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, 1954, and another 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, favored 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.