Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis

The volume Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis brings together in English translation three of Henry Corbin’s richest and most complex studies, originally presented at the Eranos conferences of 1951 and 1954 and another conference in 1956. Each of these three relatively early studies is built around a complex, highly creative ‘comparison’ of the phenomenological correspondences between texts (often highly fragmentary) from a vast range of spiritual traditions from late Antiquity (including Manichaenism and the sects of Sassanid Iran) – all ‘gnostic’ in the root Greek sense of that term favoured by Corbin, though not in the narrower historical sense used by most contemporary scholars – and comparable spiritual themes in an equally wide range of Islamic texts eventually preserved in the later Ismaili Shi‘i tradition. The Islamic texts and writers examined here cover many centuries, regions (from Egypt to Central Asia) and radically differing religious and philosophic perspectives, and marvellously illustrate the rich creativity, diversity and assimilative powers of Islamic thought in the early centuries of that civilization. (Despite the richness and complexity of the comparisons developed here, the author is not concerned with proving ‘historical’ connections, but rather the sorts of recurrent, archetypal spiritual inspirations and speculations which were the focus of the Eranos group.) While the comparative, phenomenological method is that popularly associated with Corbin’s close friend, Mircea Eliade, the density, sophistication and dramatic literary intensity of Corbin’s writing are of an entirely different order.