Collected Angel Projects
Photographs & Texts
This collection of project links, individual images and text excerpts are centered around the theme of "Angels." I became fascinated with this theme during the time I was working on my multi-chaptered project "An Imaginary Book" which was inspired by my travels in Turkey and a series of mysterious encounters with Islamic sacred art during my travels there. I discovered the writings of Henry Corbin and Tom Cheetham during my research on Islamic Sacred Art, and through Corbin's many wonderful, challenging books, and Cheetham's insightful books on Corbin's ideas, I came across many references about Angels.
Most of the "Angel" photographs you will be seeing here were undoubtedly inspired by Islamic Sacred Art, Corbin, Cheetham, and my own visionary experience of an angle (no doubt due to Corbin's writings) in Vermont. I have written about it (see my Personal Story) in my multi-chaptered project entitled The Angles (included below).
The individual images I have included here are (for me) "Angel" photographs. The images tend to be anthropomorphic--with two eyes; and often with two wings--and they are, it seems to me, images from the mundus Imaginalis, the Imaginal world, which is Corbin's term referring to the realm of being that exists between the inner and the outer worlds.
The text excerpts included below, and embedded within many of the project links I have provided here, are for me quite provocative and fascinating. They often relate to my fascination with the concept of the Oneness of Being, and the symbolic photograph . . . in the sense that Angels, like true living symbols, provide us humans with a bridge which links us to the interior space of the Heart, or in Corbin's terms, the Imaginal world.
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"Collected Angel Projects" is part of an ongoing series based on the many themes that have emerged within my creative process over the past fifty years or so. You will find many other similar thematic collections on my Welcome Page. The list of themes include Stones, Water, Birds, Snow, Windows, etc. Of course birds are symbolic of spirit, and are the very embodiment of the "Angel archetype," if you will.
From the perspective of the yoga that I practice, everything in the outer world comes from the inside, and everything in the inner world comes from without. In other words, everything--not just Angels--is a manifestation of God's mystery, the Creative Power of the Universe, grace.
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When you see a word that is colored, dark blue, it will probably be hyperlinked, and when you click on the word (or phrase) you will be transported to the blog project relating to the thematic nature of the hyperlinked word. If you are using a desk-top or laptop computer, try clinking on the images to see them in a darker viewing space; clicking on the images twice may enlarge them.
Welcome to my world of Angels. S.F.
The Angelic Nature of the Earth, its Things, its Beings
In Henry Corbin's book Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth he writes about Earth from the perspective of Zorastrinaism, one of the world's oldest religions, and the Mazdean view of the Earth as an Angel. For Corbin, the things of this world must be experienced and understood personally, as a psychic event, as an archetypal image. That is to say, everything in the physical universe--the Earth, and the things and beings of the Earth--has its corresponding spiritual-archetypal, celestial-figurative counterpart: in other words, its Angel.
Corbin writes:
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 the 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 archetypal Images, experienced as so many personal presences. . .
Corbin continues: It is much less the matter of answering the questions concerning essences ("what is it?") than questions concerning . . . ("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 correspond?" Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth
Ta'Wil
from Tom Cheetham's The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
By turning the world inside out, by giving birth in the world to that interiority which is characteristic of the things of the soul . . . we return the hidden dimension to the manifest and uncover the debts that lie just under the surface of the world. ~ For Henry Corbin the bridge between creature and Creator is ta'wil, the transformation of the sensory world into symbols, into open-ended mysteries that shatter, engage, and transform the entire being of the creature. ~ Ta'wil transmutes the world into symbols which by their very nature transcend the distinction between the outer and the inner, the subject and the object, and by interiorizing the cosmos, by revealing the Imago mundi [the Imaginal world], transform and lead the soul beyond the literal understanding of the world to its truth . . . its origin.
Tom Cheetham: All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings
Meta-phor means to “carry over,” and the metaphoric vision of reality sees through the literal appearance of things to the ever-shifting and mysterious Presence that lies behind the daylight Face of things. The ta’wil is both a mode of perception and a mode of being. . . a spiritual unveiling. ~ The ta’wil requires that the literal appearance of things be . . . de-literalized, seen as metaphor. This serves to open the mind and the heart.
Tom Cheetham: The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
It is the deepest purpose of human existence to journey from the outward to the inward and so [as Henry Corbin has written] “return creation to its origin.”
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Turning within is called Yoga. . . It enables
the seeker to go deep into the cave
of his own heart. It shows him
the way to unite heaven
and earth.
Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
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The Angels
Photographs Inspired by the art of Paul Klee
and the writings of Henry Corbin and Tom Cheetham
August -- November 2014
Photographs Inspired by the art of Paul Klee
and the writings of Henry Corbin and Tom Cheetham
August -- November 2014
The Center of Being
Thing-Centered Symmetrical Photographs
Thing-Centered Symmetrical Photographs
January-February, 2016
I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even pure
Soul.
Love has befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me
Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.
Hafiz
THE GIFT
trans. Ladinsky
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even pure
Soul.
Love has befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me
Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.
Hafiz
THE GIFT
trans. Ladinsky
from the project Illuminations
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Tom Cheetham on Rilke's Angel, Corbin & Imagination
In his book After Prophecy Tom Cheetham writes the following about Rilke: Rilke's mystic vision implies a cosmology that denies any gulf between Heaven and Earth--the two are, rather, continuous . . .
Corbin believed that Rilke's Elegies "formulate exactly, literally" the central themes of the Islamic mystic vision, which he so passionately defended. Corbin quotes from a well known letter Rilke wrote [to Witold von Hulewicz] a year before his death: ". . . Our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, 'invisibly,' in us." We must perform a transfiguration of the visible into the invisible.
Cheetham continues: The imagination in us provides the necessary meeting place between this world and the Divine . . . The Angel allows us to perceive all things as suspended between Heaven and Earth in the mundus imaginalis. ~ Rilke perceived all this with startling clarity and sensitivity . . . We are here [as humans, on this earth] in order to be fully present and so, in Corbin's words, able to live "a life in sympathy with beings, capable of giving a transcendent dimension to their being, to their beauty . . ." ~ The angelic function of beings is to liberate us for transcendence. Tom Cheetham, After Prophecy
Henry Corbin on the Earth in the Person of its Angel
In Rilke's letter above, I too was struck by what he wrote about the Earth: . . . in a purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfully earthly consciousness, we must introduce what is here seen and touched into the wider, into the widest orbit. Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole. . . . It is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly." / The earth has no way out other than to become invisible . . .
In Henry Corbin's fascinating book Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth he writes about the Earth in terms of "the person of its Angel":
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.
Now we are prepared to meet Khidr.
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Opening windows
The wall that separates two worlds is an iconostasis. click here One might mean the boards or bricks or the stones. In actuality, the iconostasis is a boundary between the visible and the invisible worlds . . . Iconostasis is vision. Iconostasis is a manifestation of saints and angels--angelophania--a manifest appearance of heavenly witnesses . . . If everyone praying were wholly spiritualized, if everyone praying were truly to see, then there would be no iconostasis other than standing before God Himself, witnessing to Him by their holy countenances and proclaiming His terrifying glory by their sacred words. . . . The iconostasis opens windows in this wall, through whose glass we see what is permanently occurring beyond: the living witnesses to God. Florensky, Iconostasis (this quote is included in the following project on ICONS)The Photograph as ICON
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This "Collection" Project was posted on
my blog's Welcome Page on May 4, 2021
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape blog, which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating from the most recent to those dating back to the 1960's. You will also find on the Welcome Page my resume, contact information . . . and much more.