Temple and Contemplation brings together for the first ... - ImagoMundi

SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM
(Qiyamat) is betokened by the Sun's re-entry into the sign of Aries. We are
thus enabled to grasp the main features 102 of the cohesion between the
ideology illustrated by the Ritual of the Brothers of Purity, and the
entirety of Ismaili cosmology and sacred history.
For our purposes, we should concentrate on the succession of the
personages in this sacred history, in so far as this succession constitutes
the liturgical ceremonial of the ritual; for it is this which allows us to bring
out the specifically Ismaili configuration of the "man and ritual" theme. If
the same archetypes are exemplified in all the Cycles; if the Cycles and the
events composing them are homologous with each other; and if these
events are Persons, then all of these together must constitute and "temporalize"
Time in such a way that it is by virtue of being the time of these
Persons that it also becomes, properly speaking, liturgical Time as well.
Simultaneity and coincidence exist between the recurrence of the festivals
which constitute the Cycle of liturgical Time, and the recurrence of the
individual Figures whose personal presence is projected onto the Cycle.
The individual Figure is no longer confined to a moment in time, and does
not fade into a vanishing past, for its own individual time is also a
reversible time. In this cyclical presence is revealed simultaneously both
the archetype of the individual and the individual as archetype; in other
words, the individual case is an archetypal case every time. 103
This recurrence of archetypal cases projects the hidden significance of
the Cycles of sacred history onto a plane of historical permanence}104 By
means of it we can identify, in each generation, period and cycle, down to
the completion of the Cycle of Cycles, the
the antagonists
of the same drama: on the one hand the third Archangel in the
primordial Universe ('alam al-Ibda'), the primordial Adam and all the
incomplete Adams, and on the other hand Iblis and all the Iblis who came
after him. And since this plane of historical permanence necessitates the
recurrence of Persons who enact the geste of their archetype, it is this very
recurrence which constitutes the ceremonial of the cosmic liturgical Cycle.
The Persons are the festivals of this Cycle, and their recurrence is the
recurrence itself of liturgical times. Because these festivals arc the recurring
102 Notably in the Zahr al-Ma'ani by Idris ( c Imaduddin, chaps. IX-X, XX-XXI; cf.
Strothmann, Texte IV, 2; Idah I and index s.v. al-'Aql al-'Ashir (the tenth
Intelligence).
103 Cf. my 'Livre du Glorieux', {supra, ch. II, n. 3), pp. 16—17.
104 A term used by L. Massignon in Salman Pak, op. fit., p. 467.
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SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM
presence of the same archetype, they do not merely commemorate an Event
which happened once for all in the past. The exemplifications of the
archetype do not occur in time; they themselves determine their time "in
the present" as gauge of their relationship with each other, as token of
their specific individuality, an individuality irreducible to the abstract
generality of a category. 105
In the absence of this individuality, we would have only a banal system
of rationalist propositions, propping up a philosophy of history. In complete
contrast to this depersonalization, the ritual meaning of the gesta
mundi performs, with respect to these gesta, a ta'wil on each occasion; that
is to say, it elevates the event to the level of symbol, and there discloses the
geste of the archetype. That is why the festival in the liturgical calendar
docs not simply commemorate an event. It is that very event, and the
Event is the Person who enacts the geste of the archetype. A striking
illustration of this will be found below in the personalizing valorization of
the Shiite Calendar. Another illustration is provided by the Mazdean
calendar, where each day is called by the name of an Angel, inciting us to
the discovery of what is meant by the "day of an Angel", that is, the day
whose event is this very Angel. This meaning, in the case of the ritual as in
that of the revealed text or of the cosmic text, very distinctly shows us how
the spiritual exegesis or ta'wil brings about the "return" to the archetype
and of the archetype. By the same token, the ministry of this exegesis is
understood as an angelic one, personified on earth, for example, in the
' person of Salman the Persian, the Stranger whose role of companioninitiator
to the Prophet 106 is repeated in each relationship of initiator to
initiate, which, step by step, unites one by one the members of the Ismaili
Order to each other. We have already mentioned, in fact, that the ritual of
the sacred mesocosm is essentially a Cycle of resurrections, homologous
with the Great Qiyamah. The meaning that lies in conceiving a festival as a
Person, the sense that each festival is a Person, is the promotion of that
Person to a new 'resurrection', his elevation to a new heaven in the
105 Thus, something like a reversal of the notion of a time which imposes its measure:
in this case, it is the soul that is the measure of its time. The same reversal is
implied by a "chronology" which expresses the ideal interval between Zarathustra
and Plato as being a period of 6,000 years. In the same way, the meaning of the
Periods of Ismaili historiosophy cannot be reduced to the homogeneous time of the
profane calendar.
106 Cf. my 'Livre du Glorieux', (supra, ch. II, n. 3), pp. 63 ff., and Massignon, Salman
Pak, pp. 464 ff.
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