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Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth – Henry Corbin [translated by Nancy Pearson] 1977

Elburz is…. the cosmic mountain… It is “the resplendent mountain where there is neither night not darkness, nor sickness with a thousand deaths, nor infection created by the demons”. It is the sea of divine palaces created by Archangels. And the other mountains all originate from it, as if from a gigantic tree growing and thrusting out roots from which spring other trees. The mountain system thus forms a network in which each peak is a knot..........

...........There is in Eran-Vej a mountain called Hukairya, a mountain which is as high as the stars and from which pours down the torrent of the heavenly waters of Arvi Sura Anahita, the high, the sovereign, the immaculate; a torrent possessing a Xvarnah as great as all the waters together which flow upon the earth. There it is that the abode of the goddess of the heavenly waters is imagined. She thus appears as the paradisal source of the water of life. Marvellous plants and trees grow in or around this wellspring, and above all the white Haoma, ‘Gaokarena’ of which it is said ‘He who partakes of it will become immortal’. That is why the Elixir of immortality will be made from this at the moment of the final transfiguration. The tree which cures all ills and in which are deposited the seeds of all plants grows next to the white Haoma. Indeed the fertility of all beings in all their forms depends on the goddess Ardvi Sura. However, she is by no means the ‘Terra Mater’ after the manner of Cybele, for example, she is far more like a virgin of the waters, pure, chaste, immaculate, recalling the Greek Artemis..................

In Eran-vej, close by the mountain of Hukairya, there is a mountain of the dawns – Ushidarena . The liturgical chant to the Angel Zamyat opens with a strophe in praise of this mountain of the dawns. It is made of ruby, of the substance of heaven; it is situated in the middle of the cosmic sea Vourukasha, into which it pours the waters it receives from Hukairya. It is the first mountain to be lighted up by the aural fires, …, it is the receptacle, the treasury of the dawns and likewise that which gives intelligence to men. It is said that the mountain first lighted up by the rays of the dawn also enlightens the intelligence, since dawn and intelligence are one.............

Another high mountain, the Chakad-I-Daitik (the peak of judgment) completes this same landscape of individual eschatology and is also situated in Eran-vej, the middle of the world. From its summit springs the Bridge of Chinvat, at the entrance to which takes place the meeting of the soul either with its heavenly ‘I’, or on the contrary, the terrible apparition that reflects nothing but the ‘I’, mutilated and disfigured by every kind of ugliness, cut off from the celestial archetype. So this is the situation, above all others, when the Imago Terrae, transfiguring the outer material data, shows the perfect soul the places and symbolic landscapes of its antiquated eternity, in which it encounters its own heavenly image. The perfect soul crosses the Bridge of Chinvat by the impetus of its spiritual flight and the power of its actions, it moves on towards the stars, then to the Moon, then to the Sun and then to the Infinite lights.

............none of these – the dawns blazing on the mountain tops, the torrents of spring water, the plants of immortality growing in them – belong to the empirical earth, accessible to the neutral verification of sensory perception.