-clerks of the primitive Celtic Church who played on the western side the role the canons of the Holy Sepulchre play on the eastern one. Their symbol was the dove, the feminine symbol of the Holy Spirit; Druidism and the poems of Taliesin mingle with their tradition. To their time belongs the Scottish knighthood of Kilwinning under Mount Heredom, a mountain no more on our maps than Corbenik. Corbin gives three readings of the name: Hierodom, the Holy House; Harodim, the overseers of works at Solomon's Temple; or "knighthood" from herus.
Three mystical mountains thus stand together: Moriah, Sinai and Heredom. The third Temple, unlike the first two, needs no masons; it is built by divine hands and needs a knighthood to serve it. In Wolfram's Titurel, Merlin, initiated by Joseph of Arimathea into the measurements of Solomon's Temple, directs its building: Celtism and Templarism meet.
The Temple of the Grail
Corbin wishes the Grail cycle were read like a "Bible of the Holy Grail", as Philo or Swedenborg read the Bible. In Albrecht von Scharfenberg's Younger Titurel (1260-1270), the plan of the Temple appears one morning on the onyx summit of Montsalvat, projected from heaven. A sapphire dome holds a gold Sun and silver Moon moving through a zodiac; there are seventy-two or twenty-two chancels, the main one consecrated to the Holy Spirit, the next to Sophia, the third to St. John; at the centre a Holy of Holies reproduces the whole Temple as a microcosm, and the Grail floats inside it.
| Zone | Form | Cosmic meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Upper | Sapphire dome with carbuncle stars | Heaven |
| Middle | Chancels, artificial trees with Angels and birds, emerald walls | Transfigured Earth, Paradise |
| Lower | Crystal tiles over moving fishes | The waters below |
The Grail Temple is the Christian counterpart of Solomon's: not an architectural copy but an equivalent, and not a church among churches, since it knows nothing of the Roman hierarchy. Its rotunda echoes the Dome of the Rock, whose rock plays the role of the Black Stone in the Ka'bah. Titurel is four hundred years old with the look of a man of thirty, the thirty years the building took: "every man is always as old as his temple." The knights must have hearts of diamond; every stone has a virtue; Pentecost is the Temple's main feast.
The Grail Temple is what a Gothic semi-rotunda would be if completed into a full circle. The Gothic chancel opens instead onto a basilica's rectangle. For Corbin the cutting of the rotunda signifies "the breaking of the unity formed by exoteric and esoteric". The Templar rotundas were destroyed, and the Grail withdrew with Titurel and Parsifal to the "India" of Prester John, an Orient not on our maps.
Montsalvat described
Corbin follows Ringbom's summary of Albrecht. The onyx summit, cleared of grass and earth, shines like the Moon; the plateau forms a base two toises thick (a toise being about two metres) with a five-toise space around the wall. Bronze columns hold the dome; windows are framed with beryl and crystal, and the panes are coloured so as to soften the light. As with Solomon's Temple, whose stones came cut so that no hammer was heard, everything is sent by the Grail. Four statues of Angels stand for the evangelists, their wings directing attention to the Throne. There are three portals, west, south and north, and above the western one an organ of extraordinary power. On the outside, towers flank the Temple; inside the Holy of Holies they become ciboria with images of saints.
Corbin rejects the objection that seventy-two chancels make the building impossibly large: the Temple of the Grail stands at the meeting-place of the two seas, on the "Earth of Light", not where the laws of physics prevail. Ringbom traces its models from the Sassanid castle-temple of Khosrow at Shiz (now Takht-i Sulayman) to the West; Corbin values the material but asks that historical research be more clearly separated from comparative phenomenology.
More on the Grail Temple
Numbers. Twenty-four chancels (twenty-two plus the double main chancel) are double the signs of the zodiac and tie the Temple to the cosmos; seventy-two is the traditional number of peoples and tongues, contained in twelve times six, and makes the Temple the measure of the whole human community. Corbin notes that Haydar Amuli's diagrams of the 72 sects correspond to the ideal plan of Montsalvat.
Michael. Titurel's "speech from the Throne" opens with the angelic cohorts of Michael and closes with Michael weighing souls; as at Qumran, the knights fight beside a celestial militia, and meditation on building the Temple leads to meditation on leaving this world.
Pentecost. Of the three great feasts, Pentecost gets a whole stanza while the others get a line. In the Quest of the Holy Grail the Grail appears on the eve of Pentecost, carried by no mortal hand. The liturgy of the Grail is Pentecost realized, because the Paraclete's outpouring is still to come.
Eckhart and the castle. Corbin cites the question whether Eckhart, born in the epoch of the New Titurel, was touched by the Grail when he called the uncreated part of the soul a castellum, a small fortress.
Prester John. At the end of Wolfram, Prester John is Parsifal's nephew; at the end of Albrecht, the name passes to Parsifal himself. He is the priest-king of the Johannine kingdom, and the knights' return to his "India" is a return to invisibility. Lohengrin states the rule: the Grail's power "is sacred as long as it remains unknown to all."
The Sons of the Valley
Zacharias Werner's drama Die Sohne des Thal's adds a critique of the Temple: the historic Templars, stand-ins for the eighteenth century's Enlightenment Templarism, misused their secret knowledge and lost the protection of the hidden "Sons of the Valley", whose Valley is Jehoshaphat, place of the Last Judgement. Part one is set in Cyprus; part two in Paris, March 17-18, 1314. Young Gottlieb, giving the password, whispers "Ich— in mir—wir sind—das Sein". Against discursive, analytic knowledge Werner sets an intuitive knowledge joining imagination and feeling; the Valley's secret is spiritual alchemy.
| Stage | Colour | Spiritual correspondence |
|---|---|---|
| Nigredo | black | Dark night of the soul |
| Albedo | white | Illumination; birth of the filius philosophorum |
| Rubedo | red | Divine love; hierogamy of the soul with God |
Jacques de Molay passes through all three and dies in ecstasy, "the philosopher's stone which transforms the base lead of the old Temple into the gold of the new." Robert of Heredom rides with six companions at daybreak toward Scotland, and the drama ends with the flaming Star of the Church of the Holy Spirit.
The appeal to the Valley
Because the Valley of Jehoshaphat is the place of the Last Judgement in Joel, the Imago Templi becomes "the supreme and effective recourse of all innocent men condemned unjustly." Corbin recalls Molay's last words summoning Clement V and Philip the Fair before God's judgement, and notes that both died that same year. Gottlieb's answer when pressed, that he cannot do otherwise, echoes Luther at Worms.
The Valley's three grades
Werner's Valley organized the historic Order in three grades: knights, men of action who did not even know the Valley existed; initiated brothers who received esoteric teaching; and masters in secret contact with the Sons of the Valley. When the Valley withdraws its mission, the Order falls, but the Valley remains, guardian of the Imago Templi ready for future palingeneses. Werner's critique of discursive knowledge owes much to Schleiermacher, and in a note Corbin applies it to his own day, citing from memory a recent invitation to celebrate the Eucharist less and to share more socially: the second, he says, needs neither faith nor a Church.
Adam de Valincourt teaches Robert of Heredom that dead bodies leave a subtle body, as the burned rose yields its astral form, an experiment Corbin pairs with Oetinger's sprig of balm. Robert receives the coffer holding the doctrine and the bell of the primitive Church.
Nova Hierosolyma
A Chartres window shows John on Ezekiel's shoulders. Ezekiel's city has twelve gates for the twelve tribes; John's has twelve gates with twelve angels and twelve foundations bearing the apostles' names; Shiite gnosis sees the twelve Imams in the cube of the Ka'bah. "In this way there emerges an Imago Templi that is common to all three branches of the Abrahamic tradition." John sees "no temple therein" because God and his Christ are the Temple, and the city itself, a cube like the Holy of Holies, is all Temple. Swedenborg reads the city as the Nova Ecclesia: lower Angels perceive a city, higher Angels a doctrine, the highest a most beautiful maiden. In the new Jerusalem nothing exoteric remains whose esoteric meaning is veiled; that abolition joins Joachimites, Kabbalists and Twelver Shiites who identify the twelfth Imam with the Paraclete.
Swedenborg's three heavens
For Swedenborg, John "carried away in the spirit to a great and high mountain" was raised to the third Heaven: the Angels of the third Heaven dwell on mountains, those of the second on hills, those of the first in the valleys between. The elevation happens in an instant, as a change of the visionary's whole inner state. The jasper light of the city means the letter of the Word has become translucent so that its spiritual meaning shows through. In a long quotation from Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg says that angels and men read the same words, angels spiritually and men naturally, and are joined "almost like soul and body".
Templum and contemplation
Templum first meant an open space from which one surveyed the horizon and read the flight of birds; to contemplate is to set one's sights on Heaven from the temple. The temple is the organ of vision. Philo's etymology of Israel as "He who sees God" makes Israel a people of contemplatives dedicated to the vision of divine things. When man is the temple, "contemplator, contemplation and temple are one."
The destruction of the Temple is now the destruction of the man-temple: "there is no longer either temple or contemplation." A Shiite shaykh told Corbin: "Never forget! The day will come when one will no longer be able even to utter the name of God in this world." Most men "live outside themselves, even though they may never have gone outside themselves, for the good reason that they have never been inside themselves." The Imago Templi makes us be within ourselves outside ourselves, delivering us from an invasive sociology and from a subjectivity that is its own thrall.
The vision of the open sky
Templum first designated the field of the open Heaven where birds were observed and interpreted; then the sacred building; and so it came to translate Beth ha-miqdash and Bayt al-Maqdis, which mean a dwelling, while its own etymology means a place of vision. Philo supplies the last link: at Sinai "all the people saw the sound", for the human voice is received by hearing but God's voice by sight, like a light. Vision surpasses sound and the ears become eyes.
The painter's study in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle shows a ravine between two crags, a forest of menacing thickets, a rider on a pale grey horse about to leap the chasm, and the rider looking not at the abyss but at a castle rising into an orange-gold radiance, "enveloped in a shining and lilac-coloured aureole". For Corbin this proves that the Image left to mankind by Parsifal will never be lost.
- To distinguish introspection from contemplation: there is no contemplation without the Temple.
- To refuse both an invasive sociology and a subjectivity that is its own prisoner.
- To see the recurrences of the Image as decisions of the soul, not as links in a chain of documents.
- To accept that the Temple is not yet completed, so that the lecture ends with a "denouement", not a conclusion.
The last parable comes from the Younger Titurel: passing through a city on the way east, Parsifal leaves an image of Montsalvat, and with it alone the people build their own Grail Temple. "This Image is also what remains to us. No more; but no less." Solzhenitsyn's First Circle supplies a painter's Montsalvat rising over a chasm, and Corbin answers the knights of Gavarnie: "No! the Temple is not destroyed forever." The book ends with Suhravardi's litany: "O God of every God! Make the litany of the Light arise. Make the people of Light triumphant. Guide the Light towards the Light. Amen."
6. Slips in the Printed Book
Small errors visible in the printed text itself: a doubled phrase, inconsistent references, dates and counts that do not agree with each other. Nothing here depends on outside sources; anything that would need outside checking is left alone, and queries are marked as such.
Page numbers are the printed ones (roman for the front matter). Some leaves are missing from the scan (printed pp. 32-33 and 178-179, the plates on pp. 126-131 and the index), so slips there cannot be checked.
| # | Page | Slip |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | p. xii | I was I was thereby led to the heart of a physiology of the subtle body: "I was" doubled. Query, since it could be a scanning artifact. |
| 2 | pp. 3, 27 | The same journal issue is cited as Der Islam 43/3 with the year 1967 in note 5 and 1907 in note 16. One of the two years is wrong. |
| 3 | p. 71 | Notes run 21, 23, 23: note 22 is missing and 23 appears twice. Query. |
| 4 | pp. 72-73 | Note 36 refers to my study on Qadi Sa'id Qummi, cited above (note 4), but note 4 concerns Jaldaki; the Qummi study is cited in note 18. |
| 5 | pp. 110, 124-125 | The circles of the Imams in figure 6 are read from left to right (twelfth to first) in the text, and from right to left for the same diagram in the Appendix. Query, since the plate itself is not in the scan. |
| 6 | pp. 104, 137 | The encyclopaedia of the Brothers of Purity has 51 treatises in chapter 2, note 86, and 52 treatises in chapter 3. |
| 7 | p. 134 | Note 2 prints Ibn 'Arabi's dates as 560/1165/638/1240, with a slash in place of the dash between birth and death. |
| 8 | pp. 206-207 | Note 30: the twelfth Imam has been in occultation since 260/864, and the eleventh Imam died 260/874. The same hijri year is converted to two Christian years ten years apart; 864 cannot be right if 874 is. |
| 9 | pp. 263, 350, 372, 376 | The Templars were arrested on October 13, 1307 and Jacques de Molay died on March 18, 1314, yet his imprisonment is said to have lasted eight years (twice). By the book's own dates it was under seven. Query, since Corbin is summarizing Werner's drama. |
| 10 | pp. 299, 320 | Enoch's vision of the mountain-throne is cited as I Enoch chaps. 24-25 on p. 299, but as I Enoch 24:25 in note 138. Probably 24-25 is meant. |
| 11 | pp. 357, 366 | The Grail scholar is Lars-Ivar Ringbom (and L.-I. Ringbom) in the notes, but L.J. Ringbom in the text of p. 366. |
Not slips. Corbin himself points out several discrepancies in his sources: errors by the draughtsman in two of Haydar Amuli's figures, a list announced as 51 ancestors of which only 46 are named, and Saturn placed nineteenth in a sequence. These are recorded in chapters 2 and 3 as he presents them. Spellings that vary (Pharoah, Aramithea) are left alone as consistent house forms, and the duplicated scan of pp. 236-237 is a fault of the copy, not of the book.
7. Synthesis
Twenty-six takeaways
- Spirit has form. The book's first premise, put by Chauncey Giles in chapter 4, is that a spiritual substance either has form or does not exist; the "body of light" is a body of a subtler kind.
- There are three worlds and three organs. Senses for the mulk, active Imagination for the malakut, intellect for the Jabarut; the middle one is the place where every vision in the book occurs.
- Imaginal is not imaginary. The active Imagination in the service of the intellect perceives realities; under the estimative faculty it produces delirium. The difference is the direction it serves.
- Existence is not manifestation. Colour exists at every level even where it is not seen; invisibility can come from excess of light.
- Light is the spirituality of colour, and colour is light in a materialized state; neither is primary in isolation.
- Every reading has levels. Red is Nature, the Imam Husayn, Gabriel, the Imam within and the Muhammadan Reality, all at once, without one cancelling another.
- The Balance is qualitative. It weighs correspondences, not quantities; confusing it with measurement is confusing the chemist with the alchemist.
- Every zahir has its batin. Seven planets and twelve signs answer to seven prophets and twelve Imams; the outer heaven has an inner heaven.
- Diagrams convert time into simultaneity. Haydar Amuli's circles let figures from different cycles stand side by side as homologues.
- Time and balance share a root. ZaMaN and MiZaN: the Balance gives time its cyclic shape.
- The Temple has three stages. A temple of stone built in a star's image, a temple of persons (the Temple of Light of the Imamate), and the temple of the soul.
- Ta'wil discloses persons, not abstractions. Behind each rite or fact stands a Person-archetype; the festivals of the Brothers of Purity are Persons.
- Correspondence is functional. The Black Stone does in the Ka'bah what the Angel does in man; meditation can pass from one to the other because the relationship is the same.
- The centre surrounds. In spiritual circles the centre also envelops; turning from material to spiritual form is turning a glove inside out.
- The cube is a figure of the Imamate. Eight corners, twelve edges and six faces are the eight bearers, twelve Imams and six names.
- The tomb is the subtle body the soul has configured by its habits, knowledge and desires: a garden or a pit.
- The Black Stone is a swallowed pact. It was an Angel who accepted the covenant first; it is the Angel, the Imamate, within each man.
- The drama of Adam is the drama of Knowledge. To eat of the forbidden Tree is to force the spiritual down to the level of natural things, and the failure returns as agnostic doubt.
- The pilgrimage is a lifetime. Desire (Mina), confession at sunset ('Arafat), vigil and dawn (Muzdalifah), refusal of the last pride, and the seven circuits that begin creation again.
- The power of the keys is ardent desire. For Qummi, Weigel and Swedenborg alike, every believer holds them.
- The Image of the Temple is tautegorical. It is the form the transcendent takes to be seen, not a cover for something else.
- Hierohistory has its own time. Recurrences of the Imago Templi need no archives; affiliation by decision makes a man heir to his predecessors.
- The destruction of the Temple is our entry into exile, and the real loss is not the Temple but the crypt, the felt sense of being in exile.
- Realized eschatology is liturgical. Qumran and the Johannine community lived the end "in the present" through worship joined to the Angels; jam and nondum together.
- "All is finished" closes the door. When nothing is left to expect, esotericism goes underground: Templar tradition, the Grail, the Sons of the Valley, Swedenborg's Nova Ecclesia.
- The temple is the organ of vision. Templum is a place to see from; when man is the temple, contemplator, contemplation and temple are one, and only that answers the reign of "normal man".
- You cannot find in a fact what you began by denying it has. Corbin's case against the reduction of religious fact to sociology or childhood is a point about method: the frame chosen before looking decides what can appear. His alternative is a space wide enough to hold the whole form, which he calls the eschatological dimension and locates in the mundus imaginalis.
- Interpretation is a crossing. Ta'bir means both crossing and interpreting. If both our dreams and our waking perceptions need interpreting, this world is a bridge, not a dwelling, and the diagrams of correspondences are themselves made within the sleep from which death awakens. The work of the horsemen of the Invisible is to cross again and again.
Frameworks at a glance
| Framework | Chapter | Elements | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Existence and manifestation | 1 | wujud vs zuhur; latent vs manifest colour | Separate what is from what appears |
| Five levels of red | 1 | Nature, Husayn, Gabriel, Imam within, Muhammadan Reality | Layered hermeneutics without reduction |
| Lord and vassal | 1 | rabb and marbub; light and colour; knight wearing the colours | Mutual dependence of manifest and manifesting |
| Balance of 7 and 12 | 2 | planets, signs; prophets, Imams | Homology of outer and inner heavens |
| Balance of 19 and 28 | 2 | Basmallah letters; lunar mansions and alphabet | One structure across cosmos, man and Book |
| Three rituals | 3 | religious, philosophical, the Brothers' own | Levels of the same practice |
| Three universes and three times | 4 | mulk, malakut, Jabarut; dense, subtle, hyper-subtle | Locate events and perceptions |
| Proof of the Throne | 4 | 4 limits, 8 bearers, 12 edges, 6 faces | Structure derived by projection |
| Four corners | 4 | Intelligence, Soul, Matter, Nature; Water, Fire, Earth, Air | Map a plan to a cosmology |
| Stations of the heart's pilgrimage | 4 | Mina, 'Arafat, Muzdalifah, Mina, seven circuits | Stages of an inner path |
| Ezekiel's four phases | 5 | ruin, God as Temple, return, New Temple | Read any loss and restoration |
| Temple, crypt, destroyed crypt | 5 | antiquity, Suhravardi, modernity | Diagnose how a culture stands in the world |
| Triple Logos-priest | 5 | First-born Logos, Aaron, Aaron of the soul | Macrocosm, community, microcosm |
| Nigredo, albedo, rubedo | 5 | night, illumination, love | Stages of transmutation |
The five lectures as one argument
Read in Corbin's order, the lectures form a single movement from perception to practice.
| Lecture | What is perceived | Organ | What it becomes | Practice |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Colours | Colour at every level of being | Sight raised to the subtle | The Imam within; the knight wearing his lord's colours | Reading a sensible quality as a sign |
| 2. Balance | Numbers and figures of cosmos, man and Book | The hermeneutic of correspondences | The homology of prophets, Imams, planets and signs | Meditating on diagrams |
| 3. Sabian Temple | A temple built in a star's image | Ta'wil | The Temple of Light built of persons | Ritual raised to the level of Persons |
| 4. Ka'bah | The cube, its corners, the Black Stone | Imaginative spiritual perception | The body of light, the Temple of the heart | Pilgrimage as inner journey |
| 5. Imago Templi | The recurring Image of the Temple | The active Imagination at the meeting-place of the two seas | The man-temple and the community-temple | Liturgy, knighthood, contemplation |
Three threads tie the lectures together. The Imam appears as the Imam within (ch. 1), the hidden pole of the esoteric hierarchy (ch. 2), the Temple of Light of the Imamate (ch. 3), the edges of the cube and the Angel within man (ch. 4), and the awaited one who keeps hierohistory open (ch. 5). Gabriel appears as the angel of the colour red's third level (ch. 1), the Holy Spirit and Angel of humanity who receives pilgrims and initiates Adam (ch. 4), and the Tenth Intelligence whose Sinai the exile climbs (ch. 5). The number twelve links the signs, the Imams, the tribes, the gates of the new Jerusalem and the edges of the Ka'bah.
What changes for a reader
- From two worlds to three. The reader stops asking whether a vision is real or imaginary and asks on which level it is real.
- From allegory to tautegory. A symbol is no longer a code to crack but a form to dwell in.
- From causes to correspondences. The question becomes not what produced a thing but what it answers to.
- From chronology to hierohistory. Lineage becomes a matter of decision and affinity, not of documents alone.
- From introspection to contemplation. Turning inward is not enough; one must find within oneself the space from which one sees beyond oneself.
Questions to take away
- Where in my own work do I treat what cannot be measured as if it did not exist?
- Which of my "visible components" have lost their "invisible counterpart", the purpose that justified them?
- Am I reproducing the forms of a model, or its relationships?
- What in my practice is "dense time" (transactions), what is "subtle time" (positions, habits), and what is "hyper-subtle" (trust, meaning)?
- Which traditions do I affiliate myself to by decision, and what do I owe them?
- Where have I accepted that "all is finished", and what would it mean to keep something open?
- What single image, like the one Parsifal left the townspeople, would let a team build its own temple?
Corbin's method in practice
| Move | Example in the book | How to apply it |
|---|---|---|
| Distinguish levels before judging | Existence and manifestation of colour | Ask what exists unseen before deciding what is absent |
| Read the figure, not only the text | Haydar Amuli's circles; Qummi's plan | Draw the structure; relationships show what prose hides |
| Find the Person behind the rite | The festivals of the Brothers of Purity | Ask who a practice serves and represents |
| Follow a form across levels | Circle, square, cube; Ka'bah, heart, Throne | Look for the same relationship in different materials |
| Compare without deriving | Ka'bah, Ezekiel, Grail, Swedenborg | Set parallels side by side without claiming borrowing |
| Hold the already and the not yet | Qumran's liturgy; the Paraclete | Treat goals as partly present in the practice that seeks them |
A closer look
- A coherent ontology. The three-world scheme lets Corbin speak of visions, rites, diagrams and legends in one vocabulary, and he states its premisses openly (the Gestalt premisses in chapter 4, the metaphysics of the Imagination in chapter 5).
- Close reading of sources. Kirmani, Haydar Amuli, Qummi and Fujita are followed paragraph by paragraph; Corbin marks where he is summarizing and where he adds.
- Comparative reach. The Ka'bah, Ezekiel, Qumran, the Grail and Swedenborg are set side by side as phenomena of one Image, not as borrowings.
- A sharp diagnosis. The distinction between losing the Temple and losing the crypt names something precise about modern experience.
- Phenomenology or apologetics? Corbin declares that the Image governs the sources and that historical criticism cannot judge it. That protects the method from refutation, and a reader may ask what evidence could ever count against it.
- Legends as testimony. The Templar filiations (Aumont, Beaujeu, Larmenius) are presented as "more true than history". Corbin is explicit that he is not doing history, but the line between hierohistory and wishful lineage is drawn only by the author's judgement.
- Polemical targets. Sociology, historicism, psychoanalysis and "dialectic theology" are named as followers of Pharaoh; their own arguments are rarely given.
- Dependence on secondary sources. Chapter 5 leans heavily on one unpublished dissertation (Fujita) and on Waite and Le Forestier, whose author Corbin himself finds unsympathetic.
- Unrevised collection. Lectures from 1950 to 1974 repeat material and carry small inconsistencies (Part 6).
Who's Who
Only dates printed in the book are given; where the book prints none, none is given.
| Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i | d. 1826 | Founder of the Shaykhi school from which Kirmani's treatise comes |
| Avempace (Ibn Bajjah) | twelfth century A.D. | Andalusian philosopher for whom colours exist in potentia in darkness |
| Kamaluddin Farsi | d. 1320 A.D. | Commentator of Alhazen's optics |
| Thabit ibn Qurrah | 221/836-288/901 | Sabian scholar whose works on the planetary liturgies Barhebraeus still saw |
| Nizami | 535/1140-606/1209 | Poet of the Haft Paykar, the seven planetary domes |
| Ibn Babuyah | d. 381/992 | Author of the Kitab al-Tawhid on which Qummi commented |
| Johann Valentin Andreae | (1616, date of the myth) | Author of the Rosicrucian myth, compared by Massignon to the Sabian story |
| Christian Jambet | Author of the Editorial Note, translated by James W. Morris | |
| Person | Book's dates | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Henry Corbin | died 7 October 1978, aged 75 | Author; directeur d'etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes 1954-1974, successor of Louis Massignon |
| Muhammad Karim-Khan Kirmani | d. 1870 | Shaykhi master; "Book of the red hyacinth" (ch. 1) |
| 'Alauddawlah Simnani | fourteenth century | Subtle physiology of colours and "prophets of your being" |
| Haydar Amuli | born 720/1320, died after 787/1385 | Shiite interpreter of Ibn 'Arabi; diagrams of the Balance (ch. 2) |
| Ibn 'Arabi | died 638/1240 | Metaphysics of the Imagination; "meeting-place of the two seas" |
| Qadi Sa'id Qummi | 1049/1639-1103/1691 | "Hakim-i Kuchak"; the Ka'bah, the three times, the heart's pilgrimage (ch. 4) |
| Suhravardi | twelfth century | Shaykh al-ishraq; visionary recitals, Temples of Light, crypt of the Temple (ch. 5) |
| Jalal Davani | fifteenth century | Follower of Suhravardi; Persia as a Solomonic kingdom |
| Mas'udi | tenth century | Describes the Sabian temples (ch. 3) |
| Robert Fludd | 1574-1637 | English Rosicrucian; the triple Temple |
| Valentin Weigel | sixteenth century | Treatise on the potestas clavium |
| Swedenborg | eighteenth century | Correspondences; spaces as states; Nova Hierosolyma |
| Jean-Baptiste Willermoz | eighteenth century | Lyons; the "inner Order" and the Rite ecossais rectifie |
| Zacharias Werner | Die Sohne des Thal's, first edition dated Berlin 1803 | Dramatist of the Templars and the Sons of the Valley |
| Albrecht von Scharfenberg | New Titurel written between 1260 and 1270 | Poet of the Grail Temple of Montsalvat |
| Jacques de Molay | died March 18, 1314 | Last Grand Master; martyr and alchemical apotheosis in Werner |
| Philostorgius | died after 425 A.D. | Arian historian; the Gospel of John found in a well |
| Emperor Henry II | 973-1024 | Nocturnal vision in the cave-temple of Michael (note) |
| Judas Maccabaeus; Simon Maccabaeus | 165-161; 142-135 | Hasmonean rulers (ch. 5 notes) |
| Antiochus Epiphanes IV | 175-164 | Profaner of the Temple |
| Sarkar Agha (Shaykh Abu'l-Qasim Ibrahimi) | died 1969 | Shaykh who warned the name of God would one day be unsayable |
| Shozo Fujita | dissertation 1970 | Japanese theologian; Ezekiel and Qumran Temple theology |
| Jabir ibn Hayyan | none printed | Name associated with the science of the Balance |
| Jaldaki | fourteenth century A.D. | Alchemist; commentary on the "Book of the seven statues" |
| Hamiduddin Kirmani | died c. 408/1017 | Ismaili; the Balance of things religious |
| Sa'duddin Hamuyah | died 1252 A.D. | Iranian Sufi Shiite; seven ranks of the Friends of God |
| Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz | none printed | The Friends as the eyes through which God looks at the world |
| Balzac | none printed | The Human Comedy read on two floors (ch. 4) |
| Kazantzakis | none printed | The icon of the two St. Georges |
| Hans Schmid-Guisan | introductory note dated Basel, 1937 | Comme le jour et la nuit: Collectivopolis and Individua |
| Friedrich Oetinger | none printed | Swabian mystic; the prayer that closes chapter 4; the sprig of balm |
| Annie Jaubert; D. E. Aune; J. Strugnell | none printed | Scholars of the Covenant, realized eschatology and the angelic liturgy |
| Lars-Ivar Ringbom; Gudula Trendelenburg | Graltempel und Paradies 1951; Studien 1972 | Scholars of the Grail Temple |
| Alexander Solzhenitsyn | none printed | The First Circle: the painting of Montsalvat |
| Friedrich Weinreb | contemporary | Kabbalist; destruction of the Temple as entry into exile |
A reading path for the book itself
Readers who go on to Corbin's text can take the lectures out of printed order with profit. Start with the Ka'bah lecture, since its first section states the premisses (spiritual Forms, qualitative space, three universes and three times) that the others assume. Then read the Imago Templi, which applies those premisses across Judaism, Christianity and Islam and names the norms Corbin opposes. The Sabian lecture comes next: it is the oldest (1950), and shows the ritual turn from a temple built in the image of a star to the human Temple. Finish with the colours and the Balance, which Jambet presents as the method, and which read more easily once you know where the method leads.
Three habits help. First, keep a note of each level Corbin distinguishes (sensible, imaginal, intelligible) and ask at every step which level a word is used on; most apparent contradictions dissolve there. Second, read the notes: many of the book's most concrete details, from Qummi's biography to the four grades of the Brothers of Purity, live in them. Third, take Corbin's polemical passages as part of the argument, not as asides. His attacks on sociological and historicist reduction state, in negative form, what his hermeneutic requires.
8. Glossary
Terms as the book glosses them. Arabic and Persian forms follow the book's transliteration without diacritics.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| 'alam al-mithal, mundus imaginalis | The imaginal world between the intelligible and the sensible, perceived by the active Imagination; not the imaginary |
| 'alam al-shahadah, mulk | The phenomenal world perceived by the senses |
| Animae caelestes | The Souls that move the heavens; possess pure active Imagination; abolished by Averroes |
| awliya' (Friends of God) | The esoteric hierarchy headed by the pole; Awliya' Allah |
| barzakh | The world in-between; the meeting-place of the two seas |
| batin / zahir | Hidden, esoteric / apparent, exoteric; every zahir is balanced by its batin |
| Bayt al-Ma'mur | The celestial Temple in the fourth Heaven; Adam's Ka'bah taken up at the Flood |
| Bayt al-Maqdis | "Sacrosanct house": Jerusalem, and the celestial Temple from which the Angel comes |
| hierohistory, subtle history | Sacred history taking place in subtle time, not measurable by archives; its events become parables |
| hikayah | Image-imitation, "history"; each Temple is the hikayah of the one above |
| Imago Templi | The Image of the Temple, manifested at the meeting-place of the two seas; kept in Latin ne varietur |
| Ishraq | Dawn, the orient of light; Suhravardi's "oriental" theosophy; 'ilm ishraqi, cognitio matutina |
| Jabarut | The world of the pure Intelligences |
| jam et nondum | Already and not yet: the simultaneity lived in liturgical time |
| jism mithali | The imaginal body, body of light, formed by the soul's acts and desires |
| khangah | Sufi lodge; for Suhravardi, the sanctuary within the Temple of Light where the Angel is met |
| majma' al-bahrayn | "The meeting-place of the two seas" (Koran 18): where Moses met Khezr; the imaginal world |
| malakut | The world of Souls; also the inner, invisible aspect of each being, its "guardian" |
| Merkabah | The divine Chariot-throne of Ezekiel's vision; source of Jewish throne mysticism |
| mithaq | The pact; swallowed by the Angel who became the Black Stone |
| Mizan | The Balance; the science of correspondences ('ilm al-Mizan) |
| mysterium liturgicum | The liturgical mystery in which eschatology is realized in the present |
| Nova Hierosolyma | The new Jerusalem; for Swedenborg, the Nova Ecclesia |
| pesher | Qumran hermeneutic, compared to Shiite ta'wil |
| potestas clavium | The power of the keys; for Qummi, ardent desire; for Weigel and Swedenborg, the faith of every believer |
| Sakinah / Shekhinah | The divine Presence in the Holy of Holies; for Suhravardi, lasting illumination in the Temple of Light |
| silsilat al-'irfan | The "affiliation of gnosis", an invisible spiritual lineage |
| tautegorical | Of an image that is itself the thing it expresses, as opposed to allegorical |
| ta'wil | Spiritual hermeneutics: leading a thing back to its archetype |
| Temple of Light (haykal al-nur) | Man's spiritual individuality; in Ismailism, the Temple formed by the Imams and initiates |
| walayah | The Friendship of God; esoteric side of prophecy; the corpus mysticum of the Friends |
| zaman kathif / latif / altaf | Dense, subtle and absolutely subtle time (Qummi) |
| Abdal | The seven "substitutes" who guard the seven climes and can leave their physical bodies unnoticed |
| Awtad | The four "tent-posts" at the cardinal points, matching the four archangels and the four corners of the Ka'bah |
| Nujaba' / Nuqaba' | The forty spiritual princes and the three hundred spiritual leaders of the esoteric hierarchy |
| qutb, pole of poles | The summit of the esoteric hierarchy, on whom God's gaze rests; for Shiism the hidden twelfth Imam |
| ghawth | "Help": a pole below the pole of poles, assisted by two Imams |
| wasi, awsiya' | Spiritual heir of a prophet; each legislative prophet had twelve |
| hujjah | Witness and guarantor of a prophet before his people |
| futuwwah | Spiritual chivalry; Suhravardi pictures the angelic hierarchy as such an Order |
| khirqah | The cloak of investiture given by a master (pir) |
| takbir | The formula Allah akbar; uttered four times on each of the seven mountains, seven times when stoning Iblis |
| tashriq | Turning towards the Orient; the three days after the pilgrimage |
| hijr | The enclosure of Ishmael marked on Qummi's plan of the Ka'bah |
| Xvarnah (Khurrah) | The Mazdean Light of Glory, identified by Suhravardi with the Sakinah |
| Fravarti | Zoroastrian celestial soul, compared to the Neshamah |
| Neshamah | Man's celestial soul in Weinreb's Kabbalistic recital, which descends into exile |
| miqdash adam | "Temple of men": Qumran's name for the Community as Temple |
| Christos Angelos, Verus Propheta | The Judaeo-Christian Christology of the angelic Christ and the True Prophet |
| Ecclesia Johannis | The Church of John, reign of the Spirit-Paraclete, opposed to the Ecclesia Petri |
| Coli Dei (Culdees) | "Men of God": hermit-clerks of the Celtic Church in the Templar tradition |
| Gralsburg, Montsalvat | The castle-temple of the Grail on its mountain, built by Titurel |
| Sons of the Valley | In Zacharias Werner, the hidden brotherhood behind the Templars; the Valley of Jehoshaphat |
| nigredo, albedo, rubedo | The three alchemical stages: night of the soul, illumination, divine love |
| ta'bir | From the root 'br, to cross: crossing and interpreting at once; ta'bir al-ru'ya is the interpretation of visions and dreams, a main use of the science of the Balance |
| mustaqarr / mustawda' | The appointed, permanent Imam (ordinarius) / the depositary Imam who protects him in times of danger; Ishmael and Isaac in the Ismaili reading of the sacrifice |
| majdhubun (the Transported) | The first category of the horsemen of the Invisible, carried by divine attraction; their vision of the malakut is direct and they need no bridge |
| spissitudo spiritualis, Geistleiblichkeit | The "spiritual density" of the Cambridge Platonists and Oetinger's "spiritual corporeity"; Corbin's Western equivalents of imaginal corporeity (jismiyah mithaliyah) |
| maddah ruhaniyah | Spiritual matter, the highest state of matter in Islamic theosophy |
| perspectiva naturalis / artificialis | Euclid's qualitative space, each region with its own horizon / the unified homogeneous space of Renaissance perspective, open to trompe l'oeil |
| Umm abiha | "Mother of her father": Fatimah, origin of both the Prophet's ancestors and the line of Imams, at the centre of Amuli's diagram of the Imamate |
| Hakim-i Kuchak | "Philosophus junior": the Persian name for Qadi Sa'id Qummi, to tell him from his elder brother |
| kharif | Autumn: Corbin's correction of kharuf (sheep) in the Rasa'il, so the ram grazed "forty autumns", forty years |
| Sabian | In the book, less a defined religion than a common name for several sects, signifying simply "gnostics" |
| Strangers (ghurbah, exile) | Those who live in spiritual exile; the hadith "Islam began in exile"; typified by Salman the Persian |
| ashkhas natiqah | "Persons who Announce": what the Brothers of Purity say their festivals are |
| Cycle of Unveiling / Cycle of Occultation | The alternating cycles of Ismaili historiosophy; ours is a Cycle of Occultation, ended by the Great Resurrection |
| Night of Destiny | The night the Koran descended (97:1-5); for Ibn 'Arabi the recurring time when the horsemen of the Invisible ride to meet the descending Angels |
| Studies of Manners / Philosophical / Analytical Studies | The three storeys of Balzac's work in Corbin's image of reading on the ground floor only |
About this book
Temple and Contemplation by Henry Corbin, 1980. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions