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Henry Corbin - Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth - Zoroastrian cosmology
Identifier
022297
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth – Henry Corbin [translated by Nancy Pearson] 1977
The Mazdean vision divides thinkable totality into an infinite height of Light in which there dwells for all eternity, Ohrmazd (the Avestan Ahura Mazda), the Lord Wisdom; and an unfathomable abyss of Darkness that conceals the Antagonist, the Counterpower of negation, disintegration, and death, Ahriman (the Avestan Angra Mainyu).
Between the Power of Light and the Counterpower of Darkness there is no common ground, no compromise of coexistence, but a merciless battle of which our Earth, together with all visible creation, is the field, until the consummation of the Aeon, the apokatastasis or ‘restoration’ which will put an end to the ‘mixture’ by the separation that will cast the demonic counterpowers back into the abyss.
To be sure, this view of things is by no means the childish concept to which, as we frequently see nowadays, certain writers, pressed for time or ill informed, reduce something they believe to be now Mazdaism, now Manicheism, describing it as incomplete and rudimentary. This view has nothing at all to do with professing that the beings who surround us are either ‘white’ or ‘black’. The state in which we live is precisely one of ‘mixture’. What is in question is a certain way of understanding this mixture and a way of being toward it, which differs profoundly from that which is inspired in us by our ready made and rarely challenged judgements.