Occultation enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily through Henry Corbin’s sustained phenomenological engagement with Sufi theosophy, where it names not mere concealment but an ontological condition structurally twinned with epiphany. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s system, as Corbin illuminates it, occultation (the state of the batin, the hidden) and manifestation (zuhur) are rhythmic poles of a continuous divine self-disclosure: Creation itself is the passage from the state of occultation or potency to luminous, manifest existence, a passage enacted and re-enacted at every instant through theophanic Imagination. The term thus carries cosmological, psychological, and mystical weight simultaneously — it is not privation but a positive mode of the divine real, the reservoir from which theophanies perpetually issue. Corbin’s index entries in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism place occultation in explicit dialectical pairing with epiphany, anchored within cycles of prophecy and walayat. A secondary, sharply divergent usage appears in Campbell’s reading of Nietzsche on Socrates, where occultation designates pathological suppression — the monstrous occultation of the mystical faculty. These two registers — cosmic-generative and clinical-diagnostic — define the conceptual poles around which the library’s deployments of this term orbit, making occultation a productive site for examining the relationship between hiddenness, revelation, imagination, and psychological wholeness.
Thus Creation is Epiphany (tajallī), that is, a passage from the state of occultation or potency to the luminous, manifest, revealed state; as such, it is an act of the divine, primordial Imagination.
Corbin establishes occultation as the pre-manifest ontological state from which all creation emerges through divine theophanic Imagination, making it structurally inseparable from epiphany.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
creation is Epiphany (tajallz), that is, a passage from the state of occultation or potency to the luminous, manifest, revealed state; as such, it is an act of the divine, primordial Imagination.
A parallel formulation confirming that occultation names the potency-state that precedes every act of divine creative manifestation.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
the Breath of the Divine Compassion (Nafas Rahmani), which liberates the divine Names still confined in the occultation of their latent existence, this Compassion which makes itself into the substance of the forms whose being it puts into the imperative
Corbin shows that occultation is the latent mode of the divine Names, from which they are liberated only by the Breath of Compassion, linking occultation directly to the cosmogony of theophanic names.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
Cycle: of epiphany, of occultation, 156 n. 116; of Initiation, 149 n.52; of initiatic growth, 125; of prophecy, 12, 54, 125, 134-135; of the walayat, 134
The index entry explicitly pairs occultation with epiphany as co-constitutive cycles embedded within the structures of prophecy, initiation, and walayat in Iranian Sufism.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
what his case in fact represents is a monstrous occultation of the mystical faculty; so that Socrates must be viewed as the specific pattern of the non-mystic, in whom the logical facul
Campbell, following Nietzsche, deploys occultation in a clinical-diagnostic register to denote the pathological suppression of the mystical faculty, inverting its cosmological valence into a psychological deficit.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis
when He hides in one, He manifests Himself in another. Created Being is the manifested, diversified, successive, and evanescent forms, which have their substance not in their fictitious autonomy but in the Being that is manifested in them and by them.
Corbin articulates the dynamic alternation between concealment and manifestation that underlies the doctrine of occultation, showing that the hidden divine persists as the ontological ground of all manifest forms.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
This Imagination is subject to two possibilities, since it can reveal the Hidden only by continuing to veil it. It is a veil; this veil can become so opaque as to imprison us and catch us in the trap of idolatry.
The passage extends the logic of occultation into the psychology of Imagination, showing that the veil between hiddenness and revelation can become either a liberating transparency or an imprisoning opacity.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
it is black light and the abscondity of pure Essence, the night of unknowingness and of unknowableness, and yet luminous night, since it is at the same time the theophany of the absconditum in the infinite multitude of its theophanic forms
Corbin’s phenomenology of black light renders the Deus absconditus as a form of luminous occultation — hidden pure Essence that simultaneously self-discloses through innumerable theophanic forms.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
the initial idea of Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystic theosophy and of all related theosophies is that the Creation is essentially a theophany (tajalli). As such, creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination.
By grounding creation entirely in theophanic Imagination, Corbin implicitly frames occultation as the necessary prior condition to every creative act, reinforcing its structural primacy in Ibn ‘Arabi’s system.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
If they remain hidden, this concealment indicates a lack, a preponderance of the dark nature. Furthermore, they may appear bigger or smaller; more frequently or less: all these variations correspond to an excess or a deficit on the scales
Najm Kobra’s doctrine of photisms treats the concealment of inner light as a diagnostic indicator of spiritual deficit, translating the cosmological logic of occultation into a fine-grained psychology of soul-states.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
The light is in itself invisible, a darkness to our intellect. This may be, I suggest, part of what mystics mean when they say that God is everywhere visible and nowhere visible
McGilchrist’s Cusanian meditation on the invisibility of light as the ground of all seeing provides a philosophical analogue to the Corbin-Ibn ‘Arabi doctrine of occultation as the hidden condition of all manifestation.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The light is in itself invisible, a darkness to our intellect. This may be, I suggest, part of what mystics mean when they say that God is everywhere visible and nowhere visible
A duplicate passage reaffirming the apophatic principle that the ground of all visibility is itself an occultation, a darkness that subtends rather than negates the manifest.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The totality symbolized by the ‘midnight sun’ is the Deus absconditus and the Angel Logos, or, in terms of Shi’ite gnosis, the pole, the Imam, which brings light into the night of the inner world.
Corbin’s figure of the Deus absconditus as midnight sun situates occultation within the symbolic geography of the celestial pole and the esoteric doctrine of the Hidden Imam.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971aside
creation signifies nothing less than the Manifestation (ẓuhūr) of the hidden (bāṭin) Divine Being in the forms of beings: first in their eternal hexeity, then—by virtue of a renewal, a recurrence that has been going on from moment to moment since pre-eternity—in their sensuous forms.
The passage articulates the ontological structure underlying occultation by defining creation as the perpetual emergence of the hidden divine into sensuous form through recurrent renewal.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside