The Seba library treats Sohravardi in 8 passages, across 1 author (including Corbin, Henry).
Sohravardi dramatizes the search for this experience and its attainment in a complete short work: a visionary recital, a spiritual autobiography entitled Recital of the Occidental Exile.
Corbin identifies Sohravardi’s ‘Recital of the Occidental Exile’ as the paradigmatic literary enactment of the soul’s gnostic drama of estrangement and return to its luminous origin.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
Both the Arabic text and the paraphrase in Persian were published in vol. II of our Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques of Shihaboddin Yahya Sohravardi… we have published a translation into French of the whole cycle of Sohravardi’s mystical recitals.
Corbin anchors his scholarly treatment of Sohravardi through his own editorial and translatory work on the complete cycle of Sohravardi’s mystical recitals, establishing them as the primary textual basis for Illuminationist depth-psychology.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
it is because the universe of spiritual beings postulated by both of them is not on the scale of the multitudes of the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, the ‘infinite Lights’ on which Sohravardi’s meditation was fixed.
Corbin argues that Sohravardi’s visionary apperception transcends Ptolemaic and Peripatetic frameworks by opening onto a suprasensory cosmology of infinite lights that ground the soul’s spiritual orientation.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
with Sohravardi’s commentators (Shahrazori and Ibn Kammuna), we recognize the mundus imaginalis, the autonomous world of the archetype-Figures, the Earth of Hurqalya sheltered by the battlements of the Throne.
Sohravardi’s commentatorial tradition is invoked to identify the mundus imaginalis — the intermediary world of archetypal figures — as the cosmological space encountered by the soul in visionary ascent.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
The same theme is fundamental in Sohravardi and his great commentator, Molla Sadra Shirazi: spiritual realities must be observed in a proper manner, just as material realities call for an appropriate method of observation.
Corbin establishes a methodological principle shared by Sohravardi and Molla Sadra — that spiritual realities demand their own mode of perception — which underpins the Ishrāqī epistemology of inner vision.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
the microcosmic temple, called by the Ishraqiyun the ‘temple of light’ (haykal al-nur), the human organism with its seven centers or subtle organs: the seven latifa (infra VI, 1), or inner Heavens.
The Ishrāqī school founded by Sohravardi supplies the conceptual framework of the ‘temple of light,’ aligning microcosmic subtle anatomy with a cosmological structure of ascent.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
hikmat al-Ishraq, see ‘oriental’ theosophy
The index entry cross-referencing Sohravardi’s Illuminationist philosophy (hikmat al-Ishraq) with ‘oriental theosophy’ signals how Corbin’s lexicon systematically integrates Sohravardi’s school into a broader framework of esoteric geography.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971aside
Sages of ancient Persia, 8
The index locates the ‘Sages of ancient Persia’ — the pre-Islamic lineage Sohravardi claimed to revive — within Corbin’s synthetic account of Iranian spirituality.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971aside