ORIONISIS

LIGHT AND LIFE 

Lars Olof Bjorn 1976

Page197

BY

WRITING

THE

26

LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE

KEEPER OF GENESIS

A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND

Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996

Page 254

"...Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have.

That common language is science and mathematics.

The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."

FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

G Hancock

1995

Page 287

"What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics."

"Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked,

what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3"

WHAT ONE WOULD LOOK FOR THEREFORE WOULD BE A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE THE KIND OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSIBLE TO ANY TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED SOCIETY IN ANY EPOCH

SUCH LANGUAGES ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN BUT MATHEMATICS IS ONE OF THEM

"ALL IS NUMBER"

Pythagoras

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875-1955

Page 417

"I preach mathematics." 

 "I tell them: that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh. Lawyer Paravant was a bad case; he took my advice, he is nqw busy squaring the circle, and gets great relief. But most of them are too witless and lazy, God help them!"

Page 628

"Next they tired of ordinary photography, the fashion veered to flash-lights and colour photography after Lumiere. They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring eyes in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses of the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed diaposi-tive, showing him with a copper-:coloured visage, a brassy butter- cup in his buttonhole, standing among buttercups in a poison- ously green meadow, with Frau Stohr on one side of him in a sky-blue blouse, and Fraulein Levi on the other in a blood-red sweater.
Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Every- body pasted, haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carrie on correspondence with special vendors foreign and do- mestic, with societies and private owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specime?s, even by people whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof..
Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of all possible brands of chocolate. Everybody's mouth was stained brown, and the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate delicacies to captious and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites to Milka-nut, Chocolat Ii la creme d' amandes, Marquis-napolitains, and gold-besprinkled cats' tongues.
Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago carnival evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical teasers which for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof world, and eventhe last thoughts and en- ergies of the dying. Weeks on end the house was under the spell of a complicated figure consisting of not less than eight circles, large and small, and several engaged triangles, the whole to be drawn free-hand without lifting the pen - or, as a further refine- ment, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind of mental concentration, finally succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps with some loss of symmetry; but he was the only one.

"We know on the authority of the Hofrat that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics, we know too the disciplinary grounds of /  Page 629 /
his devotion to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and dulling the edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof had more generalIy applied themselves' to the same study, the necessity for certaIn recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The chief of these dealt with the passage across the bal-conies, at the end of the white glass partitions that did not quite ,reach to the balustrade. These were now extended by means of little doors, which. the bathing-master had it in charge to lock every night - and did so, to a general accompaniment of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the ve-randah roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not been introduced on Lawyer Paravant's account. He had long since overcome the severe attack caused by the presence of the Egyptian Fatme, and she had been the last to cliallenge his natural man. Since her time he had flung himself with redoubled conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, of whose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens had so morally discoursed. There was one problem to which day and night he devoted all his brains, all the sporting pertinacity which once - before the beginning of this prolonged and enforced holiday, that even threatened at times to end in total quiescence - had gone to the convicting of crim-inals. It was - the squaring of the circle.
In the course of his studies, this retired official had convinced himself that the argtiments on which science based the impossi-bility of the proposition were untenable; and that an overruling providence had removed him, Paravant, from the world of the living, and brought him here, having selected him to transfer the problem from the realms of the transcendental into the realms of the earthly and exact. By day and night he measured and calcu-lated; covered enormous quantities of paper with figures, letters, computations, algebraic symbols; his face, which was the face of an apparently sound and vigorous man, wore the morose and vision-ary stare of a monomaniac; while his conversation, with consistent and fearful monotony, dealt with the proportional number pi, that abandoned fraction which the debased genius of a mathematif:ian named Zachariah Dase one day figured out to the two-hundredth decimal place - purely for the joy of it and as a work of superero-gation, for if he had figured it out to the two-thousandth, the result, as compared with unattainable mathematical exactitude, would have been practically unchanged. Everybody shunned the devoted Paravant like the plague; for whomever he succeeded in button-holing, that unhappy wretch had to listen to a torrent of red-hot / Page629 / oratory, as the lawyer strove to rouse his humaner feelings to the shame that lay in the defilement of the. mind of man by the hope-less irrationality of this mystic relation. The fruitlessness of for ever multiplying the diameter of the circle by pi to find its circum-ference, of multiplying the square of the radius by pi to find its area,. caused Lawyer Paravant to be visited by periodic doubt whether the problem had not been unnecessarily complicated, since Archimedes day; whether the solution were not, in actual fact, a child's affair for simpleness. Why could not one rectify the cir-cumference, why could one not also convert every straight line into a circle? Lawyer Paravant felt himself, at times, near a revela-tion. He was often seen, late in the evening, sitting at his table in . the forsaken and dimly lighted dining-room, with a piece of String laid out before him, which he carefully arranged in circular shape, and then suddenly, with an abrupt gesture, stretched out straight; only to fall thereafter, leaning on his elbows, into bitter brooding. The Hofrat sometimes lent him a helping hand at the sorry sport, and generally encouraged him in his freak: And the sufferer turned to Hans Castorp too, again and yet again, with his cherished grievance, finding in the young man much friendly understanding and a sympathetic interest in the mystery of the circle. He illustrated his pet despair to the young man by means of an exact drawing, executed with vast pains, showing a circle be-tween two polygons, one inscribed, the other circumscribed, each polygon being of an infinite number of tiny sides, up to the last human possibility of approximation to the circle. The remainder the surrounding curvature, which in some ethereous, immaterial way refused to be rationalized by means of the calculable bound-ing lines, that, Lawyer Paravant said, with quivering jaw, was pi. Hans Castorp,.for all his receptivity, showed himself less sensitive to pi than his interlocutor. He said it was all hocus-pocus; and advised Paravant not to over-heat himself with his cat's-cradle; spoke of the series of dimensionless points of which the circle consisted,. from Its beginnig - which did not exist -to its end- which did not exist either; and of the overpowering melancholy that lay in eternity, for ever turning on itself without permanence of direction at any given moment - spoke with such tranquil resig-nation as to exert on Lawyer Paravant a momentary beneficent effect."

I

THE

NINTH

 HIEROGLYPHIC

THE

BOOK OF CREATION

THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS

HISTORY OF GOD

Karen Armstrong

The God of the Mystics

Page 250

"A quality of holiness, a quality of power, a fearful quality, a dreaded quality, a quality of awe, a quality of dismay, a quality of terror   Such is the quality of the garment of the Creator, Adonai, God of Israel, who, crowned, comes to the thone of his glory; His garment is engraved inside and outside and entirely covered with

YHWH, YHWH"

"No eyes are able to behold it, neither the eyes of flesh and blood, nor the eyes of his servants.⁶
If we cannot imagine what Yahweh's cloak is like, how can we think to behold God himself?
Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth-century Sefer yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed and the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words. The purpose was to bypass the intellect and remind Jews that no words or concepts could represent the reality to which the Name pointed. Again, the experience of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a non-linguistic signficance, created a sense of the otherness of God. Mystics did not want a straightforward dialogue with a God whom they experienced as an overwhelming holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father.
Throne Mysticism was not unique. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have had a very similar experience when he made his Night Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse. On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and a crowd of other prophets who confirmed Muhammad in his own prophetic mission. Then Gabriel and Muhammad began their perilous ascent up a ladder (mira}) through the seven heavens, each one of which was presided over by a prophet. Finally he reached the divine sphere. The early sources / Page 251 / reverently keep silent about the final vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed to refer.
And indeed he saw him a second time by the lote-tree of the furthest limit, near unto the garden of promise, with the lote-tree veiled in a veil of nameless splendour . . .
[And withal] the eye did not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did he see some of the most profound of his Sustainer's symbols⁷
Muhammad did not see God himself but only symbols that pointed to the divine reality: in Hinduism the lote-tree marks the limit of rational thought. There is no way in which the vision of God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language. The ascent to heaven is a symbol of the furthest reach of the human spirit, which marks the threshold of ultimate meaning.
The imagery of ascent is common. St Augustine had experienced an ascent to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language of Plotinus:

Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate objects
and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue
and wonder at your works and entered into our own minds.⁸

Augustine's mind was filled with the Greek imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens. This was not a literal journey through outer space to a God 'out there' but a mental ascent to a reality within. This rapturous flight seems something given, from without, when he says 'our minds were lifted up' as though he and Monica were passive recipients of grace, but there is a deliberation in this steady climb towards 'eternal being'. Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance experiences of Shamans 'from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego', asJoseph Campbell puts it.9
The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been left far behind. The experience of God that is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak, / Page 252 / his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims who specu- lated about Muhammad's flight to heaven stress the paradoxical nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did not see the divine presence. ¹⁰ Once the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their flight, stressing its transcend-ence of space, time and ordinary knowledge. They 'talked and panted' for God, and 'touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of heart'. II Then they had to return to normal speech, where a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end:

Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the
heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and everything transitory is silent - for if anyone could hear then this is what all of them would be saying, 'We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5) . . . That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things.¹²

This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so to speak, 'heard his voice' through any of the normal methods of naturalistic communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they, had 'touched' the Reality which lay beyond all these things. '.1
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent' seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a 'vision of God'; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical / Page 253 / experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not of a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind - often called the imagination - rather than through the more cerebral logical faculty

Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon dtem unawares.
Augustine seems to have imagined that privileleged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life:: he cited Moses and St Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, a had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God.We could make no predictions about his behaviour on the basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him."¹⁴ Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle before tasting  God's sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element:

It cannot fix its mind's eyes on that which it has with h the within itself, because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeeavours to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness.¹⁵

Page 254
God could only be reached after 'a great effort of the mind', which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, 'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured' by its desire for God, it only 'found rest in tears, being wearied out'.16 Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain.
In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterised by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found world-wide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, 'every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.' The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire 'a certain sense of presence' that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person.17 This attitude was called hesychia, 'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'. Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive.
How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between God's essence (ousia) and his 'energies' (energeia,) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the 'energies' not the 'essence' that we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the 'rays' of divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable. As St Basil had said: 'It is by his energies that we know our God; we do not assent that we come near to / Page 255 / the essence itself, for his energies descend to us but his essence remains unapproachable.'¹⁸ In the Old Testament, this divine 'energy' had been called God's 'glory' (kavod).ln the New Testament, it had shone forth in the person of Christ on Mount Tabor, when his humanity had been transfigured by the divine rays. Now they penetrated the whole created universe and deified those who had been saved. As the word 'energeiai," implied, this was an active and dynamic conception of God. Where the West would see God making himself known by means of his eternal attributes - his goodness, justice, love and omnipotence - the Greeks saw God making himself accessible in a ceaseless activity in which he was somehow present.
When we experienced the 'energies' in prayer, therefore, we were in some sense communing with God direcdy, even though the unknow-able reality itself remained in obscurity. The leading hesychast Evagrius
Pontus (d.399) insisted that the 'knowledge' that we had of God in prayer had nothing whatever to do with concepts or images but was an immediate experience of the divine which transcended these. It was important, therefore, for hesychasts to strip their souls naked: 'When you are praying,' he told his monks, 'do not shape within yourself any image of the deity and do not let your mind be shaped by the impress of any form.' Instead, they should 'approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner'.¹⁹ Evagrius was proposing a sort of Christian Yoga. This was not a process of reflection; indeed, 'prayer means the shedding of thought'.²⁰ It was rather an intuitive apprehension of God. It will result in a sense of the unity of all things, a freedom from distraction and multiplicity, and the loss of ego - an experience that is clearly akin to that produced by contemplatives in non-theistic religions like Buddhism. By systematically weaning their minds away from their 'passions' - such as pride, greed, sadness or anger which tied them to the ego - hesychasts would transcend themselves and become deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor, transfigured by the divine 'energies'.
Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this deification was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced consciously here below. He taught a method of concen-tration that involved breathing: as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: / Page 256 / Jesus Christ, Son of God'; they should exhale to the words: 'have mercy upon us'. Later hesychasts refined this exercise: contemplates should sit with head and shoulders bowed, looking towards their heart or navel. They should breathe ever more slowly in order to direct their attention inwards, to certain psychological foci like the heart. It was a rigorous discipline that must be used carefully; it could only be safely practised under an expert director. Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and they would feel totally one with their prayer. Greek Christians had discovered for themselves techniques that had been practised for centuries in the oriental religions. They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body. Maximus the Confessor had insisted: 'The whole man should become God, deified by the grace of the God-become-man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.'" The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine. As we have seen, the Greeks saw this 'deification' as an enlightenment that was natural to man. They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha, who had attained the fullest realisation of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an 'epiphany', a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary.
Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to re-present anything in this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable / Page 257 / mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual fonn to inspire the non-mystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains, 'Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one another. Some deep gathering into one focal point of the collective imagination. . . ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person's imagination, in which it was commonly portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realised dream.'²² Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information, ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria) which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world.
They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the centre of a passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning to ask what exactly the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was impossible to depict his divinity but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the heretical belief that Jesus's human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether but icons were defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656-747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759-826), of the monastery of Studios near Constantinople. They argued that the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since the Incarnation. the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ the Logos was the icon of God par excellence. God could not be contained in words or summed up in human concepts but he could be 'described' by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy.
The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of Denys's apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology for the Holy Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were 'expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the / Page 258 / ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of God in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology,²³ Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings, Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired to the condition of music; in ninth -century Byzantium, Greek Christians saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of God that depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians.
This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the small monastery of St Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the 'New Theologian'. This new type of theology made no attempt to define God. This, Symeon insisted, would be presump-tuous; indeed, to speak about God in any way at all implied that 'that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible'.²⁴ Instead of arguing rationally about God's nature, the 'new' theology relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just an-other being about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed himselfin the transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to contemplation by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was of God himself. This was not light as we know it, of course; it was beyond 'form, image or representation and could only be experienced intuitively, through prayer'²⁵ But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a / Page 259 / union with God that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life.
For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead of attempting the impossible task of describing 'ineffable matters by words alone',z6 he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon during one of his visions: 'Yes, I am God, the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make you God'²⁷ God was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlighten-ment. Yet Symeon's refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past. The 'new' theology was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus:

O Light that none can name, for it is altogether nameless.
O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things. . .
How do you mingle yourself with grass?
How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible,
do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?²⁸

It was useless to define the God who affected this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity, 'God' was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed ideas about God - such as the Trinity and the Incarnation - that separated them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews.
Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily con-cerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They / Page 260 attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favoured by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained:
The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.29
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ala (d.748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d.728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism.
The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other religions, seeing it as the one, true faith but Sufis by and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly-guided religion. Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to say: 'There is no god but aI-Lab and Jesus is his Messenger', which was technically correct but intentionally provoca- tive. Where the Koran speaks of a God of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d.801) spoke of love, in a way that Christians would have found familiar:

Two ways I love Thee: selfishly,
And next, as worthy is of Thee.
'Tis selfish love that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought.
'Tis purest love when Thou dost raise
The veil to my adoring gaze.
Not mine the praise in that or this:
Thine is the praise in both, I wis.³⁰

This is close to her famous prayer: 'O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, bum me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, / Page 261/ withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!'³¹ The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East but Muhammad remained a crucial influence. They hoped to have an experience of God that was similar to that of Muhammad when he had received his revelations. Naturally, they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their own experience of God.
They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics all over the world to achieve an alternative state of conscious-ness. Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behaviour which seemed bizarre and unrestrained and such mystics were known as 'drunken' Sufis. The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d.87.) who, like Rabiah, approached God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please al-Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own needs and desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalised conception of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt that nothing stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that he understood as 'self' seemed to have melted away:

I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: 'Who is this?' He said, 'This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God
but I.' Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood . . .
Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying:
'How fares it with me with Thee?' He said, 'I am through Thee;
there is no god but Thou.'³²

Yet again, this was no external deity 'out there', alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic destruction of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality. This state of annihilation (rana) became central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, / Page 262 / had it not been recognised by so many other Muslims as an authentic experience of that islam commanded by the Koran.
Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d.910), who mapped out the ground plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al- Bistami's extremism could be dangerous. He taught that 'fana (annihilation) must be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self. Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfil them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realisation and self-control. He would become more fully human. When they experienced 'fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek Christian would call 'deification'. Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi quest as a return to man's primordial state on the day of creation: he was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience; it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the 'separation' of which Freudians and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this to a non-theistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work under the expert guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself, al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and achieve that original sense of God's immediate presence that he had experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam's loins. It would be the end of separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the self he or she was meant to be. God was not a separate, external reality and judge but somehow one with the ground of each person's being:

Now I have known, 0 Lord, What lies within my heart;
In secret, from the world apart,
My tongue hath talked with my Adored.
So in a manner we
United are, and One; / Page 263 /

Yet otherwise disunion
is our estate eternally.
Though from my gaze profound
Deep awe hath hid Thy Face,
In wondrous and ecstatic Grace
I feel Thee touch my inmost ground.³³

The emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the divine presence in personal integration.
Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of a pir, and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement and the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd's famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the winds, however, and became a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus. In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: 'I am the Truth!' According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God's incarnation in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al- Hallaj's ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God and it was idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems:

I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I:
We are two spirits dwelling in one body.
If thou seest me, thou seest Him,
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.³⁴

Page 264

It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called fana. AI-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death.

When he was brought to be crucified and saw the cross and the nails, he turned to the people and uttered a prayer, ending with the
words: 'And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favours, forgive them, O Lord, and have mercy upon them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed to them that which Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done; and if Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou hast hidden from them, I should not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou willest.³⁵

Al-Hallaj's cry ana aL-Haqq: 'I am the Truth!' shows that the
God of the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly subjective. Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated. Because there is no reality but al-Lah - as the Shahadah maintains - all men are essentially divine. The Koran taught that God
had created Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate himself as in a mirror.³⁶ That is why he ordered the angels to bow down and worship the first man. The mistake of the Christians had been to assume that one man had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would argue. A mystic who had regained his original vision of God had rediscovered the divine image within himself, as it had appeared on the day of creation. The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi) beloved by the Sufis shows God drawing a Muslim towards him so closely that he seems to have become incarnate in each une of his servants: 'When I love him, I become his Ear through which he hears, his Eye with which he sees, his Hand with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he walks.' The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that can exist between the mystic and the religious establishment who have different notions of God and revelation. For the mystic the revelation is an event that happens within his own soul, while for more conventional people like some of the ulema it is an event / Page 265 / that is firmly fixed in the past. We have seen, however, that during the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al- Ghazzali himself had found that objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory and had turned towards mysticism. AI-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable to the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic form of Muslim spirituality. During the twelfth century the Iranian philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi and the Spanish-born Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi linked Islamic Falsafah indissolubly with mysticism and made the God experienced by the Sufis nonnative in many parts of the Islamic empire. Like al-Hallaj, however, Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191, for reasons that remain obscure. He had made it his life's work to link what he called the original 'Oriental' religion with Islam, thus completing the project that Ibn Sina had proposed. He claimed that all the sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine.
Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom Suhrawardi identified with the prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible); in the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras and in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi. Since Aristotle, however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral philosophy but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj. This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as al-Farabi but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition. Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others.
Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that issues from the / Page 266 / East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore, is not the geographical location but the source of light and energy. In Suhrawardi's Oriental faith, therefore, human beings dimly remem-ber their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would help Muslims to find their true orientation, to purify the eternal . wisdom within them by means of the imagination.
Suhrawardi's immensely complex system was an attempt to link all the religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequendy his philosophy linked the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology, Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical origins of the universe. In his masterwork The Wisdom of Illumination (Hiqmat al-lshraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of physics and natural science but this was only a prelude to the mystical part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had their place in the perception of total reality. The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and mysticism. There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual leader was the true pole (qutb) without whose presence the world could not continue to exist, even if he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi's Ishraqi mysticism is stilI practised in Iran. It is an esoteric system not because it is exclusive but because it requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort undergone by Ismailis and Sufis.
The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi's system was dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting to discover the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied its right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be educated and informed by the critical intelligence. / Page 266 /  / Page 267 / As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God. It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi's emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corres-ponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognising its dependency on the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar combina-tion of light and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina's scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below.
Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls:
Suddenly I was wrapped in gendeness; there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I watched attentively and there he was . , . He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity, And then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem of knowledge.
'Awaken to yourself,' he said to me, 'and your problem will be solved,'³⁷
The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: / Page 268 / "mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal, the world of pure images.
Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had ostensibly abandoned. The menok, which in Suhra-wardi's scheme became the alam al-mithal, was now an intermediate realm that existed between our world and God's. This could not be perceived by means of reason nor by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled us to dis-cover the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic interpretation of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina's angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures. There has recendy been much interest in this phenomenon. lung's conception of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars, such as the Rumanian- American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights.³⁸
Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of Scripture - such as Heaven, Hell, or the Last Judgement-were as real as the phenomena we experience in this world but not in the same way. They could not be empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of earthly phenomena. This experience was / Page269 / nonsensical to anybody who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises had been undertaken. All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal. The Prophet Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world. Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration. The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic.
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not.³⁹ Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive. A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the human / Page 270 / condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together - science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion - he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning and significance in life."