¹ Indeed the book, which grew out of two papers published in the Eranos Yearbooks of 1955 and 1956, fosters the illusion that one is reading backwards, as it were in the world of Through the Looking Glass, so frequently are later portions required for the explication of earlier ones; in reality the process is more helical than regressive – Corbin himself introduces such imagery in his last chapter, ‘Around the Mystic Ka'aba’ – what one is really doing is gradually narrowing in on the single focus of the author's concern.