II
ШИИЗМОТ И
ПРОРОЧКАТА ФИЛОЗОФИЈА
Б
Исмаилизам
1.
Фатимидскиот исмаилизам
b) The drama in Heaven and the Birth of Time
1. If the Ismaili community calls
itself the da ‘wah, the Convocation,
to the esoteric tawhid, it is because
this Convocation,or ‘Proclamation’ (keigma)
bean ‘in Heaven’ with the summons addressed by the First Intelligence, prior to
time, to all the Forms of light in the archangelic Pleroma. This da’wah ‘in Heaven” is the eternal
Convocation of which the ‘Ismaili Convocation’ is merely the terrestrial form,
the form appropriate to the Muhammadan period of the present cycle of prophecy.
On earth – that is to say in the phenomenal world – its existence began with
the initial Adam, well before the Adam of our own cycle. Whereas the Second
Intelligence – the First Emanant – obeyed this summons, the Third Intelligence,
which proceeded from the dyad of the first two, opposed it with negation and
refusal. This Third Intelligence was the Adam
ruhani, the celestial spiritual Adam, angel-archetype of humanity, in whose
person the Ismaili metaphysical imagination represents, in symbolic form, the
hierohistory of humanity’s origin.
The spiritual Adam, then, remains
motionless in a state of amazed bedazzlement before himself. He refuses the
‘limit’ (hadd) preceding him, the Second Intelligence, because he does not see
that even if this hadd ‘limits’ his horizon, it also points toward the beyond.
He believes that he can attain the inaccessible Principle without this
intermediary ‘limit’ because, being ignorant of the mystery of the Deus revelantus in the First
Intelligence, he thinks that to do otherwise would be to identify this limit
with the absolute deity, the ‘mubdi’. In order to escape this idolatry, he exalts
himself into the absolute, thus succumbing to the worst metaphysical idolatry
of all. When, finally, he rouses himself from this stupor, rather in the manner
of an archangel Michael, winning the victory over himself, he hurls away from
him the demonic shadow of Iblis (Satan, Ahriman) into the lower world, where it
reappears with every cycle of occultation. But he realizes that he has been
‘overtaken’, delayed (takalluf), that
he has fallen behind himself: from being the Third Intelligence, he has become
the Tenth. This interval is the measure of the time of his stupor, a time which he must redeem. It corresponds to
the emanation of seven other
Intelligences, who are called the ‘Seven Cherubim’ or the ‘Seven divine Words’,
and ho assist the Angel-Adam to come to himself. The Seven denote the ideal distance of his fall. The time is his delay over himself – it is
literary true, in this context, to say that time is ‘eternity delayed’. This is
why seven periods govern the rhythm of
the prophetic cycle, and seven Imams
govern the rhythm of the prophetic cycle. Herein lie the metaphysical roots of
the Sevener, or Ismaili Shiism. The number seven represents the delay of
eternity in the Pleroma, a delay which the Third Angel, now become the Tenth,
must reclaim for his followers, and with their help.
This ‘delay’ introduces into a
being of light a dimension which is alien to it and which expresses itself in
the form of ‘opaqueness’. It is interesting to recall that in the Zarvanist
theosophy of ancient Iran ,
Tenebrosity (Ahriman) originated in a doubt
which arose in the thought of Zarvan, the supreme Divinity. However, for the
Zarvanists and Gayomarthians described in the sixth/twelfth century by
al-Shahra-Ntani, Zarvan was no longer the supreme divinity, but an angel of the
Pleroma. It could be said that the spiritual Adam, the Third Angel of the
Ismaili cosmogony, is the homologue of the Angel Zarvan in this lute
neo-Zarvanisam.
2. Each archangelic Intelligence
in the Pleroma itself contains pleroma of innumerable Forms of light. All the
Forms who composed the pleroma of the celestial Adam were immobilized with him
in the same delay. In his turn, he communicated to them the da’wah, the eternal Summons. Most of
them, however, in varying degrees of obstinacy and rage, rejected him and even
denied him the right to make such an appeal. This denial darkened the essential
ground of their being, which had previously been purely incandescent. The
Angel-Adam realized that if they were to remain in the spiritual world, they would
never free themselves of their Tenebrosity. This is the reason why he made
himself the demiurge of the physical
cosmos, as the instrument through which the Forms who had once been of Light
would find their salvation.
This symbolical history is clearly
reminiscent of Manichaeism. Furthermore, in the Ismaili shema, the Third
Intelligence who becomes the Tenth takes on the same position and role as the
‘active Intelligence’ in the writings of Avicennan philosophers and the
ishraqiyun {…}. (We explained above why this Intelligence is identified with
the Holy Spirit, with Gabriel as the angel of Knowledge and Revelation.) There
is a difference in that, for Ismaili theosophy, this Intelligence dose not
simply come simply come tenth in the normal course of emanation: it is seen as
the central figure in a ‘drama in Heaven’ which precedes and explains our
present terrestrial humanity.
All the members of this pleroma
were seized with panic terror when they saw the Tenebrosity invade their being.
The triple movement which they executed in a vain attempt to tear themselves
away from it resulted in the three dimensions of cosmic space. The densest mass
consolidated itself at the centre, while cosmic space exploded into several
regions: those of the celestial Spheres and those of the Elements. Each of the
planets in turn ruled for the space of a millennium over a world of gestation,
up till the beginning of the seventh millennium, the cycle of the Moon. At this
point, like a plant growing out of the Earth, appeared the first human being
surrounded by his companions.
c) Cyclical Time: Hierohistory and Hierarchies
1. This earthy Anthropos is
designated as the integral primordial
Adam (Adam al-anwal al-kulli),
the pananthropos. He must therefore
be distinguished both from his celestial archetype, the spiritual Adam, the
Third Intelligence who became the Tenth, and from the partial (juz’i) Adam who
inaugurated our present cycle. He is described as the ‘physical personification
of the primordial Pleroma’. Needless to say, he has no connection with the
primitive man of our philosophizing palaeontologies. He made his appearance in Ceylon (Sarandib),
because Ceylon
then possessed the most perfect temperate climate; and with him appeared
twenty-seven companions. ‘As the red hyacinth stands out among the other
stones’, so he stood out from the rest of humanity which arose at the same
time. Together with him, these twenty-seven companions are the visible
typification, in a form possessing ‘physical mass’, of the archangelic Pleroma,
for they are the faithful humanity of the pleroma of the Tenth Angel, those who
responded to his da’wah. Their
fidelity ‘in Heaven’ is expressed in their earthly condition by psychical and
spiritual superiority over all the human beings of other climes (jazirah), who came into existence with
them at the conclusion of the same anthropogonic process.
This first earthy Adam is
simultaneously the epiphanic form (mazhar)
and the veil of the celestial Adam. He is the celestial Adam’s first thought
and the limit of his knowledge, the substance of his action and the ray which
concentrates the brilliance of his light. Like the Adam of Judeo-Christian
prophetology, he is anamartitos,
(whose exact equivalent is the Arabic term ma’sum),
immune from all impurity and sin – a privilege that he transmitted from cycle
to cycle to all the holy Imams. His own cycle was one of epiphany (dawr al-kashf), an era of felicity in
which the human condition, including even its physical characteristics, was
still that of a paradisical humanity. Human beings perceived the spiritual
realities (haqa’iq) directly, not
through the veil of symbol. The first Adam founded the ‘Noble Convocation’ (al-da’wah al-sharifah) in this world; he
it was who established the hierarchy of the hierocosmos (‘alam al-din), which symbolizes both with that of the Pleroma and
with that of the macrocosm. He sent out twelve
of his twenty-seven companions, twelve da’is,
into the twelve jazirahs of the
Earth, and he appointed twelve hujjahs,
the 61ite among his companions, in his presence. In short, he was the founder
of the permanent esoteric hierarchy, uninterrupted from cycle to cycle, and
from period to period in each cycle, up to and since Islam.
After having invested his
successor, the first Adam was transferred to the Pleroma. Here he succeeded the
Tenth Angel – the celestial Adam – who himself rose, together with the entire
hierarchy of Intelligences, to a level higher then the one he had previously
occupied. This ascending movement will not cease until the Third
Angel-Intelligence, whose aberrance immobilized him and thus demoted him to the
rank of Tenth Intelligence, has regained
the sphere of the Second Emanant or Second Intelligence. The same pattern
applied to each of the Imams who succeeded the first Adam in the first
epiphanic cycle. This cycle of epiphany was followed by one of occultation (dawr al-satr), which was followed by a
new cycle of epiphany and so on, the cycles alternating with each other in a
rotary succession. This will continue until the ultimate Resurrection of
Resurrections (qyjamat al-qyjamat),
which will be the consummation of our Aion,
and will restore humanity and its Angel to their initial state. In some of
their sayings, the holy Imams go as far as calculating the Great Cycle {al-dawr
al-a’zam} at 360000 times 360.000 years.
2.
...
(History of Islamic Philosophy by Henry Corbin, KEGAN PAUL
INTERNATIONAL London and New York in
association with ISLAMIC PUBLICATIONS for THE INSTITUTE FOR ISMAILI STUDIES, London )
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