From Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (trans. Nancy
Pearson, Princeton University Press, 1989, pps. 71-72).
"...That is why the progression, which this mode of thought makes it
possible for us to conceive, is not a horizontal linear evolution,
but an ascent from cycle to cycle, from one octave to a higher
octave. A few pages from the same Shaikh, which have been translated
here, illustrate this. The spiritual history of humanity since Adam
is the cycle of prophecy following the cycle of cosmogony; but though
the former follows in the train of the latter, it is in the nature of
a reversion, a return and reascent to the pleroma. This has a gnostic
flavor to be sure, but that is exactly what it means to 'see things
in Hurqalya.' It means to see man and his world essentially in a
vertical direction. The Orient-origin, which orients and magnetizes
the return and reascent, is the celestial pole, the cosmic North,
the 'emerald rock' at the summit of the cosmic mountain of Qaf, in
the very place where the world of Hurqalya begins; so it is not a
region situated East on the maps, not even those old maps that place
the East at the top, in place of the North. The meaning of man and
the meaning of his world are conferred upon them by this polar
dimension, and not by a linear, horizontal and one-dimensional
evolution, that famous 'sense of history' which nowadays has been
taken for granted, even though the terms of reference on which it is
based remain entirely hypothetical.
Moreover, the paradise of Yima in which are preserved the most
beautiful of beings who will repopulate a transfigured world, namely,
the Var that preserves the seed of the resurrection bodies, is
situated in the North. The Earth of Light, the Terra Lucida of
Manicheism, like that of Mazdeism [Zoroastrianism], is also situated
in the direction of the cosmic North. In the same way, according to
the mystic Abd al-Karim Jili, the 'earth of the souls' is a region in
the far North, the only one not to have been affected by the
consequences of the fall of Adam. It is the abode of the 'men of the
Invisible,' ruled by the mysterious prophet Khizr (Khadir). A
characteristic feature is that its light is that of the 'midnight
sun,' since the evening prayer is unknown there, dawn rising before
the sun has set. And here it might be useful to look at all the
symbols that converge toward the paradise of the North, the souls'
Earth of Light and castle of the Grail...."