#tomcheetham

[esowteric]

Alchemy and the Hidden Secret

“Alchemy for [Henry] Corbin is essentially the inner, spiritual work of attaining union between the human soul and its heavenly counterpart within the mysterious ground of the ‘hidden secret’ pointed to by the symbolic image. This is the intermediate place between spirit and matter, the mundus imaginalis, where the spiritual world assumes an objective reality, and where the transmutation of the prima materia of the human psyche into the subtle or spiritual body is the work of an alchemical opus that involves encounter with an angelic presence through the faculty of the active imagination.”

~ Angela Voss, “Becoming an Angel: the mundus imaginalis of Henry Corbin and the Platonic path of self knowledge”.

Image: Water lily. Image description: A white water lily of the genus nymphaea. Image author: Plane777 at English Wikipedia. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

[esowteric]

The Battle for the Soul of the World

“It was [Henry] Corbin's contention that European civilization experienced a "metaphysical catastrophe" as a result of what we might call the Great Disjunction. This was signaled by the final triumph of the Aristotelianism of Averroes over Platonic and neo-Platonic cosmology championed by Avicenna. To the defeat of that cosmology is coupled the disappearance of the anima mundi, the Soul of the World. The catastrophic event that gave rise to modernity is the loss of the soul of the world ... [Corbin] warns us that the history of the West has been the theater for the battle for the soul of the World.”

~ Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel.

“Our western philosophy has been the theater of what we may call the ‘battle for the Soul of the World.’ ... Is it a matter of a battle that has finally been lost, the world having lost its soul, a defeat whose consequences weigh upon our modern visions of the world without compensation? If there has been a defeat, a defeat is still not a refutation.”

~ Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, xiv.”

Image: Nasa earth. Image author: NASA ESA. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.