First published in 1983. The volume Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis brings together in English translation three of Henry Corbin's richest and most complex studies, originally presented at the Eranos conferences of 1951 and 1954 and another conference in 1956. Each of these three relatively early studies is built around a complex, highly creative 'comparison' of the phenomenological correspondences between texts (often highly fragmentary) from a vast range of spiritual traditions from late Antiquity (including Manichaenism and the sects of Sassanid Iran) - all 'gnostic' in the root Greek sense of that term favoured by Corbin, though not in the narrower historical sense used by most contemporary scholars - and comparable spiritual themes in an equally wide range of Islamic texts eventually preserved in the later Ismaili Shi'i tradition.
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A little manual of Mazdean doctrine, written in Pahlavi and dating from the fourth century of our era, contains a number of questions the answers to which everyone over the age of fifteen is supposed to know. The first questions are: “Who am I and to whom do I belong? Whence have I come and whither am I returning? What is my lineage and what is my race? What is my proper calling in earthly existence? … Did I come from the celestial world, or is it in the earthly world that I began to be? Do I belong to
hrmazd or to Ahriman? To the angels or the demons?”1
And here are the answers:
I came from the celestial world (m
n
k), it is not in the terrestrial world (g
t
k) that I began to be. I was originally manifested in the spiritual state, my original state is not the terrestrial state.2 I belong to
hrmazd (Ahura Mazda, the Lord Wisdom), not to Ahriman (the Spirit of Evil and of Darkness); I belong to the angels, not to the demons. … I am the creature of
hrmazd, not the creature of Ahriman. I hold my lineage and my race from Gay
mart (primordial Man, Anthropos). My mother is Spandarmat (Angel of the Earth), my father is
hrmazd. … The accomplishment of my vocation consists in this: to think of
hrmazd as present Existence (hast
h), which has always existed (ham
-b
t
h), and will always exist (ham
-b
vet
h). To think of him as immortal sovereignty, as Unlimitation and Purity. To think of Ahriman as pure negativity (nest
h), exhausting himself in nothingness (av
n-b
t
h), as the Evil Spirit who formerly did not exist in this Creation, and who one day will cease to exist in
hrmazd's Creation and who will collapse at the final time.3 To consider my true self as belonging to
hrmazd and the Archangels (Amahraspand
n).
These few simple but decisive formulas project the responses simultaneously on a horizon both of pre-existence and of superexistence. They imply that the moment of birth and the moment of death, recorded so carefully in our vital statistics, are neither our absolute beginning nor our absolute end. They imply that time, as we commonly conceive of it, as a line of indeterminate length, losing itself in the mists of the past and the future, has literally no sense, but is simply the absurd. If a modern mathematical philosophy has taught us to conceive of time as a fourth dimension added to the three dimensions of space, we may say that the myth of Mazdean cosmogony reveals to us something in the nature of still another dimension (a fifth dimension?), the one which situates a being's “elevation” of light or depth of darkness.
The terms “elevation,” or “height,” and “depth” suggest the dimensions of visual space,4 and the exigencies of language compel the myth to place the power of light and the opposing power of darkness in this sort of spatial relation to one another. Yet any geometrical representation is doomed to failure, since we must conceive of a space both infinite and limited. For in point of fact, the primordial Light and Darkness do not occupy a space that is situated and defined in advance; they establish a space that is absolutely peculiar to themselves, that can only be measured in terms of light and darkness. The height or depth of light...
Table of contents
Cover
Half Title
Full Title
Copyright
The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
Contents
Editorial Note
1 CYCLICAL TIME IN MAZDAISM AND ISMAILISM
2 DIVINE EPIPHANY AND SPIRITUAL BIRTH IN ISMAILIAN GNOSIS
