[...]ability to exhibit gradients, or lines of force

self-organization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously


topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.

According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended meaning of the words of the Bible, may be either figurative or non-figurative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.

The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation

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(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.

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(Corbin)

Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology

psalms and invocations to the beings of light

the celestial physics, which limits the number of Intelligences

victoriality
Sovereignty of Light, heralded by Zarathustra زرتشت‎‎

(arch)angelic vectors

to grasp the notion of ishraq (eshragh اشراق), the structure of the world that it governs, and the form of spirituality that it determines.

ishragh is at the same time both the ‘illumination’ and the ‘reflection’ (zuhur ظهور) of being

appearance = unveiling

Thus, just as in the sensible world the term signifies the splendor of the morning, the first radiance of the star, in the intelligible Heaven of the soul it signifies the epiphanic moment of knowledge.

the Presence of the philosopher at the mutational appearance of the intelligible Lights
“estrangement from their bodies” was for them a philosophical question



(for hayula proj.:)

primordial Flame which is their source, and which Sohrevardi claims to have seen in a vision that revealed to him the authentic ‘Oriental source’. This is the ‘Light of Glory’ that the Avesta names as the Xvarnah (khurrah in Persian, or in the Parsi form fan, farrah فره). Its function is primordial in Mazdean (مزدایی) cosmology and anthropology. It is the effulgent majesty of the beings of light, and it is also the energy which conjoins the being of each being, its vital Fire, its ‘personal angel’ and its destiny...

... the ‘negative’ intelligible dimensions of the ‘longitudinal Order’ (dependence, passive illumination, love as indigence)
produce the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which accords with them. The innumerable stellar individuations of this Heaven {as in the Avicennan schema, each celestial orb is celestial in relation to the Intelligence from which it emanates) are so many emanations which materialize, in a still wholly subtle celestial matter, that part of non-being which conceals--if one thinks of it hypothetically as isolated from its Principle--their being that emanates from the Light of Lights.
... from this second order of Archangels there emanates a new Order of Lights, through the intermediary of which the Archangelarchetypes govern and rule over the Species, at least in the case of the higher Species. These are the Angel-Souls, the ‘Animae caelestes’ and ‘Animae humanae’ of Avicenna's angelology.

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transcend the ‘two-dimensional’ space {of the necessary and the possible) of Avicenna's theory of the hierarchical Intelligences.

Intimated beyond the heaven of the Fixed Stars of Peripatetic or Ptolemaic astrology lie innumerable marvelous universes.
In opposition to what was to happen in the West, where the development of astronomy eliminated angelology, here it is angelology which takes astronomy beyond the classical schema within which it was confined.

...there proceeds eternally the universe of the Primordial Ruling Lights



... which marks the boundary between the celestial world and the material world of becoming. It is the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which now symbolizes the boundary between the angelic universe of Light and Spirit (Ruh-abad روح آباد) and the dark, material universe of the ‘barzakh’ (برزخ).

The characteristic term barzakh, when used in eschatology, means the intermediate, and when used in cosmology, it means the inter-world {the ‘mundus imaginalis’). In Sohrevardi's philosophy of the Ishraq it assumes a more general meaning: it designates in general everything that is body, everything that is a ‘screen’ and an ‘interval’, and which of itself is Night and Darkness.

That concept, therefore, that the word barzakh connotes is fundamental to Sohrevardi's system of physics. The barzakh is pure Darkness; it could exist as such even if the Light were to withdraw. Thus, it is not even a potential light, a virtuality in the Aristotlian sense; in relation to Light it is pure negativity, Ahrimanian (اهریمنی) negativity as Sohrevardi understood it. It would be a mistake, then, to attempt to base the causal explanation of a positive fact on this negativity. Every species is an ‘icon’ of its Angel, a theurgy effected by this Angel in the barzakh which in itself is death and absolute night.


the schema of Mazdean cosmology, in which the universe of being is divided into menuk {celestial, subtle) and getik {terrestrial, dense);


{سهروردی}--{*} In Sohrevardi, the perception of the world includes, in structural terms, a metaphysics of essences; existence is simply a way of regarding {e'tebar اعتبار) essence or quiddity--it does not add anything to it in concrete.

The schema of the universe, then, is arranged according to a fourfold plan:
... (4) There is the mundus imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ideas (muthuli flatunlyah مثل افلاطونی?), but of Forms and Images ‘in suspension’ (muthul mu'allaqah مثل معلق). This term means that such forms are not imminent in a material sub-stratum, as the colour red, for example, is imminent in a red body; they possess ‘epiphanic places’ (mazahir مظاهر) where they manifest themselves like the image ‘in suspension’ in a mirror. This world contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense in a subtle state; it is a world of subsistent and autonomous Forms and Images, the threshold of the malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.


It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.



stories:

The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible world, the world of the events of the soul, because the writer, in configurating his own symbols, spontaneously discovers the meaning of the symbols of the divine revelations.

We are not concerned with a series of ‘allegories’ but with the secret hierohistory, invisible to the external senses, which unfolds in the world of the malakut, and with which external and fleeting events symbolize.



سهروردی Sohrevardi's noble venture is not an ‘insurrection’ to islam an external and literalist religion, rather view that sees the integral Islam is spiritual, then Sohrevardi lies at the summit of this spirituality and is nourished by it.

crypto-Shiism شیعه

prophetic philosophy

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Between a scientific treatise, a fable and philosophical discourse, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis imagines a pitch-dark world of an animal living as deep as possible down in the abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.
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