Here, as also in John Sparrow’s first English translation of Jakob Böhme’s Aurora, which was published in 1656, only forty years after the original, we retain the original German term for source spirits.

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Harayana: Penguin Random House India, 2016), p. 87–88.

Phillippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), translated by Janet Lloyd, p. 87–88.

John G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1956).

...and which happens to be pronounced like the English word »boost.«

Jakob Böhme, Aurora, ed. Gerhard Wehr (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1992), p. 185.

Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 282.

This phrase is taken from Ibn Arabi’s Meccan Revelations, Chapter 26: »Concerning the inner understanding of how people remain between this world and the Resurrection.« There, he writes of the Horn of the Imagination, the wahdat al-wujud (unity of being) of which represents the entire conceivable cosmos, creation itself. The manifest part that we are able to physically perceive he describes as »the broad side of the Horn.« »It is breathed into the Horn/forms« (6:73, etc.) and »it is blown upon the Trumpet« (74:8). And the two of them (the »Horn« and »Trumpet«) are exactly the same thing, differing only in the names because of the various states and attributes (of the underlying reality)… Since the Imagination gives form to the Real, as well as everything in the world around it, including even nothingness, its highest section (horn of imagination) is the narrow one and its lowest section is the wide one.« Quoted from James W Morris, »Spiritual Imagination and the »Liminal« World: Ibn 'Arabi on the Barzakh,« POSTDATA, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1995), pp. 42–49 and 104–109.

Also known as the Brethren of Sincerity (Arabic: إخوان الصفا‎, translit. Ikhwān Al-Ṣafā), this was a secret society of Muslim philosophers in Basra, Iraq, in the 8th or 10th century CE.

English translation from William C. Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge – Ibn Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, (Albany: State University of New York, 1989) p. 231.