Celestial Earth

The celestial Earth is the topographical name henry-corbin gives to the imaginal world when it is approached as a place rather than as a faculty. Where the mundus-imaginalis is the ontological category, the celestial Earth is the geography — its mountains, its cities, its rivers, its light. The term is drawn from Corbin’s Terre céleste et Corps de résurrection (1960, translated as Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth) and appears throughout Alone with the Alone as a synonym for hurqalya.

Shaikhī Shī‘ite theosophy, building on suhrawardi, identifies the celestial Earth as the “Earth created from the surplus clay of Adam” — an Earth continuous with the biblical creation but existing in a subtle mode (Corbin 1969, note to Ch. III). “All the things seen in this world exist in the subtile state of an ‘immaterial matter,’ with their figures, their contours” (Corbin 1969, Alone with the Alone). The celestial Earth is the home of Hermes — “Hermes being the tutelary spirit of all gnosis, from the Hermetic Corpus through Christian Gnosticism, the Sufis, and the Jewish Kabbalah” — and for this reason it is also the “Earth of Resurrection” (Bloom, in Corbin 1969, p. xiii).

The doctrine is load-bearing for the depth tradition because it refuses the modern division between matter and meaning. The spiritual body is not allegorical. The resurrection Earth is not metaphor. Both occupy a real topography — one that the mystic visits in visionary experience, that the alchemist gestures at in the terra lucida of the opus, and that Jung approaches in the late alchemical writings as the caelum. Corbin’s celestial Earth is the Shī‘ite and Shaikhī form of the same intuition: that the soul has a country.

Relationships

• henry-corbin
• hurqalya
• mundus-imaginalis
• man-of-light
• caelum

Primary sources

• corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)
• corbin-man-light-iranian (Corbin 1971)