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Corbin, Henry - The landscape of Xvarnah
Identifier
006324
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth – Henry Corbin [translated by Nancy Pearson] 1977
Just as a landscape of Xvarnah cannot be expressed by representative art, but has essentially to do with symbolic art, so this map making does not lead to reproducing the outlines of a continent. Rather, it shapes an instrument for meditation that makes it possible mentally to reach the centre, the medium mundi, or rather to take position there directly. Only a visionary geography can be the scene of visionary events, because it itself takes no part in them; plants, water, mountains are transmuted into symbols, that is, perceived by the organ of an image which itself is the presence of a visionary state…………….
This ‘Imagination’ does not construct something unreal, but unveils the hidden reality; its action is, in short, that of the ta’wil, the spiritual exegesis practised by all the Spirituals of Islam, whose special quality is that of alchemical meditation; to occultate the apparent, to manifest the hidden. It is in this intermediary world that those known as the ‘urufa’, the mystical Gnostics, have meditated tirelessly, gnosis here being taken to mean that perception that grasps the object not in its objectivity, but as a sign, an intimation, an announcement that is finally the soul’s annunciation to itself.