Derivative Images

* This comparitive dissertation by Tom Cheetham is based on the lifelong work of Henry Corbin which included an astonishing variety of influences: Christian theology, Heideggerian phenomenology and Islamic mysticism fused with Zoroastrian angelology; all united by a deep reverence for what in Islam is called the Primordial Revelation: the book of nature.

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"The black color, if you follow me, is light of pure Ipseity; within this Darkness is the Water of Life." - Shams al-Din Lahiji's Commentary on Shabestari's Rose Garden of the Mystery

The principle that like can only be known by like is the fundamental principle of alchemy. Coming to consciousness, coming to know is an alchemical procedure because it can only occur by means of a transformation of the body and of the world. It requires the development of a subtle, imaginal body, a resurrection body, as a refinement, not a rejection, of the literal, material body perceptible by the common senses. This can only take place in and through the imaginal world.

For Najm Kubra and his followers the achievement of the subtle body can be recognized and accomplished by means of the imaginal perception of "photisms," of colored lights. They mark the stages on the path. They originate in the public world. They occur in and to the traveler and are realizations of the mode of being attained. They are interior, but not subjective. They occur in the mundus imaginalis and are perfectly real, just as the Burning Bush is real, but are not thereby visible to all: they are too real to be visible to everyone. What we call objective reality isn't precisely false, but it is the lowest form of reality.

Alchemy requires a method.(Every Sufi Order specifies a particular method. The rules of the Kubrawiyyah include the Eight Principles of Junayd of Bagdad: ritual purity, fasting, silence, seclusion, invocation (dhikr), absolute devotion to the shaykh, repression of all thoughts and impulses as they occur, and surrender to the will of God. The disciple must at all costs avoid the impulse to desire visionary experience - this comes directly from the lower soul).  The method par excellence in Sufism is the dhikr, the "remembrance" of God. Dhikr is "meditative recitation of the Qur'an, ritual prayer, the names of God." Islam is based upon the Revelation of the Word of God. The Qur'an was and is experienced first and foremost an oral phenomenon. It is the spoken word that is primordial, and the written text spoken and memorized for recitation. The embodiment of the Word of God is fundamental to Islamic spirituality. God has spoken through the prophets, but He also sings, speaks and bodies forth his signs in the Heavens and in the souls of the believers. Thus the meditative, interiorizing recitation of the Word can bring forth tremendous energies for drawing creation towards the divine. But this is too abstract. The energies released by dhikr don't just raise the soul: they transform it by enabling it to attain a new mode of being. And this includes the transformation of the organs of perception that give form and body to the soul and its world, and the growth of a subtle body in harmony with the attributes that characterize the state of the soul and the world it now inhabits. Among the Kubrawiyyah the dhikr embraces an array of techniques of posture and breathing that serve to emphasize that this remembrance is grounded in the body.

The gnostic journey is not without risk: it is easy to get lost in an infinite world. It is no sojourn into a vague Paradise of disembodied forms. The closer to divinity, the more infinite, the more real and more individual the soul becomes. Infinite because God is the All-Encompassing. More definite because God is the Unifier, and it is His Oneness that grounds the uniqueness of every being. As William Blake knew well, things in the world of imagination are more detailed, more definite than anything in the public world. The ascent through the modes of being is the ascent of the self towards the Angel that defines its individuality. The status of personhood is not given: it must be won. We are born with the freedom to become demons or angels or anything in between. Our task is to travel toward the Light that emanates from our celestial counterpart, our Fravarti, our Angel, through whom the Light of the Divine is transmitted to us.

The stakes are very high and the opportunities for losing one's way are great. That is why a guide is required. You cannot raise yourself: that is the reason for Revelation. That is why there are prophets. Islam is not a religion of salvation as is Christianity. It is a religion of guidance. There is no doctrine of original sin in Islam. Though we are surely free to descend to the level of demons, and are prey to the temptations of Iblis (Satan), our fundamental trouble is ignorance, and we need constant reminders of who we are and where we should be heading. The Qur'an says that for every people there have been sent messengers. The lineage of their followers provides for guidance after they are gone. For the Peoples of the Book, there is of course the sacred text. For everyone there is the Primordial Revelation of Nature, though we forget, and lose sight of the signs placed there.

"Alchemy is the sister of prophecy."  -  the Imam Jafar

For an account of the stages of the quest we turn to the doctrines of 'Ala al-Dawlah al-Semnani. It is in his work that the correspondences between prophetic religion and luminous physiology is most clearly outlined, and it is his insight into the significance of Christ that provides a pivot point for Henry Corbin's critique of Christian civilization.

For Semnani the stages correspond to the modes of being of the major prophets in the lineage of Abraham as it is known in Islamic tradition. To each prophet, each stage, there corresponds a light of a characteristic color that appears to the mystic, as well as specific moral and psychological attributes. The correspondences occur because the soul's mode of being is its mode of understanding and its mode of perception. The soul's self knowledge is its knowledge of its world. But since the Word of God takes the form of the signs in the world and in the soul as well as the Revealed Text, the soul "reads" itself and the world in accordance with its stage in the process of coming to consciousness. This means that the depths of meaning that can be discerned in the exegesis of the Qur'an must correspond to the spiritual hermeneutics that the soul is able to perform upon itself and on the world of Nature.

In Semnani's mystical physiology there are seven levels on the path towards the divine and they are homologous to the seven "prophets of your being."

First there is Adam. The color that dominates this stage is a smoky grey-black. The physical organ or center with which this resonates is the "subtle bodily organ" or the "mold." This derives directly from the anima mundi and is "the embryonic mold" providing the basis for the growth of the resurrection body.

The second level is that of Noah - the Noah of your being. Its color is blue, and to it corresponds the nafs ammara, the extravagant lower soul or ego of the natural human. It is passionate and prone to evil, and must be overcome through self-consciousness.

The third level is that of Abraham. The organ is the heart (qalb). This is the embryonic form of the celestial Self, the eternal Individual. Its color is red. This is the "pacified soul" and is the organ of perception of the imaginal world.

Fourth is the Moses of your being. The organ is the mystery, secret, or threshold of supraconsciousness (sirr). It is the place of intimate conversation between Persons. The color is white.

Fifth is the noble spirit (ruh). Yellow is the color of the David of your being.

The sixth level marks the stage of Jesus. It is what in Latin west was called the Arcanum, through which help and inspiration from the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, may come. Its color is black.

The final level is of course that of Mohammad. It is the stage of the truth, the reality of your being, the true Self whose embryo is found at the origin, at the stage of Abraham. The journey,

The pilgrim must trust in the Guide, the Word and the method.

A language is concrete, like Arabic, when the words are pregnant with images. Poetic language in any tongue can be concrete in this way. Image opens onto image, landscape onto landscape, stitching the inner and outer together and enacting the sympathies between beings by means of perceptions of the subtle relations that link all things. This requires subtlety and attention and perceptual skills that have atrophied in us from lack of use.

We have Freud and Jung to thank for taking seriously the procession of images, the theater of the life of the soul, for the "talking cure" that recognizes the power of language to transform, and for the amplificatio that extends our reach into the unknown places where our souls and the world interact. But, as James Hillman has argued for many years now, we need to move beyond the inner-directed emphasis of much psychotherapy to the complex and difficult task of working in that intermediate realm of the alchemical, of subtle bodies, where the geographies of nature and the landscapes of the human soul interpenetrate. We have to learn to inhabit a world where the human and the more-than-human meet in mutual presence.

We who live in a world of real abstractions have seen the products of abstract and dogmatic thought with little sympathy for human or any other beings. Knowing the inhumanities and excesses of a world so constructed, we can turn to the more difficult task of transformation that the thing-like-ness of concrete thought implies. We can turn now back to the real work of being human.

We have lived too long within a world of our own making. We have lived too long within a language of the merely human. To keep our internals open we have to learn to read and write ourselves out of ourselves, and uncurl ourselves back into the world. This is the task set to us by Khidr, the Green Man, the hermeneut at the meeting place of the two seas. Language is not a tool for communication that belongs to us. Language is not an exclusively human ability at all. It is a field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit. Human language grows out of the world itself. We speak because the world speaks. And because language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God, it has the power to penetrate to the very heart of things. Language in the broadest sense is creative because the world was spoken into being. Because of this, reading can be, in the words of Ivan Illich, "an ontologically remedial technique," a means of transformation, of gnosis.

What are the techniques we need? We already know that we must be willing to allow the world to speak, willing to seek correspondences between human consciousness and what we might call the consciousnesses in the natural world. We already know that this means being open to images as the theater of the world. To open ourselves to the news of the universe requires a poet's hermeneutic attentiveness, and this requires some disciplines we are sorely lacking. We do need something like "houses of reading," to serve as cells of resistance to the dominion of those who control the post-literate culture of the wholly un-natural. But these would be half-open dwellings, opening outward beyond the confines of the ego, beyond the range of human culture and onto the mysteries of the more-than-human world. To fully understand the significance of the task we set ourselves, we must recognize with Jung that these untamed regions do not correspond to the boundaries we have set up between the inner and the outer. The wild is not identical with the world of physical nature. And the tame is not restricted to a protected enclave within the human person.

The reading of the world that we need to learn has to be active and engaged. It must take the form of a dialogue that begins with a careful listening to the voices that speak to us from beyond the bounds of the known. We have to engage in a gentle kind of call and response, a reading that calls in turn for speech, and perhaps for writing, or other kinds of making, and that always turns back to listening. We can learn aspects of this kind of discipline from children, from certain kinds of natural science, and from poets and artists. George Steiner's profound study of the grounds of meaning in language and art are of tremendous importance here. We need a theory, a theoria, not just of meaning in poetry and literature, but in the perception of all reality, and Steiner's suggestions are fertile. He recalls to us yet again the roots of theoria. "It tells," he writes, of concentrated insight, of an act of contemplation focused patiently on its object. But it pertains also to the deeds of witness performed by the legates sent, in solemn embassy, to observe the oracles spoken or the rites performed at the sacred Attic games. A 'theorist' or 'theoretician' is one who is disciplined in observance, a term itself charged with a twofold significance of intellectual-sensory perception and religious or ritual conductThus theory is inhabited by truth when it contemplates its object unwaveringly and when, in the observant process of such contemplation, it beholds, it takes grasp of the often confused and contingentimages, associations, suggestions, possibly erroneous, to which the object gives rise.

All truth in perception begins with this "theory." This kind of attention is intensely relational because it is felt, it is sensuous, it is embodied. The encounter with intelligible form as presented in art requires that the object be experienced as a real presence, and in this encounter the "poem, the statue, the sonata are not so much read, viewed or heard as they are lived." Art thus "makes sense" of the world. But aesthesis refers to the perception of the world we have not made, as much as to the world that we have. We who are so removed from the more-than-human need this kind of contact with the primordial grounds of life. And crucially, Steiner understands that the perception of any meaningful form is grounded in the encounter with a real presence, a transcendence, beyond the human. The perception of meaning in art, and we can extend this to the world as a whole, is based upon the "axiom of dialogue." We are always, when we are truly paying attention, in communion with what lies beyond us. Steiner writes, "it is, I believe, poetry, art and music which relate us most directly to that in being which is not ours." As we begin to learn what it may mean to read and write the world, to hear the news of the universe, we would do well to hear these words.

 Bodies occupy places, they are located. This we know from the ecologists. You need to know where you live: to know the trees, the flowers, the bedrock on which we build, where the water comes from and where it goes. But human beings are not only located; they locate.

"Orientation is a primary phenomenon of our presence in the world. A human presence has the property of spatializing a world around it, and this phenomenon implies a certain relationship of man and the world, his world, this relationship being determined by the very mode of his presence in the world." -  Henry Corbin

Both of these aspects of our place in the world must be given their due. The inner and the outer interpenetrate. You cannot know who you are without knowing the terrain you occupy; and yet you cannot truly know what your orientation is within that terrain without knowing who you are. The ecologists tell us we are defined by our world. The boundaries of the world as we have learned to see them are disrupted. To realize this is threatening. There are few safe havens in this task of being human.

To cope with the threats and challenges of the encounter with the worlds beyond the ego, what we would learn in the houses of reading would have to include an ancient virtue: ascesis. There are three aspects of this discipline to consider. First, an asceticism of the body. This asceticism cannot be incompatible with a passionate love for the things of this world. An asceticism of the body would, for us in the developed world, mean a refusal to participate in the excesses of the consumer culture. But this is really the easy part. Ivan Illich uses ascesis in another sense to mean "courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation, accomplished in community." Corbin proposes an "epistemological ascesis," a purging of corrupting concepts that give reality to abstraction, and tear us away from our roots in embodied, local, communal realities. When we live immersed in the modern world of generalized communication, where every natural boundary is violated, we are constantly assaulted by images, messages, ideas, all of them having their origins outside the boundaries of our responsibility and control, all of them having been crafted by someone for some purpose of their own, and all of which in the end serve to manipulate us. The profound and magical news of the human that Shakespeare once brought, has now degenerated, at the end of literacy, into advertising and mere "news."

Keep the darkness very close, always. For it is the function of the Absconditum, the forever and necessarily hidden God, to open the world for us at each instant, making everything new. The ever-present "moment of nothingness" hovering just beyond the horizon insures the pervasive transcendence of the world. Only the Deus absconditum guarantees the eternal dissolution of dogmas and underlies the necessity of a "permanent hermeneutics," the unending reading and writing of the soul of the world, the ceaseless uncovering of harmonies between the worlds within and the worlds without. This provides the setting for the human journey towards itself and the world in which it is truly at home. We are not spirits lost in a world of matter. Both spirit and matter are abstractions born of reason.

Tom Cheetham