The Science of Letters ('Ilm al-Hurūf)

La Science des Lettres (Ilmul-Hurûf), February 1931.

In the introduction of his study on the 'Theodicy of the Kabbalah' (Octo-ber 1930), Mr. Warrain, after saying that the "Kabbalistic assumption is that the Hebrew language is the perfect language taught by God to the first man," finds it necessary to make some reservations about "the de-ceptive pretension of possessing the pure elements of the natural lan-guage, whereas one only possesses snippets and deformations.” None-theless, he admits that “it remains probable that ancient languages derive from a hieratic language composed by inspiration,” and that “there must therefore be words expressing the essence of things and their numerical relations," and that “the same can be said of the divinatory arts.” We think it would be of benefit to make some clarifications on this issue; but, first, we wish to point out that Mr. Warrain has placed himself in a par-ticular philosophical point of view, while we intend to restrict ourselves strictly, as we always do, to the initiatic and traditional field.

An initial point to draw attention to is this: the affirmation that the Hebrew language is the very language of primitive revelation seems to have nothing but an exoteric character and is not the essence of the Kab-balistic doctrine, but, indeed, used to simply cover something much more profound. The proof for this is that this is also true of other languages, and this claim of 'primordiality,' so to speak, cannot be taken literally in all cases, since there would be an obvious contradiction. In particular, this is the case with the Arabic language, and it is even a fairly common opinion that it is the original language of mankind in the countries where it is in use; but what is remarkable, and what makes us believe that this is the same case with regards to Hebrew, is that this vulgar opinion is so unfounded and devoid of authority that it is in contradiction with the true traditional teachings of Islam, according to which the 'Adamic' lan-guage was the 'Syriac language,' loghah suryānīyyah, which has nothing to do with the country currently known as Syria, nor with any of the more or less ancient languages of which men have preserved the memory of until today. This loghah suryānīyyah is properly, according to the in-terpretation given by its name, the language of 'solar illumination,' shams-ishrāqiyyah; in fact, Sūrya is the Sanskrit name of the Sun, and this would seem to indicate that its root sur, would designate light, and it belongs to that original language. It is therefore this primitive Syria that Homer speaks of as an island located ‘beyond Ogygia,' which identifies it with the Hyperborean Thule, and 'where revolutions of the Sun are found.' According to Josephus, the capital of this country was named Heliopolis, 'The City of the Sun, '^[151] a name later given to the city in Egypt called On, like Thebes would have been one of the first of the names for the capital of Ogygia. The successive transfers of these names and many others would be particularly interesting to study in regards to the constitution of the secondary spiritual centers of various periods, a constitution which is closely related to that of languages destined to serve as 'vehicles' for their corresponding traditional forms. These languages are those which can properly be called 'sacred languages;' and it is precisely this distinction which must be made between these sacred languages and the vulgar, or profane, languages upon which the justification of the Kabbalistic methodology rests, as well as similar processes found in other tradition. We can say this: just as every secondary spiritual center is an image of the supreme and primordial center, as we have explained in our study on The King of the World, any sacred language, or 'hieratic' language if one wishes, can be regarded as an image or reflection of the original language, which is the sacred language par excellence; this is the 'Lost Word,' or rather, hidden for men of the 'dark age,' just as the Supreme Center has become invisible and inaccessible to them. But this is not 'snippets and deformations;' on the contrary, it is a question of ordinary adaptations necessitated by circumstances of time and place, which is to say, according to what Muhyiddīn ibn Arabī taught at the beginning of the second part of al-Futūhāt al-Makkīyyah, each prophet or revelator had to use a language that could be understood by those to whom it was addressed and what was appropriate to the mentality of such people and times. The reason for this is because of the diversity of traditional forms, and it is in this diversity that results, as an immediate consequence, the languages that must serve as their respective means of expression; it is therefore all sacred languages that must be regarded as truly the work of the 'inspired,' without which they cannot be fit for the role to which they are essentially destined. As for the primitive language, its origin was to be 'non-human' such as the Primordial Tradition itself; and every sacred language participates in this character of its structure (al-mabani) and its significance (al-maʼānī), a reflection of this primitive language. This can also be interpreted in different ways, which do not have the same signif-icance in all cases, because the issue of adaptation intervenes here once again: for example, the symbolic form of the signs used for writings;^[152] such is the case, particularly with Hebrew and Arabic, the correspond-ence of numbers with letters, and consequently with the words which compose them. It is certainly difficult for Westerns to realize what sacred languages really are, because, under the present conditions at least, they have no direct contact with any of them; and we can recall in this link what we have said more generally on other occasions, with the difficult of assim-ilating the 'traditional sciences,' which is much more difficult than that of teachings of a purely metaphysical order, because of their special char-acter which binds them indissolubly to particular forms, and which does not allow for transportation from one civilization to another, under threats of making them completely unintelligible, or to have only an il-lusory result, if not one that is completely false. Thus, to effectively un-derstand the full significance of the symbolism of letters and numbers, it is necessary to live it in a way, in its application to the very circumstances of everyday life, as is possible in certain Eastern countries; but it would be absolutely quixotic to pretend to introduce considerations and appli-cations of this sort into European languages, for which they were not made, and where the numerical value of letters, in particular, is a non-existent thing. The essays that seek to attempt anything from this sort of order of ideas, apart from what is from traditional data, are therefore in-correct from the outset; and, if they have obtained some accurate results, for example from the ‘onomantic' point of view, this does not prove the value and legitimacy of the processes employed, but only the existence of a kind of 'intuitive' faculty (which, of course, has nothing in common with the true intellectual intuition) of those who have implemented them, as frequently happens in the 'divinatory arts.'^[153] To expose the metaphysical principle of the 'science of letters' (in Ar-abic 'ilm al-hurūf), Sayyidī Muhyiddīn, in al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyyah, con-siders the Universe to be symbolized by a book: it is the well-known sym-bolism of the Liber Mundi of the Rose-Cross, and also of the apocalyptic Liber Vitae.^[154] The character in this book are, in principle, all written sim-ultaneously and indivisibly by the 'divine pen' (al-qalam al-ilāhī); these 'transcendent letters' are the eternal essence or divine ideas; and every letter being at the same time a number, one will notice the agreement of this teaching with the Pythagorean doctrine. These same ‘transcendent letters,' which are all creatures, having been condensed principally within the divine omniscience, are by the divine breath, descended to the lower lines, thereby composing and forming the manifested Universe. A rapprochement is necessary here with the role that the letters play in the cosmogonic doctrine of the Sefer Yetzirah; the 'science of letters' has more or less equal importance in both the Hebrew Kabbalah and in Is-lamic esoterism. ^[155] According to the basis of this principle, it will be easy to understand that correspondence is established between the letters and the different portions of the manifested Universe, and more particularly within our world; the existence of planetary and zodiacal correspondences is, in this regard, sufficiently well known to be useless to press further upon, and it suffices to note that this places the 'science of letters' in close connec-tion with the astrology envisaged as a 'cosmological' science.^[156] Further-more, by virtue of the constitutive analogy of the 'microcosm' (al-kawn as-saghir) with the 'macrocosm' (al-kawn al-kabīr), these same letters also correspond to different parts of the human organism; and, in this connection, we will note in passing that there is a therapeutic application of the 'science of letters,' each letter being employed in a certain manner to cure the diseases which affect the corresponding organism.

It also follows from what has been just said that the 'science of letters' must be considered in different orders, that we can in fact related this to the 'three worlds:' understood in its higher sense is the knowledge of all things in the very principle, as eternal essences beyond all manifestation; in another sense, that can be said to be an average, it is the cosmogony, which is to say, the knowledge of the creation or the formation of the manifested world; finally, in the inferior sense, it is the knowledge of the virtues of names and numbers, insofar as they express the nature of each being, knowledge allowing, by way of application, to exercise by their means, and reasons for this correspondence, a 'magic' action on the be- ings themselves and on the events concerning them. Indeed, according to what Ibn Khaldūn explains, the written formulas, being composed of the same elements which constitute the totality of beings, have the fac- ulty of acting upon them; and this is also why the knowledge of the name of a being, expression of its own nature, can give a power over him; it is this application of the 'science of letters' which is usually referred to by the name sīmīā.^[157] It is importante to note that this goes much further than a simple 'diviniatory' process: one can first, by means of a calcula- tion (hisab) carried out on the numbers corresponding to letters and names, arriving at the forecast of certain events;^[158] but this is only an initial degree, the most elementary of all, and it is possible to carry out mutations on the results of this calculation which will have the effect of bringing about a corresponding modification in the events themselves.

Here again, we must also distinguish between varying degrees, as in the knowledge itself, of which this is only one application and implemen- tation: when this action is exerted only in the sensible world, it is only the lowest degree, and it is in this case that we can properly speak of 'magic;' but it is easy to conceive that one is dealing with something of a completely different order when it is an action having an impact within the higher worlds. In the latter case we are obviously dealing with the 'initiatic' order in the most complete sense of the word; in only such an order can you actively operate in all the worlds, which has reached the degree of 'red sulfur' (Al-Kabrīt al-ahmar), a designation indicating a link, which may appear quite unexpectedly, between the ‘science of let-ters' with alchemy.^[159] Indeed, these two sciences, understood in their most profound meanings, are but one in reality; and what they both ex-press, under very different appearances, is nothing other than the very process of initiation which rigorously reproduces the cosmogonic pro-cess, the total realization of possibilities of a being necessarily taking place through the same phases as that of the Universal Existence.^[160]

Footnotes

[151]Cf. the 'Solar Citadel' of the Rose-Cross, the 'City-State of the Sun' of Campanella, etc. – It is to this first Heliopolis that the cyclic symbolism of the Phoenix should be related.

[152]This form may have undergone modifications corresponding to later tradi-tional readaptations, as it happened to Hebrew after the Babylonian captivity; we can say that this is a readaptation, because it is unlikely that the old writing system was really lost in a short period of seventy years, and it is amazing that this seems generally to not be perceived. Occurrences of the same type have had also had to occur for other more or less remote writings systems, notably for the Sanskrit alphabet and, to a certain extent, for the Chinese ideograms.

[153]It seems as if, in spite of the 'scientific' appearance of these methods, the results obtained by modern astrology, which is so far removed from true tradi-tional astrology; the latter, whose keys seem to be lost, was quite something other than a mere divinatory art,' although it was obviously susceptible to ap-plications of this kind, but they are altogether secondary and 'accidental.'

[154]We have already had occasion to point out the relation between this symbol-ism of the 'Book of Life' and that of the 'Tree of Life:' the leaves of the tree and the characters of the book represent all the beings of the Universe (the ‘ten thou-sand beings' of the Far-Eastern traditions).

[155]It should also be noted that the 'Book of the World' is at the same time the 'Divine Message' (Ar-Risālat al-Ilāhīyyah), the archetype of all sacred books; tra-ditional scriptures are only translations into the human language. This is af-firmed expressely in the Vedas and the Qur'an: the idea of the 'Eternal Gospel' also shows that this same conception is not wholly foreign to Christianity, or that at least it has not always been so.

[156]There are also other correspondences, with the elements, sensible qualities, the celestial spheres, etc.; the letters of the Arabic alphabet, being twenty-eight in number, are also in relation with the lunar mansions.

[157]This word sīmīā does not appear to be purely Arabic; it probably comes from the Greek semeia, 'signs,' which makes it roughly equivalent to the name of the Kabbalistic gematria, a word of Greek origin as well, which is not derived from geometria as is often claimed, but from grammateia (from grammata, ‘letters').

[158]One can also, in certain cases, obtain by a calculation of the same kind the solution of doctrinal questions; and this solution sometimes presents itself in a remarkable symbolic form.

[159]Sayyidī Muhyiddīn is called Ash-Shaykh al-Akbar wa Al-Kabrīt al-Ahmar.

[160]It is curious to note that the Masonic symbolism itself, in which the 'Lost Word' and its research plays an important role, in characterizing the initiatic degrees by expressions obviously borrowed from the 'science of letters:' spell, read, write. The ‘Master' who has among his attributes the 'tracing board,' if he were really what he should be, would be able to not only read from, but also to write in the 'Book of Life,' that is to say he can cooperate consciously in the realization of the plan of the 'Great Architect of the Universe;' one may be judged by the distance separating the nominal possession of this rank from its actual possession!