The Prayer of the Heliotrope

Can plants pray? I wish to introduce two philosophers, one ancient and one modern, who thought that they can and do, and to explore why they thought so and what they thought was at stake in the question. The two philosophers are Proclus (c. 412–485) and Henry Corbin (1903–1978). Those who today debate plant sentience and intelligence (or, if you prefer, signaling and communication) often seek to identify the physical structures of plants that might support these faculties. Our two philosophers follow a different path, because for both of them prayer is not a faculty seated in a structure, but rather a simple fact of being: to be (esse) is to pray (orare). The significance, then, is not in the fact that plants, rather than, say, stones, pray, because each and every being prays—angels, daemons, humans, animals, plants, fungi, and even stones (or however else we might classify beings). Rather, what is at stake in the question of whether plants pray is what we can witness, whether and how we might contemplate a particular plant in prayer and so better participate in the sympathetic cosmos of which we are already a part. In other words, how might attuning to plants make us better members of what Corbin calls a prayerful “community of essence”?

Proclus was a prodigious pagan philosopher, a towering figure in the history of Greek philosophy whose influence on the metaphysics and mysticism of the Abrahamic religions can hardly be overstated. He was the head of the Platonic Academy in Athens—the diadochus, or successor, of Plato himself—for an astonishing 50 years in the fifth century. Among his surviving works is a very short text, which has come to be called On the Hieratic Art according to the Greeks.¹ It is probably an excerpt from a longer work that has not survived.² “Hieratic” derives from the Greek adjective hieros, meaning “filled with or manifesting divine power”; as a substantive, to hieron means “the holy” or “the sacred.” The adjective hieratic (hieratikos) denotes one who is charged with the holy (to hieron), and so is priestly or sacerdotal.³ The Greeks’ hieratic art is a technē, that is, a craft or skill. More specifically, in this case, it refers to theurgy (theourgia, or “divine work”), a theory and practice of working with gods and other divine beings that was popular (but controversial) in philosophical circles from the third to the sixth century.⁴ 

According to Proclus, the hieratic art of theurgy depends on there being a “sympathy” (sympatheia) at work in the cosmos, a subtle connective tissue. It binds all apparent things to one another and to “invisible powers.” An infinite nesting of everything in everything else: As Proclus wrote, “all things are included in all things,” the first in the last, the last in the first. This sympathy is the foundation for the hieratic art and it is expressed in “chains” (seirai; singular: seira) or sequences of correspondences. For Proclus, the ultimate and ineffable source of everything—the One—emanates a host of henads or “ones,” who in turn emanate and preside over chains of beings, ranging from the celestial to the terrestrial, from the ethereal to the earthly. These henads are gods, “one-gods,” if you will permit a paradoxical combination of the singular and the plural. There is no one great chain of being but rather a divine chainmail of cosmic correspondences.

What has any of this to do with plants? According to Proclus, the sympathetic arrangement of the seen and unseen is best seen in a certain plant, the heliotrope, so-called because its flowers turn (trepein) to follow the sun (helios).⁵ Today, Heliotropium refers to a genus of plants in which clusters of flowers (called “inflorescences”) turn to face the sun. Hundreds of species of Heliotropium are known across the world. Although heliotrope is often translated as “sunflower,” the common sunflower (Helianthus annuus), native to the Americas, is not a proper heliotrope: its flowering head is fixed in one direction, typically East. Proclus would presumably have known a variety of heliotropes native to Greece and Asia Minor. He would also have known the myth of the heliotrope, a myth most fully preserved in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The nymph Clytie was in love with the god Helios, and he, for a time, with her. But he eventually spurned her, and in despair she sat naked on the ground for nine days, gazing longingly at her beloved. Eventually, her limbs became roots, her trunk a stem, and her face a purple flower, a heliotrope: “She turns, always, toward the sun, though her roots hold her fast, and, altered, loves unaltered.”⁶

There is no evidence Proclus knew the work of Ovid, but he certainly knew the myth of Clytie. For him the heliotrope is indeed part of the sun god’s chain (seira). The sun is the henad or one-god who presides over a chain that includes the heliotrope and other plants such as the lotus, palm, and laurel, but also animals such as the cock and the lion, and again, even stones.⁷ All of the beings in any chain pray to their respective one-god and in doing so pray to the One who is beyond henads and beyond being: “All things pray according to their own order, and recite hymns to the leaders of all the chains either intellectually, or logically, or naturally, or sensibly,” Proclus wrote.⁸ Plants pray sensibly (aisthētōs), he believed, so if you have ears to hear, you can listen to the prayer of the heliotrope: “If anyone was able to hear it striking the air during its turning around, he would have been aware of it presenting to the king through this sound the hymn that a plant can sing.”⁹ Look to the heliotrope and learn to listen to a plant’s prayer. Sense its sessile song.

What will be revealed is a cobweb of correspondences, in which you can pluck one silver string and sense the vibration travel up and down the chain, toward and away from the web’s center. To work these strings is to practice the hieratic art: You can see stars in stones, planets in plants, ether in the earth, and vice versa—“the sympathy of things here to things there.”¹⁰ Consider the lotus, its flower opening and closing with the rising and setting of the sun: “So, how does it differ when people open or close mouths and lips to hymn the sun, from when the lotus folds and unfolds its petals? For the lotus has these [petals] instead of the mouth, and its hymn is a natural one.”¹¹ If it is a surprise to see that plants have mouths, what of stones having lungs? “But really,” Proclus insists, “it is possible to see the stones breathing in under the influences of the luminaries.”¹² When you see stones breathe, you are practicing the hieratic art.

Over a millennium before Proclus saw a stone breathe, the philosopher Thales of Miletus is reported to have said that stones have souls.¹³ A soul is something that moves (kinētikon), always itself (intransitive), and sometimes something else (transitive). If a magnet moves (kinei) iron, then it must have a soul. And if something as seemingly inert as a stone can be seen to move something else it must have a soul, and if even a stone has soul, then everything must have one. Just as the heliotrope shows us that all things pray according to their own order, the magnet shows us that all things are ensouled in their own order too, that all things move and are on the move. Thales is also famous for having proclaimed (but not explained) that “all things are full of gods” (panta plerē theōn einai).¹⁴ Proclus borrows this proclamation: In a cosmos composed of chains of correspondences, it is gods all the way down, and up.¹⁵ Only the empty space at the center of the web is not full of gods. It is not a thing such that it could ever be full, either of a god or of anything else; it’s an emptiness that spills over into being, a space in which gods and beings are born.

Henry Corbin was a French philosopher of religion, a scholar of Islam and pre-Islamic Iran, and professor of Islamic Studies at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études. He is often remembered today, along with Mircea Eliade and Gershom Scholem, as one of the three principal intellectuals active in the postwar Eranos seminars, held every summer on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Ascona, Switzerland.¹⁶ Like Eliade and Scholem, Corbin’s writings were influential across various fields in the 1960s and ’70s, especially in the Anglophone world, thanks to English translations of some of his major works made possible by the Bollingen Foundation.¹⁷ He is perhaps most famous for his work on the Islamic philosophers Avicenna (980–1037), Suhrawardi (1154–1191), and Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), and for recovering Islam’s interest in what he calls the mundus imaginalis or “imaginal world,” a realm between sense perception and pure intellection, a realm of the soul and symbol, and the realm in which we each meet our angelic guides, who usher us into higher states of being and knowing.¹⁸

In 1955, Corbin wrote a long piece for the Eranos Jahrbuch (annual publication) that would eventually be incorporated into his brilliant but controversial study of the great theosophist Ibn ‘Arabi, a book now known to English readers as Alone with the Alone.¹⁹ In his introduction Corbin meditates on Proclus’s On the Hieratic Art according to the Greeks and the prayer of the heliotrope. He extends Proclus’s account in three interesting directions. First, he highlights but modifies Proclus’s angelology. Proclus’s system of emanation is extremely complicated, and as best as I can understand, Corbin simplifies it for his own purposes. In his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Proclus ranks angels, daemons, and heroes below the henad who presides over them—they are “more partial gods” who communicate being, life, and intellect (respectively) down the ranks of each chain.²⁰

Corbin, however, consistently speaks of the henads themselves as angels or as “god-angels” (dii-angeli). Angels are no longer one class of being in a henadic chain; rather, for Corbin, the entire logic of Proclus’s metaphysics is angelic. In “The Necessity of Angelology,” a late essay published posthumously in The Paradox of Monotheism, Corbin differentiates the exoteric from the esoteric meaning of the angel.²¹ The exoteric etymology of “angel,” from the Greek angelos, suggests that it is a “messenger”; Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian have their exoteric equivalents. However, this exoteric etymology, Corbin claims, hides an esoteric angelic function—namely theophany. Angels are what enable an absolutely transcendent divinity (the One) to appear, to show itself. Angels serve both a demiurgic function, in that they bring beings into existence, and a revelatory function, in that they communicate with those very beings, initiating them into the chain of being of which they are each a part and summoning them to ascend ever higher, link by link. This is the theophanic function of angels—they are the demiurgic and revelatory aspects or agents of the henads or one-gods; they are both creative and communicative. When we are met by an angel, we might think that it is a separate being sent by the gods with an individualized message for us—and so it is, in a sense. But there is a deeper structure at work, in which the angel is not a being separate from us, but rather a higher instantiation of each of us in the causal chain of being at whose head is a god. An angel is that theophanic aspect of the god that both creates and communicates with us—in other words, we exist because of angels, and we exist because we are angels, and the angel is the capacity of every being to ascend beyond itself in ecstasy. As Corbin says, “the human soul descending into this world emanates from the Angel who is its demiurge, and who is then its double or its celestial Self, its divine counterpart.”²²

Consider again the title of his essay—the necessity of angelology. In its deep structure, Corbin insists, Proclus’s henadology-angelology aligns with the esoteric angelology of the Abrahamic traditions. He argues that angels—or at least their esoteric, theophanic functions—have been suppressed by movements within both orthodox Christianity and Islam and by secularized versions of those same movements in modernity. What happens when we suppress what is in fact necessary, when we suppress the angelic function of beings? For Corbin, angels are the links in the chains that make up the universe. To lose sight of angels, to lose contact with them, is to isolate ourselves in our current and quotidian states, to break the creative and communicative link with the god to which we each owe our individual existence. The paradox at the heart of monotheism is that the mediating ranks of angels are necessary to prevent an annihilating gulf opening between an unknown god (the One) and its creatures. Monotheism therefore requires a kind of polytheism, in the form of angels (henads, one-gods), for angels make possible the integrity of a causal and communicative cosmos. 

Corbin extends Proclus’s account in a second direction. He parses the earlier philosopher’s term sympatheia, which in Greek can mean fellow-feeling (as in our contemporary “sympathy”), affinity, a correspondence of qualities, or (in music) chords vibrating together. Proclus draws on all these meanings when he uses sympatheia to name the links and relations among the beings in any chain of being and the wider web of correspondences that makes possible the hieratic art. Corbin leans into the path in sym-path-eia, from the Greek verb paschō, meaning to undergo something, to suffer. Pathē is therefore a “passive state,” and a pathos is “that which happens to a person or a thing,” hence experience, and especially an emotion or a passion.²³ This is why “passion” can refer both to an emotion that one suffers or undergoes, seemingly passively, swept up in its throes, and to one’s suffering at the hands of another, such as the Passion of Christ. 

Thus, Corbin wonders, when the heliotrope turns to the sun in sympathy, who exactly is active and who is passive? 

But taken as a phenomenon of sympathy, this tropism in the plant is at once action and passion: its action (that is to say, its tropos, its “conversion”) is perceived as the action (that is, the attraction) of the Angel or celestial prince whose name for that very reason it bears. Its heliotropism (its “conversion” toward its celestial prince) is thus in fact a heliopathy (the passion it experiences for him). And this passion, this πάθος, is disclosed in a prayer, which is the act of this passion through which the invisible angel draws the flower toward him. Accordingly, this prayer is the pathos of their sympatheia (here we must take the word in its etymological sense, for the word “sympathy” as currently employed has lost much of its force); and in this sympatheia is actualized the reciprocal aspiration of the community of essence.²⁴

Corbin’s strained language here attests to the difficulty, perhaps futility, of parsing active and passive roles in cosmic sympathy. It may appear that the heliotrope actively turns toward the sun, but its turn or “conversion” is responding to a more primordial turn, the sun’s first shining down on it, the henad’s first unfolding of itself into lower links of the chain. To be is to be attracted upward, to respond by turning to the source of light, by turning one’s face, in this case a flower, to the face of what Corbin calls “the angel out ahead.” Face-to-face—that is the rule of the cosmos. Reciprocal, from Latin reciprocus: re- (back), -que (and), prō- (forwards). Unfolding this reciprocal cosmic sympathy is the second way in which Corbin extends Proclus’s hieratic art.

There is one third and final extension. The primordial reciprocity of beings within a henadic chain is said to be enacted, but also disclosed, in the prayer of the heliotrope. To say that a prayer is enacted is to focus on the pray-er and the prayed-to: the heliotrope and the sun, a being and its one-god. But to say that this reciprocal action-passion is “disclosed in a prayer” (my emphasis) suggests to me a third party, a witness to whom something might be disclosed, and so widens the community of essence from two to three. Sympathy is not only a fact but also a call, “a condition and mode of perception.” One is called to perceive sympathetically, which means to perceive sympathy at work between another being and its one-god (e.g. a flower singing, a stone breathing). Sympathy has witnesses, and so, Corbin writes, “we must also speak of the poetic or cognitive function of sympathy in a man like Proclus … we may speak of a pathos experienced by Proclus in common with the flower, a pathos necessary to his perception of the sympathy which aroused it and which, when he perceived it, invested the flower with a theophanic function.”²⁵ Proclus is caught up in the pathos or reciprocal passionate longing between the heliotrope and the sun. More consequentially, he has a function: Proclus’s very witnessing of the divine sympathy helps to further it, helps to empower the flower to be the theophany it is and was created to be. Therefore, to see divine sympathy is to help effect it, to help the heliotrope sing to the sun, to aid every being in its ascent and every angel in its descent. For Corbin, the act of witnessing is also angelic insofar as it has a demiurgic and revelatory function: To witness the prayer of the heliotrope is help bring it about, to help cause it. Proclus the witness becomes a kind of angel himself. And not only Proclus: By calling attention to Proclus’s act of witness, Corbin also writes himself into the drama as a witness, and by extension us, his readers. He and we are enlisted into the community of witnesses. Corbin invites us to look with him and not look away. There’s something contagious, then, about this cosmos of correspondences: once you see it, and certainly once you say it, it spreads. 

The question of whether plants can pray may seem an abstract and general one. But the question narrows our gaze to a concrete and specific spectacle: the heliotrope’s turn to the sun. In his early manifesto Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes these famous lines: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”²⁶ Plants nod to us, and we to them, acknowledging that we are their kin and community, their “relations.” And yet something in this relationship between us remains occult (from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden or secret). Perhaps the unique power of the heliotrope is that it renders more sensible for us what we might otherwise struggle to see. It allows us to hear the hidden, to see the secret: that every being nods to its own god, that to be (esse) is to pray (orare), that ontology is angelology. In the same way Thales drew attention to a magnet moving stone, for it disclosed a truth perhaps hard for us to perceive: that stones breathe, that all things move and have souls (psuchai), that ontology is psychology.