Polar Luminary

The polar luminary is Corbin‘s English rendering of the Ishraqi-Sufi concept of the pole of light — the qutb of luminous being toward which the seeker orients in the spiritual ascent — as articulated by Suhrawardi in the Hikmat al-Ishraq and elaborated by Najm al-Din Kubra and the later Iranian Sufi tradition. The polar luminary is the light-form of the soul’s own Guide — the figure Corbin calls the man-of-light — who appears at the north of the inner cosmos as the orienting pole of the spiritual voyage.

The concept belongs to the Sufi cosmology of hurqalya — the imaginal world of visionary experience that stands between the sensible world of bodies and the intelligible world of pure forms — and it specifies the structural function of the Guide figure across the Ishraqi-Sufi literature: not a teacher in the ordinary sense but the luminous presence toward which the soul orients itself, by whose gravitational pull the spiritual ascent is possible. For the Seba lineage, the polar luminary is the Islamic-mystical form of what Jung articulates as the Self as inner orienting center. See corbin-man-light-iranian and hurqalya.

Relationships

• suhrawardi
• man-of-light
• hurqalya