THE ATLAS OF THE POLISHED MIRROR

Ibn ʿArabī

nature

Born in Murcia, formed in Andalusia, and buried in Damascus — al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, author of thousands of pages on how a hidden God comes into relation with a world. For him the divine Names are not decorations but the very structure of that relation: every created thing is the trace of a Name seeking display.

The single most Kabbalah-shaped mind in Islam, and he was in Andalusia and then the East in the exact generation the first Kabbalists were writing in Gerona. Divine names as the architecture through which the Absolute meets creation is, structurally, the sephirotic move — and both traditions arrive at it within one lifetime of each other.

My heart has become capable of every form: a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for monks… I follow the religion of Love, whichever way its caravans take.

rhymes with

sephirahchokhmah

whyThe flash that contains everything before it divides — and his whole doctrine is about how that undivided thing comes to be many without ceasing to be one.