THE MYSTERIES OF WINE
& SPIRITUAL
TRANSFORMATION
IN SUFI AND CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES
This is a version of
a paper given at the 'Sufism & Civilizational Dialogue
Conference', Iqbal Centre, Lahore, Pakistan, November 2006.
They are given to drink of a
pure wine, sealed, whose seal is musk - for this let [all]
those strive who strive for bliss - and mixed with water of
Tasnim, a spring whence those brought near [to ALLAH]
drink.
-Koran 83:25-28
"I tell you solemnly, I shall not
drink anymore wine until the day I drink the new wine in the
kingdom of God."
- Gospel of Mark 14:25
The authors of our being,
remembering the command of their father when he bade them
create the human race as good as they could... placed in the
liver the seat of revelation.
- Plato, Timaeus 71D.
He made me aware of an ancient
secret...
- The Qasida al-Khamriyya (Wine
Ode)
Introduction
At an external level one of the
most obvious and palpable differences between Islamic and
Western civilizations is that alcohol is prohibited in
Islamic society while it is widely available and culturally
acceptable in the West. Put plainly, alcohol is absent from
Islamic social life while it is an altogether normal feature
of Western social life - a stark contrast. This, of course,
reflects the religious foundations of the respective
civilizations: the Koran and the sunna of the Prophet
Muhammad forbid wine-drinking while in Christianity - or at
least in the orthodox branches of the faith - wine is
nothing less than a sacrament.
This seems an irreconcilable
difference, a matter about which there can be no
rapprochement between the two civilizations and the two
faiths, a point on which Islamic and occidental opinions
seem diametrically opposed and on which there is no common
ground.
It is important, therefore, to
explore this divisive issue and to bring to it deeper, more
universal perspectives, to rediscover and then to reiterate
points of view and modes of understanding that have been
lost and forgotten in our troubled and superficial times. As
is the case with so many other issues that create Islam/West
tensions the contrasts turn out to be not so stark, and at
the deepest levels, in view of perennial and universal
truths, they cease to be contrasts at all. There are
dimensions to these religious traditions where we find that
there is, in fact, a common platform and a convergence of
doctrines, symbols and methods, and that what appears to be
a contrast is really a complementarity Beyond their
differences, the two religions are rooted in common
mysteries and have overlapping paradigms.
In this paper we will examine
something of these mysteries, not only as they are expressed
in the current Sufi traditions of Islam and by Christian
mystics but also in view of the ancient gnosis and wisdom
sciences that came before the historical manifestations of
either the Islamic or Christian spiritual orders. The
symbolism of wine is primordial and extends into matters
that are fundamental to all human spiritual life and to the
entire spiritual constitution of man. For there to be truly
meaningful dialogue between Christian and Islamic
civilizations on this pivotal issue we need to recover a
wider and more profound context of spiritual knowledge and
begin to reacquire a lost understanding of ourselves as
spiritual creatures, both before God and in the world.
1. A Symmetry of
Paradoxes
There is a symmetry of paradoxes
between Islam and Christianity on the issue of wine. In
Islam, where wine is forbidden, the mystic, paradoxically,
seeks a divine intoxication. Conversely, in Christianity,
where wine is compulsory (because communion is an
obligation), the mystic is often given to an ascetic
abstinence. This fact should immediately suggest that the
external contrasts are not absolute; the spiritual seekers
of both faiths very often defy and push against the norms of
the social order around them which is, in the process,
exposed as only a shell, a protective covering.
There is a tendency among Muslim
externalists - understandable and not illegitimate at is own
level - to demonize alcohol in all its forms and to portray
it as vile and evil, the urine of Iblis. Good Muslims will
shun alcohol in every way. In popular Islam alcohol is often
portrayed as a foul and sinister pollution. But the mystics
of Islam, the Sufis - while adhering to the strict sunna of
the Prophet - know that wine is paradisiacal in nature. It
is haram not because it is infernal but, on the contrary,
because it is divine and among those things in creation
reserved for Allah. The Koran attests that there are rivers
of wine in Paradise and declares that the denizens of
Paradise are given pure wine to drink:
They are given to drink of a pure
wine, sealed, whose seal is musk - for this let [all] those
strive who strive for bliss - and mixed with water of
Tasnim, a spring whence those brought near [to ALLAH] drink.
The injunction for all those who
seek bliss to strive to drink the pure wine of Paradise
(forgoing the wine of this world) is the warrant for the
Sufi's zeal for a sacred intoxication. There is a cult of
divine inebriation in Islam, a drunkeness for God, although
it is symbolic and even in that necessarily constrained by
the social shell that surrounds it and to which it is a
kernel. In the interior dimensions of Islam, extending from
this warrant in the Koran, there is a doctrine of wine and a
method of sacred drunkenness even if abstinence and sobriety
is the norm of the Islamic social order. The Sufi drunkeness
is not literal, of course. The Sufi ideal is to be inwardly
drunk and outwardly sober - this is in fact supposed to be a
tension integral to Islamic society at large.
In Christianity, on the other hand,
there is a tradition of mystical abstinence, although this
is necessarily curtailed by the obligatory nature of the
Eucharist. Abstinence is an interior perspective in
Christianity just as drunkenness is an interior perspective
in Islam. We find illegitimate manifestations of Christian
abstinence among many Protestant sects - these are often
Christian imitations of Islam inasmuch as Protestantism,
with its emphasis on the Book and its bourgeois foundations,
is a Christian adaptation of the Islamic spiritual order -
but it takes a more legitimate form among orthodox ascetics,
such as, for instance, the Carmelite monks, the mystical
tradition of such luminaries as John of the Cross and
Therese of Avilla. The primitive Carmelites shunned all wine
until the Order was forced to accept the chalice as part of
their accommodation into Latin Orthdoxy. They retained their
vegetarianism and their going barefoot, but their asceticism
of abstinence was limited by and adjusted to the essentials
of the orthodox sacraments in which wine cannot be avoided.
Traditions of Christian abstinence,
though muted, are built upon the scriptural warrant quoted
at the head of this article:
"I tell you solemnly, I shall not
drink anymore wine until the day I drink the new wine in the
kingdom of God."
It is important to note that the
Koran and the Gospels are at one here: wine will flow
abundantly in the Garden, in God's coming Kingdom, and those
who long to drink that wine will refrain from wine in this
life. The sacrament does not violate this injunction,
though, for, by virtue of the Real Presence, it is the new
wine of the kingdom. The wine of the Christian Eucharist -
the blood of Christ - is thus the very same wine that the
Koran describes as flowing freely in Paradise. There are
many Christian mystics who refrain from all wine but for the
blood of Christ and who fast taking no food or drink but for
the Lord's Supper. Here we have two different expressions of
the same symbolism. The parallel is confirmed by the Koran's
description of the wine of paradise being tempered with the
waters of Tasnim: the wine of the Eucharist must be tempered
with water too, not only because this was the ancient
custom, but because this "new wine of the Kingdom" is the
blood of Christ and we are told in the Gospels that when
Christ was wounded in his side two fluids, blood and water,
- the two elements, wine and water, of the liturgy - flowed
from his body.
2. The Thirsty
The most obvious symbolism of wine
concerns unity and multiplicity. The grape, which forms in
bunches, is quite obviously emblematic of the Many and of
the realm of multiplicity; wine then is the single essence,
the principle of Unity, contained in the Many. But, just as
important, the symbolism of wine concerns distinctions of
immanence and transcendence, and it is this with which the
mystical dimension is concerned. The problem, or rather the
conundrum, that wine presents to mystics of either Islam or
Christianity is this: wine is the preserve of the Hereafter,
the coming kingdom, and yet it is an almost ubiquitous thing
in the present life. In all but the coldest climates it is
very hard not to make wine. The juice of any fruit will
readily ferment. The windfall fruit below a tree will
ferment of its own accord. The necessary yeasts are
everywhere. They live on every breezeÝand breath of
wind. Fermentation is a spontaneous capacity of nature.
This, though, is exactly the point and is why wine is
subject to this type of religious symbolism: God is not
remote and His blessings are not postponed until another
life. The natural fermentation processes that make wine are
a symbol of how the transmutation of the soul is possible in
this world. God is ever-present. His Creation is leavened
with His spirit. His banquet is served. His wine can be
tasted now; indeed, not only tasted but drunk to the dregs.
By temperament the mystic is not,
as we might imagine, the most pious believer and the most
devoted worshipper - rather the mystical temperament is, in
an important sense, faithless and skeptical, impatient and
doubting. For the mystic wants proof and he wants it now.
The promise of paradise is not enough. The mystic will not
wait until he is cold in his grave to be with God. He wants
to be with God in this life. He wants the immediate
experience of the sacred. He is thirstier than other men. He
cannot wait until the Day of Judgment to enter Paradise and
quaff its wine. He wants to drink his fill of the wine of
Paradise in the flesh, in this present world, immediately.
This is one of the reasons why the mystical zealot is not
always welcome by his fellow believers and why exoteric
forces in religions often, quite properly, impose
constraints and limitations upon mystical modes of the
faith. The mystic is often a threat to the equilibrium of a
spiritual order, such orders existing, after all - at least
in the case of religions like Christianity and Islam - for
the salvation of all and not just the liberation of the few.
Strange to relate, it is the
doubting disciple, Thomas, who gives us a canonical
prototype for this temperament in Christian sources. He is
the disciple who wants to touch the Risen Christ and who
puts his fingers into Christ's wounds so as to be certain
that Christ is risen in the flesh and is not a mere phantom.
Christ had told the Magdalene in the garden "Touch me not,
for I have not yet ascended to the Father! (Noli me
tangerÈ)" but Thomas, of all those who witnessed the
resurrection, needed the tangible experience, the corporeal
certitude of touching. While this makes Thomas the model of
the skeptic there is, nevertheless, a Thomasine gnosis where
the mystic knows Christ as a tangible Reality. This is why
the Thomas episode is only found in the most esoteric
Gospel, the Gospel of John. It is Thomas who attests to the
Real Presence which is the principle of Christian
sacramentalism and which underpins the mysteries of
transubstantiation.
In the iconography of the
incredulity of Thomas the doubter inserts two fingers into
Christ's wounded flesh. These two fingers represent the two
natures of Christ, man and God, and in the act of inserting
them into the transfigured flesh Thomas realises that there
is no division, no duality, but that the risen flesh is
divine and human at once. There is no final distinction
between a man's corpse and his ghost - the resurrected body
is beyond any such duality. The mystical temperament is
stirred by this fact. It means that we need not shed our
fleshly form in order to know God. We need not pine for a
distant heaven. In God there is no here and there, no past
and future. If we attain to the Eternal Now all is
transfigured, spirit and flesh both, as all opposites
resolve into the Divine Unity.
In Islam there are some who simply
must see God face to face. They burn with a desire to know
the Real - really! - and nothing less will do. The Koran
declares that God is nearer to us than our very life vein,
and that wherever we turn our face, He is there. The mystic
wants to know this, not just know of it. Islamic
spirituality is often expressed in terms of nearness to God,
and "Presence" (Hazrat) is a title given to the saints. The
mystic seeks the Real Presence, to be so near to God that
one can touch Him and be touched by Him. God is no mere
vapor, He is immanent Reality, Ever-present. There is an
important hadith in which the Prophet, praying the eclipse
prayer, is seen to reach out into space as if grasping at
some invisible thing before him. After the prayer his
companions ask him what he was doing. He explains that, for
a moment, Paradise opened before his eyes and its fruits
were so real, his vision so corporeal, that he reached out
to grab at the heavenly fruit. "And had I grasped one," he
said to his companions, "you would have eaten from it as
long as the world remains." Paradise is more real than this
life. Christianity and Islam share the doctrine of the
bodily resurrection, resurrection in the flesh. Paradise is
a transfigured reality, a transmuted physicality, not an
otherworldly dream.
3. Wine as Revelation
Akin to this order of symbols is
the use of wine as a metaphor for revelation, a symbol of
the manifestation and incarnation of the divine, of how the
divine can be present in this world. In Christianity, Christ
himself is the revelation, the revealed Logos, God
incarnate, God as flesh and blood. His blood is the wine of
life. In the spiritual order of Islam, the holy Koran is the
Logos and the words of the Koran are the draught of
blessedness, sweet to the lips, intoxicating to the soul. It
is in the words of the Koran that the Uncreated is made
manifest. In Christianity, where the liturgy takes the form
of a sacred meal, one imbibes the divine wine from the
chalice in the sacrament. In Islam, which reverts to a more
primordial mode of liturgy that is not sacramental as such
and that requires no priesthood, one imbibes the divine wine
in the salat, in the ritual recitation of the Koran, in
which the living God is present. That is to say that the
formal recitation of the Koran is, as it were, the
"sacrament" of Islam, not in the mode of a sacred meal but
in a more direct mode of invocation. God is really present
in the Christian sacrament - so attests the orthodox
Christian tradition - and, in a different mode, God is
really present in the Koranic recitation where the
worshipper actualizes the Divine Reality in the spoken word
and living breath. The Koran is to speech as wine is to
water.
Wine as revelation is an especially
pronounced theme in Sufi poetry. Bistami compares the
sequence of prophets to the production of wine. The true
seed, he says, was planted in Adam's time and it germinated
in the times of Noah. In the time of Abraham it sent forth
its branches and in the time of Moses the grapes set upon
the vine. In the time of Jesus they ripened and then
"Muhammad's time" he says "saw the pressing of the clear
wine" the miraculous draught of transformation. This is at
the same time a description of the spiritual journey. Each
of the prophets represents a spiritual station until one is
drinking in the company of the winemaster, Muhammad, the
Seal of the Prophets.
This parallel between the two
religions becomes clearer when we realize that the
transformative principle in both cases is anemnesis,
recollection. The life of this world is a forgetting and
God's revelations are reminders from and of Him.
Recollection is the actualising principle in the Eucharist
for Christ said "Eat! drink! Do this in remembrance of me!"
while in Islam the Koran, and its ritual recitation, is
dhikr'allah, remembrance of God according to the Koranic
covenant: Remember Me and I shall remember you. Spiritual
realisation in both faiths consists of the act of
remembering. It is our dallying in vain pasts and idle
futures that keeps us from the reality of the moment. All
methods of mystical realisation consist of remembering the
Ever-present God, seeking and abiding in the Divine
Presence. As this relates to wine, the old wine will cause
us to forget - it reduces the body to a dead weight, the
mind to a stupor and the tongue to a slur- while the new
wine is a remembering, a sparkling lucidity, an uplifting
joy that inspires the tongue to a heavenly eloquence. The
Koran itself is dhikr - from the tongue of the supremely
eloquent Prophet. Similarly, at Pentecost when the apostles
were filled with the Holy Spirit and were enabled to speak
in "tongues" - a divine eloquence - people said "They have
had too much wine."
Remembrance, dhikr, is, in
particular, the great theme of the Sufis and of the Sufi
brotherhoods, and their methods of remembering - principally
the invocation of God's Name - are routinely compared to
drinking the sacred wine. The Sufi lodges are often called
"taverns of the righteous" where spiritual seekers gather to
"carouse" and grow intoxicated upon God's revelations.
Although there is no sacramental meal, certain devices in
Islamic spiritual life nevertheless suggest the idea of
revelation as nourishment. Amongst other things, the fast of
Ramadan has this purpose. In Christianity the Lord's Supper
sanctifies eating and drinking. In Islam, the fast does the
same. The worshipper forgoes all food and drink during the
daytime and prayer is their only nourishment. At night,
eating and drinking - often of an expansive, festive
character - is interspersed with the special devotions
called "tarawih", long sequences of voluntary prayers (a
feast of prayer) to which the Sufis are especially devoted.
With each cycle of these prayers a
portion of the Koran is recited, so it is in the extended
tarawih prayers that the worshipper may recite large
sections or all of the Koran during the sacred month. The
Sufis are especially dedicated to the tarawih prayers
because they lead directly to and are an arena for the
Laylat al-Qadr, the mysterious "night of power" or "night of
awe", the most mystical occasion in Islamic spirituality,
the night that the Koran describes as better than a thousand
months. The Laylat al-Qadr - the night upon which the Koran
was revealed to the Prophet - is the climax of Muslim
mystical life, the night (related in an axial manner to the
Night of the Ascent) where the very principle of revelation
is open to the saints, the night of the intoxicating ecstasy
of Divine disclosure.
4. The Liver as Organ of
Revelation
The mention of Thomas the Doubter
earlier opens up another symbolism that is very obscure in
our present times but that is essential to any full
appreciation of all the issues before us. We must remember,
as already stated, that as historical religions both
Christianity and Islam are founded upon, and overlay,
deeper, more ancient understandings from those times before
the historical religions were even needed. To come to an
adequate understanding of many religious matters we nowadays
have to make an effort to reacquire ways of seeing and
thinking and knowing that were once common and developed but
which are now rare and neglected. In the present case we
must place the symbolism of wine against a background of a
primordial cosmological and metaphysical heritage. This is a
more primal order of gnostic understanding. It is more
concrete, more visceral, less abstract. It is preserved in
the historical religions but often in ways that become less
and less accessible to the increasingly abstracted
historical man. It is entirely necessary that we introduce
some salient aspects of it here.
In the depictions of the Johannine
scene of doubting Thomas inserting his fingers into Christ's
wounds, it is always the wound in Christ's side, whence
flowed the eucharistic blood and water, rather than the
wounds of his hands and feet, that Thomas is touching, and
the wound in his side is always, in these depictions, on the
right side of his torso. This is where the liver resides
among the internal organs. As naturalism begins to prevail
during the passage from medieval to renaissance Christian
art, and the Christian mysteries are emptied into the public
domain, representations of the scene become more lurid,
culminating in Verocchio's statue and, later, Carravagio's
almost shocking painting. But these representations make it
clear in the most graphic way; Thomas' fingers - his two
fingers, representing the two natures of Christ - intrude
into the wound in Christ's right side where the liver is
exposed. In a typical play of renaissance symbolism, Thomas
is sometimes quite plainly both touching and pointing, the
image being a document on esoteric anatomy for those with
eyes to see it.
Turning, then, to this deeper and
more ancient (we might call it shamanic) dimension, it is of
cardinal importance - but entirely overlooked - to situate a
consideration of the mysteries of wine alongside an
investigation into the mysteries of the liver. The two
things belong together - just as macrocosm and microcosm
belong together - and cannot be separated. Wine is to drink.
The fermentation of wine recalls the fact that processes of
fermentation have been internalized in the digestive organs
of the human microcosm. The fermentation of wine-making is
essentially a predigestion, and the transformation of
foodstuffs into nourishment (or inebriants into visions) is
completed in the subtle alchemy of that most complete of all
symbols, the human body.
In modern times we might still
appreciate wine as a spiritual symbol but any spiritual
significance of the liver - hepato - the organ that
metabolizes alcohol and purifies blood, is entirely lost to
us. Modern industrial medicine knows the liver as a murky
swamp of catalysts and compounds, or sentimentally as the
body's "wonderful chemical factory", but we no longer have
the slightest idea why ancient and even neolithic man
regarded the liver as the seat of the soul. In traditional
accounts, the liver is regarded as the very seat of anima
and, more importantly for our present purposes, as the organ
of revelation, an internal spiritual "mirror". Our ancestors
gave to this organ the exalted role of "portal of dreams",
"seat of divination" and "eye of revelation." Let us recall
that hepatomancy - divination by an examination of the liver
of a sacrificed animal - was almost as widespread as
astrology in the ancient world. But modern man has not the
slightest clue what all of this attention to the liver might
be about nor the slightest inkling that the religious
mysteries of wine are connected to it. It is necessary that
we spell it out.
The important thing to know about
the liver is that it is the microcosmic internalisation of
the cycles of night and day and it is therefore the organ of
duality. It has two cycles, a day cycle and a night cycle,
the night cycle being triggered when we sleep and stop
consuming food or drink. The iconography of the doubting
Thomas - who, incidentally, is Thomas the Twin - is all
about duality. The two fingers of Thomas touching the place
where blood and water flowed from Christ's (right) side
could hardly be a plainer signal. Blood and water are, by
extension, the cosmic elements fire and water, ignis and
aqua, and represent the primal duality in elemental terms,
while the two nature's of Christ concern the duality 'God
and man' and Thomas' doubts are to do with the duality
'spirit/flesh'. The liver, in esoteric anatomy, is the
microcosmic seat of the primal duality 'night/day' (and
hence, waking/sleeping).
These connections are signaled not
only in Christian art but they are quite clear in classical
mythology. In Greek myth it is the demiurgic Hephaestos (the
Greek version of Ptah, the Egyptian creator god) who blends
wine and water in his chalice (krater) for the gods, and -
part of the same mythology - binds Prometheus to the rock
where Prometheus will have his liver pecked from his body
every day, only to grow a new liver each night. Prometheus
has his liver pecked out and restored in cycles; it is a
defining condition of his bondage. It is the state of
duality to which Prometheus is bound by the
Wine-blender.
The other crucial thing to know
about the liver is that, in traditional understandings, it
is not just a filter in the body's drainage system but is a
sense organ comparable to an inner eye. Traditional
thinking, in fact, regards the liver and the eye as akin and
connected. The eye is the other organ that has a day/night
cycle. It opens and shuts with waking and sleeping in
parallel, or rather counter to, the cycles of the liver. In
the alternations of night and day, when the outer eye is
open the inner eye is shut, and when the outer eye is shut
the inner eye is open. The liver is the eye of dreams, the
seat of inward vision, an inner mirror. As well, the finely
knit, dense, shiny texture of the liver is remarkably
similar to that of the eyeball. The connection is obvious in
cases of liver disease which manifests as a yellowing of the
whites of the eye. We might also recall, in our present
context, that alcoholism produces blindness and that we
commonly refer to someone being "blind drunk". The liver is
an organ of vision, but it is the vision of our dreams, not
our waking life.
Any method of spiritual
transformation that is concerned with transcending the
condition of duality and attaining a higher unity, any
spirituality that conceives of the human predicament as
bondage to a realm of duality, is likely to involve
practices calculated to impact upon or manipulate the cycles
of the liver and to preserve the clarity of this inner eye.
Almost always there will be a preliminary process of
purgation in order to cleanse the organ, polish its mirror,
sharpen its sight and differentiate its cycles. These cycles
can then be manipulated by the use of fasting (and
fast-breaking) as means of controlling the organ's triggers.
The organ can also be influenced by either drinking or
refraining from alcohol.
In the symbolic order specific to
Christianity, the duality of the liver (physically evident
in the two lobes of the organ) is further divided into a
fourfold symbolism where the organ is seen as consisting of
four half-lobes. Christianity adopts a cruciform symbolism
here. It is essentially the same as the basic symbolism used
in astrology, and indeed the whole basis of heptamonacy is
that the liver can be read in exactly the same manner as a
horoscope according to two axes marking east and west, up
and down. Wine, in this context, is a distillation of the
year, the four seasons, the four directions. Thus is wine
graded by vintage. In its flavors and nuances a wine retains
the essence of a year. Christianity uses wine as a tincture
of unity to overcome a fourfold multiplicity.
4. Practices
These ideas underpin both Christian
and Islamic mystical praxis. Beneath the external
differences that exist between Christian and Muslim
teachings there is a common sub-stratum of primordial wisdom
science. Both the Christian Eucharist and the Muslim
prohibition of alcohol must be seen in this context.
Christianity employs wine to achieve certain inner
transformations while Islam achieves the same
transformations without it. Christianity, we should recall
at this point, specifically addressed the degeneration of
the ancient mysteries in the Graeco-Roman world - the
mysteries of Demeter and Dionysius - and so took a
sacramental form since these were agricultural mysteries
concerned with bread and wine. But the Christian redress of
pagan decadence was, in the total economy of things,
excessive, and this excess precipitated Islam which, again
in the context of greater cycles, restored an even older,
and nomadic, equilibrium. In either case, though, the steps
in transformation are the same: purgation, illumination,
unity. And even though the Koran is "clear" wine, which is
to say it is not a physical liquid to be drunk like the
Christian sacrament, it is still the liver that "digests"
it, so to speak. Islamic mystical practices have the same
organic basis as Christian spiritual realisation.
In the Christian case the wine in
the Eucharist - in which is united spirit and matter, God
and the world, Creator and creation; in short, the two
natures of Christ - "works" upon and through the liver. The
Christian mystic prepares himself with fasting and purgation
and forgoes all food and drink except for the flesh and
blood of Christ. In this, the wine - the blood - acts upon
the purged organ almost like a Hahnemannian potency or
perhaps, to use a better known illustration, like silver
nitrate over photographic film. It is the catalyst for a
spiritual alchemy.
Islamic practices are even more
calculated even though they do not involve actual physical
wine. The whole secret of the Islamic mode of fasting is
that it reverses the cycles of the liver, and that this is
akin to reversing the cycles of night and day, sleeping and
waking. As the fasting Muslim goes about his business during
the day, his liver is triggered into its active mode because
no food or drink has been ingested for hours. Normally, this
occurs during sleep. During fasting it occurs while awake.
The point of this is to bring the inner and outer eyes into
alignment, into a common focus upon the Reality that is
inner and outer, subject and object, both. Usually the inner
eye opens when we sleep, but Islamic fasting reorders these
cycles so that the inner eye is open while the Muslim is
awake and conscious. Thus the Muslim has the experience of
being fully awake while his body, so to speak, is sleeping.
He is effectively conscious in sleep. The conscious mind and
the dreaming mind are both awake at once.
This is a nascent spiritual state
that prefigures the resurrected state beyond the opposites
of flesh and spirit. In the resurrection all opposites are
reconciled. It is the state symbolized by the eclipse, the
resolution of the sun/moon duality - thus the import of the
hadith mentioned earlier. It is the same state sometimes
depicted as the "midnight sun", the union of
day-consciousness with deep sleep or, more commonly, as the
union of the opposites male/female in the mystical wedding.
Islamic fasting is part of a spiritual science calculated to
re-order our metabolism in a specific way, namely to reverse
the normal cycles governed by the liver, to prepare us on
the psycho-physical level for states of spiritual
realisation.
There is also a common gesture
found in Islamic devotion that acts upon the liver, though
no one understands it as such anymore. When the worshipper
sits up from placing his forehead to the earth in the
canonical prayers, and he sinks backwards upon his heels,
placing his hands upon his thighs, it is sunna to fold the
right foot in a peculiar manner that leaves the toes facing
towards the qibla (Mecca). To achieve this the body must
lean rightwards somewhat, stretching the left side of the
torso but compacting and placing pressure upon the right
side. It looks an odd and uncomfortable position to
non-Muslims, and seems an unnaturally yogic contortion of
the legs that makes sitting contrived and has no
significance other than it is said to be how the Holy
Prophet arranged his feet and legs at that juncture in the
prayer.
This sitting position is very
obviously designed to reposition and push upon the liver.
Once it is pointed out to us it is as obvious as Thomas
pointing to the liver of Christ in Christian iconography. We
can stand at the rear of any mosque and watch it. To place
the legs and feet in this way exerts a mild pressure upon
the liver. It is almost a massaging of the liver done by
titling the torso rightwards. If we still understood why the
liver is the "eye of dreams" and thought of it as something
more than a filter in a drain, we would recognize this fact
immediately; this position in the canonical prayers is
undoubtedly designed to have a directly physical effect upon
the liver, the organ of dualities. Prayer consists of
recitation of the Koran, then this pressing on or massage of
the liver during the sitting position that follows. Recite
the Koran. Press on the liver. Recite the Koran. Press on
the liver. It is almost as if the Prophet's practice was to
hold himself in this position to sooth the liver after each
imbibing of the "clear wine" of God's Word.
As far as salat as a symbolic "wine
drinking' is concerned it is relevant to recall here that
alcohol impairs our verticality. A drunken man staggers. He
cannot stay upright. He loses that most human of
characteristics, his uprightness. Eventually he falls down.
After the Muslim, standing upright in prayer, imbibes the
Koran he falls down on his face in prostration. After each
recitation, made while standing, he falls down to the
horizontal plane. The symbolism of wine concerns not only
the Unity/multiplicity duality but also the spatial
dichotomy, vertical/horizontal, that is the operative
symbolism in Islamic prayer and its alternations between
standing and prostration.
In view of all of this, consider,
then, the cumulative effect of the fast of Ramadan. In the
fasting itself the cycles of the liver are reversed and the
worshipper assumes the state of conscious sleeping. He is
held in that state for a whole month. And throughout there
is the nightly feast of prayer, drinking deep draughts of
the clear wine of God's sweet and intoxicating Word. In
addition, at each of the extended rakas the worshipper,
resting with his feet and legs as the Prophet did, places
pressure on the liver. The devotions of the sacred month are
designed in this way. As well, the month is traditionally
divided into three sets of ten days, leading to Laylat
al-Qadr on an unspecified night in the third set. These
three sets correspond exactly to the processes: purgation,
illumination, unity. The first set of ten days is purging.
The sharpening of the body/soul duality is preparatory in
all systems of gnostic attainment. Its organic correlative
is the purging of the liver. The second set of ten days is
illuminating - many people report vivid dreams beginning in
the middle part of the fast. Then, in the third part of the
fast there is the greatest potential for the unitive
experience, the Night of Power, only attained by the highest
souls and with the grace of God.
***
There is no space here to describe
all of the more subtle processes of this alchemy and how
they culminate in the mystic's experience of Unity, but it
is necessary to add - it is an exceedingly important point -
that the liver is, so to speak, the pulse of the heart
expanded into the duality of night and day, and conversely,
in the heart we find the diurnal cycle of the liver
condensed into the pulse of the moment. This latter
condensation corresponds to the work of the Sufi dhikr, the
perpetual invocation of the Divine Name in the heart, and of
the equivalent practices in Christianity, such as the
hesychasm. The Divine Name encapsulates the whole
revelation. The Divine Name is the precious wine. Wine acts
upon the liver but all of its higher associations are with
the heart, qalb, and the oasis of the Moment that is between
two heart beats.
Conclusion
The most important thing to be
taken away from these explorations of alchemical
transfiguration is a sense of the wealth of the esoteric
traditions in Christianity and Islam and a corresponding
sense of how woefully inadequate is any merely sociological
consideration of contemporary religious debates.
We also begin to realise that
meaningful dialogue must engage the representatives of the
mystical schools of both religions. Externalism on its own
will only create polarisations, entrench contrasts and
obscure the common foundations. The social tensions between
Christian and Muslim civilizations over their respective
attitudes to alcohol, along with a whole range of problems
(not the least of which is a worldwide epidemic of
alcoholism, a disease of the modern soul) can only be
overcome by rediscovering a transcending truth. The only
solution to the contemporary impasse is to reacquire those
things we ignored or threw away in our self-destructive rush
for the superficial benefits and glamour of modernity, to
start remembering those essential things we have so
completely forgotten. The task of conducting dialogue
between civilizations is much the same as the task of
mystical realisation itself, namely overcoming distinctions
without destroying them.
We need the special wisdom of the
Sufis and that of their Christian brothers and sisters,
gathered together to share the new wine of God's
revelations, if a genuine dialogue of substance is to take
place. The realisation that awaits contemporary man is that
mystics have been right all along. The wine is served. It is
at the banquet of Love, where all opposites meet and all
dualities are resolved into the One, that the mystics of all
faiths come together.
© Dr Abdu Razzaq
Blackhirst
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