The Man of Light

The figure of the inner guide as a luminous person — the shahid (witness), the heavenly twin, the Perfect Nature of Hermetism. Corbin’s The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism traces this figure from the Zoroastrian Daēnā, through the Nous of Hermes and the Shepherd of Hermas, through the Manichean Heavenly Twin and the fravarti, to the shahid of Najm Kubrā and the “oriental theosophy” (ḥikmat al-Ishrāq) of Suhrawardī (Corbin, Man of Light 1971).

The Man of Light is the luminous counterpart of the seeking soul. He is the pole by which the soul orients itself; he is the witness who makes the soul’s vision visible to itself. “According to whether the soul in vision sees it as light, or on the contrary ‘sees’ only darkness, the soul itself testifies, by its vision, for or against itself” (Corbin 1971). The figure is simultaneously the “first Intelligence, the archangel Logos” and “the human soul itself as the light of consciousness rising over the Darkness of the subconscious.”

The Man of Light is a structural concept in depth psychology even though it lacks a direct Jungian vocabulary. It prefigures and parallels what Jung names the self and daimon, but it holds a specifically luminous, angelic register that Corbin refused to collapse into the psychological.

Relationships

• self
• daimon
• mundus-imaginalis
• theophanic-imagination

Primary sources

• corbin-man-light-iranian (Corbin 1971)