Corbin - Hillman - Duncan

In a move that elegantly ties together many of the threads that have made up the last 20 years or so of my life, Robert Duncan dedicated one of the late poems in his Passages series, "Whose," as follows:

[for Jim Hillman's tribute to Henri Corbin The Thought of the Heart]

It was Hillman's 1979 Eranos lecture that first turned my attention, and that of many others I know, to Henry Corbin. In it he wrote,

"You who have been privileged at some time during his long life to have attended a lecture by Henry Corbin have been present at a manifestation of the thought of the heart. You have been witness to its creative imagination, its theophanic power of bringing the divine face into visibility. You will also know in your hearts that the communication of the thought of the heart proceeds in that fashion of which he was master, as a récit, an account of the imaginal life as a journey among imaginal essences, an account of the essential. In him imagination was utterly presence. One was in the presence of imagination itself, that imagination in which and by which the spirit moves from the heart towards all origination." -  James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1992, 3. For more on Hillman's debt to Corbin see Archetypal Psychology, Volume 1 of the Uniform Edition of Hillman's works.

Duncan's poem can be found on page 263 of Ground Work: Before the War, In the Dark. Those interested in Duncan's relation to Hillman should search out a copy of Duncan's remarkable lectures to the Analytical Psychology Society of Western New York transcribed for Spring Journal (1996): Spring 59: Opening the Dreamway: In the Psyche of Robert Duncan (out-of-print but worth searching for). The audio recoding of the second lecture can be found here as "Reading on "Wind and Sea, Fire and Night" at the American Psychoanalytic Society, 1980." The audio of the first lecture will be available on PennSound in the near future.

IISMM Octobre 2011

IISMM BULLETIN OCTOBRE2011

Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum

Islamic Art Treasures at the Met

Don't miss the videos with this article.

The new exhibit opens to the public November 1.

Schiere di angeli iranici

Schiere di angeli iranici
Giulio Busi

Dal «grande angelo nero, fuligginoso» di Montale, a quello «vestito di panni d'un viola azzurro, cinto di cordoni d'oro, con vaste ali bianche dal fulgore di seta», che spicca il volo verso Franz Kafka, e fino agli angeli di Rilke, con «stanche bocche» e «anime senza contorni», gli esseri celesti si muovono attraverso il XX secolo furtivi e imprendibili, incuranti delle due guerre mondiali, delle ideologie, e della conclamata morte del divino. Raramente si occupano della Storia, perlopiù continuano il loro mestiere vecchio di millenni, messaggeri troppo umani del l'aldilà, aureolati d'inquietudine.

Ma forse nessun autore del secolo scorso ha saputo evocare l'antico mistero degli spiriti immateriali come Henry Corbin, filosofo e orientalista dalla prosa incalzante e ammaliatrice. Grazie a Corbin, nella cultura europea irrompe l'angeologia iranica. Richiamati in vita dalle antiche pagine dei magi zoroastriani o degli gnostici sciti, gli spiriti messi in scena da Corbin sorprendono il lettore occidentale con costumi e compiti in gran parte diversi da quelli dei loro colleghi biblici. Se nella tradizione ebraica i mal'akim, gli angeli, sono umili servitori del Dio trascendente, esecutori di ordini altrui, gli angeli venuti dall'Iran hanno dignità propria, sono principi conoscitivi, modelli di una compiutezza non solo sovrumana ma addirittura sovradivina.

Il repertorio angelico di Corbin si arricchisce ora di un inedito, tratto dall'archivio del grande studioso conservato a Parigi, e pubblicato nella raffinata traduzione di Raphael Ebgi. Le combat pour l'ange fu composto nel 1950, un anno dopo la stampa del Mito dell'eterno ritorno di Mircea Eliade. E in effetti, il testo corbiniano deve molto alla lezione di Eliade, e al concetto di sacro come liberazione dall'ansia della storia. Non importa, sostiene Corbin, che i dati storici e geografici su Zarathustra siano contraddittori e confusi, e che l'emergere dello zoroastrismo resti avvolto in un alone mitico. Quello che conta è riuscire a interpretare questi racconti come altrettante tappe di una «ierofania». La particolare ierofania zoroastriana si può riassumere, secondo Corbin, in un insegnamento fondamentale: ogni livello di essere ha un proprio angelo, ovvero è chiamato a un grado superiore di perfezione, ad angelicarsi nella luce della propria completezza. Una nostalgia di perfezione, venuta come i magi dal l'Oriente, che non poteva non affascinare il Novecento europeo.

© RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA
Henry Corbin, Le Combat pour l'Ange (Ricerche sulla filosofia mazdea), a cura di Raphael Ebgi, Torre d'Ercole, Travagliato, pagg. 148, € 24,00

The Divine Twin in Late Antiquity

I have in hand a draft copy of an essay that will be of considerable interest to students of Corbin:

"A unus-ambo anthropology: The Divine Twin in the Gospel of Thomas, the Cologne Mani Codex, and Plotinus' Enneads," by Charles M. Stang , Asst. Professor of Early Christian Thought, Harvard Divinity School.

Dr. Stang writes, "A version of this essay was delivered at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. It will appear in a forthcoming volume edited by Kimberley Patton, entitled Gemini and the Sacred: Twins in Religion and Myth (I.B Tauris). This essay is an attempt to sketch out the contours of a new research project on the theme of the divine twin or double, tentatively titled "When You Become Two: The Divine Twin in Late Antiquity." The book owes quite a bit to Corbin's opening two chapters of L'homme lumiere. It will have chapters devoted to the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Thomas, the Hymn of the Pearl, the Cologne Mani Codes (and other Manichean literature), and Plotinus. Perhaps other chapters on Plato (Phaedrus and Symposium) and Hermeticism."

Here are the opening paragraphs of Stang's essay:
 
In 1971, Henry Corbin published a short book by the title of L'homme de lumiere dans le soufisme
iranien. Ostensibly this book explores symbols of light in the writings of several medieval Persian
sufis, but Corbin begins with an exploration of "an innovation in philosophical anthropology" from
antiquity, a notion that "the individual person as such ... has a transcendent dimension at his
disposal," "a counterpart, a heavenly 'partner,' and that [the person's] total structure is that of a biunity,
a unus-ambo." Corbin traces this unus-ambo anthropology through a variety of sources from the
ancient Eastern Mediterranean up to and including the Iranian plateau. An unus-ambo anthropology
suggests that what it means to be properly human is not to be a single, integrated subject - to be
oneself, so to speak - but somehow to be one and two simultaneously. In several of the sources
Corbin considers, such an anthropology is figured as one's encounter with one's divine double or
twin. In other words, these sources imagine that only when one encounters one's divine double or
twin, only when one recognizes that one is and has always been two, does one (now a one-yet-two,
or unus-ambo) become a proper human self.

Among the sources to which Corbin turns is the small body of literature associated with the apostle Judas Thomas, who is said to have been the "twin" (didymus) of Christ - although what "twin" means in this context is unclear. Another source for him is Manichaean literature, wherein it is said that the prophet Mani was twice visited by his divine twin, heavenly companion or counterpart. Yet another is Plotinus' Enneads, where it is said that the self is divided between lower and higher halves. Corbin, I believe, is correct that there is a peculiar anthropology animating these three roughly contemporary corpora. Together these three offer a picture of human selfhood as being properly one and yet two, an anthropology according to which the inauguration of an intimate relationship with the divine is marked by an encounter with one's double or twin. All three offer an anthropology suspicious of simple singularity and easy integration, an alternative anthropology that relies on the figure of the twin to gesture at the baffling coexistence of singularity and duality. In what follows, I will explore this alternative, unus-ambo anthropology by an examination of selections from these three corpora...

[The Cologne Mani Codex reproduced here]

«Mundus imaginalis» Анри Корбен

«Mundus imaginalis» Анри Корбен

Блистательный Анри Корбен.

Блистательный, ибо свет внутренний, свет метафизический – исходит от каждой страницы его книг. Будь это переводы Сухраварди, или теоретические рассуждения о «mundus imaginalis».

«Mundus imaginalis» - призрачная страна «воображаемого», куда нас относит пурпурный архангел, одно крыло которого светлое, другое тёмное. «Воображаемое», или точнее имагинация, это не пустое фантазирование, не измышление чего-то не существующего. Имагинальный мир – место единения, священной взаимности, где божественная (духовная) любовь и человеческая любовь становятся единым целым в существе любящего. Ибо любовь, в конце концов, есть способ познания одного существа другим. Здесь теофании происходят реально, а священные истории, подобные сказанию о Граале, обретают свою истину

Жизнь и труды Корбена были связаны с Востоком. Но то, что именуют Востоком не всегда связано с географическим путешествием. Восток в эзотерической Традиции, это – Исток, Полюс, Накоджа – абад, страна Нигде, место где зарождается Свет Истины. Феномен этого Света был ведом арабским мудрецам – Ибн ‘Араби, Ширази, Сухраварди. Корбен был авторитетнейшим переводчиком их сочинений.

Его фундаментальный труд «История исламской философии» готовится к выходу в издательстве «Феория», а «Terra Foliata» хочет издать – «Циклическое время и исмаилитский гнозис». Пока же, открываем и читаем: «Световой человек в иранском суфизме», или его же «Свет Славы и Святой Грааль».

More on the "New Atheism"

Beyond the New Atheism, by Gary Gutting. Of particular note is the reference to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which sits, alas, largely unread in the pile on my desk. I will finish it. And it deserves to be pointed to here in the context of Corbin's work.

Un Remoto Presente

Un Remoto Presente
Editore: Moretti & Vitali
a cura di Francesco Donfrancesco. pp. 176, nn. ill. b/n, Bergamo Prezzo: 2002. € 16,00

Al centro di questo volume si trova un testo classico di Henry Corbin, Mundus imaginalis, che ha rappresentato uno dei cardini nella formazione del pensiero di James Hillman.

Questi è presente con un suo scritto, Immagine senso, che traccia le linee portanti di un’interpretazione dei sogni coerente con la sua visione. Francesco Donfrancesco confronta la concezione della memoria in Freud e Jung, e introduce il tema generale del volume attraverso l’analisi dei testi dei due maestri e di alcuni sogni.

Venuti, Sacco e Oddo propongono una disamina storica che mette in evidenza gli importanti punti di contatto, rispettivamente, fra l’iconologia di Warburg e il pensiero di Jung e Hillman, e fra il pensiero psicologico di Jung e le correnti vitalistiche della biologia. A questi testi si aggiungono le voci di artisti, come Ruggero Savinio e Margot McLean.

Contents:

Henry Corbin, Mundus imaginalis L’immaginario e l’immaginale
Francesco Donfrancesco, Memoria dell’ignoto
Daniele Chiaffi, Un ritorno dagli Inferi
Paul Kugler, L’eredità dei morti
Avigdor Arikha, Dalla preghiera alla pittura
Francesco Donfrancesco, Incroci
Ruggero Savinio, Immagine e Figura
Daniela Sacco, Le trame intrecciate di Mnemosyne - Jung, Warburg, Hillman in dialogo
Margot McLean, La memoria nelle cose
James Hillman, Immagine senso
Letizia Oddo, Permanenza e trasformazione - L’eredità del pensiero biologico vitalista nella teoria junghiana
Alfred J. Ziegler, Il sogno, l’angoscia e l’afflizione naturale

IISMM: Complément d'informations septembre 2011

Complément d'information septembre 2011

Contemporary Esoterism: International Conference

Contemporary Esoterism: International Conference
Stockholm University, Sweden, August 27-29, 2012

Keynote speakers

Wouter J. Hanegraaff,
Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, 

University of Amsterdam

Christopher Partridge, Religious Studies, Lancaster University

Kocku von Stuckrad, Study of Religion, Groningen University

Deadline for Abstracts: March 30, 2012

Details here