this first chapter orbits around a twentieth-century French philosopher and historian of Iranian mystical literature (Shi‘i, Ismaili, and Zoroastrian) by the name of Henry Corbin (1903–1978). Still on the surface, it traces a particular lineage of impossible thinking through Corbin back to the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, to the Swiss professor of psychology Théodore Flournoy, and, ultimately, to the American psychologist and philosopher William James and his good friend, the British classicist Frederic Myers. This is a lineage that thinks and writes in French, German, and English. It is
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