The Visionary Recital (I)

excerpts from the introduction to The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  by W.M. Thackston, Jr.:



...what the neophyte must achieve is a release of the soul from the material world of the senses, the "bottomless pit" of this temporal world, into which the soul of man has been cast and where his atemporal, spiritual nature is held captive, so trapped inside the strictures of gross matter, the stuff of which this world is made, that the soul becomes like the king's peacock in Treatise VII that was placed under a basket: it forgets entirely its original home and thinks that this world is all it has ever known.



While in this state of forgetfulness, the soul cannot extricate itself if
it is attached to any of the goods this world has to offer, be they
material like property and wealth or immaterial like position and renown.

The process of detaching oneself from the material... is often expressed as a journey or pilgrimage-quest, which can take the form either of an external journey out of the material world or of an internal journey into the self and thence out of this world.





THE EXTERNAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE MACROCOSM:



The external journey leads the pilgrim up through the celestial spheres
that encompass the totality of spatial and temporal creation. Everything
that is subject to human sensorial perception is contained within the
concavity of the celestial spheres. What lies outside them is, in terms of
created matter, nothingness. This "nothingness" which is beyond the
encompassment of created spatiality and temporality, is the spiritual realm,
the true home of the soul. From there, the atemporal world of eternality,
came the divine part of man's soul, and it is there that the aspirant seeks to return.



To effect this type of return, the seeker travels figuratively out of the
sublunar region , the earthly realm and across the celestial spheres of the
macrocosm ...



[Suhrawardi] is too subtle in his treatment to be interested in simple
cosmological allegory, for he constantly weaves his narrative fabric from
the warp of the external cosmos and the phenomena of the celestial spheres and from the weft of the internal cosmos, the microcosm of man's inner "celestial" configuration...



A brief survey of the physical cosmos as generally accepted by the
traditional Islamic world:



Suhrawardi's main allegorical descriptions of the heavens reflect the
standard Ptolemaic universe inherited by Islamic civilization from the
Hellenistic world. In this geostatic view of the celestial order, the earth
stands in the concavity of nearly immaterial spheres which contain the
heavenly bodies that revolve around the earth on the ecliptic.



The number of the spheres, though conceptually constant, is variously given by Suhrawardi, depending upon how he is considering them.



They are, from highest to lowest:

1. The Great Sphere of Diurnal Motion, the primum mobile of Latin
cosmography: it revolves westerly once every 24 hours and is responsible for the movement of all the other spheres.

2. The Sphere of Fixed Stars including the 12 Signs of the Zodiac..

3. Sphere of Saturn

4. Sphere of Jupiter

5. Sphere of Mars

6. Sphere of Sun

7. Sphere of Venus

8. Sphere of Mercury

9. Sphere of the Moon

10-11. Spheres of Ether and Zamharir, part of the sublunar realm of gross
materiality and properly reckoned as the boundary of Earth.



When Suhrawardi alludes to a cosmological 'eight', he means the spheres that contain one or more heavenly body (i.e., Fixed-Stars to the Moon); 'nine' spheres will include the Great Sphere; 'seven' is the number of planetary bodies plus the Moon; and 'eleven' is the total number, including the two sublunar spheres to balance the two highest non-planetary spheres.



The Sun is always said to be in the middle.



In the most cosmologically detailed of the treatises, he gives the allegorical number of the "old men"-- the Intellects of the spheres-- as ten, i.e., the nine upper spheres plus one for the sublunar region.



As Suhrawardi explains, the Great Sphere, represented by the first old man of Treatise II, is much too subtle materially to hold onto the light that emanates from the Creator from without the realm of temporal existence: this sphere is the intermediary or bordeline between being and non-being and thus has but a shadowy hold on materiality so that the emanating light passes through it without being captured.



The dual nature of this sphere is also expressed in terms of the
Suhrawardian symbol of Gabriel's wings: the right wing being an abstraction of the relation of the Prime Intellect (Gabriel) to God's being, is pure "light", i.e. without any taint of "darkness" or materiality, and it is divine in attribute, and represents absolute being.



The left wing, on the other hand, is the essential realization of non-being
as posited in the soul. Thus the Great Sphere (or right wing), with regard to form , is as near to "nothing" as anything can be and still be "something"; while in terms of attribute or predication of God, it is the most "something" that exists. In ontological terms, the Great Sphere is the intermediary between material, temporal and spatial existence and immaterial existence.



It is symbolically represented by Mount Qaf, the mythic mountain range that surrounds the earth.



As the light emanating from the Creator reaches the second sphere, it is
shattered into myriads of small bits, much as a globule of mercury breaks up on a large spinning plate. These small bits of light are the Fixed Stars of the Constellations and Signs of the Zodiac, the primal "workshops" of Treatise III.




Because this sphere is close to the first, it is still too diffuse in force
to capture much light, for which reason the stars of this sphere appear dim
in relation to the light of the planets, which, having much smaller spheres,
are made of coalesced fragments of the light that escape from the sphere
of the fixed stars.



The greatest amount of luminosity belongs to the Sun by virture of its
middle position, where the equilibrium provides the resistance necessary to generate the force to hold enormous luminosty.



From the Sun down to the Earth, the amount of luminosity decreases until
the Moon is reached. In its position as the farthest from the source of
light, and because it has no sphere in its convex, the Moon has no
luminosity of its own and merely reflects the light it receives from the
Sun...



The realm of temporality and spatiality, represented cosmollogically by
the celestial spheres, is finite in extent. Beyond the Great Sphere there is
nothing of matter; and it is this very immaterial, atemporal and non-spatial
realm that the soul must strive to attain in order to regain the original
homeland.



Thus the bird-soul of Treatise I crosses eight mountains to reach the court of the great king, so also must the hawk [Treatise III] traverse the eleven mountains of Qaf when delivered of its bondage.



In all cases, it is matter composed of the four elements (fire, water, earth
and air) and what is coincident with it, that have fettered the soul and
prevent it from escaping its temporary imprisonment.



That which is conjoined with the material, a divisible thing... necessarily
temporal, cannot by its nature comprehend the immaterial eternal.



If we think in Avicennan terms of a vertical orientation ...an orientation
such that "down here" (this corporeal world) is the "west" of this world and
"out there"(the spiritual realm beyond the senses) is the "east" (*mashriq,
lit. "the point whence the dawning rays of the sun emanate) of the "other
world", i.e., the world of the unseen from which the rays of the spiritual
sun arise, then the quest of the soul to regain that original "east" will be
expressed in an external , "vertical" pilgrimage up through the spheres and
ultimately out of the created universe.



In this manner the birds of Treatise I make their quest across the mountains, each representative of one of the celetial spheres, until they finally come to the cities atop the last mountain, where the [beautiful King] dwells... symbolic of the Prime Intellect. The king tells the birds that the remants of the fetters that have clung to their legs since they were trapped by the senses in the oblivion of the material world can be removed only by those who put them there in the first place.



The pilgrimage of the individual soul must inevitably end thus. Although
the soul may attain its goal of finding the "king",  it must return whence it
came and conquer the materiality that has ensared it from the beginning.



Note:  Suhrawardi uses the Arabic word latif to describe the substance of the spheres. In order to avoid the ambiguous term "immaterial", the word "subtle" has been used throughout the translation...




(from The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  translated and introduced by W.M. Thackston, Jr., Octagon Press, 1982.)