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Henry Corbin – Alone with the Alone

It is not without reason that the iconographic method here followed has been compared to the Iranian representations of paradise ….. the iconography of this Iranian motif par excellence figures an enclosure planted with trees, hortus conclusus, at the centre of which (centre of the world) stands a pavilion, which here seems to have its correspondence in the Ka'aba

The iconographic method embodied in this image calls for the following brief remark, in reference to the contrast of which we here take it as a symbol.

There is not, as in classical perspective, a foreground behind which the secondary levels recede in foreshortening …. AII the elements are represented in their real dimensions (in the  present), in each case perpendicularly to the axis of the viewer’s vision. The viewer is not meant to immobilize himself at a particular point enjoying the privilege of  ‘presentness’ and to raise his eyes from this fixed point; he must raise himself toward each of the elements represented.

Contemplation of the image becomes a mental itinerary, an inner accomplishment; the image fulfills the function of a mandala.  Because each of the elements is presented not in its proper dimension but being that same dimension, to contemplate them is to enter into a multidimensional world, to effect the passage of the ta'wil through the symbols.

And the whole forms a unity of qualitative time, in which past and future are simultaneously in the present.

This iconography does not correspond to the perspectives of the historical consciousness; it does respond to the "perspective" by which the disciple of Khidr orients himself, and which permits him, through the symbolic rite of circumambulation, to attain to the "centre of the world."