The Angel Whose Wing is the Color of Peacock Feet

 

I love the small discoveries in my overnight studies that bring a subject to quivering life. I am reading the visionary tales of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi in Henry Corbin's French translations published as L'Archange empourpré. Suhrawadi, the medieval Persian Shaykh al-Ishraq ("Master of Illumination") melded Neoplatonist philosophy and mystical Islam. I read some of his visionary treatises forty years ago, in a translation by W.H. Thackston that I found in the tiny offices of the publisher opposite the British Museum on Great Russell Street [1]. I was called to deepen my study of Suhrawardi by lucid dreams and inner conversations in the liminal space between sleep and awake, and the play of synchronicity, of dreams literally spilling onto sidewalks. 

In a story whose Farsi title Corbin translates as "The Rustling of Gabriel's Wing"[2], the teller walks the night in a half-dream state until he encounters ten sages of shining beauty, only one of whom can speak to him in a way he can begin to understand.

The sage tells the traveler "that everything in the four corners of the world proceeds from Gabriel’s wing". Then he explains that Gabriel has two wings. light and dark. The left wing is dark because it bears a reddish "imprint", the color of "the moon at its rising or of peacock feet." It is from the shadow of that wing that human events unfold. 

What a stunning image, and goad to contemplation. A difficult and barely animated philosophical text whose terms resist easy translation and definition is suddenly gloriously alive, its words swishing and fluttering in the air. The peacock would have been quite familiar to Suhrawardi's audience, both the literal bird with its gorgeous many-eyed back feathers (not actually its tail) and the symbolic bird central to many forms of religious art and belief in the general area from the Peacock Angel of the Yazidis to the companion of deities in India. What are we to make of peacock feet in a mystical account of emanation from the Highest Word down to the human plane? Will we hear the peacock scream, as Yeats did?

There are other phrases to bite on and savor in Suhrawardi's didactic story. Why does the angelic speaker declare that the business of the ten sages is "tailoring" (in Corbin's French translation, couture)? We know that 'garment" is a term often used in theo-sophy of many stripes for the vehicles of soul or consciousness on various levels. 

[1] The Mystical & Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi trans. W.M. Thackston (London: Octagon Press, 1982)

 [2]"Le bruissement de l'aile de Gabriel" in Shihaboddin-Yahya Sohravardi. L'Archange empourpré: Quinze traités et récits mystiques. trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Fayard, 1976)

Images

Top: Detail from "Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation" Folio from a manuscript of the Majma' al-Tawarikh. Herat c. 1425

Bottom: "Calligraphic Composition in Shape of Peacock," Folio from the Bellini Album, Turkish ca. 1600

Both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Public Domain.