Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Above the mountains of Persian imagination—higher than Damavand where the dragon-king lies chained, higher even than the emerald rampart of Qaf that rings the world—there soars a bird so vast that her wings darken provinces, so old that she has watched the destruction of the world three times over, so wise that all the sciences of every age are gathered under her feathers. The Persians call her the Simurgh . She nests in the Tree of All Seeds, whose shaking scatters the germ of every plant upon the earth; her plumage carries healing in its touch; and her name, by an accident of language that the mystics refused to consider an accident, can be read in Persian as si murgh — thirty birds . Upon that pun, as we shall see, one of the supreme edifices of world mysticism was built. But the pun came late. The bird came first, and she came out of a sky far older than Islam. The Bird of the Oldest Sky In the Avesta, the scripture of the Zoroastrians, she is Saēna mərəγō , the Saēna bird—a ra...

At the center of Islamic civilization, running through its heart like a hidden river, flows a current of mystical experience that the religion's more legalistic forms have often tried to contain and sometimes to suppress — and that has always found a way to express itself anyway, in poetry, in music, in the ecstatic turning of the body, and in some of the most exquisite visual art ever produced in the history of human civilization. This current is Sufism — tasawwuf in Arabic — the inner dimension of Islam, its esoteric heart, the path of direct experience of the divine that runs alongside and sometimes athwart the path of law and doctrine. The name's origins are debated: some derive it from suf (wool), referring to the coarse woolen garments worn by early Muslim ascetics; others from safa (purity); others from the Greek sophia (wisdom). What is not debated is what Sufism seeks: fana — annihilation of the ego in the divine Beloved — and baqa — subsistence in that unity, ...

Persian miniature painting — the tradition of illustrated manuscript art that flourished in the courts of Persia (Iran) from approximately the 13th through the 17th centuries — is one of the supreme achievements of Islamic civilization and one of the most sophisticated visual traditions in the history of world art. Where European manuscript illustration tended toward narrative clarity and theological instruction, Persian miniature painting pursued a different ideal: the creation of an image so dense with beauty, so perfectly organized in its color relationships and spatial arrangements, that the viewer's ordinary perception was suspended and replaced by something closer to the contemplative state that the poems it illustrated described. The great Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi — the Persian national epic — and the mystical poems of Rumi, Hafez, Attar, and Nizami provided the primary narrative content; the painters of Herat, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Isfahan provided visual interpr...