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

SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM
tradition demands that the Ram must have grazed for forty autumns on
the Earth of Paradise, 114 the Brothers go further and add: "an entire
lifetime if necessary". We already know that by "Earth of Paradise" is
signified the da'wah, the Ismaili Church as "potential Paradise". Here
alone can the exoteric sense (zahir) of religion grow and mature, for it is
given substance by the inner and esoteric sense (batin): it may grow for an
entire human lifetime until it can be sacrificed at the moment when
interiority is in full flower; for the mystery of the esoteric Church is
accomplished in a cycle of Resurrections. Everywhere else in the official,
external religious world, the letter can never be anything but the letter,
the Law remains the Law. The ritual of the Ismaili Brothers of Purity thus
culminates in an act of spiritual resurrection which liberates one from this
Gehenna.
It may seem, perhaps, that the sacrifice of the Law's bondage is one
which man would be only too happy to make. Yet it is represented by the
Brothers as the culmination of an entire lifetime of effort. This is because,
far from signifying an anarchic, negative freedom, obtained without anything
being given in exchange, such a sacrifice can only be achieved at the
end of a long period of inner asceticism. This is the meaning given to it by
the great mystical poet 'Attar—who is suspected, moreover, of having
possessed a knowledge of Ismailism—when he says: "If you profess the
religion of Abraham (and if you arc thus a pure Hanif), the sacrifice of the
son is a teaching which is addressed to you."115 This teaching becomes
imperiously evident from the moment it is viewed within the Ismaili
perspective, in which Ishmael and his line represent the spiritual heritage,
the perpetuation of the esoteric Imamate, while Isaac represents carnal
descent and perpetuation of the Law. The religion of the Law, the social
imperative, may prescribe the sacrifice of Ishmael—the sacrifice, that is, of
the universe of the soul and its celestial mysteries. By contrast, to sacrifice
the ram which is Isaac is to sacrifice carnal desire for earthly possession
and descent, in exchange for the spiritual heritage. It is to renounce the
child of flesh and blood in order to ransom the child of the Soul. It is to
114 On the age of forty, see note 108.
115 Ilahi-Name, die Gesprache des Konigs mit seinen sechs Sohnen . . . , ed. Helmut
Ritter, Bibliotheca Islamica 12 (Istanbul, 1940), p. 59 v. 19. Cf. Fritz Meier, 'Dei
Geistmensch bei dem persischen Dichter 'Attar', Eranos-Jahrbuch XIII (1946),
p. 295. Along with other Sufis, 'Attar was regarded by the Ismailis as a coreligionist;
see Ivanow, Guide, no. CXXIV, pp. 104-105 and p. 118.
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gather into oneself all the Soul's energies, to sacrifice the illusory terrestrial
posterity which men naturally desire, in order to produce instead within
oneself the child of the Anima caelestis, so that man himself becomes the
child of eternity, who can only be born and begin to exist within an
esoteric kingdom (batin) which is quite other than the exterior and visible
universe.116
This engendering in the Soul of the Puer aeternus is the goal towards
which the visions of mystics, from an 'Attar to Meister Eckhart and
Angelus Silesius, are unanimously and strikingly drawn; and the Brothers
of Purity, in accordance with their whole ethic, which could be termed ad
imitationem Angeli, 117 refer to it at the conclusion of their Ritual: "Then the
angelic Form (al-surah al-malakiyah) will be perfected for you, and on your
Great Return (ma'ad) it will be ready for you to unite with it and dwell in
it";118 that is to say, so that you may then be in actuality the Angel whose
birth in you only makes it potential here below. Thus, the ta'wil of the
ritual, like the operation of alchemy (which is an Ismaili application par
excellence of the ritual), leads to the emergence of that Third World or
mesocosm, born of a mediation which triumphs over contraries. All gnoses
have aspired towards this world; it is proclaimed, for example, in an
apocryphon of Clement of Alexandria, by Jesus, who replies to Salome's
question as to when the reign of death will come to an end by saying
"When masculine and feminine are one."119
If the "angelic Form" is the fruit of this sacred inner marriage of the
masculine and feminine aspects of the Soul, the birth of that Form surely
represents the passage, the exodus, leading from the Sabian ideology of the
Temple to the Ismaili conception of the Temple of Light. It is no longer
the luminescent forms of the stars shining in the night sky which are the
temples of the hermeneutical Angels of the Divinity, but the Persons of the
members of the Order, forming the Temple of Light of the Imamate.
Through the angelomorphosis of man, the one divinity abides in man.
The ritual celebrated by man in the Temple of his being is his own
metamorphosis, the bringing to birth within himself of that Form of himself
which conforms to the angelic archetype. Here, so to speak, lies the
116 Cf. Esther Harding, Frauen-Mysterien einst und jetzt (Zurich, 1949), the chapter on
the sacrifice of the son, pp. 323 ff. and 373 ff.
1 17 Cf. the texts cited in note 56.
118 Rasa'il IV, p. 309.
119 Cited in E. Harding, op. cit., p. 376.
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