Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran

Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran is a work by Henry Corbin (1960).

Core claims

• Corbin’s central achievement is not a history of Iranian religion but the philosophical recovery of an ontological register—the mundus imaginalis—whose disappearance from Western thought after Averroism left the psyche without a legitimate epistemic organ between sense perception and abstract intellect.
• The book demonstrates that the “heavenly twin” or celestial counterpart (Daēnā, Fravarti, Perfect Nature, qarīn) is not a mythological curiosity but a structural invariant of individuation that resurfaces identically across Mazdean, Mandean, Manichaean, Ismailian, and Sufi anthropologies—making it the Iranian equivalent of what Jung calls the Self, though Corbin refuses the reduction to intrapsychic process.
• By grounding the resurrection body in the imaginal rather than the physical or the purely intellectual, Corbin dismantles the Western binary of literal versus allegorical and replaces it with a third hermeneutic mode—ta’wīl—that is simultaneously cognitive, visionary, and ontologically creative.

Related questions

• How does Corbin’s concept of the Fravarti as pre-eternal celestial archetype challenge or deepen Edinger’s ego-Self axis as described in Ego and Archetype, particularly regarding whether individuation is an intrapsychic process or an ontological reunion?
• In what ways does Corbin’s insistence on the mundus imaginalis as a cognitive organ—distinct from both sense and intellect—parallel or contradict Hillman’s critique of monotheistic literalism in Re-Visioning Psychology, given that Corbin retains a vertical metaphysics Hillman explicitly rejects?
• How might Corbin’s account of the “midnight sun” and the soul’s ascent through darkness toward the Emerald Rock illuminate Jung’s treatment of the nigredo and the aurora consurgens in Mysterium Coniunctionis, and where do their frameworks fundamentally diverge?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/corbin-spiritual-body-celestial-earth/

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