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

SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM
The point is that in the absence of the archetypal person of Salman there
is no Paradise, because he is its Person and its Form. All the Hudud of the
potential Paradise are merely the shadows of the celestial hudud. Through
an Operation, identical to that of alchemy, which reveals the batin (that
which is hidden) of natural bodies, the ta'wil of the Ritual aims at arousing
(resuscitating) the inner, angelic, spiritual person, hidden behind the mask
of the terrestrial personality, the Temple of Light hidden behind the
Temple of the material body. This educative, "exegetic" role belongs to
Salman as Angel-hermeneut, the angel of the Exodus out of the earthly
homeland of the letter. The potential Paradise in the heart of the "hadd''
desires, with each time and gesture of the Ritual, the Person of the actual
Paradise who is a new Salman. To draw back the veil of the terrestrial self
so that the Person, or primordial celestial individuality, may appear, is to
typify (as in the conversation with the Imam al-Baqir) the person of
Salman the archetype—just as the Glorious One, being likewise modelled
on his Person, is the archetype for Jabir the alchemist, 159 and as each Sabiq
in his turn is the archetype for his follower (Tali), each "limit" (hadd) for
that which it defines (mahdud) and attracts, and as in mysticism the
Beloved is for the Lover. It is the person of the Angel who calls the soul to
its Paradise by making it dwell in itself, and who accompanies it forever;
for what you see is what your person manifests, or rather, what manifests
itself through your person (according to al-Baqir, the light of the Imam),
not what your person might invent or create and which would thus be
nothing but its illusion.
This angelomorphosis of vision and mode of being abolishes and bypasses
the philosophical problem posed by viewing the angel of angelology
as a "category", and by regarding its concretization as an illegitimate
application of pure concept to experience, and hence as possessing only
the appearance of reality. We are concerned here with more than a
conceptual category or, rather, the concept already indicates a spiritual
substance (jawhar latif, ruhani), a person that it represents only momentarily
(the same applies to the concepts of the times and gestures of the
Ritual). Once its colourless generality is done away with, the concept
allows the Person, of whom it was no more than a purely logical symbol,
to come forth. This is not a mental operation whereby certain "universals"
159 Cf. my 'Livre du Glorieux de Jabir ibn Hayyan' (supra, ch. II, n. 3), § 6.
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SABIAN TEMPLE AND ISMAILISM
are hypostasized. On the contrary, a personal Individuality, anterior and
transcendent, was momentarily hidden by this abstract universal appearance.
The angelic form of knowledge leads to direct intuition of the
singular and the personal, to the thought which envisions and to the vision
which thinks individual archetypes. Just as humanity is only realized in
persons (mushakhkhas), and Divinity is only revealed in its archangelic and
angelic hypostases, all reality is true {haqq al-haqq) only in so far as it
expresses, heralds and reflects a hypostasis possessing the human Form;
for it is by means of the mode of being and knowing of this Form that the
Angel is made manifest; and it is through this same mode that it conducts
this reality and this nature to its resurrection by reconstructing it in
symbols.
These, broadly outlined, are the perspectives of ta'wil which open onto
the new dimension, one that transfigures the Ritual into an inner liturgy.
This is trans-figuration in the literal sense of the word, for it aims at
discovering the Figures of light who rule over times and gestures, just as
the text of the Book, or the texts of Nature and of philosophical reason, lead
to the same "trans-appearance". The vision of and nostalgia for this
mesocosm, this universe peopled by an infinite multitude of angelic hypostases
of light, was the support and nourishment of the Ismaili da'wah. To
propose to the man called upon to join the esoteric community that his
raison d'etre was to typify on earth these existences of light was perhaps a
wild dream, and a defiance of the laws of exoteric everyday life; only the
inner man can bear witness to such a correspondence, visible only to those
whose souls "trans-appear" to each other, but ridiculous in the eyes of the
profane. It is the total transformation of existence into a liturgy. In the
correspondence between the celestial hierarchies and all the hierarchs of
the mystical Earth, from the greatest to the most humble, who fill the
Temple of the Imamate, is to be found something of the sentiment of the
Byzantine liturgy:
Because, moreover, it was a question of the liturgical mystery of existence,
the Ismaili Order could not break the discipline of the arcane during
a Cycle of occultation. One does not expose the subtle, gentle light of the
angelic world to the crude and glaring day of ready-made facts and social
norms. It is not through addressing the multitude that one calls human
beings to the "potential Paradise" of the esoteric community. Far from it:
if the Call is thus betrayed in the false light of day, it provides men with
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