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SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM forth and drawing towards itself that which it limits, leads it into the presence of a new Anima and of a new Angel that is its Lord." 57 Consequently, the Angel no longer has, as in the classic cosmology of Arabo-Persian Neoplatonism, a significance which is merely cosmological; it also possesses an anthropological significance. More precisely, the Angel is the term and the fulfilment of the Anthropos. Cosmology "re-emerges" in a universe of archetypes, where all is the transfigured human Figure. Angelology imparts to man the knowledge of his future condition; it reveals to him the secret of initiatory birth {wiladah diniyah), of his entry into the Temple of the Imamate. By the same token, it reveals and prescribes the Ritual of this Temple, which is also the Temple of Agathodaimon into which the Brothers of Purity invite one to enter. This Ritual will also arise from a "leading back to the source" of another ritual, from a ta'wil similar to the exegesis which presides over the appearance of the physical Heavens and their Temples. The question then presents itself: whence comes the ritual which is to be transcended? In its reply to this question, angelology unveils to man his initial condition, that condition, precisely, which it invites him to regain by means of a ta'wil which is a succession of resurrections. It is of these resurrections that the Ritual of the esoteric Temple is the ceremonial form. 3. The transcendent origin of the Ritual. Out of what past does' the present human condition arise, for it to be linked with ritual observances which its "resurrections" must surpass by leading them back to their source, that is to say, to their true meaning? In their Encyclopaedia, the Brothers of Purity make solemn allusion to this past on a number of occasions, most notably when they set forth the secret of their association: "Know, oh my brother, that we are the society of the Brothers of Purity, beings who are pure, sincere and generous-hearted. We sleep in the cave of our father Adam 5 " 57 Cf. the series of the Eight Qiyamat or Resurrections in Zahr al-Ma'ani by Idris 'Imaduddin, chap. XIX (cf. the citation in Ivanow's Rise of the Fatimids, p. 243, and Strothman, Texte, Idah 11, pp. 153-154, and Ism 2-3 see note 99). On the work Zahr al-Ma'ani, see my report 'L'Ismaelisme yemenite: 1'oeuvre d'Idris 'Imaduddln', in Annuaire de la Section des Sciences religieuses de l'Ecole pratique des Hautes-Etudes, 1971-1972, pp. 257-260. 58 This is an allusion to the Seven Sleepers in the Koran, 18:18: "We turned them over sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left." The idea is of a continuum, a length of time proper to the mystical sleep, with the Events peculiar to it whose active Subject is God. 148 SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM through the lapse of time during which temporal vicissitudes and the calamities of events turn us over, sometimes onto one side, sometimes onto another, until at last, after our dispersion through divers countries, there comes the moment of our meeting in the kingdom of the Master of the eternal Religion, 59 the moment in which we shall see our spiritual City rise into the air ... the City out of which our father Adam, his wife and his posterity were forced to go." 60 The cave of refuge and the spiritual City of Return confront each other. In the first of these, which is the first theme of Surah 18 of the Koran, it is easy to recognize the refuge where the Elect ("who are neither Muslims nor Jews nor Christians") sleep until the dawning of the Last Times. In our text the "posterity of Adam", who took shelter in this cave, in no way denotes humanity in general, but only a specific fraction of humanity, whose composition is determined in the light of Ismaili sacred history. At the point of its fullest speculative development, this sacred history presents a schema made up of an innumerable succession of Cycles, in which Cycles of Unveiling (dawr al-kashf) alternate with Cycles of Occultation (dawr alsatr). The Cycle of Unveiling marks a state of beatitude and contemplative perfection; for the human beings living in such a Cycle, True Gnosis {haqiqah) is proclaimed, directly and openly, and the prescriptions of ritual are abolished. The soul has a direct and intuitive perception of pure spiritual Realities (haqa'iq) through union with the light that flows over it from the First Archangel; the human body already enjoys certain glorious prerogatives pertaining to the "spiritual body". 62 The Cycle of Occultation is caused by the evil Desire of individual souls, who renounce their state of angelic individuality (ashkhas ruhaniyah) through an aberrant tendency which leads them to don the mask of material physical individuality 59 To compare this concept of Namus in Ibn 'Arabi, see H. S. Nyberg, op. cit., p. 131 and pp. 102-103. Dailami, op. cit., p. 73, 1.5, saw in it nothing but a device dissimulating a state of topsy-turvydom, the overturning of the Koranic law. 60 Rasa'il IV, p. 85. 61 Cf. the most important study by L. Massignon, 'Les "Sept Dormants" apocalypse de l'lslam' (in Opera minora, vol. III (Beirut, 1963), pp. 104-118): an exemplary research into the "lines of spiritual force" underlying which is a topic of the imagination, and whose "knots" (the archetypes of C.-G. Jung) serve as "intersigns", enabling one to recognize and name the "consellations", as it were, in the multitude of events (cf. p. 115). With regard to the theme of the "person-archetypes" which we introduce here, cf. especially p. 109, where the Cave of the Seven Sleepers is identified with the Assembly of believers personified in Fatimah. 62 Jami'ah 25b, Strothmann, Texte I, 5, and X, 7; Idris 'Imaduddln, Zahr, chap. XII. 149
SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM (ashkhas tabi'iyah). The Great Cycle (al- kawr al-a'zam), which includes the totality of the Cycles, and as to whose duration we are given the most dizzying figures, 63 began with a Cycle of Unveiling inaugurated by the Manifestation of the universal Adam, the each Cycle in turn is inaugurated by an incomplete Adam.6 4 Thus the "historical" Adam of our present Cycle, spoken of in the Bible and the Koran, is far from having been the first human being on earth. At the time of the grave symptoms which marked the end of the Cycle of Unveiling that preceded our Cycle—symptoms of the evil Desire of individual souls—the last Imam decided once more to impose the discipline of the Arcane, and to confer the Imamate on the young Adam whose father had himself died in the flower of his youth. Such is the extraordinary Ismaili exegesis (ta'wil) of the Koranic verse 2:30, in which God addresses the Angels and says: "I wish to install a successor on the earth." 65 Yet just as—according to this exegesis—it is not the transcendent and unknowable God who speaks, but the Imam, so the Angels whom he addresses are not the spiritual Angels of the supreme celestial hierarchy, but the terrestrial Angels, human beings in the spiritual and glorious state of the Cycle of Unveiling; that is to say, they are the entirety of the hudud, dignitaries or hierarchs, major or minor, of the Imam, who form his Temple or mystical body, 66 and whose descendants in the following Cycle will be no more than Angels, or demons, in potentiality. It is these privileged human beings, the terrestrial Angels, and they alone, who receive the command to prostrate themselves before Adam, their new Imam. 67 Their vehement protests at the announcement of this investiture are undoubtedly motivated by the prospect of a state in which only symbolic Knowledge will be possible (for this is what it means "to be on Earth", 63 The Imam alludes to these in some passing remarks, certain of which estimate the Great Aion (al-Kawr al-a'zam) as made up of 400,000 Aions (Kawr) of 400,000 cycles (dawr) each! Cf. Texte I, 8 and II, 1. 64 Ibid., cf. index p. 52 s.v., and Idris, Zahr, chaps. XII and XIII. 65 Ibid., chap. XIII and Texte, Tuhfah 2, p. 163. 66 Jami'ah 25b. Note the same word majma' in Majma' al-Qa'im (the Temple of the Imam, Texte, p. 21 I.4., or his Temple of Light, Haykal Nurarni, ibid., pp. 6-7), and Majma' al-Sabi'yin, the temple of the Sabians, in Mas'udi, Prairies IV, 64 (cf. note 141). 67 Cf. especially, again, Texte X, 23, pp. 100-101. Eo ipso the scandal is eliminated of man's taking precedence (in common anthropology) over the Angel. Just as the universal Adam is the initiator of the eternal Religion, so each partial Adam and each gnostic is a minor Angel, or an Angel in potentiality (cf. note 47). SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM esoterically speaking). But an even stronger motivation, surely, is the presentiment of the catastrophe which threatens the fragility of this form of Knowledge. 68 Here, we touch upon the mystery which the creative Imagination cannot fathom even were it to give shape to the most secret of psychic experiences. The attempt to attain knowledge beyond an eternal past, the memory of which has been wiped out by the vertigo of the abyss, traces a line of force which is pursued by the metaphysical Imagination of Baader, for example, in evoking the catastrophes which have left their traces in the universe and which we are unable, perhaps, even to picture to ourselves. 69 The transition to the Cycle of Occultation, marked by the investiture of Adam and the restoring of the discipline of the Arcane, also ushers in the personage who is the personification, in this Cycle, of the eternal Antagonist, that Iblis who before the beginning of Time caused the partial obfuscation of the Angel of Humanity, and who in the Period of Adam goes by the name of al-Harith ibn Murrah. 70 In fact, he is one of the surviving dignitaries of the previous Cycle of Unveiling, one of the "Angels" of that period. As such, he knows that he himself is of an essence of fire. This means that he possesses a direct knowledge of the Truths of Gnosis. Adam, on the other hand, is made of clay, and this means that the knowledge assigned to him, the sole knowledge that he can and must transmit to those of the Cycle he inaugurates, is a hermeneutic of Symbols. Hence the refusal of al-Harith to acknowledge Adam as the Imam (to "prostrate himself before him"), and his decision to provoke a catastrophe. This malefic initiative possesses three aspects. It aims at provoking the young Imam Adam to transgress the limits of this Land of Paradise ("earthly Paradise"), where symbols burgeon and in which he is still allowed to dwell by the discipline of the Arcane. To this end, it incites him to aspire to the Knowledge reserved to the sublime Angels of the highest celestial hierarchies, that is to say, to the direct Knowledge of hidden Realities which constitutes in its own right the state of Resurrection ('ilm al-Qiyamah). 71 It is precisely this Knowledge whose disclosure is reserved 68 "Will you place on the earth a being who will bring it into disorder and shed blood?" (2:30). 69 Cf. Eugene Susini, La Philosophie de Franz von Baader, II (Paris, 1942), p. 330. 70 Cf. Strothmann, Texte IV, 2 and X, 20, p. 101; Idris, Zahr, chap. XIII. On this partial darkening of the Angel, cf. also the symbolism of the "two wings" in my Archange empourpre, op. cit., VII, pp. 236 ff. (cf. note 101). 71 Jami'ah 20a. 150
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