Henry Corbin and The Cosmic North

The French philosopher and scholar of Sufism and Islamic thought, Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was guided by Sufi mystics and sages whose life and work provide a rich phenomenological framework for situating visionary and prophetic experience.  Corbin’s writing draws one into the circle of these mystics and sages as if magnetized by some otherworldly energy and intelligence.  It works on one, slowly, transfiguring the mode of presence we bring to bear on the world.

Our presence in the world is a bare fact; a bare fact, however, that is pregnant with meaning and signification, for our presence is at the same time the constellating factor that brings the world into being.  It is of course entirely reasonable to assert that the world itself must be independent of our particular mode of presence.  It will, after all, continue to exist long after we are gone.  Further reflection, though, reveals that the conception of a world independent of any being at all can only arise as an abstraction within the circumference of that presence whose facticity is the basis of the thought itself.  Any objective conception of the world is grounded in, and derives its meaning from, the quality of our mode of presence that underlies and sustains it.

Our presence, then, brings a world into being, engenders it.  The cardinal points of our geographical maps—North, East, South, and West—are basic expressions that this mode of presence provides, they are a “…system of a priori spatial evidences without which there would be neither geographical nor anthropological orientation” (Man of Light, 1). According to Corbin, this system of spatial evidences is expressive of an orientation to a horizontal dimension of being: our sense of linear history and of the cause-and-effect relationships that condition our understanding of events both conceptually and in terms of our sensory modalities.  In theoretical terms, the horizontal dimension is reflected in our conceptual preoccupation with reducing life, history, consciousness, and everything else, to abstract mathematical, physical, or sociological models.  This horizontal dimension is the domain of our ordinary and everyday empirical consciousness, both practical and theoretical.

The horizontal dimension, when left to its own devices, fails to acknowledge that it depends on an even more basic and fundamental mode of orientation in a vertical dimension that extends, not from North to South or from East to West, but from above to below, from Earth to Heaven; and, this vertical dimension is really, “a single point: the point of orientation, the heavenly north, the pole star” (Man of Light, 1). It is the vertical dimension extending from below to above that completes and fulfills the horizontal extension to the four cardinal points. This vertical axis, upon which the horizontal depends, is associated with the far North; not the North “situated on our geographical maps” (Man of Light, 2); but rather, with the Cosmic North of the Mystic Orient.  This vertical dimension is experienced as a inner depth, and inwardness that stretches far beyond the bounds of empirical consciousness, embracing and opening out into worlds of mystery and magic.

Corbin writes, “This suprasensory, mystic Orient, the place of the Origin and of the Return, object of the eternal Quest, is at the heavenly pole; it is the Pole, at the extreme north, so far off that it is the threshold of the dimension ‘beyond’. That is why it is only revealed to a definite mode of presence in the world, and can be revealed only through this mode of presence. There are other modes to which it will never be revealed” (Man of Light, 2)

A mode of presence whose only orientation is to the horizontal–a mode of presence incapable of experiencing the vertical dimension of being–is cut off and disconnected from the well-spring of psychic and suprasensory life that supports and sustains it; for it is in these inner depths where empirical consciousness has its origin, its beginning.  The depth is itself awake and aware communicating via primordial images, through symbols, intuitions and secret sensations, through mantic insight, vision, and prophecy.  It is the primordial image that “…dominates and coordinates the perception of empirical data…[t]he image gives physical events their meaning; it precedes them…” (Man of Light, 39).

This is a mode of presence that orients to the cosmic North and is characterized by a distinct form of imaginal or “visionary apperception” (Man of Light, 11), “….to an organ of perception to which a definite plane or region of being corresponds as its object…” (Man of Light, 39), to the active imagination whose awakening heralds an opening into the light of superconsciousness, to the mystic light of the Cosmic North, the mundus imaginalis or imaginal world, the ālam-al-mithāl, an ontologically distinct realm in which the visionary episodes of the mystic’s journey unfold. This is the “ ‘heavenly Earth of Hūrqalyā’”, “a concrete spiritual universe”, “…the autonomous world of visionary figures and forms” (Man of Light, 6) situated in the cosmic north , and discovered through this polar orientation.

The empirical world unfolds according to the laws of a deeper reality; a reality there in the depths, that is the depths itself, existentiating its designs prior to and before any empirical happening.  The reality there dictates the empirical happening.  By descending into the depths we come into contact with this reality.  This reality creates and coordinates, conspires with the subtle intelligence in man, to reproduce its designs in concrete and manifest form.  To orient to the vertical dimension is to become a conduit for the manifestation of those designs–it is to become the bridge between visible and invisible worlds.

Sources:

Corbin, Henry. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Translated by Nancy Pearson. Omega Publications, 1994.