Hurqalya

The imaginal geography of the resurrection. In the Iranian Sufi tradition Corbin recovers, Hurqalya is “the alter­nate Earth, [which] is an Imaginative universe that stands between two worlds, our sensory Earth and the intelligible universe of the Angels” (Corbin, Alone with the Alone 1969). Suhrawardī locates it as the site “where theophanies and theophanic visions take place.” Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’ī calls it the earth of the resurrection body.

Hurqalya is not a metaphor. It is the specific latitude and longitude of the mundus-imaginalis as it is inhabited and traversed in visionary experience. It has mountains, rivers, cities. It is encountered — not constructed. Corbin’s insistence on this concreteness is the antidote to every reading of the imaginal that would reduce it to allegory or to mental projection.

For Sebastian, Hurqalya names what the tradition holds: that the soul’s visionary encounters occur in a real country, with its own topography, laws, and organ of perception. The dream, the vision, the archetypal image take place there — not in the brain, not in the mind, but in the middle earth between sense and intellect that Iranian Sufism, Zoroastrian angelology, and the Hermetic tradition together mapped.

Relationships

• mundus-imaginalis
• theophanic-imagination
• visionary-experience
• corbin-spiritual-body-celestial-earth

Primary sources

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