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

THE REALISM AND SYMBOLISM OF COLOURS
eight levels of universe, because mention is now made of the world of the
hidden deity at the summit, a world that transcends all the theophanic
universes concentrated in the Temple of Mercy. To signify the distance
separating one universe from the next, the shaykh reiterates that every
superior world is of a light seventy times more intense than that of the
world immediately inferior to it. We have already seen that this figure,
with its arithmosophic value, is meant essentially to tell us that the
distance is beyond our quantitative measures.
1. The highest of these universes is "the world of the intimate depths
and light of God" ('alam al-fu 'ad wa-nur Allah). 'The lights of which we have
been speaking up till now exist there us lights that arc true and real: they
are the light of the Lord of lords, and even the pure cherubic Intelligences
are unable to perceive them. There, colours are united in a transcendent,
unific (henadic) union, without admitting plurality of any sort. It is to
these that the inspired (qudsi) hadith alludes when it speaks of seventy Veils
of light. "If these Veils were to be lifted, the splendours of his Face would
set on fire all that met his gaze." 23
2. Next come the "four pillars of the Throne". This is the universe of
the cherubic Intelligences ('alam al-'uqul); and here the lights are united in
a union which as yet admits only a plurality and multiplicity that are
wholly inner, ideal (ma'nawi), not exterior (white light).
3. This is the universe of Spirits, of subtle Forms (barzakhiyah) intermediate
between the Intelligences and the Souls. Colours are differentiated
according to a difference equally intermediate between ideal plurality
and exterior plurality (yellow light).
4. This is the world of Malakut, the world of Souls separated from the
matter of this world (al-nufus al-mujarradah al-malakutiyah). Here colours are
differentiated according to their exterior form (tamayuz sun) (green light).
5. This is the world of Nature, in which colours are differentiated by
nature and genus (tamayuz tabi'i wa-jinsi), by a diversification accessible to
the senses (red light).
6. Below is the world of Cloud ('alam al-haba'). Colours are differentiated
by a material difference (tamayuz mdddi) (ashen colour).
23 Here, the shaykh brings together two quotations—that of the Prophet: "Know God
through God himself, as God may not be known save through God; and that of the
(anonymous) poet: "She saw the Moon in the sky, and she remembered me—Each
of us two contemplates a single Moon—But I contemplate it through her eyes, and
she contemplates it through my eyes."
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THE REALISM AND SYMBOLISM OF COLOURS
7. This is the mundus imaginalis ('alam al-mithal), where colours are
differentiated by individual differences, like images seen in mirrors—these
last being the lower level of the mundus imaginalis, still linked to material
bodies (dark green; cf. the green light of the Malakut).
8. Finally there is the world of material bodies, where colours are
differentiated in a way we are able to observe (black).
"Such," concludes our shaykh, "are the Treasures (archetypes) of colours,
from which they descend and towards which they ascend. Their subtlety
or density is in proportion to the subtlety or density of each of these
universes." He is aware that he has dealt very summarily with the question
of the anamnesis of colour in each universe, but "if we wished," he says, "to
comment on these problems in a more profound fashion, with prolegomena
of prolegomena, the Moon would disappear before we had completed our
elucidation, for as the Koranic verse (18:110) says: 'If the sea were ink for
the words of my God, the sea would be exhausted before my God's words
were exhausted, even if we had another sea like the first to provide us with
ink.'"
5. The hermeneutics of the Koran and the hermeneutics of colour. The analysis of
these anamneses has of necessity been an incomplete one; nevertheless the
idea we have been given of them is enough to justify our shaykh in his
sense of having attained the goal envisaged from the start. From this
vantage-point he will be able to undertake a hermeneutic of the phenomenon
of colour, and particularly of the colour red, which parallels step by
step the esoteric hermeneutics of the Koran. It is a grandiose undertaking,
the consummation of an entire theosophy which pivots on the phenomenon
of the sacred Book; and it suggests many fruitful comparisons with other
esoteric commentaries on the Koran as well as those on the Bible. Here I
will simply recall the hadith of the Prophet proclaiming the seven esoteric
depths of the Koran, in connection with the undertaking of the great
fourteenth-century Iranian mystic 'Alauddawlah Simnani. By means of a
radical interiorization of prophetology, Simnani relates all Koranic references
to the prophets to the seven centres of subtle physiology. These
centres, which typify the "prophets of your being", are each characterized
by a colour, an aura, that belongs to it alone. In the case of our shaykh, the
undertaking is comparable in scope but follows a different schema from
that of Simnani. As we observed earlier, it illustrates in a remarkable way/
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