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.

Rilke's angels

He hears the voice in a howling wind on a cliff path above the Adriatic, and it gives him the first line of what becomes the Duino Elegies. 

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Who, among the orders of angels, would hear me if I cried out?

He warns at the end of the first verse that “every angel is terrifying”. He picks up that refrain at the start of the second elegy, where he calls the angels “almost deadly birds of the soul”.  He gives a longing glance at the gentler appearance of the angel in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, as a gentle, very human guide who escorted the boy Tobias along the road 

Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of your most radiant stood at that simple doorway,
 dressed for travel and no longer frightening…?” [1]

The author is Rainer Maria Rilke, who was born in Prague and is recognized as one of the greatest poets in the German language. His imagination was angel-struck, from his early poem about the angel of the sundial at Chartres to his ghost writing for the Angel of Death in the last lines he ever wrote. His angels rarely have much in common with the familiar figures of Jewish and Christian angelology. He told  Witold Hulewicz, his Polish translator, that he was more drawn to the angels of Islam. [2]

Before he arrived at Duino Castle, near Trieste, in 1912 as the guest of the Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Rilke had wandered Andalusia with a Koran and a copy of a French biography of Muhammad in his book bag  He wrote a poem about Muhammad’s summoning.

The 96^th sura of the Quran (“Recitation”) corresponds to the night of January 12, 611, when Gabriel first appeared to Muhammad – who was sleeping in a cave in Hira -and ordered him to read. In the hadith Muhammad is roused by a blinding light. When his eyes adjust he is terrified by a radiant figure that spans the whole distance between heaven and earth. The angel lifts him by his hair (he feels no pain) and speaks to him in a voice that fills him with fear. In the name of the creator, the angel hands him a scroll and orders him to read. Muhammad protests that he cannot read.In some versions,the contents of the book enter his heart and three years later, on the orders of the angel, he starts to deliver them to others. 

When Muhammad reads, in Rilke’s elaboration,the angel submits.and bows to him.

The Angel bowed its head
before him, one from thenceforth who had read:
who knew, and carried out, and who decreed. [3]

From the birth of the Duino Elegies in the storm above the Adriatic, it took Rilke ten years to complete all ten, after the trauma of the Great War, in what he called a thunderstorm of the mind. Often, in these lovely, wild and mysterious verses,we fell the aching distance between the human condition and the untouchable beauty of the angelic realm. In a letter to his Polish translator Rilke explained that "the angel of the Elegies is that being that vouches for [our] being able to recognize a higher level of reality in [the realm of the] invisible than in the visible.” 

“You are the bird whose wings came/when I wakened in the night and called.”  This is how Rilke addressed the Guardian Angel (Der Schutzengel) in a poem with that title.

What shall I call you? Look, my lips are lame.
You are the beginning that gushes forth,
I am the slow and fearful Amen
that timidly concludes your beauty.
You have often snatched me out of dark rest
when sleep seemed like a grave to me
and like getting lost and fleeing, -
then you raised me out of heart-darknesses
and tried to hoist me onto all towers
like scarlet flags and bunting.[4]

In the last lines Rilke composed, in the unfinished poem that begins Komm du, du letzter ("Come on you, you last") the poet gives voice to an angel. This time it is Azrael, the Angel of Death. 

As I burned in spirit, I burn in you.
The wood that blazes held back for so long has aged;
now I feed it and burn in you. [5]

Rilke gave us a gentler version of human-angelic interaction in one of the many poems he composed in French. 

From “Vergers”(Orchards)

3

Reste tranquille, si soudain
l’Ange à sa table se décide:
efface doucement les quelques rides
qui fait la nappe sous ton pain.

Tu offriras ta rude nourriture,
pour qu’il en goûte à son tour,
et qu’il soulève à la lèvre pure
un simple verre de tous les jours.

3

Stay still, if the Angel
suddenly chooses your table;
gently smooth those few wrinkles
in the cloth beneath your bread.

Then offer him your own rough food
so that he can have his turn to taste,
so that he can raise to that pure lip
a simple, common glass.[6]

The hint that an everyday angel may sit down at our table brings shivers of recognition and hope. In these lockdown times, it's good to know we may have visitors who don't need to enter by the door or come masked. Also helpful to have guidance on the correct table manners to observe when the angel calls.

References

1. Rilke, Duino Elegies II trans. Stephen Mitchell
2. 1925 letter to Witold Hulewicz quoted in Karen J. Campbell, “Rilke's Duino Angels and the Angels of Islam” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics No. 23, Literature and the Sacred (2003) 191-211.
3.  Rilke, "Muhammad's Summoning", translated by Leonard Cottrell. https://dailypoetry.me/rilke/mohammeds-summoning/ 
4. Rilke, "The Guardian Angel" in  in The Book of Images translated by Edward Snow.
5. Adapted from an unsigned translation of “Komm du” published in the Times Literary Supplement in December 1975 accompanying an essay on Rilke by Walter Kaufmann, who is presumed to be the translator.
6. from "Vergers" (Orchards) trans. A. Poulin, Jr,, in Rilke, The Complete French Poems.

Image: Duino Castle,near Trieste, where Rilke composed the first of his Duino Elegies in 1912.

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

What if the dream angel spoke to you tonight?

"Can you imagine a modern American man coming to his wife, who had just had a baby, and saying 'I had a dream last night, and I received a message that we need to move to Mexico because our baby is in danger here'?  Can you imagine her discussion with her parents, as they’re packing up the house?  The conversation at work when they quit their jobs?"

     The question was put to me by a Christian friend after he read an article I had written on the dreams that saved the life of the infant Jesus. My friend continued:

     "Somehow we seem to think that lives 2,000 years ago were simpler, and that these decisions weren’t as 'big' as they would be today, but in an era when the average person probably never traveled more than 50 miles from the spot they were born, this was a very large decision indeed.  They knew how to listen."

      A thought transference exercise of this kind is like stoking a fire, and bringing the glowing coals under the cold ashes alive. It carries a fierce and luminous story that may have grown cold and gray through mindless repetition into blazing relevance for how we live today.

      My friend had further questions. "Where, and when, did we lose the ability to listen to our dreams? How do we get it back?"

       Here's part of the answer I give in my book Conscious Dreaming:

For centuries, the church applied crushing weight to deny the validity of personal experience in the worlds of spirit. Personal revelation is always perceived as a threat by religious monopolies. To impose its control over bodies and souls, the medieval church not only demonized half the cosmos; it demonized the dream source and the personal unconscious - a poor name for what is also our channel to higher consciousness.

     Carl Jung, the son of a Protestant minister who had lost his faith, observed that organized religion exists to protect people from a personal experience of the divine. Hopefully, we and our churches will evolve beyond the need for such defenses. In these things, there is simply no substitute for personal experience.

     If fear of dreams breeds witchfinders, it also spawns reductionists, who are perhaps more deadly (or at least more deadening) because they invoke scientific jargon in a society where 'science' is widely presumed to have all the answers. Turn a certain kind of scientist loose on the dreaming mind and you will soon be informed that dreams are hallucinations spawned by the wash of chemicals, or nonsensical clutter generated by random neural firing. Such findings are usually reported without a single reference to the researcher's personal experience of dreaming, which speaks eloquently about their value.

     There is all the difference in the world between a genuinely scientific approach and scientism, the dull ideology that denies the authenticity of what cannot be quantified and replicated under laboratory conditions. It is scientism, not genuine science, that is the enemy of dreaming. True science is hungry for fresh data and new experiments, ready to jettison theories that our understanding has outgrown, ever alive to the possibility that the universe (like the dream source) is putting bigger questions to us than our best brains can put to it. It is no accident that the pathfinders of modern science - Einstein and Pauli, Kekule and Bohr, even Sir Isaac Newton in his day - have been dreamers and practical mystics.

"How do we get it back?"

I've spent nearly thirty years in that cause, and have founded my own school of Active Dreaming, training dream teachers from more that 20 countries. Part of what we help people to understand - to revert to my friend's initial questions - is the need for discernment. Working with dreams, as with any other source of information, we want to check the reliability of our sources and fact-check the details. Active dreamers learn to do this in a  number of ways, for example by (a)  identifying and trusting their true feelings and gut instincts about a dream; (by) getting feedback from others according to the quick, clear and action-oriented Lightning Dreamwork process and (c)  mastering the art of dream reentry, which means going back inside a significant dream, wide awake and conscious, to develop further information and dialogue with the source.


Image: Russian Orthodox icon of the archangel Gabriel

Gabriel descending

Buşteni, Romania 

You can't see his brilliance in the sketch; his great wings of light swept our whole space, and charged us all. He came armored, in blue and gold, fanning the huge wings, when we asked for higher guidance and help to clear away shadows that beleaguered some of us, up here in the Bucegi Mountains, under the peak of Caraiman.
     I remembered how he came, unasked, when I was in the midst of a spiritual crisis 25 years ago, taking form as a winged being of light outside, on a sunny day, between the farmhouse where I was then living and the white oak tree where I had reached the decision to move here. He was so beautiful that I saw him as feminine rather than masculine, and wrote a song addressed to Gabrielle

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

"Gabrielle" is close to the Hebrew pronunciation of the angelic name.
     All three people of the Book - Jews, Christians and Muslims - know Gabriel, as a divine messenger and a patron of dreams and astral travel. In the Gospel of Luke, Gabriel is the one who tells Mary what will born into the world through her. In an old Celtic hymn he is called "the seer of the virgin".
     I know the angel is there, even when I forget to call on him.

Karlsson on the Roof, Gabriel on the Strand

Djurgärden-Nacka Strand, Sweden

On my first day in Sweden, I was too tired after 16 hours of travel to do more that take a first ramble around the Old Town and enjoy köttbullar and beer at the old tavern known as the Golden Peace. So in the middle of the night, lying in bed, I decide to give myself a quick tour of the fourteen islands on which the city of Stockholm stands, and perhaps the archipelago beyond, by taking a conscious dream flight over the whole scene. It is brisk and cold as I sail over the night city, swooping down from time to time to inspect a locale more closely. It occurs to me that I am surely not alone as I ride the astral winds above this city of the sea. I sense huge sea birds and winged creatures like stork-men flying around me. A goddess-like figure soars through the night sky in a chariot pulled by what could be great flying cats. Can she be Freya?

Then a chubby little fellow buzzes up in front of me, with something like a tiny aircraft propeller on his back. I recognize Karlsson, a character in beloved children's books created by Astrid Lindgren. I am incredulous, of course. "You're not really Karlsson," I tell him. "Of course I am Karlsson, the best Karlsson in the world," this roly-poly character insists with an air of pompous irritation. "The imagination of the Swedish people is full of me."

This confirms my plan to take the ferry across to Djurgärden, the "Island of Animals" in the morning and visit Karlsson and Astrid Lindgren's other characters in the Junibacken, a museum devoted to the fantasy world she created for the child in all of us.

THE SHIP THAT DIED OF PRIDE

Ice cakes bang and clang against the ferry's hull during the morning crossing. It has been a very long winter in Stockholm. I slither along icy paths from the Djurgärden ferry dock, dodging great potholes full of melted ice, and trucks that throw up icy jets.

I pause at the Vasa Museum, devoted to a great 17th century vessel built for an imperial-minded King of Sweden, Gustavus Adophus. This 64-gun warship was designed to be the largest and most powerful naval vessel in the world, and to overawe enemies, foremost among whom, in the contemporary struggle for the Baltic, was Poland. When the gunports were opened, huge wooden lion heads, teeth bared, appeared above the mouths of the cannon. A springing lion, the king's personal symbol, decorated the prow. The statues of thirty Roman emperors, plus gods and sea-spirits, gargoyles and monsters, bible heroes and warriors of all periods, added to the imaginal freight of the Vasa.

Almost lost among these garishly painted figures, at the stern, was the memento mori of a pale head with snakes slithering in and out of all the orifices - eyes and ears, nose and mouth. Proud Hercules stood atop this head, promising victory over death, but the promise was soon dashed. On the Sunday in 1628 when the Vasa left the dock on her maiden journey, the ship rolled over and sank in a modest squall, drowning fifty seamen and vanishing from the world until she was salvaged in the 1960s. Naval historians think that what sank the ship was a relative lack of ballast - not enough down below to balance all that top-heavy firepower and vainglory. For me, this is a ship that died of pride. What a cautionary tale about the price of hubris!

THE TRAIN TO NANGIJALA

On across the ice and snow and through a dense forest of prams to the Junibacken, where I am given a ticket for the train ride through Astrid Lindgren's imaginal worlds. On the way to the train, excited children are jumping in and out of the pages of a giant book, stood upright. Soon I am transported, with an eager little Danish boy and his parents, into landscapes of enchantment, thrills and delight. Through a series of wonderful dioramas, we enter the landscapes of Pippi Longstocking, who flouted conventional notions of how children ought to behave by lying with her feet on her pillow. Then the commentator asks, "Do you see that you are flying?" Indeed we are. The sensation is remarkably vivid, almost as vivid as my astral flight the night before. Far below, above the lights of a night city, a chubby figure is buzzing around over the rooftops. "Karlsson!" the boy beside me exclaims in delight, hissing the Ss. Now we are in Karlsson's messy house on the roof. Can't stay there for long.

It's in the world of the Jonathan and Karl Lejon - the Lionheart brothers - that the full scope of Astrid Lindgren's gift to children comes home to me. The Brothers Lionheart was not part of my boyhood reading (it was published in 1973) and I have to intuit much of the story as we enter the scenes. It involved the tragic death of one brother, followed by the death of his younger sibling. So death is not kept off-stage here, but put in front of young readers, where it needs to be, however reluctant many adults may be to face it themselves or talk about it with children. Not only is death featured, but we are given a tour of possible afterlife locales. Soon we are flying over a beautiful world of green meadows and flowering cherry trees, a happy afterlife. But on its borders is a dark and sinister prison world, ruled by a cruel tyrant whose will is enforced by a she-dragon. The brothers go to war to help free the captives. I am deeply stirred by these glimpse of life beyond life in Nangijala, Astrid's name for the region of the afterlife she evoked. It has entered so deeply into the collective imagination that now it is not unusual to say of a child's death, in Sweden, "She went to Nangijala". The Brothers Lionheart has replaced the mystery novels on my list of my next Swedish must-reading.

MEETING THE ARCHANGEL ON THE NACKA SHORE

On to Nacka, a commune on a large island south of Stockholm, where my weekend workshop will be held. I check into the beautiful Hotel J, where they advise me to walk down to the water, turn left and walk for five minutes to get to lunch at their restaurant on the Strand. By following these directions quite literally, walking with care on deep ice, I find myself at the end of a narrow spit of land that ends at a great metal beam soaring up against the sky, curling over at the top like a giants diving board. High above, a heroic figure in flashing silver seems to be playing a starry constellation like a washboard. At the base of the metal pillar, right next to me, is a winged figure about my size, holding a single star. A grounded angel, or an angel who came down to catch a falling star?

I am eager to know the story. In the restaurant J, before I look at the menu, I ask the waitress if she knows. It seems the sculpture is famous in Sweden. Designed by Carl Milles, it was intended to decorate the United Nations in New York, but the religious element was considered incorrect, so its full realization came about here. In English, the title of the sculpture means God the Father on the Rainbow. What about the winged figure on the ground. "Ah, that is the Archangel Gabriel," I am told. You just met the Archangel Gabriel.

I am wildly happy to think that I met Gabriel by straying slightly from my directions, here on a snowy beach in Sweden. This bodes well for the dream adventures I will be leading soon. For all three people of the Book - Jews, Christians and Muslims - Gabriel is the archangel of dreams, the patron of astral travel and a primary messenger and mediator between the divine realm and that of humans. A dreamer's kind of angel.