The Black Light

Henry Corbin:

"The black light reveals the very secret of being, which can only be as made-to-be; all beings have a twofold face, a face of light and a black face. The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that the common run of men perceive Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty. The totality of their being is their daylight face and their night face" ^[1]

A theophanic conceptual description of creation by John Scotus Eriugena:

“For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing other than the apparition of the non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the intellection of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the beyond-essence, the form of the formless, the measure of the immeasurable, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of the placeless, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both conceived and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of memory and which escape the blade of the mind.” ^[2]

Within This Darkness:Incarnation, Theophany and the Primordial Revelation by Tom Cheetham

^[1] Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1994, p. 112-113.

^[2] Quoted in Sells, Michael, 1994, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, University of Chicago Press, p. 44.