Night Journey and Ascension with Gabriel

I have been re-rereading an excellent scholarly study of early accounts of Muhammad's "night journey" under the aegis of Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), the angelic patron of dreams and astral travel. These "primitive" narratives, like the ascension discourse of Ibn ‘Abbas, are sometimes wildly different from Islamic orthodox teachings. The first angel the Prophet encounters in Ibn ‘Abbas’ narrative is a Rooster Angel (no kidding) - a giant with emerald green and blazing white feathers whose wings spread as far as the eye can see. Its function is to wake everyone up on Earth below. 
    Then the Prophet meets an angel who is half fire and half snow, split down the middle. Somehow the fire does not melt the snow and the snow does not put out the fire. Next the traveler meets the Angel of Death, who is studying a kind of cosmic laptop on which everyone's expiration date is inscribed - with the whole Earth between his knees, so none can escape him. He now encounters the Angel of the Hell Gates.
   The Prophet's ride is the Buraq, a mystical steed with a beautiful human face.  
   There are angels all the way up, through seven heavens. They get bigger and bigger. Higher up they stand in rows, with a distance of “50,000 years” of normal travel between each row,
   Muhammad is terrified by cherubim whose bodies are full of faces, and by seas of fire and wild water. These are the “veils” of God. Gabriel gives "firmness" to Muhammad’s vision, at last leaving him to trade in the Buraq and fly up in a strange green vehicle called a rafraf (for which there is no translation). It’s been suggested that it is a flying carpet. It dips and rises like a bucket seat on a tilt-a-whirl and will interest aficionados of UFOs.
    Muhammad leaves Gabriel behind to whizz up for a face-to-face with God (an idea frowned upon by orthodox imams). God "inclines' himself until he is the distance of "two bows", then reaches between Muhammad’s shoulder blades until the Prophet feels a cold hand closing around his heart, that delivers him from fear.
     Recurringly, Muhammad falls into a swoon, from which he emerges to tour the numberless palaces of Paradise as far as the Lote Tree of the Boundary, also known as a sidr tree. He then makes his homeward journey, stopping to greet the earlier Prophets in the lower heaven (Jesus in the lowest, the First Heaven).
     The authenticity of the narrative, attributed to Ibn Abbas, a contemporary of the Prophet (he was 13 when Muhammad died) revered as the "Interpreter of the Koran" and the "Great Sea of Wisdom" is contested. Yet the scholars concur that this version of the isra (night journey) and mir'aj (ascension) is very early, and gives us some insight into the type of visionary experience - embarrassing to organized churchmen - that is the fundament of religions..
     Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who melded Christian faith with neoplatonist philosophy, gave us in his fifth-century Celestial Hierarchy tiers upon tiers of angels, from seraphim and cherubim closest to God down to archangels and angels nearest to earth and humans.  Ibn 'Abbas has angels in myriads, ordered in rows seventy rows deep, separated on their various levels by those 50,000 years of distance which the Messenger of God is enabled to cross in an hour. When the Prophet returns to his body he finds that the jug of water overturned by the hoof of the Buraq when they took off has not finished spilling. With the help of the archangel of dreams, he has visited heavens and hells and traveled to the outermost limit of what it is possible for a human to see and know, in less than the time it takes to empty a jug of water. 

Source: The book I quote here is Frederick S. Colby, Narrating Muhammad’s Night Journey: Tracing the Development of the Ibn 'Abbas Ascension Discourse (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2009). 

Art: Mounted on the Buraq,watched over by Gabriel, the Prophet visits the paradise of ḥūrīs Illustration from the Mi‘rājnāma (Book of Ascension) from the Timurid period in Persia, c.1436. In the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The archangel of dreams

Gabriel is the archangel of dreams, for all three peoples of the Book – Jews, Christians and Muslims.

He first appears in scripture in the Book of Daniel, where he explains a troubling vision that Daniel does not understand. The archangel shows himself in the form of a man. But when he comes closer, Daniel is seized with fear and awe and falls prostrate on the ground. [Daniel 8:13-16] When Gabriel comes again to explain a prophecy about the restoration of Jerusalem, he “swoops” on Daniel in “full flight.” [Dan. 9:22]

The name Gabriel is a composite of two Hebrew words, meaning “man” (gever) and “God” (El). As Rabbi Joel Covitz comments, “Gabriel brings man to God and God to man, thus divinizing man and humanizing God.” [1]

In the Talmud, Gabriel figures as an angel of justice, smiting the hosts of Sennacherib with a sharpened scythe. He is also an interpreter between nations, fluent in languages such as Syriac and Chaldee. In Jewish tradition, Gabriel is sometimes identified with the nameless voice that told Noah to prepare the Ark, and the invisible force that prevented Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, and the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush.

The Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, identifies Gabriel both as the Master of Dreams, and as the angel who mentors the soul before birth. In this conception, the bringer of dreams is also the source of the soul’s knowledge of its destiny and its place in the order of creation.

In the Christian story, Gabriel is the angel of the Annunciation. He appears to Mary to announce the coming of the Christ, as he formerly appeared to Zacharias to announce the coming of John the Baptist. He visits Joseph in a dream to reveal the identity of the divine child. He returns in another dream to warn the family to flee from Herod’s persecution.

The beauty of his face and form are almost feminine in countless Renaissance images of the Annunciation – in Leonardo’s version, for example, and in Melozzo da Forli’s.

The whole of Islam hangs on Gabriel’s relationship, as dream guide, with the prophet Muhammad. The prophet claimed it was Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic) of the “140 pairs of wings”, who dictated the Koran to him, sura by sura. It was Gabriel who escorted Muammad on his Night Journey (miraaj) to gain the personal knowledge of higher worlds.

Gabriel brought Muhammad an extraordinary ride, the Buraq, sometimes depicted as a mule with a woman’s face. Like the human mind, the Buraq is restive and must be calmed by the angel before it can carry Muhammad through the many worlds. They fly to Jerusalem, swift as thought. They ascend to higher realms from the Dome of the Rock. They explore successive heavens – some say seven, others nine – where Muhammad interviews spiritual masters who once lived on earth, as well as planetary angels.

Gabriel parts company with Muhammad at the Lote Tree of the Farthest Boundary. The Lote Tree is unlike any tree known on earth. It marks the outer limit of the realm of images; beyond this, the intellect may not go.

When Muhammad returns to his body, with the inspiration for the Koran, he finds that water from the jug his mystical steed kicked over during its take-off is still spilling onto the floor of his cave. His travels through all the heaven worlds have taken less time than is required to empty a jug of water.
    A hadith says that Gabriel used to come to the Prophet in the form of Dihya Kalbi, the most beautiful of his contemporaries. [2]

Muslims believe that Gabriel descends to earth once a year on the Night of Destiny, towards the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

In Kabbalah, Gabriel is associated with Yesod, Foundation, and the sphere of the Moon. In the Western Mystery traditions, his  color is blue and his element is water. Coptic Christians associate him with Anubis, the canine-headed Egyptian patron of dreaming and astral travel. In Celtic blessings Gabriel is sometimes called the Seer of the Virgin.

My favorite account of Gabriel is from Rumi. The great Persian mystical poet put himself inside the scene in which Mary first encountered the archangel and found that (of course) she was terrified.

Alone in her room, Mary saw a “heart-ravishing form”. It “rose up before her from the face of the earth, bright as the moon and the sun.”

She trembled with fear. She was naked and feared that her body would be ravished by this amazing power.

She was so scared she jumped out of her skin, trusting herself to the protection of God. She was practiced in “flight to the unseen.” “Seeing this world to be a kingdom without permanence, she made a fortress of the presence of God” – and sought shelter in that fortress now.

The angel spoke to her. “I am the true messenger of the Presence. Do not fear me.” As he spoke, a pure light flamed from his lips, like a candle, and spiraled up to the star Arcturus.

“You flee from me from the seen into the unseen, where I am lord and king. What are you thinking? My home is in the unseen. What you see before you is only a portrait. Mary, look closely, for I am difficult to grasp. I am a new moon and a yearning in the heart.

“You seek refuge from the one who is your refuge. You confuse the Friend of your soul with a stranger. You flee from the Friend you seek. Don’t choose sorrow when what is before you is joy.”[3] 

Thirty years ago, in bright sunlight, I had a vision of the archangel as a being of feminine beauty formed of solidified light. I fell on my knees,streaming tears, on a dirt road behind the farm house where I was then living. I wrote a poem for Gabriel from that vision.

Song for Gabriel

My heart is a song that rises

It is a rainbow bridge

spanning abysses 

of place and time

My heart is a song that rises

to walk in the One Light

to heal the wound

between earth and sky

    My heart is a song that rises

It is the crystal fire

that wakens the sleeper 

into the dream

My heart is a song that rises 

It is the pure waterfall 

that cleanses my path

with tears of joy

References

1. Joel Covitz, Visions of the Night: A Study of Jewish Dream Interpretation (Boston: Shambhala,1996) 58
2. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) 117, 396n4

3. Freely adapted from A.J.Arberry's rendition in Tales from the Masnavi (London: Curzon Press, 1994) 267-268.

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Gabriel as Annunciating Angel by Melozzo da Forli (1438-1494)

Many faces of the Guide

The Guide can take many forms, in dreams and on the roads of waking life. Our true spiritual teachers often use shock or humor in their efforts to wake us up to the real nature of things, and they love to play dress-up.
     An earnest woman in a church group once asked me, at the break, whether she could meet her guardian angel in her dreams. "Absolutely", I told her. When I began to explain the process of dream incubation, she interrupted me. "I've done that three times, and each time I asked to meet my guardian angel, I got Garfield the Cat."
     I asked her to explain to a visiting space alien, "Who is Garfield the Cat?" She explained that he's greedy and always looking out for Number One. "Angel means messenger", I pointed out to her. Could there be a message in Garfield's approach to life? This earnest woman, who had clearly given a lot of her life to service to others, thought about this, then stole a quick look at the buffet and asked, with a mischievous glint in her eyes, "Would it be okay to jump the line and get some chocolate cake while it's still left? I reassured her that Garfield, as guardian angel, would say "Absolutely.”
    The angel can be terrifying as well as funny. Rumi evokes beautifully the terror Mary felt when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her in the moment of annunciation. In the presence of a supremely greater power, she literally jumps out of her skin. Whereupon the angel who is patron of the astral realm and of dream travel says to her (in paraphrase): "You flee from me from the seen to the unseen, where I am lord and master? What are you thinking of?"

    The truth of our dealings with higher sources of knowledge - and above all the Guide of our soul - is that we don't need to go looking for them because they are forever looking for us. When Dante at last finds Beatrice (the Guide appearing in the form of a beautiful women he loved and lost) after the terrible journey through all the hells of the medieval imagination, she reproaches him that for many years she was seeking him in dreams, and he would not listen.

    The Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. It's like that with the powers of the deeper world. Here's a poem I wrote about this:

Hunting Power

You say you are hunting your power

But your power is hunting you.
I'll go up to the mountain, you say.
I'll fast and live on seaweed
I'll hang myself on a meat-hook
Under the hot sun. I'll give up sex
And wine and my sense of humor.What are you thinking of?
For you to go hunting your power
Is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

Go out in the garden any night
Step one inch outside the tame land
And you are near what you seek.
Open the window of your soul
Any night and your guide may come in.
The issue is whether you'll run away
When you see what it is. To make sure
You succeed, tether yourself like a goat
At the edge of the tiger wood that breathes
Right beside your bed. He'll come.

"Hunting Power" is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories published by Excelsior Editions (State University of New York Press).

Drawing by RM

Gabriel has a sister

Never judge the depth of a dream by the length of the dream report. From my first cycle of sleep dreams last Sunday night, I harvested just one line, spoken to me by an unseen voice:

The Archangel Gabriel has a sister.

I was surprised, not least because in my first conscious visions of Gabriel, more than thirty years ago, I encountered a being of such feminine beauty that I was inclined to call him/her "Gabrielle".
     One of those visions is indelible. Under bright sunlight, in front of an old white oak on the farm in upstate New York where I was living at the time, a being formed from condensed light, radiant and beautiful and winged. In the presence of this luminous being, I felt cleansed and renewed. My heart swelled in my chest. I fell to my knees on the dirt road by the cornfield, weeping with joy. A poem burst from me. I chanted it aloud, half-singing. When I returned to the house, I wrote it down, like this:

Song for Gabriel

My heart is a song that rises
It is a rainbow bridge

spanning abysses
of place and time

My heart is a song that rises
to walk in the One Light
to heal the wound
between earth and sky

My heart is a song that rises
It is the crystal fire
that wakens the sleeper
into the dream

My heart is a song that rises
It is the pure waterfall
that cleanses my path
with tears of joy

   I knew something of Gabriel, All three peoples of the Book - Jews, Christians and Muslims - know this great angel. In all three traditions, Gabriel is the patron of dreams and of astral travel. Gabriel is the angel of annunciation. In Rumi's powerful vision of the annunciation, Mary is seized with terror by the coming of an immense power into her space. Fearful of violation, she flees from her body. The angel smiles on her and says (in my paraphrase): "You flee from me, from the seen to the unseen, where I am lord and master. What are you thinking of?"
   Coptic Christians, I have heard, identify Gabriel with Anubis, who is also a patron of dreams and of travel between worlds.
   I have met Gabriel many times since the vision under the white oak. In troubled times, the archangel has sometimes appeared armored for battle. In some visions, I have seen Gabriel as both male and female, light and dark - and as something before the opposites held in dynamic balance in this winged form. 

    But what did it mean to be told, in this recent dream, that "Gabriel has a sister"?

    I posted the one-line dream report on my personal Facebook page and received a bevy of suggestions from other dreamers, some of whom are steeped in angelology. The general view was that angels are neither male nor female but will exhibit forms adapted to the character and perception of the beholder. I recalled a remarkable and wildly funny story by Stephen Mitchell, the distinguished translator, in which Gabriel appears to him in such an alluring feminine form that he is possessed by lust.
    My mind moved, like a long-legged dragonfly upon a pond, over all the associations.
    Then I decided to share my one-line dream report with a dear friend who had been expecting a baby. She has very strong angel connections, and I have often joked that in her presence I find angels unavoidable.
     Here is an excerpt from our email exchange:

RM (April 5): You may have seen this on my Facebook page, from a dream over the weekend:

The Archangel Gabriel has a sister. I was surprised to learn this in a dream last night, especially since in some of my visions Gabriel appears feminine 

As I think about this today, I am wondering whether you have news of the bright angel who is coming into the world through you.

Friend (April 7): This is amazing. 

First - yes, my beautiful daughter landed on the 5th of April, the day you wrote to me. She is wonderful - and we are enchanted by her presence. 

Second - a few days before birth, I had this dream: 

I was in a long line, in front, waiting to enter a beautiful, white church. As I am almost at the entrance, I am wondering what I am doing there. I see then that I have in my right hand a piece of paper. A single word is written on it: Gabriel. 

Amazing.

Yes angels are. And I see that my dream of Gabriel may have been a dream of annunciation. Gabriel ("the seer of the Virgin" in an old Irish blessings) is good at that.

Images (1) Icon of the Archangel Gabriel from the royal gates of the central iconostasis of the Kazan Cathedral in St.Petersburg (2) RM drawing from a vision of Gabriel as male and female, light and dark.