Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth
There remains, of course, a certain lack of precision in Fechner’s vision.
He seems to have identified the face of the earth,
haloed by the spring light, with the actual effigy of the Angel,
when in fact the telluric glory is the liturgical creation, the
hierurgy of that Earth Angel whose features are perceived as a
glorified human image.
But such exact perception presupposes the perfect exercise of this faculty, the degradation and neglect of which is exactly what Fectner deplores.
And this is the second point to remember.
The fact that the perception of the Earth as an Angel can be classed as imaginary, as unreal, signifies and indicates that this way of perceiving and meditating the Earth is, on the contrary, linked with a psycho-spiritual structure which we have to rediscover in order to bring out the value of the means of knowledge it offers.
Essentially this mode of perception implies an intellectual faculty that is not limited to the sole use of conceptual abstraction nor to the sensory perception of physical data.
That is why Fechner’s avowal, to the very extent that it is a valid reminder of the Mazdean angelology, calls on us to link together two equally inseparable questions: that of the Mazdean perception of the Earth, as it arises in the perspective of an angelology, and correlatively, that of the mode of apprehension of beings and
things which it presupposes and which differs entirely from the only one acknowledged by our positive science and, incidentally, by our geography.
To come face to face with the Earth not as a conglomeration of physical facts but in the person of its Angel is an essentially psychic event which can “take place” neither in the world of Impersonal abstract concepts nor on the plane of mere sensory data.
The Earth has to be perceived not by the senses, but through a primordial Image and, inasmuch as this Image carries the features of a personal figure, it will prove to “symbolize with” the very Image of itself which the soul carries in its innermost depths.
The perception of the Earth Angel will come about in an intermediate universe which is neither that of the Essences of philosophy nor that of the sensory data on which the work of positive science is based, but which is a universe of archetype Images, experienced as so many personal presences.
In recapturing the intentions on which the constitution of this universe depend, in which the Earth is represented, meditated, and encountered in the person of its Angel, we discover that it is much less a matter of answering questions concerning essences (“what is it?”) than questions concerning person~ (“who is it?” or “to whom does it correspond?”), for example, who is the Earth? who are the waters, the plants, the mountains? or, to whom do they corre~pond?
The answer to these questions causes an Image to appear and this Image invariably corresponds to the presence of a certain state.
This is why we have to recapture here the phenomenon of the Earth as an angelophany or mental apparition of its Angel in the fundamental angelology of Mazdaism as a whole, in that which gives its cosmology and its physics a structure such that they include an answer to the question, “who?”
To forestall any misunderstanding and make clear the full significance of the term angelology, which we require in order to think the Mazdean hierophany of the Earth, we have also to remember this.
Angelology is one of the characteristic features of Zoroastrian Mazdaism, for which reason it can neither be reduced to an abstract and monolithic type of monotheism, nor invalidated by what people have tried to interpret as a return to the “ancient gods,” or a restoration of pre-Zoroastrian polytheism.
A spiritual morphology, the aim of which is to restore and to valorize effectively lived devotion, demands that we comprehend the canonical Avesta as a whole, or at least that part of it which has reached us, namely, the ritual which preserves in its center the Psalms ( Giithas ) of Zarathustra, and is completed ·by the commentaries and traditions in middle Iranian (Pahlavi) and in Persian.
Here again, when the believer is reciting his Bible or when the liturgy is being celebrated, the objections justified by historical stratifications would appear to be wide of the mark.
In always wanting to know “where” things “come from” one wanders about finally in vain pursuit of a succession of hypotheses.
·If, on the other hand, we ask ourselves, “to what does this lead?” the soul, on being questioned, can at least give us irrefutable evidence of what it wished.
The soul cannot be explained;
lt h1 tlu! aoul itaelf which is the principle of every explanation and the key to it.
This is why, for many centuries, Mazdean piety has recognized the equivalent of its Y azatas (the “Adorable Ones”) in the figures of Angels and Archangels (firishtagan in Persian).
Of course, their ontological status is quite different from that of the biblical or Qur’anic angels; they are neither servants nor messengers, but rather figures homologous to the Dii-Angeli of Proclus.
On this point I am convinced that Neoplatonism (which it has long been fashionable to disparage) was infinitely closer to Iranian angelology, and to a better understanding of the theurgical and demiurgical role of its heavenly entities
than the philsophical improvisations in which religious historians are apt to indulge when they are short of categories.
We have an exact tradition to follow if we wish to understand, for example, what the Angels of the Earth proclaim to Mazdean piety. ~Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Page 3-6
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