Cyclical Time & Ismaili Gnosis

Book excerpt: First published in 1983. 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.