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

THE REALISM AND SYMBOLISM OF COLOURS
what is common to the phenomenon of the Book both as Liber mundi, the
"Book of Being" to which colours pertain, and as the Liber revelatus, the
holy Book; for the same hermeneutic leads to an understanding of both of
these.
The vocabulary to be used needs careful defining. The word ta'wil is the
key-word of this hermeneutic procedure, our shaykh defines the ta'wil (II,
chapter V) as "consisting in referring the literal appearance back to one of
the archetypes [or in 'exchanging' the literal Value for one of the treasures
or archetypes], 24 with the understanding that this archetype determines
what the object is, whether it belongs to the sensible or to the suprasensible
world." This definition accords perfectly with that given by
Ismaili theosophy: "The ta'wil consists in leading back, in returning a
thing to its principle or archetype" (in Persian: chizi-ra bi-asl-i khvud
rasanidan). Thus, the idea of the ta'wil implies the action of rising up again,
the idea of an ascensional, anagogical way. As an esoteric hermeneutic, the
ta'wil is essentially an "anagogical hermeneutic".
The starting point of this hermeneutic is the zahir, the exoteric dimension.
At every hermeneutic level there is both an esoteric dimension (batin)
to discover and a ta'wil to accomplish. Thus there is a ta'wil of the esoteric
as well as of the exoteric dimension, and this ta'wil in its turn contains an
esoteric dimension. In order to clarify the route we still have to traverse,
we will recapitulate its stages in the following schema:
24 According to the double meaning connoted by the root srf. send back, expedite;
exchange; change the direction of something (whence, in grammar, the sarf signifies
declension and conjugation); tasarruf means "to dispose freely of something"; sarraf
means "he who changes". The spiritual hermeneutist is in some sense an "exchanger"
of value and a "changer" of direction.
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The shaykhs of the Shaykhi School discussed certain chapters of the
Koran according to this complete schema, and one can well imagine that
it would require an entire library to make a commentary on the Koran in
this fashion from one end to the other. In order to make it clear from the
start what the process of the ta'wil comprises, the shaykh takes as an
example a verse from the Koran, an example which has the virtue of
showing us how the colour red belongs to the phenomenon of the sacred
Book, and how as a result the same hermeneutic can be applied to it.
The Koranic verse (13:17) is as follows: "He makes water descend from
the sky, so there are torrents that flow according to their measure." By
means of the ta'wil, the sky is elevated to the level of the divine creative
Will (the mashi'ah) which is itself subject and object, organ and source of
Creation, the active dimension (jihat al-fa'il) of that which is set in motion
(the mutaharrak). The water descending from the sky is being—not absolute
being, but the determined and delimited being (muqayyad) that descends
from this Will. It is the Water whereby every thing in the act of being has
been made to live (we have already seen how, in alchemical terms, this
Water is the equivalent of the primordial Fire); by this Water, corpses,
which are vessels of being in a state of expectation, are aroused to life. The
torrents are precisely these vessels of being; they are torrents whose beds
are empty and dry until the "Water of being" flows into them. This,
according to the shaykh, is how the ta'wil is employed, as the anagogical
hermeneutic of all verses of the Koran and all traditional recitals. 25 But he
emphasizes that the initiative with regard to its use cannot be left to the
first comer: only he has the capacity and the right to assume responsibility
for the ta'wil who has first acquired a perfect understanding of the "data"
which the literal revelation (tanzil) provides for the ta'wil, and who is fully
apprised of the modalities according to which the universes intercorrespond,
as well as of the meaning of the anamneses to be found in all of them. For
this universality of universes forms the Liber mundi, the Book of being, the
immense register-book (Kitab tadwini) which God wrote with the Pen of the
creative Act, the Pen which signifies the first Intelligence, the first-created
Logos. 26
25Cf. for example 7:143: when God manifests himself on the mountain (Sinai), he
reduces it to dust; for the ta'wil, the mountain is the body itself of Moses, and Moses
falls down in a swoon; similarly, the four Elements are the four humours of the
human body, etc.
26 Cf. the hadith: "The first thing that God created was the Pen. Then he told it:
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