Limits of Linguistic Representation: Wittgenstein and the Unrepresentable that shows forth

Abstract
The paper seeks reexamination of the received critical heritage about Wittgenstein that treats him as a positivist or unquestionably derives inspiration for positivism from him or sees him as a philosopher of language instead of the translinguistic unrepresentable transcendence. It also questions the influential reading of Wittgenstein scholars who argue that he supports only foundationless view of religion and language game is best metaphor for characterizing his religious views. I argue for the centrality of the mystical or transcendence in understanding the whole corpus of Wittgenstein, especially the Tractatus and his ethics. Questioning the approach that writes off a few scattered mystical utterances here and there in Wittgenstein the paper, building on Russell  Neili’s arguments, argues for shift in the paradigm of approaching Wittgenstein by keeping subservient the “positivist” in him  and foreground the broader head of mystic in him. A proper understanding of mysticism is all that we need to have in order to appreciate the mystic Wittgenstein’s transcendence of logic and language in both life and thought and foreground him as a philosopher of transcendence and not merely a philosopher of language. Mysticism is the key to Wittgenstein though most Wittgenstein scholars have failed to put in proper perspective the primacy of the mystical and ignored this vital element that alone explains certain ambiguities and difficulties in traditional Wittgenstein exegeses. Far from being antimetaphysical positivist Wittgenstein is to be read as a mystic in the tradition of great mystical thinkers and can be compared with Simone Weil and other significant mystical thinkers of the recent past. His dialectic of transcendence has significant resemblances with transtheistic mystical philosophies such as that of Buddhism and Taoism. Arguing for continuity of his religious views from Tractatus onwards, the paper seeks to rectify problems resulting from emphasizing later Wittgenstein for deriving a philosophy of religion that has been perpetuating noncognitivist, fideist interpretations of him while failing to properly place ethical and aesthetic in his fundamentally mystical approach to religion and culture.

Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections are in large part, however indirectly, readings between the lines of the story of the soul in the Western metaphysical tradition.
Fergusson Kerr in Theology after Wittgenstein p.166
I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.
Wittgenstein
My thoughts are one hundred percent Hebraic.
Wittgenstein

Linguistic Representations and Dialogue with the Mystical

What do linguistic representations aim at? Mirroring reality? Or they constitute an autonomous play that gives us no insights into the most important foundation for culture? The dream or motivation has often been access to reality however imperfect that may be. Strangely there now seems to be increasing consensus over the thesis that language and reality are two different things and the latter is either opaque for the former or far too rich a thing to be captured in the net of the former. From Nagarjuna to Wittgenstein and Derrida many thinkers have denied language and thought access to reality. The question is what do mystics say about this problem? Could the path ahead for philosophers dealing with linguistic representations be opening for a cross disciplinary study with mystical philosophers or philosophers of mysticism? My contention in this paper is that it should be so. Particularly focusing on Wittgenstein it is argued that the royal road to reality is not through language and thought but modes of perception that bypass them. The most important point is that what matters at the end of the day is ethics and answer to fundamental existential questions, the problems that Culture and Value embodies and for these questions we need to explore other languages than the one ordinarily known. This language is the language of the Self. Wittgenstein fundamentally preoccupied himself with this problem though this concern has been largely sidelined by Wittgenstein scholars and those working on philosophy of language. The present paper pleads for a dialogue with this ignored Wittgenstein to contemplate the possibility for breaking fresh ground in tackling the nagging problems in the debate on language and reality.

There is hardly any difference in early and late Wittgenstein’s on the question of the mystical and the ethical. He remained Tractarian till the end in his mystical viewpoint. He did abandon parts of the Tractatus later but there was no evolution – and in fact could not by the very logic of mystical experience that converts its subjects for good. The mystics solve – for themselves at least – all important problems – intellectual and existential. In fact experiencing God dissolves all problems. For logical positivists what mattered most was what is in Tractatus but for Wittgenstein himself what mattered most was what was not in there, the unsaid part. That was not in the Tractatus because language could not handle that. That something is neither linguistic nor representable in any other way. However that shows itself and thus need not be spoken of or represented. Wittgenstein’s most decisive move was thus away from linguistic representations and the most important job for the philosopher was to delimit what can be represented and thus related to what only shows itself. Ethics and aesthetics and the mystical all belong to this second category. Man does not live by bread of facts (science, instrumental rationality) alone but needs supernatural manna embodied in ethical/aesthetical/mystical. It is ironic that what mattered most to him has not been given due attention by his successors. All his endeavor was to save the intelligence from the bewitchment of language. He was all for transcendence so that man becomes himself and lives truly, joyfully. In his search for happy life, life lived sub species aeternatatis  he paid great attention  to working of language, how language fails to represent reality and leads us astray by creating problems that are not there. It is how men lived that interested him rather than their speculative exercises. This alone solves the riddles of life. Language has no answers and answers can only be found when we step outside language.
As Wittgenstein was more interested in what cannot be linguistically represented his conclusions are radical. The most important things can’t be talked about. Ethics, religion and aesthetics are transcendental. The very fact that things exist is mystical or linguistically and conceptually unrepresentable. We can only gaze at it and get lost in wonder. We can dissolve into this primordial mystery, love and celebrate it. Wittgenstein lived almost like a saint. He is the most mystical of the greatest philosophers of the modern Western history. He tried to show exit to philosophy. He found no problems once we let intelligence operate naturally and it shatters linguistic cobwebs. He fought against pervasive bewitchment of intelligence by language.
However he also realized all pervasiveness of language and how it constructs the world for us. It hardly needs to be argued that we have nothing but linguistic representations even when we seek to talk about transcendence. Man, as has been observed in the classical ages, is a speaking animal. Language is a house of Being. In language the divine and the human meet. Prophets and saints too have spoken. Even the Buddha, the Prophet of silence, spoke even if it is about the impossibility of speech in matters transcendental. Man is condemned to speak and even speak to God and receive the speech of God in turn as scriptures narrate. Scriptures are all filled with linguistic representations of that which though ideally resists getting represented nevertheless is largely accessible though not quite adequately through language. Masses don’t know silence and even saints can’t afford it for too long. Man lives in dialogue, I and Thou dialogue. The absolute stillness is superhuman and for most humans synonymous with death. It is not given for man to conceptually know Truth or represent the divine. But nevertheless he has no other window to higher worlds. Language though imperfect is normally indispensable for humans. Later Wittgenstein is all about appreciating how divine suffuses and expresses in religious language, how ordinary use of language is steeped in transcendental world.

We must not confuse two senses of the term transcendental in Witttgenstein. Logic too is transcendental and we can only show rather than speak about/represent the correspondence between two pictures. To ‘say’ the correspondence between language and reality would require an intermediate language which in turn will require the same ad infinitum., but then that language would also require the same. This kind of transcendence has logical or intellectual function only and did interest Wittgenstein but what mattered for him both personally and as a philosopher is transcendence in ethical/aesthetic/mystical experiences, in the primordial encounter with the world and finding that things exist. The present paper is about this transcendence. As there can be no propositions about what is not in the world or is transcendental we shall have to focus more on life and experiences of the transcendent than on analysis of some theses regarding language or language games to make our point.

Wittgenstein’s Mysticism

Wittgenstein’s protests against being misunderstood notwithstanding, a great industry propounding a version of him he would strongly resent, has been flourishing. What he considered more important has been relegated to background. There is great agreement between scholars on almost everything except that mattered most to him. His motive for doing philosophy and living philosophy have been absent amongst his admirers, not to speak of detractors. His life has not been taken seriously as an aid in clarifying his basic theses and commitments. He has been read as philosopher of language though for him transcendence is more central for culture and value realization.

The mystical in Wittgenstein has not been duly noticed and if noticed  not quite well understood. His religious thought has been misunderstood and not read in continuation with his fundamentally mystical outlook. All kinds of theories have been put forward for accounting for his scattered mystical statements and observations on religion. The mystical is central for Wittgenstein and his philosophy and he has stated it in his Tractatus, Notebooks,“Lecture on Ethics” and in fact most of his writings develop this theme in novel ways, in so subtle a manner that few can notice. His attitude towards religion, often understood in connection with the thesis of language game, is to be put in proper context by foregrounding the empirical mystical foundation that he gives to religion. Wittgenstein scholars have not generally succeeded in integrating his mysticism with his view of religion, culture and aesthetics. Mysticism is in the background of many a theses of later Wittgenstein as well and not just the Tractatus. Even Philosophical Investigations’ central arguments that foreground illusoriness of the self, critique mentalistic picture of the soul, dissolve subject object duality and plunge headlong into the world which is all there us, alert us of dangers in asserting or making propositions on anything that transcends language.
Wittgenstein deserves a comparison with great mystical thinkers. If we understand that God is what is and is missed when we attempt to think or imagine or make images of Him or attempt to comprehend the Mystery we can understand Wittgenstein. According to mysticism God is the case. The only thing is we don’t see. We verbalize and babble and create theologies and metaphysics. Wittgenstein is a metaphysician in the same way Buddha is or Krishnamurti is. God is above speech. The Absolute has never been defiled by speech. But by metaphysics is here meant living or breathing the noumenal world, dissolving into it and not speculating about it with conceptual schemes. Metaphysics as the knowledge of the supraphenomenal reality is the soul of all traditional cultures or “epistemologies.” Man is made for the Absolute, to die in It and thus to eternally live. Certainty is the requirement of intelligence and man is not absurdity. If man fails to access the most certain, the indubitable, the absolutely safe in Wittgenstein’s terms, he has failed as a man. God is the greatest certainty – the greatest and most palpable of the present facts in Whitehead’s words –and a philosophy or epistemology that doesn’t account for this does not deserve to be called a philosophy. It is failure and betrayal of philosophy and of man and his intelligence if the  real is not knowable though of course not conceptually knowable.  Modern philosophy that is largely ignorant of God can’t qualify as a genuine philosophy, as Indians or great traditional philosophers from other traditions understood philosophy as darsana, as seeing or vision.
Wittgenstein had mystic experiences of both the ecstatic and nature-mystical kind. Seeing creation as wondrous is what Einstein correctly defined as religious or mystical attitude. God is attention without distraction as Simone Weil would say. He is the Mystery at the heart of everything. For Wittgenstein God is approached in all these ways and doubting our experience of wonder, of mystery, of eternity, of the ethical or unconditional goodness or his urge for it is absurd. Indeed God is the case and only the fools say in their hearts there is no God. Nasr has remarked that if it were possible to teach (traditional) metaphysics to everyone there would be no atheists around. Modern man has failed to understand what traditions meant by God. God is Reality for traditions and it is absurd to ask is there a reality. Only mystics can, however, say this so genuinely and Wittgenstein is a mystics. As ethics or aesthetics is transcendental and yet quite human and real concerns and constitute the grounds of all that we value most  so is religion understood as living/talking God (to be distinguished from talking about God or mere propsitional belief statement) so characteristic of human endowment that it is absurd to question it. In fact, as the Quran says, no question or doubt can be entertained regarding God. God is love, superabundant joy, beauty that kills, sweetness of every sweat thing, green in the leaves and red in the golden rays and  mystery that surrounds us.

This is not pantheism which is a heresy for traditions but our experience of God out of the world, so to speak, -and of course we also need to note that samsara is nirvana and this very garden is the Garden of Eden for the seeing or who know. Debating about God is height of folly like debating about pleasures of love by enunchs. Against this folly Wittgenstein asserted what normal men have always taken to be the case that God is reality or Reality and only saints truly live life. Wittgenstein was a saint though not of the order of great Western saints like Eckhart. Saints don’t talk about God but talk God, live God, breathe God and share the great joy that God is with lesser mortals. The real question for traditional philosophies is how we become Godlike (theosis) or prepare for death in life (which is the same thing or means for it) or live and move and have our being in God. All else is vanity.

Wittgenstein stood for this primordial heritage of man and that is why was misunderstood by most of his friends and foes like. Needless to remark that he didn’t consider Western civilization that refused to fully countenance the reality of the sacred as something of a monstrosity and like Gandhi a laughable “interesting” idea He complained of Russell, the paragon of modern rationality or philosophy – to have fatally misunderstood him. In fact what he considered most important has been dismissed by many a modern thinker as folly. God (understood mystically or more precisely metaphysically) is the meaning of life for all religions including transtheistic one as for Wittgenstein. I wish to argue the point that Wittgenstein is to be read alongside great traditional philosophers that saw the Good above everything, had little use for fashionable pursuits of today, considered ethics as first philosophy and metaphysical discoveries as fruits or realizations of real ethical life, were centred on God rather than man and saw quintessentially human in living up to the divine image in him, in transcending himself. There is nothing new or original in Wittgenstein’s mysticism as in fact there can’t be anything new in matters transcendental. One can refer to many mystics while explicating central statements of him. So far we have read – with few exceptions– Wittgenstein as a philosopher or failed to appreciate how mysticism informs/grounds his philosophy.
Wittgenstein is not only a philosopher of mysticism but a mystic, a practical mystic of great standing. All his work was dedicated to the “glory of God” as he once said to his friend Dury (Rhees, 1984: 168) – an expression quite unexpected from modern profane philosophers. He didn’t like philosophizing as a speculative/analytical  exercise, as an academic pursuit as is the case now in modern academies or universities but something that Plato would appreciate or other ancient traditional philosophers would prescribe as a way of life and nothing short of preparation of death. That he wanted his legacy to c of changed attitude towards ethics is hardly surprising.  “I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all those questions superfluous.”(Wittgenstein, CV: 61). Philosophy, as pursued by his contemporaries or today, is a disease of modern form of life that needs cure. And that cure is ultimately provided by seeing the futility of the game called philosophy.

For ancients it was ethics and a vision and had little to do with language or concepts.  It was, most probably, his deep conviction borne from experience regarding sacrality of the world and thus the truth of the supernatural/eternal that made him loath modern civilization that had banished the sacred. It is in light of mysticism that we can understand his  unconventional attitude towards secular carriers or vocations, his renunciation of his property, his austerity in life and manners, his casual attitude towards dress, his independence in thought and action, his nostalgia for peasant life in Russia, his alienation from his times that he characterized as dark ages and many puzzles in his biography. His view of philosophy’s aim, his attempt at transcending it for getting the vision of the things as they really are, his rejection of the claims of conceptual analysis or linguistic analysis as explaining reality, his rejection of classical dualisms that have bedeviled Cartesian and post-Cartesian thought, his plea for convergence of the ethical and the aesthetic, his view that ethics is transcendental, his rejection of doing science and mathematics as the ideals of philosophizing endeavor, his critique of psychologism and rationalistic attempts at building a metaphysics and our addiction to use metaphysical notions in ordinary discourse at rational plane are all threads in the fabric of mystical tapestry that has so subtly woven. He rejected theological representations as many others before have done but he never rejected the symbolizandum.

He said there is no theoretical content in religious doctrines. This is, in a way, easily understandable. God is not a thing, an entity, a being among other being or existence. “God is not” as Eckhart would put it. God is Nothing as Buddhism would put it. God is all that there is as Sufism and Taoist mysticism see it. Samsara and nirvana are really one.
There can be no doubt about the mystical in Wittgenstein. Amongst the most loved books of him are included William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, Augustine’s Confessions, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in which Father Zossima figures, and writings of George Fox and Plato. He claimed that Vienna circle people didn’t understand Tractatus and that few will understand it and in fact his learned commentators still mostly miss its kernel, its last pages and especially the closing proposition. His only public lecture is through and through a mystical piece. His only published book during his life time is an attempt to delineate the sacred realm and prevent its debasement by speculative metaphysics and exoteric theology. His notebooks are marked by the mystical passion. His Culture and Value criticizes modern Western civilization on precisely religious-mystical grounds. His Philosophical Grammar, Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations have mysticism in the background and in fact pave way for it. The most important questions of life that science or logical positivism or any reductionist philosophy miss need, according to him, to be treated mystically. His respect for religion as a form of life – though this belongs to the exoteric part of his work – and his refusal to take cudgels on behalf of theologians are explainable through the thesis of the mystical that he values above everything.
If we don’t comprehend such typical mystical statements as “Samsara and nirvana are one,” “God is what is,” “ I see nothing but God everywhere,” “God is the Hidden and the Manifest” “ God is our ultimate concern,” “Eternity is the present moment,” “Don’t prat about God; God is not,” “God is neither good nor true,” “God is the sweetness of all sweat things,” “ God is Beauty and Truth,” “ God is the real Doer,” “It is God that sees and listens rather than we,” “God is the knownest of the Known,” “No doubt can be entertained regarding God,” “God is the Light of the World,” “God is the Totality, the Whole,” “God is the most immediate of the present facts and unattainable quest” we can’t comprehend mysticism of Wittgenstein. He saw everything from mystical (what he wrongly called religious) point of view. His metaphysics of experience is built on the foundations provided by mystical attitude towards life and the world. The central doctrines and conceptions of religion or theology are understood in light of mystical interpretation that informs Wittgenstein.
Review of works on the mystical in Wittgenstein
The problem with most of the works done on this theme is that they have not been done by the students of mysticism but philosophy and that too a very hostile antimetaphysicalantimystical philosophy. How deeply ironic it is that Wittgenstein would be understood as supporter of the manifesto of logical positivism that banished as nonsense everything which concerned Wittgenstein the most. Science for Wittgenstein has not and could not even touch the problem of life, the problem of meaning, the problem of transcendence. His critique of psychologism meant saying good bye to one of the most fashionable reductionist approaches to spiritual reality. His denial of self was negation of everything for which secular humanism and modern individualism stands. His characterization of scientific-technological civilization as dark ages places him squarely with other great religious critics of Enlightenment thought. For him modern positivist civilization lacked culture and therefore was cursed. He lamented that Russell, Carnap and many others who were so close to him didn’t really understand him and those who claimed to be his followers didn’t make spiritual endeavour share the spiritual vacation that moved him. He was every inch a mystic and no doubt should be entertained regarding this. Both Russell and Carnap accused him of mysticism and in fact none of the Wittgenstein scholars or biographers has denied the element of mystical in him but none has been able to see how mysticism is the key to his whole thought not excluding the latter Wittgenstein. Logic is a tool for paving the way to the supralogical or transcendental. In fact mystical is the case for him and needs no arguments. The unrepresentable shows forth. It is there to be contemplated, breathed and enjoyed. God is everywhere and nowhere. Man is not. He lives and moves and has his being in God. My purpose here is to make some general remarks on the centrality of the mystical in Wittgenstein and thus help to put in perspective the critical writings on his religion besides clarifying why it should matter in any discussion of him. I shall particularly focus on his Notebooks (1914-16) to argue my case though I shall not ignore the Tractatus which has been much though still inadequately and often not quite rightly commented upon from this perspective.
Amongst those who have sympathetically written on his mysticism Russell Neili should count as the most important and balanced. Atkinson reads him as a pantheist as if Wittgenstein had not placed transcendence outside the world in so clear terms. Malcolm and some other critics who have written on his view of religion as a language game have missed the mystical core of his religiosity – his metaphysics of experience – to recall Pradhan’s title of his very useful book – I believe it is Indians who can better comment on Wittgenstein because the metaphysics that he affirms – metaphysics as suprarational intuitive or intellectual instead of speculative rational affair – belongs to India especially. (Indians have no difficulty in understanding Buddha as a mystic and Buddhism as a great metaphysic even if Buddha refused to answer 14 metaphysical questions). Brian McGuiness has made a useful small study and there are valuable insights in Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein. Mark Lazenby in The Early Wittgenstein on Religion pays attention to the mystical in him and rightly points out that McGuinness’s view that Wittgenstein is a nature mystic in the Tractatus is not correct and instead argues that he is actually a theistic mystic. He notes that there are two worlds in Tractatus, namely the factual and the spiritual and points out that realizing this is in order to understand how there can be value inside the world. Lazenby develops this position by arguing that the factual world is the everyday one which logic characterizes and that value lies outside this world. The mystic looks back upon this world after transcending it and once it has been transcended there is nothing to say and hence silence ensues. Engleman, Dury and other acquaintances of Wittgenstein have also pointed out the profundity of his mystical outlook. In fact logical positivist camp soon discovered that he is not amongst them. Wittgenstein’s differences with Russell and positivist friends are largely attributable to his mystical-ethical convictions. Many papers have been written to argue the point that Wittgenstein had mystical convictions but very few studies have been able to convincingly link his life and work and interpret him consistently on mystical lines. He has been approached more from theological/religious than from mystic-metaphysical viewpoint. The present paper seeks to fill the gap.
K.C Pandey’s edited collection Perspectives on the Unsayable shows a glimpse of confusion on Wittgenstein’s fundamental contributions to the debate on religion or transcendence. There are disagreements over the nature of his religiosity, cognitive status of religious claims, central metaphysical notions such as the self in relation to God, the meaning of the unsayable etc. Wittgenstein has been approached as a philosopher and not as a mystic and this contributes to confusions. So far few scholars specializing in mysticism have written on Wittgenstein and this has complicated problems. Wittgenstein is a mystic and a metaphysician of a different order – he does metaphysics as many traditional philosopher-sages have been doing it. It is nonrational route for doing metaphysics that he takes. I think the best guide to understanding traditional non-rational metaphysics is the trinity of perennialistmetaphyiscians Rene Guenon, AnandaCoomaraswamy and FrithjofSchuon. For Wittgenstein – to refute his postmodernist appropriations that argue he is a prisoner of language and textuality – what can’t be said is the case. The world is not explained by science or philosophy or anything that employs language.
In a remarkable book Wittgenstein and the Mystical: Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice  Fredrick Sontag sets ten themes that run throughout Wittgenstein’s work. The “themes” dominated Wittgenstein’s life and, Sontag argues, provide a way to understand Wittgenstein’s work. The themes are, as his reviewer puts it, : (1) Philosophy as an ascetic practice; (2) The philosopher as existentialist/pragmatist; (3) The monk’s isolated search for forgiveness; (4) The penitent’s search for forgiveness; (5) The struggle with God as an unknown object; (6) Philosophy as a “religious” way of life; (7) Philosophy as a life of courage; (8) Serious philosophical pursuit has an affinity to mysticism; (9) Language has a mystical quality; (10) Insight can be imparted only to one who is serious and dedicated.
The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s texts
I focus here particularly though not exclusively on Notebooks (1914-16) and then subsume those observations and comment on them from mystical viewpoint. Some statements from Tractaus are too well known and commented to need quoting here. Almost all the statements on religion, ethics and aesthetics in the Notebooks need to be kept in focus for appreciating our reading. Here only a few statements can be quoted or alluded to while commentary proceeds.
Ethics is transcendental.
The work of art is the object seen sub species aeternitatis and the good life is the world seen sub species aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.
The urge towards mystical comes after non-realization of our wishes by science. We feel that even with all possible scientific questions answered our problem is still not touched at all.
It is true: Man is the microcosmos.
There is no such thing as the act of the will. Will is the attitude of the subject to the world.
World in itself is neither good nor evil.
Everything is perfect.
Objects I can only name.
Where in the world is the metaphysical subject to be found?
There is no riddle.
How things stand is God.
…my will is world will.
There can and must be mentioned of I in a non-physcological sense in philosophy.
Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obvious nonsense if it tries to doubt where no question can be asked
For doubts can only exist where a question exists; a question can only exist where an answer exists, and this can only exist where something can be said.

The fact that Wittgenstein had personal mystical experience is well attested. His description of being absolutely safe and seeing creation as a miracle are so compelling that we hardly need to entertain any second opinion about the mystical in him or his encounter with the mystical. The cognizance of the fact that there is a world is enough to make one dance with ecstasy and wonder. Wonder is the beginning and end of human wisdom.
According to him philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. He made the aim of philosophy more a vision than any things else (Pradhan:237). He aims was to get “vision of things as they are and therefore he aimed transcending philosophy itself. Philosophy could be transcended only after it has given us the correct vision of the world. As we have said earlier, this vision consists in man’s knowledge of the world, or in other words, in the metaphysic.” Although metaphysical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought has been disputed we can still say that he does argue for a new way of looking at the world which involves a kind of transcendence quite similar to the one advocated by mystics. After enlightenment the world continues to be the same but we have one foot above the ground as famous Zen anecdote recounts. This is the whole burden of a remarkable work titled Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing. To quote only one statement from Philosophical Investigations “What you have discovered is a new way of looking at things. As if you had invented a new way of painting; or again a new metre or a new kind of song” (401). Wittgenstein is a metaphysician in a special sense. He is a philosopher of transcendence. This point may need a clarification.
Metaphysics as conceived by its greatest masters across traditions from Nagarjuna to Sankara to Lao Tzu to Eckhart and IbnArabi consists in a vision that transforms our ordinary perception or attitude regarding the world. It is not necessarily a vision of beyond in the sense that involves moving out of oneself and talking of an abstraction or higher world ontologically distinguishable from the world we all know. It always presupposes samsara-nirvana or world-heaven equivalence. The immediate is the ultimate and path is the goal as Zen tradition would put it. God is the green in the trees and the red in the sunrays. Transcendence could well be construed as true being of beings as Heidegger would tell us or mystery of things or depth dimension of things. Everything is within according to all traditions.There is no other in absolute sense. All are one. IbnArabi’s words “you are everything, in everything, and from everything” express the vision of all great mystical thinkers. Thus all the higher worlds are part of the Self or consciousness. Ken Wilber has been emphasizing this point especially in almost all his writings. things.

To be open to revelations of transcendence is simply to keep the sense of wonder alive. Philosophy begins in wonder and mysticism makes this wonder a permanent state. The highest stage in the path is the stage of wonder or getting lost as IbnArabi says. Nietzsche was right to emphasize loyalty to this earth. In fact father Zosima in Dostovesky’s mystical work The Brothers Karamazarovsees every garden as the Garden of Eden. He says: “We don’t understand that life is a paradise [at present], for we have only to wish to understand this and it will immediately appear before us in all its beauty.”Rabbi Herschel has made the same point in different terms “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.”
The quarrel between transcendentalists and antitranscendentalists of almost all hues is largely verbal quibble. Platonic ideal world is not a separate world, an abstraction. But the world ordinarily thought to be world is also not the whole world but a mental construction. Blake sees eternity in an hour or infinity in a grain of sand. In fact for the mystics everything is, as it is infinite. Eternity is not an abstraction or some new realm as opposed to time but present moment. To live in eternity is to live in the present, to live moment by moment. What characterizes a philosopher of transcendence is he continues to find a depth in the world, something that excites wonder, something that invites our response and even love. Wittgenstein lucidly made this point in these words:

Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what maybe called “loss of problems.” Then everything seems quite simple to them,no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flatand loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallowand trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this (Z, 456).

His remark about Ayer after listening to his debate with Father Copleston  that ‘he has a point but he is shallow’ underscores the same sensibility. His remark that “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious”(p. 80 of his dairy) is in line with this viewpoint. Though he granted that only strictly scientific statements are meaningful but  he cautioned against positivists that natural science could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical.
That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent/’ as the last proposition of the Tractatusdeclared. We can understand his famous statement “I am not areligious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”in this light. In fact religions don’t aim at even vision but advocate a discipline that makes us open or vulnerable to reality, to richness of being, to thingliness of things as Heidegger would have it, to essences of things that get expressed through things when looked at rather than thought. Wittgenstein would recommend looking instead of thinking. Transcendence of thinking is what contemplation/meditation is all about. It appears to me that Wittgenstein says nothing because nothing needs to be said. He advocates no position or privilges no point of view because this can’t be done. All his endeavor, like the mystics and prophets, is to emphasize that we need to see with open eyes, unburdened by memories or anxieties of thought. We need to see through God’s eyes. And that consists in nonegoistic vision and this makes it possible to assert that “How things stand is God.”
Wittgenstein gave great attention to language in order to show that what constitutes us and what we value most is delimited from what could be expressed in language, from profane textual domain. The Tractatus’s design was expressly determined by this consideration. For him the metaphysical self that constitutes us transcends the world, the urges that move us point beyond the world, experiences that we most cherish are of the world beyond the ordinarily familiar world, our ethical and aesthetic dimension is anchored outside the world.

For him both the willing subjects and the knowing subjects are one and both are outside of the world, and are the source of our language and world-cognition. However, as in mystical traditions, transcendence is not consummated; it remains an unfulfilled quest. It is movement, perpetual movement and not reaching anywhere. It is the limit that can never be reached. Absolute is inexhaustibly rich. Man must perpetually travel. Experiences are open ended and self is perpetually creative. Our search for transcendence, like our need to engage with philosophy is, as Pradhan has noted, “merely an ideal never to be fulfilled, because the metaphysics of experience as unfolded through our subjectivity has to be constantly guarded against unclarity and confusion through language itself. Therefore, philosophy can never ultimately be transcended, since transcendence of language itself is a continuing activity which is performed by philosophy” (Pradhan, 237). It means one can never stop worshipping or glorifying God and travel on the plane of servitude or perfect his surrender or state of innocence or vulnerability to reality. Mystics, as true philosophers (as traditionally understood activity) are always striving to remove the veils of language and thought in order to reach the still centre of existence that transcends language and thought. Wittgenstein is quite clear on the point that Conceptual analysis can teach nothing about reality. Nor resolve the puzzle of how we should understand the world and how we should live. He leaves all questions open and thus paves way for alternative approaches that bypass conceptual analysis and science for understanding or living the great mystery of life.

As Paul Johnson notes: “The conclusion of a Wittergenstein investigation still have all great questions open. As far as the Inner is concerned, in one sense it will always remain as mysterious as life itself” (Johnson: 239). This is precisely mystical attitude towards mystery of life. No question is answered. Only our plane of seeing life shifts and dissolves the ordinary sense of questions. We consent to unlearn. The learned ignorance. “The mystic is an extraordinarily ordinary person” He is a non-knower, non-caner. “The human need for account for the world and our place in it will not disappear, because traditional metaphysics has been shown to be flawed… accepting these points doesn’t involve embracing relativism and is close to a moral argument. (Pradhan, 239). It means the mystic, the artist, the poet, the scientist, shall ever be busy and man needs to be humble. Let Reality speak to him. Let him learn to be receptive. Imposing conceptual structures is violence. We need to learn to be still so that God speaks to us in silence. This opening up, surrender of self, emptying out and polishing our receptivity is what is the crux of Vedanta as Som Raj Gupta has argued in his largely ignored but superb work Word Speaks to the Faustian Man (1991). In fact all religious and mystical traditions are agreed on this point.
Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘God is the meaning of life’ is quintessentially mystical and best understood in light of mystical writings. Underhill’s explication of the meaning of life in mysticism is best commentary on this statement. One can’t be more God intoxicated to equate the most significant thing in life with God. Wittgenstein’s statement that man is a microcosmos is comprehensible only in mystical worldview. He also observed that “As a thing among things each thing is equally insignificant. As a world each one equally significant” (7-10-16) which reminds of Blake’s seeing the heaven in a grain of sand. Mystics have never doubted the significance of the meanest flower or blade of grass seeing everything as the face of the Absolute, as participating in everything.
Wittgenstein famously remarked that the riddle doesn’t exist and the solution of the problem of life is seen in the disappearance of the problem of life. For mystics God is the Light of the world. The question is how to live and that dissolves the problem or riddle. Life is not a riddle to be solved but a mystery to be lived, dissolved in. Riddle exists for those who want to conceptually approach life that resists all logic. The problem of meaning of life is the problem of how to live, how to live so that life stops being problematic.  For him good life is world seen in certain way rather than in a way of behaving. For him there is no value in the world (6.41). It is impossible for to be there proposition of ethics (6.42). The problem of how to live becomes for him not  some epistemological inquiry  the problem of how to  look at that world, the problem of how to find the right spirit in it.
Wittgenstein assigns key importance to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life. Only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life. For him art is the solution. Compare this with Coomaraswamy or Schuon on art and aesthetics and we get the full import of the statement.
Wittgenstein has categorically stated the error of moderns for believing that laws of science explain nature. The world is suffused in mystery that is divine. The very fact that there is a world is incomprehensible and metaphysical. God has been conceived as mystery, as given, as something that is – ‘what is’ in Augustine’s and Krishnamurti’s phrase. Who can afford to deny the “gratuitous” universe? Philosophy begins and ends in wonder explaining nothing and demanding our opening up towards the transcendent miracle of existence. Modern man’s key problem in engaging positively or creatively with religion/mysticism arises from felt absence/hiddenness of God in contemporary experience.  But taken as synonymous with Reality the complaint seems to lose all warrant. God is the only Experiencer, Knower and Actor.

 

For IbnArabi, the great Sufi metaphysician, we don’t see but God sees and we don’t hear but God listens. God is immanent in every experience. As he says:
If we gaze, it is upon Him; if we use our intelligence, it is towards Him; if we reflect, it is upon Him; if we know it is Him. For it is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the invisible and the visible. The whole world prays to Him, prostrates itself before Him and glorifies His praise; tongues speak of Him, hearts are enraptured by love for Him, minds are bewildered in Him (Futûhât, III: 449-50).
For Wittgenstein these lines of IbnArabi would be perfectly comprehensible given his notion of metaphysical subject and its role in constituting experience, his view of the world as my world. Here I propose to compare Wittgenstein and IbnArabi by keeping IbnArabi’s explication in the background while applying the same for understanding Wittgenstein. Agnosticism and skepticisms of various orientations in the contemporary world have a point if understood as the declaration of impossibility of conceptually knowing the Reality, Transcendent Principle, the Ground of existence, the whole Truth, the Mystery. However these are often presented in cruder versions that deny men any knowledge of the supraphenomenal or the very existence of the sacred for which Wittgenstein and IbnArabiwill have zero tolerance. The Pure Absolute or Essence (Dhat) in its fundamental aspect – and thus Meaning/Truth/ Presence/ Identity/ Reality per se – is beyond the human quest and all attempts to reach It, track it, pinpoint It, catch It in the net of language or realm of the finite or time, to conceptualize It, to imagine It, to speak about It, to affirm anything of It are doomed. Before the Ipseity or Dhat one can only be bewildered according to Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein. The world is ultimately a Mystery, a Mystery of Mysteries and no rational or scientific approach could finally and completely demystify it. The world being ultimately a mystery that resists being demystified by means of conceptual intellect is what transcendence implies as Stace has explained in his Time and Eternity (1952). There is no humanely discoverable ultimate truth. All representations of the Real are provisional. Godhead/ Absolute/ Zat-uz-Zat is opaque, deep deep darkness, impenetrable, the absolutely inscrutable unknowable Other. Gnosis consists in knowing that God can’t be known as Abu Bakr is quoted time and again by IbnArabi. As the world is not-He and man ever a worshipper of his Lord or conditioned by his belief – a notion subsumable under the concept of form of life in Wittgenstein, and nothing is ever repeated as God’s theophanies change ceaselessly imply that the world will never cease to be an object of wonder and fascination and Beauty never cease to be worshipped and act as an efficient net through which God catches most of his servants as Plato also noted.
Rationalization, familiarization, demystification and descaralization of the world that ultimately make it inhuman, alienating and absurd and disrespectful towards the Big Other  can’t happen in the Akbarian/Wittgensteinian perspective that sees the mysterious, sacred divine face in everything. Western philosophy, as Heidegger pointed out, is oblivious to the ground of being. It is not open to the sacred mystery of Being. It is not the philosopher but the poet who can show the track of the holy, to the sacred mystery of Being. Nothing in the world of known can express the Divine Darkness. All quests end in wonder. In the last analysis man knows nothing to its depth by means of senses, language and reason. Other modes of knowledge such as intellectual intuition give us another kind of knowledge that instead of making things comprehensible dissolves the knowing subject in the object preserving the ultimate mystery of things in the process. If to comprehend means to have discursive conceptual knowledge we comprehend nothing ultimately. All our explanations, analyses stop at a certain point. Things are as they are. There is something instead of nothing. Being or wajudis in the last analysis a miracle or a scandal to reason. Why should there be a knowing subject and why should our universe be comprehensible are perhaps unanswerable. Man knows but little and this applies to everything from God to quarks. God is incomparable, transcendent. Symbols are all we know. We can only name things and that is all but things escape us as Wittgenstein would say. God alone knows or is Knowledge. The knowledge of reality given to mystics and prophets is of a different order. God remains inscrutable and the sacred inapproachable. Man’s prerogative is to contemplate and dissolve in the mystery of being. Though being is aware of itself this awareness has no analyzable or knowable structure.
We are here and there is no cure for it. But, more precisely, we are not. Only God is. Only the play of divine names is and man happens to be a locus of their action rather than some independent subject or agency. The cloak of mystery can’t be removed from the universe. All human knowledge is progressive unveiling of the ultimate impenetrability of the veil that disguises Reality. Essences are not discursively known.  Existence is a mystery and its grandeur and sublimity defy our reason and its categories. Rereading of Kantian sublime by such writers as Derrida or Lyotard is based on increasingly felt inability of reason to contain the brutal power of imagination. We can’t conceptualize or represent in language the infinity which human beings do encounter. The highest station is that of bewilderment according to IbnArabi and Wittgenstein . All this implies that dogmatisms are unwarranted.  Exoteric theologies need to be on guard and take Wittgenstein seriously as Kerr has also argued in Theology after Wittgenstein.
It is God and not the name of God that religions seek. Exoteric theologies may not distinguish between the Truth and the descriptions or representations of Truth. Nothing can capture the Reality in rational propositional framework. Even ethical propositions are not possible for Wittgenstein. This means we can only know our inability to know God and will good on our own and this means humility in the face of the Great Mystery that God is. This vetoes all self righteous fundamentalist ideologies. Jaina doctrine of syadvada is a corollary of the fundamental mystery and transcendence of the First Principle, the Absolute. This rules out all totalistic or totalitarian claims. Ideological conflicts are based on one’s exclusive claim to have access to truth and denying one’s fallibility. Religions by relegating truth to transcendent realm  and its access to transcendent intellect (which is in us but not ours) veto all quarrels about accessibility to it of any worldly ideology and self-centric person. Secular philosophies that require no moral purification on the part of the philosopher are barred from entering the doors of the great King or Truth.
The essential ethics of Wittgenstein like that of IbnArabi is constituted by such virtues as disinterest, self-denial, charity and love which form the ethical core of all religious/mystical traditions. God is experienced by everyone who sincerely cultivates these virtues. (Post)Modernity has essentially no argument against these values and indeed affirms them. Ibn ‘Arabî has nothing to argue for and against – he only invites us to experience things afresh, to be open to the Real which alone is really experienced in every experience. Wittgenstein’s endeavour is similar in his invitation to transcend language and thought in order to see what is, to see things sub species aeternitatis, to see solution in aesthetics, to live rather than think the mystery that life is. God is not a hypothesis that one needs to prove or could question – He is the ground of every perception, every imagination, every conception or thought, every experience. As Wittgenstein puts it there is no answer as there is no question where nothing can be said.
Wittgenstein is not himself a philosopher in the modern sense of the term which sees reason as the chief if not the only tool for understanding or approaching reality. His view of modern philosophers could not but be largely negative. For projecting IbnArabi or Wittgenstein as a philosopher we need to refer to perennialist conception of philosopher and philosophy. His denunciation of rationalism and much of what today passes for intellectuality aligns him to  perennialist critics of modern thought. It is not a prerogative of ratio or mental faculty of reason but of nous, the supraindividual universal faculty of intellect. For Wittgenstein knowing and willing subjects are one and man is knowledge, so to speak. Instead of conceptualizing we can see and in order to pave way for that direct seeing he removes the traps and cobwebs that language builds. Philosophy should not be a mere theoretical rational inquiry, a conceptual analysis or analysis of language as an end in itself but a realization, intellection or noetic vision that transcends subject-object duality and demands something like ethical discipline that Plato argued for. Philosophy as an abstract philosophical discourse based on rationalistic scientific method and its methodically obtained “truths” is what Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein  often critique. Philosophy for Wittgenstein is not a method to discover truth but a sort of shock therapy to prepare us for receiving truth, to make us innocent or children again. It is a sort of death to the linguistically/conceptually constructed self. Philosophy implies for all of the ancients a moral conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos, who lives wisely as Schuon notes (8:136). Living happily is living wisely. Living in such a way that problem disappears and there is no more sorrow and one partakes of eternity by living in the present is what  Wittgenstein is all about. Philosophy in the traditional Orphic-Pythagorean sense is wisdom and love combined in a moral and intellectual purification in order to reach the “likeness to god.”( Uzdavinys, 2005). It is contemplation of Beauty and Good. This is attainable by gnosis. By philosophizing ancients meant “both noetic activity and spiritual practice.” Wittgensteinian conception is remarkably similar.
In IbnArabi’s understanding the Real alone is and there is no distance between us and It. We are already there in the lap of God – we have never been really away and cannot be away from It. God has never been missed. We have forgotten or fallen asleep but this doesn’t alter the fact that God is our very being, our inmost reality. Man is inwardly God and outwardly a creature according to Ibn ‘Arabî. The world is God’s visible face. The real, the obvious, that which is always with us, has been always with us, will always be with us, is God. God is the world. God is how things are as Wittgenstein would put it. But this doesn’t make him a pantheist as he has categorically stated also that God is outside the world, the world constructed by language, by a self that sees it as the other.

God is the Isness of things. He is the Meaning of everything as Wittgenstein said. God constitutes all pervasive Environment (al-Muhitin the Quranic parlance) in which normal man lives, moves and has his being.
Realizing that everything is perfect this very moment or, in Buddhist (Nagarjunian) terminology, that samsara is nirvana is realizing God. Wittgenstein’s transcendence of good/evil binary and pleading for a vision of perfect harmony between the self and the “alien will” called God and seeing everything as unalterably perfect makes the same point. Such notions as  “Ground of being” “ depth of life” “mystery of things or existence” which many moderns have advocated as substitute metaphors for what used to be conventionally called God and most often pictured with a human face by anthropomorphic idolatrous imagination seem to be given some representation in this fundamentally Unitarian view of God as Totality, as Reality.
God is not an epistemological problem at all that our mind/reason can investigate. He is a percept rather than a concept for Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein. In more poetic terms He is a song to be sung rather than an abstract Being, a Being among other beings but a Being of beings. God is “the knownest of the known” and so close that we only need to open our eyes, to cleanse the doors of perception to see how. Belief in God is not a proposition for Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein but a matter of tasting, experiencing the divine (or the revelations of sheer Being), which, to him, presents itself in all experiences every moment and for everyone – in fact God is the Hearing and the Seeing as is often reiterated in the Quranic verse – and not just to a select few in the so-called religious experience which is a Jamesian construct uncritically accepted by many modern philosophers of religion. All the roads lead to His abode as they proceed from it. God is the name of ‘that which is.’ He is not something within isness, he himself is that which is.
Knowing oneself after denying the illusory desiring ego one comes to subsist in God. All beliefs and disbeliefs are in the realm of duality and need to be transcended. IbnArabi’s and Wittgenstein’s  Unitarian Metaphysics is transtheistic and transcends both theism and atheism. This Unitarianism leads to the realization that the world is ultimately none other than the Absolute and thus finding everything perfect this very moment or seeing eternity here and now.  Wittgen
Modern man’s problems are primarily with a constricted dualistic theological view of God and static absolutes of idealistic philosophies. Ibn ‘Arabî’s and Wittgenstein’s conception of divinity is not vulnerable to these standard critiques of theistic and idealistic philosophical pictures. Most empiricist-positivist-postmodernist critiques look beside the point and based on faulty construction of religious experience. Modern philosophy of religion seems to have gloriously misunderstood the central experience of religion if Akbarian exposition is accepted. It is not a subject that sees something which constitutes the essence of religious experience or mystical vision for Wittgenstein or IbnArabi. It is more a discovery or insight into things as they are, an attitude, a way of seeing the world rather than a particular or extraordinary experience.
Wittgenstein, like traditional philosopher-sages, is more concerned about certainties “seen” or “lived” by the immanent Intellect, as did the best of Greeks than about building rational speculative metaphysics.  Cracks, crises and emasculations of the discipline of philosophy in the modern West could have been avoided if the West had not opted for Latin Averrorism and Cartesian rationalism and consequent dualisms and irresolvable problems that still haunt its epistemology and other areas like ontology.
Wittgenstein, like IbnArabi, provides a possible exit point from the choking morass of skeptical thought currents which otherwise doom us to abysmal ignorance regarding our most important questions in life including possibility of certain knowledge and knowledge of good life or good action.
“The final end and ultimate return of the gnostics … is that the Real is identical with them, while they don’t exist” said IbnArabi. Wittgenstein arrives at similar conclusions through a different route. It is through the metaphysical realization that one realizes that the Self withdraws from the “servant-Lord” polarity and resides in its own transpersonal being. The subject-object dichotomy is transcended by virtue of pure intellect or Spirit, which is identical with the divine Essence” (Qaisar, 2002:133). Once the soul or nafs has withered away in the experience of fana, the self-identity of mystic realization is transformed into the Self-identity of metaphysical realization. In the metaphysical perspective the reality of the ‘I’ doesn’t belong to man or nafsbut to the Spirit which is the divine spark at the center of man’s being identical with the unmanifest consciousness or Divine Essence. The crucial distinction between soul and Spirit is necessary to understand the Akbarian-Wittgensteinian metaphysical conception of religious experience. This distinction is largely forgotten by most philosophical critics of religious experience. Numerous misunderstandings and debates of theological vs. mystical debate in religions and meaning of such notions as soul/spirit, God/man, could be resolved if we keep these key points in mind. A fruitful dialogue with critics of religion and mysticism and in fact with secular thought in general is possible if we keep in mind ingenious interpretations put forward of many exponents of nondualism in the contemporary world.

Love of the World and Discovering God as Unutterable Joy

For Wittgenstein happy life is life divine and the great moral prerogative. It comes by loving the world, byamorfati. It comes from transcending the principle of ego which judges from self-centric perspective. Jesus said “judge not.” For Wittgenstein joy accompanies this surrender of vanity of the self in the All Embracing Divine Environment or “alien” Cosmic Will. He defined God as the Other, the Great Other that dictates terms, that constrains one, that embodies principle of Necessity.
One is reminded of many writings and especially the following from Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 32 in one of his sermons.
As the harvest, in the vineyard, wherever men must labour hard, they begin with songs whose words express their joy. But when their joy brims over and words are not enough, they abandon even this coherence and give themselves up to the sheer sound of singing. What is this jubilation, this exultant song; It is the melody that means out hearts are bursting with feelings words cannot express. An to whom does this Jubliation most belong? Surely to God, who is unutterable.  And does not unutterable mean what cannot be uttered? If words will not come and you may not remain silent, what else can you do but let the melody soar? (Qtd.In Kerr, 1986:167).

In mystical perspective God is joy and awareness of God is joy and thus awareness of reality in which all association with the self is put aside. If it is possible to access Reality or God nihilism is overcome. Weil has an ingenious argument to show that awareness of reality is joy and despair or sadness is a loss of contact with reality. This is her expression of old mystical /metaphysical viewpoint which identifies God as ananda, bliss. Simone Weil expresses the identity of joy with the awareness of reality. Since beauty is manifest appearance, the striking sign of reality, joy can only be a feeling, an awareness of reality. Weil describes sadness as a loss of contact with reality. Through sadness we cannot fulfill our vacation – to understate misery of our condition and to accept our reduction to what we truly are: nothing.  The memory of the revelation of reality through joy keeps us from plunging into despair, and the joy felt in our nothingness can be inscribed in our sensibility only by suffering. “Joy and pain are equally precious gifts both of which must be savoured fully, and each in its purity…” ( Weil, 1951: 132).
Simone Weil best captures the essence of many ideas that Wittgenstein only briefly touches. I think her observations allow us to make sense of Wittgenstein’s many observations from a mystical perspective. I reproduce some of her observations to put Wittgenstein in perspective and make him comprehensible.
Wittgenstein maintained that God is the Meaning of life and one must love the world unconditionally to appropriate this meaning. Weil is at her best in showing how one creates the meaning in life by renouncing all personal meanings, by complete acceptance of submission to the order of the world. One loves the order of the world by renouncing all personal interests. This is, in practice, close to Spinoza’s view of love of God by renouncing every vestige of personal interest. Freedom lies in recognizing our utter dependence on Totality, on God and in fact giving up sense of illusory autonomy or freedom that we associate with a separate individuality. We are not asked to do something against which our heart or head rebels but just shifting the perception in accordance with the nature of things.  One is just asked to accept or recognize the obvious fact that there is the order called necessity, which exists prior to us and which is there for reasons not necessarily understandable in human terms. Reality is there that transcends all our estimates, evaluations, desires and constitutes the given and man has no choice but to accept it by renouncing that which would have led him to rebellion – the sense of individuality and freedom outside God. “Where there is complete, authentic, and unconditioned consent to necessity, there is the fullness of love of God” (Weil, 1956: 267). Other texts identify the supernatural faculty in us as consent. For Weil that consent is always consent to the good, and, as such, it is the good itself. Faith is itself this faculty of submission or consent according to her. Absurdism rejects this notion of consent as a species of bad faith. Affirming the principle of autonomy and freedom in man independent of God it can’t but reject consent and consequently suffer alienation, angst and all those things with which absurdist literature is suffused.
All traditions emphasize remembrance of God. Modern mystics such as Krishnamurti translate it as attention or choiceless awareness. Weil has a similar understanding. Attention bridges division of subject and object, knower and known. Attention consists in suspending thought, in making it available, enmity, penetrable by the object….Thought must be empty, waiting, not searching for anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which will penetrate there (Weil, 1951: 92-3). For her God is attention without distraction. It is living as a witness, a detached subject or awareness that watches every moment, that lives in the present by transcending thinking which distracts one from the given, the present. Living beyond the mind, in what has been called as the space of no-mind where time doesn’t enter and thus neither fear nor hope nor any need of consolation. God is what is in Krishnamurti’s phrase and to live in God is to be aware of what is without judgment, without condemnation, disinterestedly. Wittgenstein pleaded for seeing without the conceptual glasses, seeing things as they are after transcending philosophy. He meant something similar. Contemplation is a means of transcending confusions created by use or misuse of language.
Giving up the centre of one’s own value system is harder, but when we succeed, the very sensibility changes and we become capable of a new way of seeing. We are able to “empty ourselves of little false divinity, deny oneself, to renounce being at the centre of the world, to discern all the points of the world as being centers in the same title and the veritable centre as being outside the world.” Wittgenstein was all for this ascesis, this transformation in attitude and not correcting one’s views by updating our knowledge of history or science. By saying that God is outside the world or aesthetics is transcendental he meant adopting the divine perspective of seeing things from outside the world. This necessitates transcendence of individuality and human way of seeing and judging. When we are no longer centers we can’t condemn anything and can justify the world.
Weil argues that one shouldn’t desire particular things or pray for particular things because that is slavery.  Her argument practically converges with the formula of amorfati and loving everything as if there is eternal recurrence. This alone ensures unconditional love. Total renunciation is demanded for loving the order of the world or affirming everything unconditionally. To quote her:

Nothing can be produced unless the conditions for its production are brought together.
Such and such a thing calls for such and such a condition. But if one thinks: everything can be produced, given the conditions, and everything is equivalent…
If one desires a particular thing one becomes enslaved to the series of conditions. But if one desires the series itself, the satisfaction of this desire is unconditioned.
That is why the one and only liberation is love of the order of the world.
Christ on the cross, the greatest harm inflicted on the greatest good [can anything be more absurd and more revolting]: if one loves that, one loves the order of the world (Weil, 1970:143-144).

Nietzsche suggests a similar way of overcoming nihilism. Affirming the order of the world, praying for nothing, or letting one consent to the order of the world, freedom from the self that seeks consolation and this or that thing – these are the strategies common to Weil and Wittgenstein and in fact is the mystical position. Eckhart teaches the same thing.
Man has only two choices – to affirm his will, his autonomy or to affirm divine or cosmic will and his creatureliness, his nothingness. The first choice pits him against God and against cosmos and leads him to wail and despair for that which is thwarted, which is not honored in the scheme of things. When one renounces free will and thus choice between good and evil one no longer wishes good against evil to be done to him. Everything is justified because both good and evil are really one. (This relative understanding of good and evil is to be distinguished from that supreme value which Plato calls Good which stands above all relative distinctions.) Camus finds Christianity based on great injustice as an innocent lamb was sacrificed. Weil leaves no scope for any such reading.  We too are asked to consent to die, to be crucified, to love God in utter desolation of the Spirit when He seems absent as He was when the Christ cried.
Wittgenstein wanted us to see things from God’s perspective or sub species aeterneti. Weil asks for adapting the perspective of God or the non-perspective of supraindividual faculty of intellect (nuous as distinct from ratio or discursive reason). For attaining this perspective one has to die first. One starts from the Absolute and from the perspective of the Absolute man, his free will, his dreams, his autonomy is an anomaly, a state of disequilibrium.  If individual is engulfed in the Absolute as critics of perennialists point out or as existentialists argue against monists, it is something for which nothing can be done. If we are concerned with truth and not sentimentalism there is no escape from the tragic fact that individual or ego doesn’t count in the face of the Absolute. Are we after truth as such or truth as it appears to our subjective predispositions, to our heart? God is Truth and man may be in need of consolation though truth need not be necessarily consoling. From perennialist/Weil’s perspective the need for consolation is a weakness and a species of bad faith. This also explains Wittgenstein’s critique of conventional prayer as petition.We need to be iron-willed, capable of facing utter solitude or Void (Neant). It is only the strong man, the superman, who can unconditionally affirm and love fate – a fatalist in this higher sense is a man of strong character – or consent to eternal recurrence. Weil thus advocates the perspective of God in contrast to man-centric perspectives that individualist subjectivist thought currents advocate. This appropriates Keatsian negative capability, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Jainism’s syadvadaas all these imply openness to infinitely nuanced and multidimensional character of reality or truth.
Meaning of Providence
Wittgenstein observed in Tractatus. “How things in the world are a matter of complete indifference what is higher.  God does not revel him self in the world.” He rejected conception of prayer as petition. He, however, attempted to make sense of religious person’s trust in God and religious language that express care of God. Weil explains this difficult problem in her own characteristic way. We need to note that nothing is gratuitous and nothing is meaningless and nothing is out of God’s control, care and mercy in God-centric view though nothing is respectful of human egoism which wants things according to the self’s desire. Not a sparrow falls except by the writ of providence. There is no role for chance. God is equally present everywhere, in all circumstances. Even rain drops fall in a measured quantity and angel accompanies every drop. This is the conviction of all religions, even those who have no personal God to look into the affairs of the world. However these statements are best understood by those who are familiar with the strange language of God. One can approach such statements not as cognitive verifiable statements that positivist or empiricist could handle but only by being within a “form of life” and mastering the rules and conventions of the particular game. Despite the fact that God is “absent’’ for Weil there is providence, the mystery of which is not decipherable to the uninitiated, to those profane inquirers who refuse to be annihilated in God and insist on seeing things outside God. The following account is irrefutable on its own terms by outsiders.
All the events of life, whatever they may be, without exception, are by conventions or signs of God. God establishes a conventional language with his friends. Every event in life is a word of this language. These words are all synonymous but, as happens in beautiful languages, each of them has its completely specific nuance, each of them is untranslatable. The meaning common to all these words is: I love you.
A man drinks a glass of water. The water is God’s “I love you.” He is two days in the desert without finding anything to drink. The dryness in his throat is God’s “I love you” … Those who are beginning to learn this language think that only some of its words mean “I love you.” Those who know the language know that it has only one meaning (Weil, 1970:128-129).
There is no providence that pertains to our created nature which itself is a result of injustice because by definition it tends to be autonomous and in opposition to the whole, the totality that the term God designates. What transcends the world is indeed indifferent towards the concerns of the world as Wittgenstein would say. To be born is indeed sin according to both Christian and Eastern traditions because it involves separation from the ground and thus a kind of fall. (Redemption consists in, according to Weil, consenting to return to God what is His, i.e. our very being or existence. Metaphysically our being is a non-being and God alone is truly real and the illusory dream of separate existence must be given up and this constitutes salvation.) Providence has, as in Beckett, only a negative meaning, of ensuring decreation so that the dust returns to dust and the uncreated Spirit comes to its own glory. Because creation is abandonment it necessarily implies subjection to necessity and thus, in a sense, absence of providence in the usually accepted sense of the term.

God abandons our whole entire being – flesh, blood, sensibility, intelligence, love – to the pitiless necessity of matter and the cruelty of the devil, except for the eternal and supernatural part of the soul.
The Creation is abandonment. In creating what is other than Himself, God necessarily abandoned it. He only keeps under His care the part of Creation which is Himself – the uncreated part of every creature. That is the Life, the Light, the Word…” (Weil, 1970: 103).

God himself can’t prevent what has happened from having happened. What better proof that the creation is an abdication? What greater abdication of God than is represented by time?
We are  abandoned in time. God is not in time.
God emptied himself of his divinity and filled us with a false divinity. Let us empty ourselves of it. This act is the purpose of the act by which we were created
At this very moment God, by  his creative will, is maintaining me in existence, in order that I may renounce it (Weil, 1970:140).

One doesn’t ask of providence to take care of this and that because if one loves the order of the world one transcends it with all its misery. Love is transcendence. It is we who are asked to redeem or justify ourselves in relation to the Totality. Love of the world takes all its pain. Love, in the final analysis, is the one thing needful that solves all problems. Here Rumi comes to mind who says love cures all ills. As Weil says: “It is sufficient if we consent to this order of things.” Faith is precisely this demand for loving the world which God has made and found good. Faith is trust in the order of things. It is gratitude towards Existence. It is self effacement before the whole, the Totality, the Tao. It is renunciation of all claims to a separate selfhood over and against the Whole.
Meaning of time and Eternity
Weil has a time tested mystical mechanism of ending of time called decreation. Decreation, according to Weil, means the “end of time.” There is an eternal and hidden part of soul which has the reservoir of energy “beyond time.” Through it one lives beyond time. Nihilism is overcome by those prepared to live it to hilt by annihilating oneself, by eliminating the seeking self which lives in time and rising above the mind which lives in past and future and never beyond time, in the moment. Cultivating the faculty of undistracted attention and intelligence one breaks through the prison of time. Weil is convinced as is Beckett that there is a timeless dimension which is our home.
The entire life of the self is directed towards the future because its substratum is supplementary energy, “produced” only by motives whose ends are in the future (or in the past) (Weil, 1956: 184). One should live in the present breaking the ties with the future and the past. Here Heidegger comes to mind who sees life as project into future. Being reduced to the present moment also implies a sinless state, since sin is essentially a claim to mastery over the future, the refusal of future love or suffering, or the refusal to repent of an evil act committed in the past: “If we contemplate ourselves at a specific moment – the present moment, cut off from past and future – we are innocent… Isolating a moment in this way implies forgiveness. But this isolation is detachment” (Weil, 1956: 216).
Remarks on his Ethics and Suffering
In 1939 Wittgenstein said,
The fat that life is problematic shows the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mould. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear.
Or shouldn’t I say rather: a man who lives rightly won’t experience the problem as sorrow, so for him it will not be a problem but a joy rather; in other words for him it will be a bright halo around his life, not a dubious background  (CV:27).

This is the crux of mystical theodicy. This is what Buddha said in a different way. Eliminate desire and you will be in peace. Wittgenstein said this quite clearly and wondered what for are amenities. He was the monk in the true sense.
‘Ethics,’ Wittgenstein says, has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense (TLP,6.422) and he adds that “the ethical consequences must lie in the action itself. If we assume that it is a person’s actions and the way those actions are performed that create a life, then the ethical desert of those actions is simply that life itself, and since life and the world are said to be one, the ethical reward is nothing else but the fact with which the world looks back at you. To complete the account let us remember that the face that looks back at our is your own: it is tempting to speculate that your ethical reward is no more nor no less than the discovery of your own character.” From Lao Tzu to IbnArabi and Eckhart mystical ethics and its eschatological significance has been almost similarly understood. For mystics like IbnArabi people choose their stations in the other world. God only unveils their reality. People judge themselves in the light of the Absolute. Choosing to live inside the cocoon of limiting self amounts to obstructing Divine Mercy or choosing separation from the Real. Prayer establishes the dialogue between the self and transcendence. Refusing to pray – which is, for IbnArabi, simply gratitude to Existence for the gift of life – amounts to condemning oneself to self referring and self enclosed windowless subjective space. Hell is self love and nothing burns there but self will as one Christian mystic has said.
Modern world is largely convinced that ethics is relative and everything is permissible. There is no ontological foundation for ethics. There are some isolated thinkers who challenge dominant model but in almost all spheres of secular life there are no imperatives like those bequeathed by religions. In contrast Wittgenstein’s  ethics, like mystical ethics, is grounded in ontology. Noble character traits are not merely extraneous qualities that have no bearing upon our mode of existence. They define our mode of existence and the extent to which we participate in the fullness of the Light of Being. He accepted and further developed by including aesthetics also in it Moore’s definition of ethics as a discovery of the Good or Divinity. Ethics, he said, is transcendental. The moral law within is not biological or cultural product. It is the voice of God. Values are from the transcendental world. His disagreements with Plato come to end here. Ethical commandments have to be observed if man desires felicity. Modern wishy washy do goodism or absolutization of ethical relativism or ethics complicit with Capitalism and other power centric ideologies are not compatible with Wittgensteinian theomorphic ethics. Capitalism and State Capitalism disguised as Marxism have little room for attributes of beauty. There is no warrant for ignoring the Scale of the Law interiorized in conscience which provides the norm. Antinomianism which has been popularized by certain libertine Gurus has no place here. Men with all their limitation and imperfections can’t claim to be infinitely beyond this world and thus beyond good and evil which we encounter at every stage of existence. Man must always separate divine viewpoint which is corollary of his incomparability from his own human, all-too-human viewpoint which is a corollary of divine similarity as IbnArabi would insist.

However all this should not be construed to imply that he countenances moralism which is typical modern heresy. The deadly criticism of Nietzsche on morality doesn’t apply to his view of ethics. Wittgenstein read Gospels in Brief by Tolstoy and then read Anti-Christ of Nietzsche and could not be moved an inch from his commitment to Tolstoy’s Christian ethical universe. Postmodern probematization of ethics and modern scientific discoveries implicating relativism of morals can’t problematize Akbarian- Wittgensteinian position as he too, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, speaks from the high mountains of the Spirit which transcends all actions, good or evil. Wittgenstein emphasizes that man is not an agent of action. He can’t will to do good. This is explainable by reference to God as the Only Doer or what Taoism calls wuweiwei, actionless action. Evil action in ordinary parlance is possible only when man is under the dominion of ego or lower self and Wittgenstein’s demand for possibility of ethics is transcendence of this principle of egoism.
It is religion taken as a metanarrative, a system, an ideology explaining things, as privileging of the otherworld or eternity at the cost of this world and time here-now and privileging of soul over body, elaborate creedal formulae coached in terms of propositions privileging the religious as distinct from or opposite to the secular, as unqualified belief in the representation of Reality and their absolutist exclusivism that IbnArabi and Wittgenstein plead for transcending by virtue of their Unitarianism that puts the Real at the centre while questioning absolutization of all conceptions and theorizations of It. The world is one. And It must be affirmed in toto. Language and thought divide the One of experience and integrity of unitary subject and the world.  The Real is the essence of everything and no dualistic apprehension or categorical framework can capture it. It is the totality of all existents, a metaphysical whole that can’t be reduced to an object of knowledge by a subject that is thought to be separate from the object. All this implies that meaning closure, epistemic chauvinism, totalistic thought and consequent war on the basis of a particular conception or delimitation of the Reality/ Truth are unwarranted. Truth rather than discourse about Truth which is the prerogative of exoteric theology and rational philosophy is what the gnostic comes to realize and as it is the One and All it necessarily follows that the knower transcends all particular beliefs and views. Living Truth, dissolving in Truth rather than talking about it and fighting for it is the way to end all conflicts that arise from dualistic theological and rationalistic philosophical approaches.
For Wittgenstein religion gives one new eyes so that everything looks different and redeemed by and  suffused with love. God is wherever love is, beauty is, blessedness is and grace is. In fact God is these things and not an abstraction or object. This solves the important problems of theology as well without making it pantheism either. Seen with the eyes of love, trust and faith everything appears God. God is not the name of a person or entity but the very thingness of a thing, the beauty of beauty, the goodness in the good. As Weil puts it: “God ‘not as I love, but as emerald is green. He is ‘I love.’ And I too, if I were in the state of perfection, would love as emerald is green. I would be an impersonal person (like God)” (Weil, 1970: 129). God speaks these words through all of us who love and more effectively through those who love so intensely and selflessly as to become love. What differentiates a bhakti mystic or Sufi from ordinary mortals or nonmystics is their capacity to love and it is this love which redeems them. All positive experiences – aesthetic, moral, cognitive – are bridges to God-realization.
Representation or Practice of the Self
Wittgenstein is concerned, above all, with t he happy life and that he links with transcendence of desiring or willing self. His problem is ethical and existential and his proposed solution too is on these planes that have little to do with language or representation business. His solution involves contemplating, looking, wondering, loving rather than thinking or questioning. He is struggling with/against language rather than doing business with it. His object (ethical/aesthetical/religious or mystical) is not in the world, is untouched by scientific discoveries or any speculative exercise. His concern is metaphysical and metaphysical is what he calls mysterious, mystical, outside the world, supernatural. He was interested in speaking without words – “conveying thoughts by themselves without words” (CV:15). He thought, with Goethe, that we need to learn from contemplation of untrammeled nature rather than laboratory experiement and hypothesis that distort the truth (CV:11). Like Heidegger he found the richness of being to which poets rather than philosophers point out the key to salvation.
Wittgenstein was supremely religious man and it is because he is religious in every important sense of term (rather than only in a trivial sense as G. H. von Wright claims) that he said he is not a religious man. Humility is the supreme virtue of a religious man. He had not only respect for religion (including even its rituals) but moulded his life by its dictates. One of the things Christianity says, Wittgenstein thinks, is that all sound doctrines are of no avail. One must change one’s life (or the direction of one’s life). According to him Christianity didn’t talk about what has happened or will happen to man but what happens daily to him, every moment (CV: 28). Existentialist theology and demythologization movement have been emphasizing this point as have been mystics in all climes. For all religions the greatest obstacle in one’s journey to God or beatitude is pride/ego and Wittgenstein was supremely concerned about this thing all his life and many of his biographical details can be understood in this light only.
His remarks about symbolic significance of rituals and how they embody our search for the sacred in Culture and Value and elsewhere show how profound his religious sensibility is. His dismissal of Frazer and defence of ‘primitives’ at many points against moderns show what kind of a man he was. His critique of modernity and European civilization is fundamentally on religious grounds. He found in it loss of respect for mystery, the idea of progress, lack of culture and direction or purpose, and the cult of the ugly in its art objectionable. All his beloved writers and philosophers have been religious/mystical.  God was his ultimate concern as shown by exemplary moral life he lived and his wish to have been able to dedicate all his work to the glory of God. His biographer, Brian McGuiness reports that before doing any action, he prayed like this: “God be with me!”, “The spirit be with me.”  Sin and thus hell were terribly real for him. He thought about sin as seriously if not more as about logic as his reply to Russell to the question regarding what he was thinking about when he came to meet him during night. Explanations, reasons, justifications come to an end in religious thinking for Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, like the mystics before and after him, did not favour a cosmological conception of a Deity. For mystics theology is in fact autology.He was, like Spinoza, God intoxicated and standard reading of him as fideist or noncognitivist is far off the mark. His considering himself wretched and in need of infinite help and never ceasing to scrutinize the desires, vanity and all that religion cautions against shows how seriously he took religion and what grounds it.
Wittgenstein’s stand on different aspects of ethics is the following. Ethics deals with absolute value; value judgments that we often use can be reduced to facts. We can re-formulated them as hypothetical judgments of if …then form and make them to be statements of facts. Paradoxically, Wittgenstein states that we can experience value. An experience, is an event, and hence ought to be factual. It seems strange that Wittgenstein maintains that values are absolute and transcendental and yet we can experience them. Ethical values cannot be spoken or discussed about since they are transcendental
There are explicit statements of Wittgenstein that militate against any kind of fideist interpretation, extreme or moderate versions of it. For him God is the case. How things are is the mystical. These imply Wittgenstein can’t be framed in either ethical or conventional religious frameworks. He is fundamentally a mystic who has made metaphysical claims in the sense metaphysics is understood by perennialists. He has made cognitive claims of mysticism though not of religion. What better argument for cognitivity or knowledge claimand against fidiestic interpretations than his assertion that the mystical shows forth?
Wittgenstein scholars have not paid due attention to the distinction between the religious/theological and the mystical and confounded the two in approaching him resulting in quite divergent interpretations. I have foregrounded the mystical in him which grounds his religiosity and thus gives us a heremenutical tool to make sense of his different observations on religion. I argue that he is an absolutist and we should not approach him from the lens of Philosophical Investigations and then attempt to show that religion is a language game, a foundationless discourse making no cognitive or knowledge claims and a matter of faith. If Sankara or Eckhart or Augustine are absolutists Wittgenstein oo is an absolutist for whom God/eternity is absolute certainty, the first principle and is experienced rather than merely believed
The Unrepresentable shows forth
In a letter from the Russian front date 9 April 1917, to his friend Paul Engelmann, who had sent him a poem by the early nineteenth century poet Johann Ludwig Uhlan, Wittgenstein wrote.

The Poem by Uhlan is really magnificent. And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably-  contained in what has been uttered! (Qtd.In Kerr, 1986: 166).

Though one can’t clearly state what he means similar things in the writings of mystics that emphasize how God speaks when we become silent and how everything is lighted up by God and God is meaning of everything, how transcendence and immanence or samsara and nirvana are ultimately linked and even one. The unrepresentable shows forth and the gnostic sees nothing but That which is also the Light of the world, the light that is neither of the sea nor of the land but light that lights everything.
Though we should guard against the identification of the inexpressible and the mystical it is nevertheless clear that the really mystical for Wittgenstein transcends the world but can be accessed in ethical life rooted in transcendence and mystical and aesthetic experiences and concretely lived in religious forms and rituals. If the Unrepresentable were not accessible there would be no meaning for Wittgenstein’s taking cudgels on its behalf and judging modern intellectual thought currents from religio-mystical viewpoint.

Wittgenstein rejects all the important modernist myths such as that of progress and criticizes reductionism in anthropology and psychologism to pave way for faith. He judges modernity in the light of faith. It means how cognitive an affair religion is for him. He takes Frazer and his like to task for rationalistic interpretation of traditional ritual. He pointed out that many religious practices are not generated by any views that one could censure or verify. He saw university educated intelligentsia of the west carriers of moral and spiritual corruption that had thrusted human civilization into a new dark age.
For Wittgenstein “Symbolism of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive. All religions are wonderful, even those of the most primitive tribes.” (Qtd in Kerr, 1986). Nothing of this sort could come out from an agnostic. Like mystics he rejects literalism and believes in symbolism. He seems to appreciate the transcendental unity of religions by emphasizing mystical core at the heart of them. Religion for him is deed and not theory. This was so for Buddha also and in fact mystics have seen religion as transformative therapeutic towards a good life. Like mystics he underscored nonanthropomorphic character of belief.  God for him is not a thing, a being, a superbing, an existence.
Conclusion
No doubt can be entertained regarding Wittgenstein’s commitment to religion even if he didn’t deem himself pure enough to be called a religious man. He looked at every problem from religious point of view. He liked to call himself as ‘a truth seeker,’ and he had found it though one can’t claim that he had reached the peaks that advanced mystics have access to. “It strikes me  that religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference, hence though it is belief and assessing life. It is passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.” If religion is a method of assessing life, it is in a way cognitive. If one takes it seriously it means one takes it to be truth of a certain kind. For Wittgenstein religion was a matter of life and death. He was not a phenomenologist observing it with a detachment of a scientist. He plunged passionately into God and found the treasure. He meant business when he talked about religion or philosophy. He had faith and learnt wisdom in the end, the wisdom of an Oriental sage who cultivates detachment.  For him it is wisdom that he finds nowhere in his contemporary professors of philosophy doing sort of a work as appears in Mind that really counts. To conclude there is a path that bypasses language and thought for accessing that which really matters, for realization of what has been eternal quest for values. Wittgenstein has outlined this path that needs to be kept in mind while we ponder on the limits and approaches to linguistic representations. No confusion needs to be entertained in understanding Wittgenstein’ essentially religious/mystical outlook. He was not a great mystic but a great mystical philosopher. He had very few intense mystical experiences.

He often behaved in a way that is not expected from a mystic. Contemplating committing suicide, extreme agitated mind at times, sense of gloom that obsessed him are not the mark of a great mystic. He didn’t take himself to be a saint but had the saintly ideal of moral purity to which he tried to conform. However if religion or mysticism are centred on deeds or practice we can’t but see him as a great soul who renounced wealth, fame, amenities and other guises that self love takes. He did find for himself the truth he sought and for him indeed philosophy has been love of wisdom. He has more wisdom than faith which is passionless and that is a sign of maturity of religion. His fundamental stance can be expressed in few sentences that express a worldview that is hundred percent Hebraic and hundred percent mystical.

I conclude by quoting and commenting on these few sentences.
The problem of life is “seen in the disappearance of the problem.” This means that the answer is not known, but seen and need not be known as the problem doesn’t demand an answer as it disappears. In fact the question can’t be asked. Vanishing of the problem is only found through a way of knowing other than language. “To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life” (NB:74).To believe in God means to understand that there is more than facts (NB:74).  For him to pray is to think about the meaning of life. Further explaining the meaning of mystical prayer he says that “I can’t bend the happenings of the world to my will; I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world.”It is impossible to know God through what can be said. What one knows about God is that this world exists. To be outside the world means to be outside what can be put into words. “I am my world”(TLP:5.63). Atkinson beautifully explains it:
The separation between the thinker and the thought, or the eye and the object of sight, occurs in language, not in the event itself. Thus the idea of the personal self or subject in terms of  a thinker of the thought among others. The subject is not a thing in the world and the thought one has of it does not correspond to a fact (Atkinson, 2009: 133).
The difference between seeing the object together with and in space and time is a matter of seeing the world from either the outside or the inside. From the outside it is to see the world like one’s eye in its visual field (NB:73). To see the object sub species aeternitatis from the outside is to see it from outside the world and language. Being outside language there is nothing that can be said about an object. Wittgenstein states that there are things that can’t be put into words. These things show themselves. They are the mystical. (TLP: 6.522) These things “don’t point to another world outside the world, but show themselves as the mystical.” The metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus has been forcefully criticized by a host of scholars including Atkinson. The mystical is what one finds immediately in reality. What “can’t beput into words shows itself as the world that is and what shows itself must be coordinated with the solipsistic self in the moment of experience. This moment, I have argued, is to fell the world as a limited whole” (Atkinson, 2009: 69).

We need not advocate metaphysical interpretation and can remain contended with the fact that there is something that science can’t handle, there is a joy of the spirit available to a happy man who has consented to be nothing, the world is full of beauty, there are no problems and man’s hunger for higher things can be quenched. It hardly matters where we precisely locate transcendence that gives meaning to life and grounds ethics and aesthetics – beyond the world or immanently within its depths. Interpretations, theological and metaphysical ultimately can differ but what matters is what Wittgenstein achieves. He achieves the similar end that religions and mysticisms across traditions have sought. He gets the riddle dissolved and puts thoughts or philosophy to peace and that is the end of philosophical/mystical quest.

References
Atkinson, James R., The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings, Routledge, London, 2009.
Johnson, Paul, Rethinking the inner, Rutledge, London, 1993,
Ibn ‘Arabî , 1972–91, al-Futûhât al-makkiyya, 14 volumes, O. Yahia (ed.), al-Hay’at al-Misriyyat al-‘Âmmali’l-Kitâb, Cairo. (Quotes and translations are mostly from Chittick and Chodkiewicz.)
Lazenby, Mark, The Early Wittgenstein on Religion, Continuum, 2006,
Kerr, Fergus, Theology after Wittgenstein, Balckwell, 1989,
McGuiness, Brian, “Mysticism of the Tractatus,”Philosophical Review, 75, 1966
Neili, Russel, From Mysticism to Ordinary Language Philosophy:A Study of Viennese Positivism and the Thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, SUNY, New York, 1987
Pradhan, R.C., Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Experience
Qaisar, Shahzad, Iqbal and KhawjaGhulamFarid on Experiencing God, Iqbal Academy, Lahore 2002.
Sontag, Fredrick, Wittgenstein and the Mystical: Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Weil, Simone, 1970, First and Last Notebooks, tr. Richard Reese, Oxford University Press, New York. (Here in the text referred to as F).
……. ………..Waiting on God, 1951, tr. Emma Caruford, Putnam, New York, 1951 (referred as WG).
……………..  The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 1956, tr. Arthur F. Mills, 2 volumes, Putnam (referred as N).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,  Notebooks, 1914-16, 2nd Edition Ed. Wright and Ascombe.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, G.H. von Wright (ed.), P. Winch (trans.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,TractatusLogico-Philosophicus,D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (trans.), New York: Humanities Press, 1961.
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Courtesy of : Muhammad Maroof Shah

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A Poet’s Creed

 

JORGE      LOUIS      BORGES

Harvard Lectures

شهاب الدين يحيى السهروردي

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شهاب الدين يحيى السهروردي

 

“There was among the ancient Persians a community of people guided by God who thus walked the true way, worthy Sage-Philosophers, with no resembelence to the Magi (Dualists). It is their precious philosophy of Light, the same as that to which the mystical experience of Plato and his predecessors bear witness, that we have revived in our book called Oriental Theosophy (Hikmat al-‘Ishraq), and I have had no precursor in the way of such project.”

هذه نسخة متحقق منها من هذه الصفحةعرض/إخفاء التفاصيل
هذه النسخة المستقرة، فحصت في 19 ديسمبر 2013. ثمة 3 تعديلات معلقة بانتظار المراجعة.

الدقة    منظورة
اذهب إلى: تصفح، ‏ ابحث

أبو الفتوح يحيى بن حبش بن أميرك السهروردي ويلقب بـ “شهاب الدين”، واشتهر بالشيخ المقتول تمييزاً له عن صوفيين آخرين هما: شهاب الدين أبو حفص عمر السهروردي (632هـ)، مؤلف كتاب «عوارف المعارف» في التصوف، وصاحب الطريقة السهروردية، أما الآخر فهو أبو النجيب السهروردي (ت:563هـ).

وأبو الفتوح فيلسوف إشراقي، شافعي المذهب، ولد في سهرورد الواقعة شمال غربي إيران، وقرأ كتب الدين والحكمة ونشأ في مراغة وسافر إلى حلب وبغداد , حيث كان مقتله بأمر صلاح الدين بعد أن نسب البعض إليه الفساد المعتقد ولتوهم صلاح الدين أن السهروردي يفتن ابنه بالكفر والخروج عن الدين وكان مقتله ب قلعة حلب سنة 586 هـ،[1][2] مع أنه كان من كبار المتصوفة في زمانه ومن أفقه علماء عصره بأمور الدين والفلسفة والمنطق والحكمة ويسمي مذهبه الذي عرف به “حكمة الإشراق” وله كتاب بهذا الاسم. ومن كتبه أيضا رسائل في اعتقادات الحكماء وهياكل النور.

يعد مؤسسا للفكر الفلسفي الإشراقي، الذي يدعو إلى الوصول للمعرفة عن طريق الذوق والكشف الروحاني، بخلاف التوجه الفلسفي العام والمستدل بالتقصي والتحليل البرهاني، جمع بين عدة توجهات فلسفية من اليونان ومصر وغيرها كنماذج فلسفية لتوضيح الفلسفة الإشراقية، أكبر من دعى إلى التأمل الروحاني من بين الفلاسفة المسلمين كما عرف عنه بعدم الاقتناع بالمصادر بل بأسلوب التفكير الذاتي والنفسي, ويحكي ابن أبي أصيبعة في كتابه )عيون الأنباء في طبقات الأطباء ٫ص ٦٤١ ( فيقول ما مختصره عن السهروردي:” كان أوحد في العلوم الحكمية، جامعاً للفنون الفلسفية، بارعاً في الأصول الفلكية، مفرط الذكاء، جيد الفطرة، فصيح العبارة، لم يناظر أحداً إلا بزّه، ولم يباحث محصلاً إلا أربى عليه، وكان علمه أكثر من عقله. فلما أتى إلى حلب وناظر بها الفقهاء كثر تشنيعهم عليه. وعملوا محاضر بكفره وسيروها إلى دمشق إلى الملك الناصر صلاح الدين. فبعث صلاح الدين إلى ولده الملك الظاهر بحلب كتابا في حقه بخط القاضي الفاضل يقول فيه إن هذا الشاب السهروردي لا بد من قتله، ولا سبيل أن يطلق ولا يبقى بوجه من الوجوه، ولما بلغ شهاب الدين السهروردي ذلك، وأيقن أنه يقتل، وليس جهة إلى الإفراج عنه اختار أنه يترك في مكان مفرد ويمنع من الطعام والشراب إلى أن يلقى الله ففعل به ذلك. وكان ذلك في أواخر سنة ست وثمانين وخمسمائة بقلعة حلب 586 هـ 1190م “.

لكن اختلف في موته الكتاب في تاريخ الفلاسفة فمنهم من ذكر أنه قتل عن طريق الجوع ومنعه من الطعام ومنهم من قال بالسيف كما قيل أنه أحرق لكن اجتمعوا على أنه حكم علية بالإعدام بتهمة الإلحاد والزندقة. ، وبعد ذلك بعدة سنوات كان ابن رشد في قرطبة يعاني من نفس المصير.

“Whoever knows Hikmat (Wisdom), and perserves in thanking and sanctifying the Light of the Lights, will be estowed with royal Kharreh and with luminous Farreh, and—as we have said elsewhere—divine light will further bestow upon him the cloak of royal power and value. Such a person shall then became the natural Ruler of the Universe. He shall be given aid from the High Heavens, and whatever he commands shall be obeyed; and his dreams and inspirations will reach their uppermost, perfect pinnacle.”

On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition

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“On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and particularly on the works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann”

by  Sir Walter Scott

First published in  Foreign Quarterly Review  vol. 1, no. 1 (1827): 60-98.

No source of romantic fiction, and no mode of exciting the feelings of interest which the authors in that description of literature desire to produce, seems more directly accessible than the love of the supernatural. It is common to all classes of mankind, and perhaps is to none so familiar as to those who assume a certa degree of scepticism on the subject; since the reader may have often observed in conversation, that the person who professes himself most incredulous on the subject of marvellous stories, often ends his remarks by indulging the company with some well-attested anecdote, which it is difficult or impossible to account for on the narrator’s own principles of absolute scepticism. The belief itself, though easily capable of being pushed into superstition and absurdity, has its origin not only in the facts upon which our holy religion is bounded, but upon the principles of our nature, which teach us that while we are probationers in thissublunary state, we are neighbours to, and encompassed by the shadowy world, of which our mental faculties are too obscure to comprehend the laws, our corporeal organs too coarse and gross to perceive the inhabitants.

All professors of the Christian Religion believe that there was a time when the Divine Power showed itself more visibly on earth than in these our latter days; controlling and suspending, for its own purposes, the ordinary laws of the universe; and the Roman Catholic Church, at least, holds it as an article of faith, that miracles descend to the present time. Without entering into that controversy, it is enough that a firm belief in the great truths of our religion has induced wise and good men, even in Pro- [61] testant countries, to subscribe to Dr. Johnson’s doubts respecting supernatural appearances.“That the dead are seen no more, said Imlac, I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages, and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another could not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers, can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears.”

Upon such principles as these there lingers in the breasts even of philosophers, a reluctance to decide dogmatically upon a point where they do not and cannot possess any, save negative, evidence. Yet this inclination to believe in the marvellous gradually becomes weaker. Men cannot but remark that (since the scriptural miracles have ceased,) the belief in prodigies and supernatural events has gradually declined in proportion to the advancement of human knowledge; and that since the age has become enlightened, the occurrence of tolerably well attested anecdotes of the supernatural character are so few, as to render it more probable that the witnesses have laboured under some strange and temporary delusion, rather than that the  From Samuel Johnson’s Oriental tale  Rasselas  (1759), Chapter 31.laws of nature have been altered or suspended.  At this point of human knowledge, the marvellous is so much identified with fabulous, as to be considered generally as belonging to the same class. It is not so in early history, which is full of supernatural incidents; and although we now use the word romance  as synonymous with fictitious composition, yet as it originally only meant a poem, or prose work contained in the Romaunce language, there is little doubt that the doughty chivalry who listened to the songs of the minstrel, “held each strange tale devoutly true,”  and that the feats of knighthood which he recounted, mingled with tales of magic and supernatural interference, were esteemed as veracious as the legends of the monks, to which they bore a strong resemblance. This period of society, however, must have long past before the Romancer began to select and arrange with care, the nature of the materials out of which he constructedhis story. It was not when society, however differing in degree and station, was levelled and confounded by one dark cloud of ignorance, involving the noble as well as the mean, that it need be scrupulously considered to what class of persons the author addressed himself, or with what species of decoration he ornamented his story.  “Homo was  [62]  then a common name for all men,” and all were equally pleased with the same style of composition.  this, however, was gradually altered.  As the knowledge to which we have before alluded made  more general progress, it became impossible to detain the attention of the better instructed class by the simple and gross fables to which the present generation would only listen in childhood, though they had been held in honour by their fathers during youth, manhood, and old age.
It was also discovered that the supernatural in fictitious composition requires to be engaged with considerable delicacy, as criticism begins to be more on the alert. The interest which it excites is indeed a powerful spring; but it is one which is peculiarly subject to be exhausted by coarse handling and repeated pressure. It is also of a character which it is extremely difficult to sustain, and of which a very small proportion may be said to be better than the whole. The marvellous, more than any other attribute of fictitious narrative, loses its effect by being brought much into view. The imagination of the reader is to be excited if possible, without being gratified. If once, like Macbeth, we “sup full with horrors,” our taste for the banquet is ended, and the thrill of terror with which we hear or read of a night-shriek, becomes lost in that sated indifference with which the tyrant came at length to listen to the most deep catastrophes that could affect his house. The incidents of a supernatural character are usually those of a dark and undefinable nature,such as arise in the mind of the Lady in the Mask of Comus, –incidents to which our fears attach more consequence, as we cannot exactly tell what it is we behold, or what is to be apprehended from it:—

“A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes and beck’ning shadows dire,
And aery tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands, and shores, and desart wildernesses.”

Burke observes upon obscurity, that it is necessary to make any thing terrible, and notices “how much the
notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to thepopular tales concerning such sorts of beings.”   He represents also, that no person “seems better to have
understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things in their strongest light, by the force of audicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of Death, in the second book; is admirably studied; it isastonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes andcolouring, he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors.  [63 ]
2  From William Collins’ “Ode to Fear.”
3 From Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Macbeth says “I have almost forgot the taste of fears; / The time has been, my
senses would have cool’d / To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair / Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir / As
life were in’t: I have supp’d full with horrors; / Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts / Cannot once start me”
(V.v.9-15). 4  From John Milton’s  Comus  (1634), 205-209.
5  From Edmund Burke’s  A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  (1756), Part 2, sec. 3.Burke argues that obscurity is essential to terror: “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary.” The discussion of Milton is from the same section.

‘The other shape,—
If shape it might be called, which shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb:
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,–
For each seemed either; black he stood as night;
Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell;
And shook a deadly dart.  What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.’

In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible and sublime to the last degree.” The only quotation worthy to be mentioned along with the passage we have just taken down, is the well-known apparition introduced with circumstances of terrific obscurity in the book of Job: “Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ears received a little thereof. In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes; there was silence, and I heard a voice.”

From these sublime and decisive authorities, it is evident that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief, indistinct, and such as may become a being to us so incomprehensible, and so different from ourselves, of whom we cannot justly conjecture whence he comes, or for what purpose, and of whose attributes we can have no regular or distinct perception. Hence it usually
happens, that the first touch of the supernatural is always the most effective, and is rather weakened and defaced, than strengthened, by the subsequent recurrence of similar incident. Even in Hamlet, the second entrance of the ghost is not nearly so impressive as the first; and in many romances to which we could refer, the supernatural being forfeits all claim both to our terror and veneration, by condescending to appear too often; to mingle too much in the events of the story, and above all, to become loquacious, or, as it is familiarly called,  chatty .  We have, indeed, great doubts whether an author acts wisely in permitting his goblin to speak at all, if at the same time he renders him subject to human sight. Shakspeare [ ], indeed, has sic contrived to put such language in the mouth of the buried majesty of Denmark as befits a supernatural being, and is by the style distinctly different from that of the living persons in the drama. In another passage he has had the boldness to intimate, by two expressions of similar force, in what manner and with what tone supernatural beings would find utterance:

“ A n d  th e  s h e e  te d  d e a d
Did and gibber in the Roman streets.”

squeak   But the attempt in which the genius of Shakespeare has succeeded would probably have been ridiculous in any meaner hand; and hence it is, that, in many of our modern tales of terror, our feelings of fear have, long before the conclusion, given way under the influence of that familiarity which begets contempt.

A sense that the effect of the supernatural in its more obvious application is easily exhausted, has occasioned the efforts of modern authors to cut new walks and avenues through the enchanted wood, and to revive, if possible, by some means or other, the fading impression of its horrors.

The most obvious and inartificial mode of attaining this end is, by adding to, and exaggerating the supernatural incidents of the tale. But far from increasing its effect, the principles which we have laid down, incline us to consider the impression as usually weakened by exaggerated and laborious description. Elegance is in such cases thrown away, and the accumulation of superlatives, with which the narrative is encumbered, renders it tedious, or perhaps ludicrous, instead of becoming impressive or grand.

There is indeed one style of composition, of which the supernatural forms an appropriate part, which applies itself rather to the fancy than to the imagination, and aims more at amusing than at affecting or interesting the reader. To this species of composition belong the eastern tales,  which contribute so much to the amusement of our youth, and which are recollected, if not re-perused, with so much pleasure in our more advanced life. There are but few readers of any imagination who have not at one time or other in their life sympathized with the poet Collins,  “who,” says Dr. Johnson, “was eminently delighted with those flights of imagination, which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove through the meadows of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens.”  It is chiefly the young and the indolent who love to be soothed by works of this character, which require little attention in the perusal. In our riper age we remember them as we do the joys of ourinfancy, rather because we loved them once, than that they still continue to afford us amusement. The extravagance of fiction loses its charms for our riper judgment; and notwithstanding that these wild fictions contain much that is beautiful and full of fancy, yet still, unconnected as they are with each other, and conveying no result to the understanding, we pass them by as the championess Britomart rode along the rich strand.

Which as she overwent,
She saw bestrewed all with rich array
Of pearls and precious stones of great assay,
And all the gravel mixt with golden ore:
Whereat she wondered much, but would not stay
For gold, or pearls, or precious stones, one hour;
But them despised all, for all was in her power.

With this class of supernatural composition may be ranked, though inferior in interest, what the French call Contes des Fées;  meaing, by that title, to distinguish them from the ordinary popular tales of fairy folks which are current in most countries. The  Conte des Fées  is itself a very different composition, and the fairies engaged are of a separate class from those whose amusement is to dance round the mushroom in the moonlight, and mislead the belated peasant. The French  Fée  more nearly resembles the Peri of Eastern, or the Fata of Italian poetry.  She is a superior being, having the nature of an elementary spirit, and possessing magical powers enabling her, to a considerable extent, to work either good or evil. But whatever merit this species of writing may have attained in some dexterous hands, it has, under the management of others, become one of the most
absured, flat, and insipid possible.  Out of the whole  Cabinet des Fées,  when we get beyond our old acquaintances of the nursery, we can hardly select five volumes, from nearly fifty,  with any probability of receiving pleasure from them.It often happens that , when any particular style becomes somewhat antiquated and obsolete, somecaricature, or satirical imitation of it, gives rise to a new species of composition. Thus the English Opera arose from the parody upon the Italian stage, designed by Gay, in the Beggar’s Opera.   In like manner, when the public had been inundated,  ad nauseam,  with Arabian tales, Persian tales, Turkish tales, Mogul tales , and

9  What are now commonly referred to as “Oriental tales,” such as William Beckford’s  Vathek  (1786).
10  William Collins (1721-1759); Collins is regarded as one of the “Graveyard School” poets, and his  Persian Eclogues  is in
the “eastern” mode Scott is discussing.  Collins was a favorite poet of Ann Radcliffe.
11  From Edmund Spenser’s  The Faerie Queene  (1590), Book III, canto 4; Britomart, the chaste warrior hero of Book III, is noted for her calm and heroic martial character as well as her unwavering commitment to her future husband, Arthegall.
12  A Peri is a superhuman being, typically represented as good, from Persian mythology; a “Fata” is a “fay” or woman of
supernatural power in Italian folklore.
13  John Gay’s  The Beggar’s Opera  (1728) is a satiric  “opera” (actually a play with a lot of songs) poking fun at the
conventions of Italian opera of the day.  It was the inspiration for Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s  The Three-Penny Opera (1928), which gives us, via adaptation and translation, the jazz classic “Mack the Knife,” the roguish highwayman from  Gay’s work having become a roguish hitman.
14  Mogul, used generally as here, referes to any aspect of the Mogul Dynasty, which ruled parts of the Indian subcontinent, from current-day northern India into what is now southern China, from the 15  to the 19  Centuries.
the legends of every nation east of the Bosphorus,  and were equally annoyed by the increasing publication of all sorts of fairy tales, —Count Anthony Hamilton,  like a second Cervantes, came forth  with his satirical tales, destined to overturn the empire of Dives, of Genii, of Peris,  et hoc genus omne. Something too licentious for a more refined age, the Tales of Count Hamilton subsist as a beautiful illustration, showing that literary subjects, as well as the fields of the husbandman, may, when they seem most worn out and effete, be renewed and again brought into successful cultivation by a new course of management. The wit of Count Hamilton, like manure applied to an exhausted field, rendered the eastern sea more piquant, if not more edifying, than it was before.  Much was written in imitation of Count Hamilton’s style; and it was followed by Voltaire  in particular, who in this way rendered the supernatural romance one of the most apt vehicles for circulating his satire. This,  [66]  therefore, may be termed the comic side of the supernatural, in which the author plainly declares his purpose to turn into jest the miracles which he relates, and aspires to awaken ludicrous sensations without affecting the fancy—far less exciting the passions of the reader.  By this species of delineation the reader will perceive that the supernatural style of writing is entirely travestied and held up to laughter, instead of being made the subject of respectful attention, or heard with at least that sort of imperfect excitement with which we listened to a marvellous tale of fairy-land. This species of satire—for it is often converted to satirical purposes—has never been more happily executed than by the French authors, although Wieland,  and several other German writers, treading in the steps of Hamilton, have added the grace of poetry to the wit and to the wonders with which they have adorned this species of composition. Oberon, in particular, has been identified with our literature by the excellent translation of Mr.Sotheby, and is nearly as well known in England as in Germany. It would, however, carry us far too wide from our present purpose, were we to consider tbe comi-heroic poetry which belongs to this class, and which includes the well-known works of Pulci, Berni – perhaps, in a certain degree, of Ariosto himself, who, in
some passages at least, lifts his knightly vizor so far as to give a momentary glimpse of the smile which mantles upon his countenance.

One general glance at the geography of this most pleasing “Londe of Faery,”  leads us into another province, rough as it may seem and uncultivated, but which, perhaps, on that very account, has some scenes abounding in interest. There are a species of antiquarians who, while others laboured to reunite and ornament highly the ancient traditions of their country, have made it their business,  antiquos accedere fontes ,  to visit the ancient springs and sources of those popular legends which, cherished by the grey and superstitious Elde, had been long forgotten in the higher circles, but are again brought forward and claim, like the old ballads of a country, a degree of interest even from their rugged simplicity.  The Deutsche Sagen of the brothers Grimm,  is an admirable work of this kind; assembling, without any affectation either of ornamental diction or improved incident, the various traditions existing in different parts of Germany respecting popular superstitions and the events ascribed to supernatural agency.  There are other works of the same kmd, in the same language, collected with great care and apparent fidelity. Sometimes trite, sometimes tiresome, sometimes childish, the legends which these authors have collected with such indefatigable zeal form nevertheless a step in the history of the human race;

15  The Bosphorus Strait connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara in present-day Turkey.  It has long been regarded as the dividing line between Europe and Asia. 16  Count Anthony Hamilton (1646? – 1720) was an Irish-born writer and courtier from a well-known Scottish family, and spent much of his life in France and England.  Among his literary works is a collection of satiric fairy tales, intended,
Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel  Don Quixote , to ridicule what was seen as a stale and  passé  literary mode.
17  Latin for “and all [stories] of that type.” 18  Voltaire: pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French writer, satirist, and philosopher.
19  Christoph Martin Wieland  (1733-1813), German poet and writer, well-known for works drawing on classical myth and folklore; one of his most famous works was the romantic epic poem  Oberon  (1780; translated 1798).
20  Scott uses this term in one of his footnotes to his poem  The Lady of the Lake  (1810).
( 21  Adapted from Lucretius’  De Rerum Natura On the Nature of Things ), this translates roughly to “the older ones approach the source.”
22  These are the “Brothers Grimm,” best known for their “fairy tales,” the first edition of which was published in 1812.
( The  Deutsche Sagen German Legends ) to which Scott referes were published in two volumes, in 1816 and 1818. and, when compared with similar collections in other countries, seem to infer traces of a common descent which has placed one general stock of superstition within reach of the various tribes of mankind. What are we to think when we find the Jutt and the Fin  telling their children the same traditions which are to be found in the nurseries of the Spaniard and Italian; or when we recognize in our own instance the traditions of Ireland or Scotland as corresponding with those of Russia? Are we to suppose that their similarity arises from the
limited nature ofhuman invention, and that the same species of fiction occurs to the imaginations of different authors in remote countries as the same species of plants are found in different regions wit.hout the possibility of them having been propagated by transportation from the one to others?  Or ought we, rather,  refer them to a common source, when mankind formed but the same great family, and suppose that as philologists trace through various dialects the broken fragments of one general language, so antiquaries may recognize in distant countries parts of what was once a common stock of tradition? We will not pause on this inquiry, nor observe more than generally that, in collecting these traditions, the industrious editors have been throwing light, not only on the history of their own country in particular, but on that of mankind in general. There is generally some truth mingled with the abundant falsehood, and still more abundant exaggeration of the oral legend; and it may be frequently and unexpectedly found to confirm or confute the meagre statement of some ancient chronicle. Often, too, the legend of the common people, by assigning peculiar features, localities, and specialities to the incidents which it holds in memory, gives life and spirit to the frigid and dry narrative which tells the fact alone, without the particulars which render it memorable or interesting. It is, however, in another point of view, that we wish to consider those popular traditions in their collected state: namely, as a peculiar mode of exhibiting the marvellous and supernatural in composition. And here we must acknowledge, that he who peruses a large collection of stories of fiends, ghosts, and prodigies, in hopes of exciting  in his mind that degree of shuddering interest approaching to fear, which is the most valuable triumph of the supernatural, is likely to be disappointed. A whole collection of ghost stories inclines us as little to fear as a jest book moves us to laughter. Many narratives, turning upon the same interest, are apt to exhaust it: as in a large collection of pictures an ordinary eye is so dazzled with the variety of brilliant or glowing colours as to become less able to distinguish the merit of those pieces which are possessed of any.

23  “Jutt” is an archaic term referring to a people of northern and northwest India; “Finn” is a reference to inhabitants of Finland. “… the attachment of the Germans to the mysterious has invented another species of composition, which, perhaps, could hardly have made its way in any other country or language.  This may be called the FANTASTIC mode of writing,– in which the most wild and unbounded license is given to an irregular fancy….”

[72] “We do not mean to say that the imagination of Hoffmann was either wicked or corrupt, but only that it was ill-regulated and had an undue tendency to the horrible and the distressing.” [81] “…the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief, indistinct, and Re: Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man”: “It is impossible to subject tales of this nature to criticism.  They are not the visions of a poetical mind, they have scarcely even the seeming authenticity which the hallucinations of lunacy convey to the patient; they are the feverish dreams of a light-headed patient….” [97] “…we possess in a much greater degree the power of exciting in our minds what is fearful, melancholy, or horrible, than of commanding thoughts of a lively & pleasing character.  The grotesque, also, has a natural alliance with the horrible; for that which is out of nature can be with difficulty reconciled to the beautiful.”

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The Man Who Never Lived

Evariste Galois  – Mathematician

Evariste Galois, the famous French mathematician whose life is tragic and inspiring at the same time was born 200 years ago. Gonit Sora is celebrating his life by bringing forth a series of articles on the life and works of Galois. (…)

A famous and oft repeated quote is “Whom Gods love, die young!” Although, there seems to be no scientific evidence nor any coherent study confirming or discarding this statement, it has been noticed now and again that great men indeed die young. Not everyone, of course; but there have been some glaring examples in many fields; take for instance the great poet John Keats who died very young. But the field in which such examples are galore is mathematics. Throughout the history of mathematics, there has been many examples of extraordinarily brilliant minds living for a very short span of time. Take for example, the great Indian mathematician S. Ramanujan who died at the young age of 32; the famous Norwegian mathematician Neils Henrick Abel died at the age of 27. Some other notable people who lived for a short span of time are Riemann and Pascal; both geniuses of the first order and both could have achieved a lot had fate been kinder to them. However, no example is as tragic and as hearttouching as that of Evariste Galois, the now famous French mathematician who died at the age of 20!

Evariste Galois (pronounced ‘Gelwa’) was born in Bourg la-Riene in the then French Empire on 25th of October, 1811. Galois, like many mathematicians before and after him showed a tenacity and zeal for higher mathematics at a very small age that could only be described as hauting. Galois started his formal education at the age of 10 being self tutored at home and later joined the Lycee’s school in his hometown. As was expected, Galois showed a tremoundous amount of scholarship in his studies and soon rose to the top of his class. But, such is the tale of genius that at the age of 14, he became bored with the regular school curriculum and started taking an uncanny liking towards mathematics. This was eventful not only for him, but for the whole of mathematics as he did some pioneering work in the fields he touched upon, that even now we are yet to reap the benefits of the seeds that he sowed.

During this period of his life, Galois began studying the masters of mathematics. It is said that he finished the famous mathematician Legendre’s book on Geometry in almost 5 days cover to cover and all the while he read it like a novel. It must be mentioned that even now professional mathematicians find this book too difficult to master. At the age of 15, Galois started to follow the original research papers of another great mathematician, Lagrange. This not only fueled his deep passion for mathematics but also encouraged him to unravel the mathematical mysteries on his own. In April, 1829 Galois published his first research paper on continued fractions at the age of only 17. Thus, began the journey of a legend. Galois deep and varied contributions in many different fields of mathematics has earned him the respect and adulation of one and all today. He was the first person to use the word ‘group’ to define a certain class of mathematicial objects that are today omnipresent not only in almost all branches of mathematics but in fields as varied as physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and even economics.

Galois after completing his school with excellent marks in mathematics decided to try and enter the distinguished Ecole Polytechnique, and so sat in its entrance exam. However, Galois failed to secure a seat in this institute of unique importance and had to enroll in the far inferior Ecole Normale Superior. Here Galois studied for some time, and then again decided to try and enter for the Ecole Polytechnique. Meanwhile, on the personal frontier Galois lost his father who committed suicide by hanging himself in public. This was a major blow to the teenaged Galois and which further fuled his Republican tendencies. The French nation was at that time going through enormous imbalance in its monarchy and system of governance. Galois too decided to join the revolution at the cost of his mathematics. History is testament to tha fact that Galois was even jailed a few times for his revolutionary activities and this got him into trouble even in his institution. All these incidents happened when he was preparing for his entrance exam at the Polytechnique. It was again a surprise when Galois failed a second time to clear it. The genius of Galois was not reccognised at that hallowed institution of learning. Eric Temple Bell, the famous historian of mathematics in his book “Men of Mathematics” quotes

“People not fit to sharpen his (Galois’) pencils sat on judgement of him.”

Such failure prompted Galois to almost leave doing mathematics and light the fire of revolution once again, which was later the cause of his death too.

Galois’ major contribution to mathematics lies in his theory of equations, where he gave a very novel approach to solve one of the major outstanding problems of his time. He along with Abel showed the impossibility of solving the quintic equation via regular methods. This is regarded as a giant leap in the then 19th century mathematical scene. Galois made fundamental contribution to a new field of mathematics which is now termed as ‘Galois Theory’. Galois wrote one paper on Number Theory where he discussed the concept of a ‘finite field’ for the first time. Galois’ entire mathematical research output was a mere 66 pages. This was all that he gave to world mathematics, and this is what made him immortal. It took major advances in group theory to fully understand the implications of the works of Evariste Galois.

The story of this great man came to a very cruel end on 31st May, 1832 at Paris when he had just entered his 20th year. Galois was killed in a duel. There have been numerous speculations as to what may have been the cause of his death, and it seems that the most likely explanation could be that he fell in love with his physician’s daughter and it was at her instigation that he challenged someone for a duel and was as a result killed. The sadder part of this story is that Galois didn’t recive any medical attention for many hours after he was shot, maybe this giant of mathematics could have been saved had helped arrived on time. Galois died a very slow and painful death at the tender age of 20, and the world lost a brilliant mind who was just showing his capabilites. His last words to his brother were

“Don’t cry, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty.”

Galois never recived the admiration from his peers that he should have recived in his lifetime. Even his grave is unmarked and he died almost an anonymous person. It was only years after his death when the letters and manuscripts that Galois wrote just before he died were published that the world started revering Galois and his unparralled genius. The night before he died Galois sensing his end was near wrote down many letters, both mathematical and political to his numerous friends and brother. These letters contain some very though provoking mathematical ideas that has forever sealed Galois name in the annals of mathematical wizardry. The famous mathematician Hermann Weyl while describing these letters said

“This letter judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contain, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind.”

Galois may have died, but his legacy still lingers on. His life shows us what legends are made of, and is a true testament to the fact that whether a man is a legend or not, is determined by history, not fortune tellers. Galois seems to be a perfect man on whom the words of Albert Einstein used to describe Mahatma Gandhi fit perfectly

“Generations to come and generations to go will scarcely belive that such a one as he ever walked upon this earth in flesh and blood.”

Courtesy of Manjil P. Saikia

The Ragas Of Carnatic Music

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The ” Doppelgängers”

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Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann:

The Double in “William Wilson” and The Devil’s Elixirs

In response to accusations that the horror in his stories was derived from German literary sources, Edgar Allan Poe claimed in the Preface for the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 that “if in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” [1] There are several indications, though, that Poe could have gained access to German literature and to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s writings through Gillies’s translation of The Devil’s Elixirs, through Carlyle’s publication of the German Romance, through Sir Walter Scott’s essay on Hoffmann’s use of the supernatural, or through readings of his own in English translation. As the editor of several prominent journals such as the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, the Mirror, and the Broadway Journal, Poe was well acquainted with publications by European writers and even accused other American authors of plagiarizing their ideas. [2] While some critics have noted the similarities between “William Wilson” and The Devil’s Elixirs, scholarship on the double in these works still requires further investigation beyond a positivistic approach. This article traces the developmental stages of the double in “William Wilson” and The Devil’s Elixirs according to a reading of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” It also examines the impact of the double on the lives of the protagonists and analyzes Poe’s and Hoffmann’s overall statement on the divided self.

The historical background of the double is rooted in the philosophical, literary, and scientific theories of German Romanticism, which illustrate the Romantic poet’s constant struggle within himself to reach beyond his own existence. In terms of German philosophy, the double is steeped in Fichtean Idealism, according to which the ego creates and projects itself onto the world, and in Schelling’s concept of “identity” as developed in his philosophy of nature, which illustrates the interaction of the individual with its counterpart in nature. From a literary perspective, the double signifies the Romantic poet’s continuous longing for the infinite, which can never be fulfilled. Since the Romantic ego is continuously striving for something higher than itself, the Romantic poet finds himself divided into two parts: one is rooted in his mortal existence, the other pursues a higher transcendental harmony with the infinite. Typically, Romantic literature abounds with references that illustrate the discrepancy between the “real” and the “ideal,” that seek to express the sublime, the longing for mystical and spiritual unity, and the interaction between man and nature.

The interest in supernatural or unexplained phenomena such as hypnosis, telepathy, sleepwalking, insanity, drives, and in the subconscious also contributed to the motif of the double in Romantic literature. Students of the German physician Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) developed a scientific method of delving into the human psyche that provided the medium with access to the patient’s inner world and secrets that lay beyond human existence. This new scientific approach became the cutting-edge development in scientific research to approach the mysteries of the spiritual world and the dark side of the human mind. The Romantic poet, therefore, employed the motif of the double as the chance to investigate the passions and illnesses of the human mind and to examine the presence of a supernatural world.

Prior to the advent of Romanticism, the motif of the double existed for the sake of comedy through the mistaken identity of characters such as one finds in Plautus’s Menaechmi or Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Romanticism gave the double its psychological depth by endowing it with the meaning of “the admonishing angel, the good repressed ego, or the tenacious devil” [3] and by building around it a canon of literature that included Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Der Zauberring (1813), Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814), and Jean Paul Richter’s Siebenkäs (1776-97). [4] In American literature, there is virtually no tradition of the double, and the motif has been taken from German philosophical, literary, and scientific theory. Even though Poe asserts that he borrowed the motif of the double in “William Wilson” from an article by Washington Irving, [5] it is well known that the latter also drew extensively on German literature for his short stories and sketches. [6]

In Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919), the psychoanalyst asserts that the creation of the double is a means for the individual to safeguard himself “against the destruction of the ego” and a kind of primitive narcissism and self-love. [7] In this duplication process, the double becomes the manifestation of the ego’s repressed drives and desires, finding expression in human form. Through the psychological distance between the double and the self, the individual is able to evaluate his own behavior and to develop a conscience for his improvement. This means that once the critical stage of the Doppelgängertum has been reached, the double either provides the individual with the necessary impetus for a conscience or the double becomes the “uncanny herald of death.” [8] The characters of Medardus and Wilson undergo similar stages of development in respect to the double, including the formation of narcissistic tendencies in their formative years, the repression of sexual desires and power, and, in the words of Freud, the development of “ego-duplication,” “ego-separation,” and “ego-substitution.” [9] However, Wilson is never able to develop a “conscience” and to rejoin his second self, bringing about his own destruction.

Poe’s short story “William Wilson” is less complicated than Hoffmann’s novel, although the main character undergoes a similar process of development. Wilson is a child at a boarding school in England and grows up within the tranquil and solitary walls of the institution. He believes to be in control of his classmates, with one exception: William Wilson, the double. From their very first encounter the double proves to be superior to Wilson, offering him advice and admonishing him for his wrongdoing. After the double exposes Wilson to his fellow students for cheating at cards, and after following him to the various capitals of Europe and stopping him from committing adultery, Wilson revolts and murders his double in a duel. In retrospect, the narrator remarks that he has in fact destroyed himself by having murdered his double.

In the first stage of his development, Wilson reveals the narcissism of his early years by asserting that he had “ascendancy over” other children and that he “was left to the guidance of [his] own will, and became … the master of [his] own actions” so that he “grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions.” [10] At the same time, however, Wilson deplores his authority over others and states that “if there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master-mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions” (WW 431). In other words, Wilson is aware of the control that he has over others and he rejects this authority as a kind of “unqualified despotism.” As a result of the wish to save himself from his uncontrollable behavior, Wilson creates a double that functions as a conscience and helps him control his desire for manipulation and power. In producing a double that embodies the positive side of his being, Wilson subconsciously prevents himself from taking part in drunkenness, cheating, and adultery, and thereby protects himself from harm. Still, he regards the protective behavior of the double as “impertinent and dogged interference” (WW 432), although he inadvertently realizes that the double’s moral sense is “proof of his true superiority” (WW 432).

In Hoffmann’s novel, an orphan child is brought up in a secluded monastery under serene and pious conditions. With the coming of adolescence the child, Medardus, begins to develop sexual urges and rebels against the authority of the monastery. After drinking the forbidden elixir of Saint Anthony, that had been placed in his safekeeping, Medardus undergoes a change of personality and becomes a popular orator at the monastery. Sensing that Medardus is acting out of his own self-interest and the desire to gain his independence, Prior Leonardus implores him to leave the monastery and go on an important mission to Rome. On his way through the mountains, Medardus comes across his double (actually his own brother) asleep on the precipice of a cliff. When Medardus awakens him, the double becomes frightened and falls to his death in the abyss. Medardus then takes on the identity of the double by putting on his clothes and assuming his position at the castle. When he arrives at the double’s residence, Medardus discovers that an intricate plot is already underway between Viktorin (the double) and his lover, Euphemie, concerning the murder of his half-brother, Hermogen. Mistaken by the entire family for the actual Count Viktorin, Medardus becomes Euphemie’s lover and a conspirator to the murder of Hermogen. At the same time, Medardus recognizes Hermogen’s sister, Aurelie, as the woman from the confessional in the monastery who proclaimed her love for him. In a moment of anger, Medardus poisons Euphemie and murders Hermogen in a fight. After the double appears to him in the hallway (Viktorin had crawled out of the abyss), Medardus flees from the castle and the scene of the crime. For the remainder of the novel, Medardus attempts to hide his identity by moving from place to place (the village, the forester’s house, the prince’s residence) and in the process slowly discovers his past.

While Wilson attempts to save himself by creating a double that functions as a conscience, Medardus produces a double that allows him to live out the sexual fantasies and need for authority that he has repressed as a monk. [11] Like Wilson, who grows up in the solitary environment of a boarding school and gradually develops his desire to control others, Medardus reveals his need for power by preaching at a monastery. After having consumed Saint Anthony’s forbidden elixir, Medardus gives a sermon in a crowded church in order to win the desired admiration of his congregation and even claims of himself: “I am Saint Anthony” (DE 33). His repressed sexual desires are unleashed once he drinks the sacred potion and hears the confession of a young woman in the church: “‘You-you yourself, Medardus, are the one that I so inexpressibly love!'” (DE 41) He decides to leave the monastery “in order to hold this woman in [his] arms and to still the burning desire inside of [himself]” (DE 42). Medardus compares the young woman in the confessional with the portrait of Saint Rosalia in the church, which serves as a fetish for his sexual desires.

Wolfgang Nehring claims that “the entire vision is an erotic dream for Medardus, which surprisingly for the protagonist himself, moves from the subconscious to consciousness. From now on Medardus acknowledges his desires and attempts to fulfill them outside of the monastery.” [12] Medardus therefore creates a double (Viktorin) who enables him to pursue his sexual interests outside of the monastery through his relationships with Euphemie and Aurelie. As a result of Viktorin’s alleged sudden death, Medardus not only replaces him sexually in his affair with Euphemie, but he is also able to fulfill his taboo sexual desires with Saint Rosalia through his relationship with Aurelie. Hoffmann’s novel can be regarded as an encounter between Medardus and the manifestation of his sexual fantasies: as Medardus is composed of the negative side of Viktorin and the positive side of his grandfather Francesco, his female counterpart also embodies the femme fatale Euphemie and the saint-like qualities of Aurelie.

In both texts the double is a manifestation of the characters’ innermost drives and desires, which find expression in human form. In The Devil’s Elixirs, the double functions as an “id” who carries out devious actions and forces Medardus to examine his life, whereas Wilson’s double serves as a “conscience” who admonishes him for his wrongdoing. Wilson expresses his need for self-control and discipline through a double who has the same “identity of name” (WW 432), the “same age” (WW 434), the “same height” (WW 434), “entered the school upon the same day” (WW 432), and keeps a constant watch over him and prevents him from acting immorally. Whereas Wilson’s “ego-duplication” exists from the very onset of the story through the presence of the second William Wilson, his actual separation from the double takes place upon secretly entering the double’s room one evening in order to play a joke on him. Finding the double asleep in bed, Wilson is confounded by the fact that the second self is not a mere imitation but actually exists independently of himself. Wilson’s response to this encounter with the double is not one of recognition that would allow him to look at himself objectively, but rather one of fear, an encounter that causes him to flee throughout the story. “Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that old academy, never to enter them again” (WW 437).

In their first encounter after this frightful evening, the narrator explains that he had invited some friends to his room and the wine was flowing freely, when the double appeared at the door and interrupted the party by “whisper[ing] the words ‘William Wilson!’ in [his] ear” (WW 439). Once again, as Wilson is cheating at cards, the double enters the scene in order to reveal the main character’s devious activity to the others: “Gentlemen…. You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true character of the person who has to-night won at écarté a large sum of money from Lord Glendinning…. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve” (WW 443). Finally, the double disturbs Wilson just as he is about to make advances towards the beautiful wife of Duke Di Broglio at a party in Rome, and Wilson feels “a light hand placed upon [his] shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within [his] ear” (WW 446). Wilson believes that the double interrupts him throughout his life in order “to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which, if fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mischief” (WW 445). However, during these episodes Wilson never reflects upon his own actions as being dishonest or immoral, but rather claims that his “natural rights of self-agency” are “so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied” (WW 445) by the double.

In The Devil’s Elixirs, Saint Anthony’s wine enables the main character to delve into the darker side of his mind, to give moving sermons, and to conjure up lustful visions of Saint Rosalia in church: “I drank again, and the desire of a new magnificent life rose up inside of me” (DE 37). In “William Wilson,” the protagonist lives out his repressed desires and gives the double the greatest resistance under the influence of alcohol. It is precisely during these moments of drunkenness that the double appears before Wilson to admonish him for his actions. During the first major encounter with the double, Wilson remarks that he was “madly flushed with … intoxication” (WW 438) and “was in the act of insisting upon a toast” (438) when his double appeared at the door. It is also in this inebriated condition that Wilson finally summons up the courage to oppose his double openly and to challenge him to a duel: “I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more impatient of control. I began to murmur-to hesitate-to resist” (WW 446).

Similar to Wilson, who refuses to accept the existence of his second self, Medardus represses the existence of his double (Viktorin) by causing him to fall from a ledge of a cliff into a dark abyss. In order to hide from his true self, Medardus pretends to be Viktorin, taking on the identity of the double, who is posing as a monk: “I am that, which I appear to be, and do not appear to be that, which I am; I am an inexplicable riddle to myself; my being has been divided in two!” (DE 59). Since Viktorin slowly climbs out of the abyss and returns to haunt Medardus throughout the novel, one can see that the double and the sexual manifestations that he represents are only repressed and eventually surface in human form. The first sign of the repressed double reemerging (ego-separation) occurs in the hallway of the castle following the murders of Euphemie and Hermogen. Similar to Wilson, who is terrified by the initial vision of his own double, Medardus flees from the castle and attempts to hide from the darker side of himself by concealing his habit-“I hid the frock in a hollow tree” (WW 79)-and by changing his physical appearance through new clothes and a haircut. Unlike Wilson, however, Medardus, in his various encounters with the double, undergoes a process of development that enables him to create a conscience and to reflect upon his actions by the end of the novel.

Most important among these encounters with the double are the scenes in the forester’s lodge and in prison, and the confrontation with the double on the way to his execution. In the first instance, Medardus spends a night at the forester’s house in the woods after his carriage leaves him stranded there, and during the night the double (Viktorin) dressed as a monk enters Medardus’s room and climbs onto his bed (ego-substitution). In this key scene, the double is pointing to the psychological battle between Medardus and his second self, which would provide one of them with supremacy. Medardus, however, does not recognize the double as a manifestation of his repressed desires, but instead sees him as something strangely apart from himself: “you are not me; you are the devil” (DE 105). The forester explains that the double “is said to have committed a terrible sin by misusing a relic and has been banned from the monastery” (DE 114) and that he exhibited uncontrollable sexual behavior by trying to seduce his daughter, “whose door he kicked in with his foot” (DE 111). At this point in his development, however, Medardus is being torn apart through his second ego: “divided in my being more than ever, I became ambiguous to myself, and an inner horror enveloped my soul with destructive power” (DE 116).

After Medardus has been charged with the murder of Euphemie and Hermogen at the prince’s residence, the double whispers to him in his dark prison cell, “lit-tle broth-er … lit-tle broth-er … Me-dar-dus … I am here … am here … op-open up … up … we wa-want to go into the wo-woods … go into the woods!” (DE 165). In the appellation “little brother,” which can refer to the fact that Medardus is a monk or that he is the brother of the double, Medardus recognizes his own voice and repeats, “Me-dar-dus … Me-dar-dus!” (DE 165) The response, “lit-tle broth-er … lit-tle broth-er, did … you, you recognize m-me … recognize me?” (DE 165), points to the fact that Medardus is on his way to recognizing the darker side of his self. A few days later, Medardus again experiences the double. This time, he emerges through the floor of the cell with a knife in his hand, calling, “Lit-tle broth-er! Lit-tle broth-er, Medar-dus is here-here, come up … take this, take this! … break out … break out … into the wo-woods … into the woods!” (DE 171-72). Through this metaphorical scene of the double literally breaking through the subconscious of the main character, Medardus moves closer to the realization that the double is part of him, and he sees his own figure in the dark hole of the floor: “the full light of the lamp fell upon his face-I recognized myself-I lost consciousness” (DE 172).

Whereas Hoffmann employs the floor of the prison cell and the deep abyss of the “Teufelsgrund” as metaphors of the human subconscious, Poe draws upon the complex arrangement of rooms in the boarding school as analogous to the various parts of the human mind. Wilson describes his school, which is watched over by the Reverend Dr. Bransby, as having “no end to its windings-to its incomprehensible subdivisions” (WW 429), and that many of the rooms were “merest closets” (WW 436), “capable of accommodating but a single individual. One of these small apartments was occupied by Wilson” (WW 436). Wilson’s flight from this institution to the capitals of Europe is an expression of freedom; however, it is an escape that offers him no reconciliation with his divided self: “I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation…. Years flew, while I experienced no relief” (WW 444-45).

When Medardus sees his double being carried away in a carriage to his execution, he is confronted with the evil side of his being and his own devious actions. Although he is about to fulfill his innermost desire and marry Aurelie, whom he associates with Saint Rosalia, Medardus openly admits that he is the murderer of Hermogen: “I … I, your beloved, your fiancé, am Medardus … your brother’s murderer” (DE 206). It is through the double that Medardus is prevented from marrying his half-sister Aurelie and that he recognizes his involvement in the murder of Euphemie and Hermogen. In a fight analogous to William Wilson’s duel with his double, Medardus wrestles with his second self for his ego and thus starts the process of reconciliation with himself.

William Wilson’s final confrontation with his double takes place at Duke Di Brogio’s party in Naples, where he is again plagued by the moral voice of his second self. Unlike Medardus, who gradually learns from his various encounters with the double and is able to develop a conscience, Wilson does not yet realize that the double’s function is to bring about a moral change in himself. According to Freud’s theory of the double, the second self can either bring about a moral change in the individual through the development of a conscience or it can ultimately cause the character’s own destruction. Angered by another intrusion by the double and unable to comprehend the significance of the encounter, Wilson decides that he “would submit no longer to be enslaved” (WW 446). In the ensuing confrontation, Wilson challenges his double to a duel that ends with the murder of Wilson’s moral self. Instead of conceding victory to Wilson, the double sternly informs him: “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead-dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself” (WW 448). At the moment of running his sword through the double, Wilson sees his own reflection in what appears to be “a large mirror” (WW 447), “all pale and dabbled in blood” (WW 448), and realizes that he has murdered his own conscience, and, in effect, has brought about the moral death of himself. As Hoffmann’s depiction of the double suggests, one needs both the positive and negative sides of the self to exist. Since the “ego-substitution,” the murder, and the recognition of the double happen at the same time, Wilson is unable to bring both halves of his being together and is forced to seek reconciliation post facto through the narration of his story. In retrospect, Wilson refers to himself as an “outcast of all outcasts most abandoned” (WW 426) and asserts that he “might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had [he] less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning[ful] whispers which [he] then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised” (WW 435).

Medardus’s final stage of development begins with seeing his double being brought to the execution and ends with the writing of his memoirs at the monastery. While Aurelie is about to take her vows to become a nun, the double enters the church and stabs her on the altar before the entire congregation. After the double flees from the church, and the painter Francesco steps down from the painting of Saint Rosalia, Aurelie explains to Medardus that the phenomenon of the double is the battle between good and evil over his soul, and that its resolution lifts the divine curse on his family. As a final penance for his transgressions, Medardus writes down the story of his life. Unlike Wilson, who writes the story of his double in order to justify his own mistakes, Medardus writes his life story in order to relive the past as a kind of psychotherapy: “I did as the prior asked. Oh!-indeed it happened as he said!-pain and bliss, horror and desire-dismay and delight rushed forth inside of me when I wrote down the story of my life” (288).

The use of the double in “William Wilson” and The Devil’s Elixirs shows an overwhelming affinity between Poe and Hoffmann in terms of motifs, symbolism, and stages of development. While the double in “William Wilson” serves as a “conscience” for the main character’s moral development, the double in The Devil’s Elixirs functions as an “id” that allows Medardus to live out his sexual fantasies and need for power. In both cases, however, the double provides an impetus for the protagonists’ improvement through a process of duplication, separation, and substitution. Medardus is able to embrace both halves of his divided self and to learn to be a better person, whereas Wilson rejects the advice of his double and, in effect, brings about his own moral death. For this reason, Wilson can only comfort himself afterwards through the narration of his story. Medardus, on the other hand, returns to his life at the monastery as a complete being and sets out to write down the story of his life.

Notes

[1] Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969-78) 473.
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[2] The most famous accusations of plagiarism are aimed at Nathaniel Hawthorne (Godey’s Lady’s Book, Nov. 1847) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York Evening Mirror, Jan. 1845; Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Feb. 1849).
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[3] Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1992) 101; my translation.
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[4] The German writer Jean Paul Richter coined the phrase Doppelgänger in this novel Siebenkäs by claiming that “Doppeltgänger” are people who can see themselves (Frenzel 102).
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[5] Washington Irving, “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” The Gift for 1836 166-67.
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[6] Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900. (1957; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978) 367-81.
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[7] Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche,” Psychologische Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1970) 258; my translation.
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[8] Freud 258.
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[9] Freud 257.
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[10] Poe, “William Wilson,” Collected Works., vol. 2, 427. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text in parentheses following the abbreviation WW.
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[11] All translations from The Devil’s Elixirs are my own and are based on E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Die Elixiere des Teufels,” Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (München: Winkler, 1970). Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text in parentheses following the abbreviation DE.
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[12] Wolfgang Nehring, “E. T. A. Hoffmann: Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815/16),” Romane und Erzählungen der deutschen Romantik, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981) 344; my translation.

(Courtesy of Patrick Labriola, Bonn, Germany)
see also

 

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WILLIAM WILSON
by Edgar Allan Poe
(1839)

What say of it? what say (of) CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path?

*
Chamberlayne’s Pharronida.

LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn –for the horror –for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! –to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? –and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?

I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch –these later years –took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance –what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy –I had nearly said for the pity –of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow –what they cannot refrain from allowing –that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before –certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?

I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions.

My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep.

It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am –misery, alas! only too real –I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in the weakness of a few rambling details. These, moreover, utterly trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume, to my fancy, adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality when and where I recognise the first ambiguous monitions of the destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then remember.

The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week –once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighbouring fields –and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, —could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!

At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery –a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn meditation.

The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor anything similar within it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed –such as a first advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas or Midsummer holy-days.

But the house! –how quaint an old building was this! –to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings –to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable –inconceivable –and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars.

The school-room was the largest in the house –I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a celling of oak. In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a square enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising the sanctum, “during hours,” of our principal, the Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid structure, with massy door, sooner than open which in the absence of the “Dominic,” we would all have willingly perished by the peine forte et dure. In other angles were two other similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but still greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit of the “classical” usher, one of the “English and mathematical.” Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other.

Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon –even much of the outre. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray shadow –a weak and irregular remembrance –an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals.

Yet in fact –in the fact of the world’s view –how little was there to remember! The morning’s awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its intrigues; –these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. “Oh, le bon temps, que ce siecle de fer!”

In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself; –over all with a single exception. This exception was found in the person of a scholar, who, although no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself; –a circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those everyday appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, –a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted “our set,” presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class –in the sports and broils of the play-ground –to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will –indeed, to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions.

Wilson’s rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment; –the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority; since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle. Yet this superiority –even this equality –was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it. Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes, were not more pointed than private. He appeared to be destitute alike of the ambition which urged, and of the passionate energy of mind which enabled me to excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify myself; although there were times when I could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could only conceive this singular behavior to arise from a consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar airs of patronage and protection.

Perhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson’s conduct, conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the school upon the same day, which set afloat the notion that we were brothers, among the senior classes in the academy. These do not usually inquire with much strictness into the affairs of their juniors. I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the most remote degree, connected with my family. But assuredly if we had been brothers we must have been twins; for, after leaving Dr. Bransby’s, I casually learned that my namesake was born on the nineteenth of January, 1813 –and this is a somewhat remarkable coincidence; for the day is precisely that of my own nativity.

It may seem strange that in spite of the continual anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether. We had, to be sure, nearly every day a quarrel in which, yielding me publicly the palm of victory, he, in some manner, contrived to make me feel that it was he who had deserved it; yet a sense of pride on my part, and a veritable dignity on his own, kept us always upon what are called “speaking terms,” while there were many points of strong congeniality in our tempers, operating to awake me in a sentiment which our position alone, perhaps, prevented from ripening into friendship. It is difficult, indeed, to define,or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture; –some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity. To the moralist it will be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and myself were the most inseparable of companions.

It was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us, which turned all my attacks upon him, (and they were many, either open or covert) into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional disease, would have been spared by any antagonist less at his wit’s end than myself; –my rival had a weakness in the faucal or guttural organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any time above a very low whisper. Of this defect I did not fall to take what poor advantage lay in my power.

Wilson’s retaliations in kind were many; and there was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. How his sagacity first discovered at all that so petty a thing would vex me, is a question I never could solve; but, having discovered, he habitually practised the annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own.

The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of person and outline of feature. I was galled, too, by the rumor touching a relationship, which had grown current in the upper forms. In a word, nothing could more seriously disturb me, although I scrupulously concealed such disturbance,) than any allusion to a similarity of mind, person, or condition existing between us. But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself,) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our schoolfellows. That he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent; but that he could discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration.

His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.

How greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed me, (for it could not justly be termed a caricature,) I will not now venture to describe. I had but one consolation –in the fact that the imitation, apparently, was noticed by myself alone, and that I had to endure only the knowing and strangely sarcastic smiles of my namesake himself. Satisfied with having produced in my bosom the intended effect, he seemed to chuckle in secret over the sting he had inflicted, and was characteristically disregardful of the public applause which the success of his witty endeavours might have so easily elicited. That the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the master air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see,) gave but the full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin.

I have already more than once spoken of the disgusting air of patronage which he assumed toward me, and of his frequent officious interference withy my will. This interference often took the ungracious character of advice; advice not openly given, but hinted or insinuated. I received it with a repugnance which gained strength as I grew in years. Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so usual to his immature age and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my own; and that I might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised.

As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented more and more openly what I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first years of our connexion as schoolmates, my feelings in regard to him might have been easily ripened into friendship: but, in the latter months of my residence at the academy, although the intrusion of his ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure, abated, my sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook very much of positive hatred. Upon one occasion he saw this, I think, and afterwards avoided, or made a show of avoiding me.

It was about the same period, if I remember aright, that, in an altercation of violence with him, in which he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general appearance, a something which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancy –wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago –some point of the past even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last conversation I there held with my singular namesake.

The huge old house, with its countless subdivisions, had several large chambers communicating with each other, where slept the greater number of the students. There were, however, (as must necessarily happen in a building so awkwardly planned,) many little nooks or recesses, the odds and ends of the structure; and these the economic ingenuity of Dr. Bransby had also fitted up as dormitories; although, being the merest closets, they were capable of accommodating but a single individual. One of these small apartments was occupied by Wilson.

One night, about the close of my fifth year at the school, and immediately after the altercation just mentioned, finding every one wrapped in sleep, I arose from bed, and, lamp in hand, stole through a wilderness of narrow passages from my own bedroom to that of my rival. I had long been plotting one of those ill-natured pieces of practical wit at his expense in which I had hitherto been so uniformly unsuccessful. It was my intention, now, to put my scheme in operation, and I resolved to make him feel the whole extent of the malice with which I was imbued. Having reached his closet, I noiselessly entered, leaving the lamp, with a shade over it, on the outside. I advanced a step, and listened to the sound of his tranquil breathing. Assured of his being asleep, I returned, took the light, and with it again approached the bed. Close curtains were around it, which, in the prosecution of my plan, I slowly and quietly withdrew, when the bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked; –and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were these –these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the ague in fancying they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed; –while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared –assuredly not thus –in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that old academy, never to enter them again.

After a lapse of some months, spent at home in mere idleness, I found myself a student at Eton. The brief interval had been sufficient to enfeeble my remembrance of the events at Dr. Bransby’s, or at least to effect a material change in the nature of the feelings with which I remembered them. The truth –the tragedy –of the drama was no more. I could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom called up the subject at all but with wonder at extent of human credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I hereditarily possessed. Neither was this species of scepticism likely to be diminished by the character of the life I led at Eton. The vortex of thoughtless folly into which I there so immediately and so recklessly plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours, engulfed at once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory only the veriest levities of a former existence.

I do not wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here –a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of the night; for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous seductions; so that the gray dawn had already faintly appeared in the east, while our delirious extravagance was at its height. Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity, when my attention was suddenly diverted by the violent, although partial unclosing of the door of the apartment, and by the eager voice of a servant from without. He said that some person, apparently in great haste, demanded to speak with me in the hall.

Wildly excited with wine, the unexpected interruption rather delighted than surprised me. I staggered forward at once, and a few steps brought me to the vestibule of the building. In this low and small room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was admitted, save that of the exceedingly feeble dawn which made its way through the semi-circular window. As I put my foot over the threshold, I became aware of the figure of a youth about my own height, and habited in a white kerseymere morning frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I myself wore at the moment. This the faint light enabled me to perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish. Upon my entering he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by. the arm with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words “William Wilson!” in my ear.

I grew perfectly sober in an instant. There was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the light, which filled me with unqualified amazement; but it was not this which had so violently moved me. It was the pregnancy of solemn admonition in the singular, low, hissing utterance; and, above all, it was the character, the tone, the key, of those few, simple, and familiar, yet whispered syllables, which came with a thousand thronging memories of bygone days, and struck upon my soul with the shock of a galvanic battery. Ere I could recover the use of my senses he was gone.

Although this event failed not of a vivid effect upon my disordered imagination, yet was it evanescent as vivid. For some weeks, indeed, I busied myself in earnest inquiry, or was wrapped in a cloud of morbid speculation. I did not pretend to disguise from my perception the identity of the singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated counsel. But who and what was this Wilson? –and whence came he? –and what were his purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied; merely ascertaining, in regard to him, that a sudden accident in his family had caused his removal from Dr. Bransby’s academy on the afternoon of the day in which I myself had eloped. But in a brief period I ceased to think upon the subject; my attention being all absorbed in a contemplated departure for Oxford. Thither I soon went; the uncalculating vanity of my parents furnishing me with an outfit and annual establishment, which would enable me to indulge at will in the luxury already so dear to my heart, –to vie in profuseness of expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the wealthiest earldoms in Great Britain.

Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I out-Heroded Herod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel follies, I added no brief appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute university of Europe.

It could hardly be credited, however, that I had, even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate, as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak-minded among my fellow-collegians. Such, nevertheless, was the fact. And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honourable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was committed. Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses, the gay, the frank, the generous William Wilson –the noblest and most commoner at Oxford –him whose follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy –whose errors but inimitable whim –whose darkest vice but a careless and dashing extravagance?

I had been now two years successfully busied in this way, when there came to the university a young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning –rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus –his riches, too, as easily acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and, of course, marked him as a fitting subject for my skill. I frequently engaged him in play, and contrived, with the gambler’s usual art, to let him win considerable sums, the more effectually to entangle him in my snares. At length, my schemes being ripe, I met him (with the full intention that this meeting should be final and decisive) at the chambers of a fellow-commoner, (Mr. Preston,) equally intimate with both, but who, to do him Justice, entertained not even a remote suspicion of my design. To give to this a better colouring, I had contrived to have assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was solicitously careful that the introduction of cards should appear accidental, and originate in the proposal of my contemplated dupe himself. To be brief upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was omitted, so customary upon similar occasions that it is a just matter for wonder how any are still found so besotted as to fall its victim.

We had protracted our sitting far into the night, and I had at length effected the manoeuvre of getting Glendinning as my sole antagonist. The game, too, was my favorite ecarte!. The rest of the company, interested in the extent of our play, had abandoned their own cards, and were standing around us as spectators. The parvenu, who had been induced by my artifices in the early part of the evening, to drink deeply, now shuffled, dealt, or played, with a wild nervousness of manner for which his intoxication, I thought, might partially, but could not altogether account. In a very short period he had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating –he proposed to double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how entirely the prey was in my toils; in less than an hour he had quadrupled his debt. For some time his countenance had been losing the florid tinge lent it by the wine; but now, to my astonishment, I perceived that it had grown to a pallor truly fearful. I say to my astonishment. Glendinning had been represented to my eager inquiries as immeasurably wealthy; and the sums which he had as yet lost, although in themselves vast, could not, I supposed, very seriously annoy, much less so violently affect him. That he was overcome by the wine just swallowed, was the idea which most readily presented itself; and, rather with a view to the preservation of my own character in the eyes of my associates, than from any less interested motive, I was about to insist, peremptorily, upon a discontinuance of the play, when some expressions at my elbow from among the company, and an ejaculation evincing utter despair on the part of Glendinning, gave me to understand that I had effected his total ruin under circumstances which, rendering him an object for the pity of all, should have protected him from the ill offices even of a fiend.

What now might have been my conduct it is difficult to say. The pitiable condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom over all; and, for some moments, a profound silence was maintained, during which I could not help feeling my cheeks tingle with the many burning glances of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party. I will even own that an intolerable weight of anxiety was for a brief instant lifted from my bosom by the sudden and extraordinary interruption which ensued. The wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to their full extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us just to perceive that a stranger had entered, about my own height, and closely muffled in a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total; and we could only feel that he was standing in our midst. Before any one of us could recover from the extreme astonishment into which this rudeness had thrown all, we heard the voice of the intruder.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a low, distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled to the very marrow of my bones, “Gentlemen, I make no apology for this behaviour, because in thus behaving, I am but fulfilling a duty. You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true character of the person who has to-night won at ecarte a large sum of money from Lord Glendinning. I will therefore put you upon an expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very necessary information. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper.”

While he spoke, so profound was the stillness that one might have heard a pin drop upon the floor. In ceasing, he departed at once, and as abruptly as he had entered. Can I –shall I describe my sensations? –must I say that I felt all the horrors of the damned? Most assuredly I had little time given for reflection. Many hands roughly seized me upon the spot, and lights were immediately reprocured. A search ensued. In the lining of my sleeve were found all the court cards essential in ecarte, and, in the pockets of my wrapper, a number of packs, facsimiles of those used at our sittings, with the single exception that mine were of the species called, technically, arrondees; the honours being slightly convex at the ends, the lower cards slightly convex at the sides. In this disposition, the dupe who cuts, as customary, at the length of the pack, will invariably find that he cuts his antagonist an honor; while the gambler, cutting at the breadth, will, as certainly, cut nothing for his victim which may count in the records of the game.

Any burst of indignation upon this discovery would have affected me less than the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure, with which it was received.

“Mr. Wilson,” said our host, stooping to remove from beneath his feet an exceedingly luxurious cloak of rare furs, “Mr. Wilson, this is your property.” (The weather was cold; and, upon quitting my own room, I had thrown a cloak over my dressing wrapper, putting it off upon reaching the scene of play.) “I presume it is supererogatory to seek here (eyeing the folds of the garment with a bitter smile) for any farther evidence of your skill. Indeed, we have had enough. You will see the necessity, I hope, of quitting Oxford –at all events, of quitting instantly my chambers.”

Abased, humbled to the dust as I then was, it is probable that I should have resented this galling language by immediate personal violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the folding doors of the apartment, it was with an astonishment nearly bordering upon terror, that I perceived my own already hanging on my arm, (where I had no doubt unwittingly placed it,) and that the one presented me was but its exact counterpart in every, in even the minutest possible particular. The singular being who had so disastrously exposed me, had been muffled, I remembered, in a cloak; and none had been worn at all by any of the members of our party with the exception of myself. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the one offered me by Preston; placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame.

I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion had as yet only begun. Scarcely had I set foot in Paris ere I had fresh evidence of the detestable interest taken by this Wilson in my concerns. Years flew, while I experienced no relief. Villain! –at Rome, with how untimely, yet with how spectral an officiousness, stepped he in between me and my ambition! At Vienna, too –at Berlin –and at Moscow! Where, in truth, had I not bitter cause to curse him within my heart? From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.

And again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions “Who is he? –whence came he? –and what are his objects?” But no answer was there found. And then I scrutinized, with a minute scrutiny, the forms, and the methods, and the leading traits of his impertinent supervision. But even here there was very little upon which to base a conjecture. It was noticeable, indeed, that, in no one of the multiplied instances in which he had of late crossed my path, had he so crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which, if fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mischief. Poor justification this, in truth, for an authority so imperiously assumed! Poor indemnity for natural rights of self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied!

I had also been forced to notice that my tormentor, for a very long period of time, (while scrupulously and with miraculous dexterity maintaining his whim of an identity of apparel with myself,) had so contrived it, in the execution of his varied interference with my will, that I saw not, at any moment, the features of his face. Be Wilson what he might, this, at least, was but the veriest of affectation, or of folly. Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my admonisher at Eton –in the destroyer of my honor at Oxford, –in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris, my passionate love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in Egypt, –that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius, could fall to recognise the William Wilson of my school boy days, –the namesake, the companion, the rival, –the hated and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby’s? Impossible! –But let me hasten to the last eventful scene of the drama.

Thus far I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination. The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although bitterly reluctant submission to his arbitrary will. But, of late days, I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more impatient of control. I began to murmur, –to hesitate, –to resist. And was it only fancy which induced me to believe that, with the increase of my own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a proportional diminution? Be this as it may, I now began to feel the inspiration of a burning hope, and at length nurtured in my secret thoughts a stern and desperate resolution that I would submit no longer to be enslaved.

It was at Rome, during the Carnival of 18–, that I attended a masquerade in the palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had indulged more freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table; and now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded rooms irritated me beyond endurance. The difficulty, too, of forcing my way through the mazes of the company contributed not a little to the ruffling of my temper; for I was anxiously seeking, (let me not say with what unworthy motive) the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be habited, and now, having caught a glimpse of her person, I was hurrying to make my way into her presence. –At this moment I felt a light hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within my ear.

In an absolute phrenzy of wrath, I turned at once upon him who had thus interrupted me, and seized him violently by tile collar. He was attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own; wearing a Spanish cloak of blue velvet, begirt about the waist with a crimson belt sustaining a rapier. A mask of black silk entirely covered his face.

“Scoundrel!” I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury, “scoundrel! impostor! accursed villain! you shall not –you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!” –and I broke my way from the ball-room into a small ante-chamber adjoining –dragging him unresistingly with me as I went.

Upon entering, I thrust him furiously from me. He staggered against the wall, while I closed the door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh, drew in silence, and put himself upon his defence.

The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.

At that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, –so at first it seemed to me in my confusion –now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.

Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist –it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment –not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!

It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead –dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist –and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The Sandman

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Click picture to read on

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There is nobody in the world who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely. In the evening, while the children are seated at the table or in their little chairs, he comes up the stairs very softly, for he walks in his socks, then he opens the doors without the slightest noise, and throws a small quantity of very fine dust in their eyes, just enough to prevent them from keeping them open, and so they do not see him. Then he creeps behind them, and blows softly upon their necks, till their heads begin to droop. But Ole-Luk-Oie does not wish to hurt them, for he is very fond of children, and only wants them to be quiet that he may relate to them pretty stories, and they never are quiet until they are in bed and asleep. As soon as they are asleep, Ole-Luk-Oie seats himself upon the bed. He is nicely dressed; his coat is made of silken fabric; it is impossible to say of what color, for it changes from green to red, and from red to blue as he turns from side to side. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreams at all.

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The Sandman
by E.T.A. Hoffmann

NATHANEL TO LOTHAIRE

Certainly you must all be uneasy that I have not written for so long – so very long. My mother, am sure, is angry, and Clara will believe that I am passing my time in dissipation, entirely forgetful of her fair, angelic image that is so deeply imprinted on my heart. Such, however, is not the case. Daily and hourly I think of you all; and the dear form of my lovely Clara passes before me in my dreams, smiling upon me with her bright eyes as she did when I was among you. But how can I write to you in the distracted mood which has been disturbing my every thought! A horrible thing has crossed my path. Dark forebodings of a cruel, threatening fate tower over me like dark clouds, which no friendly sunbeam can penetrate. I will now tell you what has occurred. I must do so – that I plainly see – the mere thought of it sets me laughing like a madman. Ah, my dear Lothaire, how shall I begin ? How shall I make you in any way realize that what happened to me a few days ago can really have had such a fatal effect on my life? If you were here you could see for yourself; but, as it is, you will certainly take me for a crazy fellow who sees ghosts. To be brief, this horrible occurrence, the painful impression of which I am in vain endeavoring to throw off, is nothing more than this – that some days ago, namely on the 30th of October at twelve o’clock noon, a barometer-dealer came into my room and offered me his wares. I bought nothing, and threatened to throw him downstairs, upon which he took himself off of his own accord.

Only circumstances of the most peculiar kind, you will suspect, and exerting the greatest influence over my life, can have given any import to this occurrence. Moreover, the person of that unlucky dealer must have had an evil effect upon me. So it was, indeed. I must use every endeavor to collect myself, and patiently and quietly tell you so much of my early youth as will bring the picture plainly and clearly before your eyes. As I am about to begin, I fancy that I hear you laughing, and Clara exclaiming, ‘Childish stories indeed!’ Laugh at me, I beg of you, laugh with all your heart. But, oh God! my hair stands on end, and it is in mad despair that I seem to be inviting your laughter, as Franz Moor did Daniel’s in Schiller’s play. But to my story.

Excepting at dinner-time I and my brothers and sisters used to see my father very little during the day. He was, perhaps, busily engaged at his ordinary profession. After supper, which was served according to the old custom at seven o’clock, we all went with my mother into my father’s study, and seated ourselves at the round table, where he would smoke and drink his large glass of beer. Often he told us wonderful stories, and grew so warm over them that his pipe continually went out. Whereupon I had to light it again with a burning spill, which I thought great sport. Often, too, he would give us picture-books, and sit in his arm-chair, silent and thoughtful, puffing out such thick clouds of smoke that we all seemed to be swimming in the clouds. On such evenings as these my mother was very melancholy, and immediately the clock struck nine she would say: ‘Now, children, to bed – to bed! The Sandman’s coming, I can see.’ And indeed on each occasion I used to hear something with a heavy, slow step come thudding up the stairs. That I thought must be the Sandman.

Once when the dull noise of footsteps was particularly terrifying I asked my mother as she bore us away: ‘Mamma, who is this naughty Sandman, who always drives us away from Papa? What does he look like?’

‘There is no Sandman, dear child,’ replied my mother. ‘When I say the Sandman’s coming, I only mean that you’re sleepy and can’t keep your eyes open – just as if sane had been sprinkled into them.’

This answer of my mother’s did not satisfy me – nay, the thought soon ripened in my childish mind the she only denied the Sandman’s existence to prevent our being terrified of him. Certainly I always heard him coming up the stairs. Most curious to know more of this Sandman and his particular connection with children, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sister what sort of man he was.

‘Eh, Natty,’ said she, ‘don’t you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.’

A most frightful picture of the cruel Sandman became impressed upon my mind; so that when in the evening I heard the noise on the stairs I trembled with agony and alarm, and my mother could get nothing out of me but the cry, ‘The Sandman, the Sandman!’ stuttered forth through my tears. I then ran into the bedroom, where the frightful apparition of the Sandman terrified me during the whole night.

I had already grown old enough to realize that the nurse’s tale about him and the nest of children in the crescent moon could not be quite true, but nevertheless this Sandman remained a fearful spectre, and I was seized with the utmost horror when I heard him once, not only come up the stairs, but violently force my father’s door open and go in. Sometimes he stayed away for a long period, but after that his visits came in close succession. This lasted for years, but I could not accustom myself to the terrible goblin; the image of the dreadful Sandman did not become any fainter. His intercourse with my father began more and more to occupy my fancy. Yet an unconquerable fear prevented me from asking my father about it. But if I, I myself, could penetrate the mystery and behold the wondrous Sandman – that was the wish which grew upon me with the years. The Sandman had introduced me to thoughts of the marvels and wonders which so readily gain a hold on a child’s mind. I enjoyed nothing better than reading or hearing horrible stories of goblins, witches, pigmies, etc.; but most horrible of all was the Sandman, whom I was always drawing with chalk or charcoal on the tables, cupboards and walls, in the oddest and most frightful shapes.

When I was ten years old my mother removed me from the night nursery into a little chamber situated in a corridor near my father’s room. Still, as before, we were obliged to make a speedy departure on the stroke of nine, as soon as the unknown step sounded on the stair. From my little chamber I could hear how he entered my father’s room, and then it was that I seemed to detect a thin vapor with a singular odor spreading through the house. Stronger and stronger, with my curiosity, grew my resolution somehow to make the Sandman’s acquaintance. Often I sneaked from my room to the corridor when my mother had passed, but never could I discover anything; for the Sandman had always gone in at the door when I reached the place where I might have seen him. At last, driven by an irresistible impulse, I resolved to hide myself in my father’s room and await his appearance there.

From my father’s silence and my mother’s melancholy face I perceived one evening that the Sandman was coming. I, therefore, feigned great weariness, left the room before nine o’clock, and hid myself in a corner close to the door. The house-door groaned and the heavy, slow, creaking step came up the passage and towards the stairs. My mother passed me with the rest of the children. Softly, very softly, I opened the door of my father’s room. He was sitting, as usual, stiff end silent, with his back to the door. He did not perceive me, and I swiftly darted into the room and behind the curtain which covered an open cupboard close to the door, in which my father’s clothes were hanging. The steps sounded nearer and nearer – there was a strange coughing and scraping and murmuring without. My heart trembled with anxious expectation. A sharp step close, very close, to the door – the quick snap of the latch, and the door opened with a rattling noise. Screwing up my courage to the uttermost, I cautiously peeped out. The Sandman was standing before my father in the middle of the room, the light of the candles shone full upon his face. The Sandman, the fearful Sandman, was the old advocate Coppelius, who had often dined with us.

But the most hideous form could not have inspired me with deeper horror than this very Coppelius. Imagine a large broad-shouldered man, with a head disproportionately big, a face the color of yellow ochre, a pair of bushy grey eyebrows, from beneath which a pair of green cat’s eyes sparkled with the most penetrating luster, and with a large nose curved over his upper lip. His wry mouth was often twisted into a malicious laugh, when a couple of dark red spots appeared upon his cheeks, and a strange hissing sound was heard through his gritted teeth. Coppelius always appeared in an ashen-gray coat, cut in old fashioned style, with waistcoat and breeches of the same color, while his stockings were black, and his shoes adorned with agate buckles.

His little peruke scarcely reached farther than the crown of his head, his curls stood high above his large red ears, and a broad hair-bag projected stiffly from his neck, so that the silver clasp which fastened his folded cravat might be plainly seen. His whole figure was hideous and repulsive, but most disgusting to us children were his coarse brown hairy fists. Indeed we did not like to eat anything he had touched with them. This he had noticed, and it was his delight, under some pretext or other, to touch a piece of cake or some nice fruit, that our kind mother might quietly have put on our plates, just for the pleasure of seeing us turn away with tears in our eyes, in disgust and abhorrence, no longer able to enjoy the treat intended for us. He acted in the same manner on holidays, when my father gave us a little glass of sweet wine. Then would he swiftly put his hand over it, or perhaps even raise the glass to his blue lips, laughing most devilishly, and we could only express our indignation by silent sobs. He always called us the little beasts; we dared not utter a sound when he was present, end we heartily cursed the ugly, unkind man who deliberately marred our slightest pleasures. My mother seemed to hate the repulsive Coppelius as much as we did, since as soon as he showed himself her liveliness, her open and cheerful nature, were changed for a gloomy solemnity. My father behaved towards him as though he were a superior being, whose bad manners were to be tolerated and who was to be kept in good humor at any cost. He need only give the slightest hint, and favorite dishes were cooked, the choicest wines served.

When I now saw this Coppelius, the frightful and terrific thought took possession of my soul, that indeed no one but he could be the Sandman. But the Sandman was no longer the bogy of a nurse’s tale, who provided the owl’s nest in the crescent moon with children’s eyes. No, he was a hideous, spectral monster, who brought with him grief, misery and destruction – temporal and eternal – wherever he appeared.

I was riveted to the spot, as if enchanted. At the risk of being discovered and, as I plainly foresaw, of being severely punished, I remained with my head peeping through the curtain. My father received Coppelius with solemnity.

‘Now to our work!’ cried the latter in a harsh, grating voice, as he flung off his coat.

My father silently and gloomily drew off his dressing gown, and both attired themselves in long black frocks. Whence they took these I did not see. My father opened the door of what I had always thought to be a cupboard. But I now saw that it was no cupboard, but rather a black cavity in which there was a little fireplace. Coppelius went to it, and a blue flame began to crackle up on the hearth. All sorts of strange utensils lay around. Heavens! As my old father stooped down to the fire, he looked quite another man. Some convulsive pain seemed to have distorted his mild features into a repulsive, diabolical countenance. He looked like Coppelius, whom I saw brandishing red-hot tongs, which he used to take glowing masses out of the thick smoke; which objects he afterwards hammered. I seemed to catch a glimpse of human faces lying around without any eyes – but with deep holes instead.

‘Eyes here’ eyes!’ roared Coppelius tonelessly. Overcome by the wildest terror, I shrieked out and fell from my hiding place upon the floor. Coppelius seized me and, baring his teeth, bleated out, ‘Ah – little wretch – little wretch!’ Then he dragged me up and flung me on the hearth, where the fire began to singe my hair. ‘Now we have eyes enough – a pretty pair of child’s eyes,’ he whispered, and, taking some red-hot grains out of the flames with his bare hands, he was about to sprinkle them in my eyes.

My father upon this raised his hands in supplication, crying: ‘Master, master, leave my Nathaniel his eyes!’

Whereupon Coppelius answered with a shrill laugh: ‘Well, let the lad have his eyes and do his share of the world’s crying, but we will examine the mechanism of his hands and feet.’

And then he seized me so roughly that my joints cracked, and screwed off my hands and feet, afterwards putting them back again, one after the other. ‘There’s something wrong here,’ he mumbled. ‘But now it’s as good as ever. The old man has caught the idea!’ hissed and lisped Coppelius. But all around me became black, a sudden cramp darted through my bones and nerves – and I lost consciousness. A gentle warm breath passed over my face; I woke as from the sleep of death. My mother had been stooping over me.

‘Is the Sandman still there?’ I stammered.

‘No, no, my dear child, he has gone away long ago – he won’t hurt you!’ said my mother, kissing her darling, as he regained his senses.

Why should I weary you, my dear Lothaire, with diffuse details, when I have so much more to tell ? Suffice it to say that I had been discovered eavesdropping and ill-used by Coppelius. Agony and terror had brought on delirium and fever, from which I lay sick for several weeks.

‘Is the Sandman still there?’ That was my first sensible word and the sign of my amendment – my recovery. I have only to tell you now of this most frightful moment in all my youth, and you will be convinced that it is no fault of my eyes that everything seems colorless to me. You will, indeed, know that a dark fatality has hung over my life a gloomy veil of clouds, which I shall perhaps only tear away in death.

Coppelius was no more to be seen; it was said he had left the town.

About a year might have elapsed, and we were sitting, as of old, at the round table. My father was very cheerful, and was entertaining us with stories about his travels in his youth; when, as the clock struck nine, we heard the house-door groan on its hinges, and slow steps, heavy as lead, creaked through the passage and up the stairs.

‘That is Coppelius,’ said my mother, turning pale.

‘Yes! – that is Coppelius” repeated my father in a faint, broken voice. The tears started to my mother’s eyes.

‘But father – father!’ she cried, ‘must it be so?’

‘He is coming for the last time, I promise you,’ was the answer. ‘Only go now, go with the children – go – go to bed. Good night!’

I felt as if I were turned to cold, heavy stone – my breath stopped. My mother caught me by the arm as I stood immovable. ‘Come, come, Nathaniel!’ I allowed myself to be led, and entered my chamber! ‘Be quiet – be quiet – go to bed – go to sleep!’ cried my mother after me; but tormented by restlessness and an inward anguish perfectly indescribable, I could not close my eyes.

The hateful, abominable Coppelius stood before me with fiery eyes, and laughed maliciously at me. It was in vain that I endeavored to get rid of his image. About midnight there was a frightful noise, like the firing of a gun. The whole house resounded. There was a rattling and rustling by my door, and the house door was closed with a violent bang.

‘That is Coppelius !’ I cried, springing out of bed in terror.

Then there was a shriek, as of acute, inconsolable grief. I darted into my father’s room; the door was open, a suffocating smoke rolled towards me, and the servant girl cried: ‘Ah, my master, my master!’ On the floor of the smoking hearth lay my father dead, with his face burned, blackened and hideously distorted – my sisters were shrieking and moaning around him – and my mother had fainted.

‘Coppelius! – cursed devil! You have slain my father!’ I cried, and lost my senses.

When, two days afterwards, my father was laid in his coffin, his features were again as mild and gentle as they had been in his life. My soul was comforted by the thought that his compact with the satanic Coppelius could not have plunged him into eternal perdition.

The explosion had awakened the neighbors, the occurrence had become common talk, and had reached the ears of the magistracy, who wished to make Coppelius answerable. He had, however, vanished from the spot, without leaving a trace.

If I tell you, my dear friend, that the barometer-dealer was the accursed Coppelius himself, you will not blame me for regarding so unpropitious a phenomenon as the omen of some dire calamity. He was dressed differently, but the figure and features of Coppelius are too deeply imprinted in my mind for an error in this respect to be possible. Besides, Coppelius has not even altered his name. He describes himself, I am told, as a Piedmontese optician, and calls himself Giuseppe Coppola.

I am determined to deal with him, and to avenge my father’s death, be the issue what it may.

Tell my mother nothing of the hideous monster’s appearance. Remember me to my dear sweet Clara, to whom I will write in a calmer mood. Farewell.

CLARA TO NATHANIEL

It is true that you have not written to me for a long time; but, nevertheless, I believe that I am still in your mind and thoughts. For assuredly you were thinking of me most intently when, designing to send your last letter to my brother Lothaire, you directed it to me instead of to him. I joyfully opened the letter, and did not perceive my error till I came to the words: ‘Ah, my dear Lothaire.’

NO, by rights I should have read no farther, but should have handed over the letter to my brother. Although you have often, in your childish teasing mood, charged me with having such a quiet, womanish, steady disposition, that, even if the house were about to fall in, I should smooth down a wrong fold in the window curtain in a most ladylike manner before I ran away, I can hardly tell you how your letter shocked me. I could scarcely breathe—–the light danced before my eyes.

Ah, my dear Nathaniel, how could such a horrible thing have crossed your path ? To be parted from you, never to see you again – the thought darted through my breast like a burning dagger. I read on and on. Your description of the repulsive Coppelius is terrifying. I learned for the first time the violent manner of your good old father’s death. My brother Lothaire, to whom I surrendered the letter, sought to calm me, but in vain. The fatal barometer dealer, Giuseppe Coppola, followed me at every step; and I am almost ashamed to confess that he disturbed my healthy and usually peaceful sleep with all sorts of horrible visions. Yet soon even the next day – I was quite changed again. Do not be offended, dearest one, if Lothaire tells you that in spite of your strange fears that Coppelius will in some manner injure you, I am in the same cheerful and unworried mood as ever.

I must honestly confess that, in my opinion, all the terrible things of which you speak occurred merely in your own mind, and had little to do with the actual external world. Old Coppelius may have been repulsive enough, but his hatred of children was what really caused the abhorrence you children felt towards him.

In your childish mind the frightful Sandman in the nurse’s tale was naturally associated with old Coppelius. Why, even if you had not believed in the Sandman, Coppelius would still have seemed to you a monster, especially dangerous to children. The awful business which he carried on at night with your father was no more than this: that they were making alchemical experiments in secret, which much distressed your mother since, besides a great deal of money being wasted, your father’s mind was filled with a fallacious desire after higher wisdom, and so alienated from his family – as they say is always the case with such experimentalists. Your father, no doubt, occasioned his own death, by some act of carelessness of which Coppelius was completely guiltless. Let me tell you that I yesterday asked our neighbor, the apothecary, whether such a sudden and fatal explosion was possible in these chemical experiments?

‘Certainly,’ he replied and, after his fashion, told me at great length and very circumstantially how such an event might take place, uttering a number of strange-sounding names which I am unable to recollect. Now, I know you will be angry with your Clara; you will say that her cold nature is impervious to any ray of the mysterious, which often embraces man with invisible arms; that she only sees the variegated surface of the world, and is as delighted as a silly child at some glittering golden fruit, which contains within it a deadly poison.

Ah ! my dear Nathaniel! Can you not then believe that even in open, cheerful, careless minds may dwell the suspicion of some dread power which endeavors to destroy us in our own selves ? Forgive me, if I, a silly girl, presume in any manner to present to you my thoughts on such an internal struggle. I shall not find the right words, of course, and you will laugh at me, not because my thoughts are foolish, but because I express them so clumsily.

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves. Lothaire adds that if we have willingly yielded ourselves up to the dark powers, they are known often to impress upon our minds any strange, unfamiliar shape which the external world has thrown in our way; so that we ourselves kindle the spirit, which we in our strange delusion believe to be speaking to us. It is the phantom of our own selves, the close relationship with which, and its deep operation on our mind, casts us into hell or transports us into heaven.

You see, dear Nathaniel, how freely Lothaire and I are giving our opinion on the subject of the dark powers; which subject, to judge by my difficulties in writing down. its most important features, appears to be a complicated one. Lothaire’s last words I do not quite comprehend. I can only suspect what he means, and yet I feel as if it were all very true. Get the gruesome advocate Coppelius, and the barometer-dealer, Giuseppe Coppola, quite out of your head, I beg of you. Be convinced that these strange fears have no power over you, and that it is only a belief in their hostile influence that can make them hostile in reality. If the great disturbance in your mind did not speak from every line of your letter, if your situation did not give me the deepest pain, I could joke about the Sandman-Advocate and the barometer dealer Coppelius. Cheer up, I have determined to play the part of your guardian-spirit. If the ugly Coppelius takes it into his head to annoy you in your dreams, I’ll scare him away with loud peals of laughter. I am not a bit afraid of him nor of his disgusting hands; he shall neither spoil my sweetmeats as an Advocate, nor my eyes as a Sandman. Ever yours, my dear Nathaniel.

NATHANIEL TO LOTHAIRE

I am very sorry that in consequence of the error occasioned by my distracted state of mind, Clara broke open the letter intended for you, and read it. She has written me a very profound philosophical epistle, in which she proves, at great length, that Coppelius and Coppola only exist in my own mind, and are phantoms of myself, which will be dissipated directly I recognize them as such. Indeed, it is quite incredible that the mind which so often peers out of those bright, smiling, childish eyes with all the charm of a dream, could make such intelligent professorial definitions. She cites you – you, it seems have been talking about me. I suppose you read her logical lectures, so that she may learn to separate and sift all matters acutely. No more of that, please. Besides, it is quite certain that the barometer-dealer, Giuseppe Coppola, is not the advocate Coppelius. I attend the lectures of the professor of physics, who has lately arrived. His name is the same as that of the famous natural philosopher Spalanzani, and he is of Italian origin. He has known Coppola for years and, moreover, it is clear from his accent that he is really a Piedmontese. Coppelius was a German, but I think no honest one. Calmed I am not, and though you and Clara may consider me a gloomy visionary, I cannot get rid of the impression which the accursed face of Coppelius makes upon me. I am glad that Coppola has left the town – so Spalanzani says.

This professor is a strange fellow – a little round man with high cheek-bones, a sharp nose, pouting lips and little, piercing eyes. Yet you will get a better notion of him than from this description, if you look at the portrait of Cagliostro, drawn by Chodowiecki in one of the Berlin annuals; Spalanzani looks like that exactly. I lately went up his stairs, and perceived that the curtain, which was generally drawn completely over a glass door, left a little opening on one side. I know not what curiosity impelled me to look through. A very tall and slender lady, extremely well-proportioned and most splendidly attired, sat in the room by a little table on which she had laid her arms, her hands being folded together. She sat opposite the door, so that I could see the whole of her angelic countenance. She did not appear to see me, and indeed there was something fixed about her eyes as if, I might almost say, she had no power of sight. It seemed to me that she was sleeping with her eyes open. I felt very uncomfortable, and therefore I slunk away into the lecture-room close at hand.

Afterwards I learned that the form I had seen was that of Spalanzani’s daughter Olympia, whom he keeps confined in a very strange and barbarous manner, so that no one can approach her. After all, there may be something the matter with her; she is half-witted perhaps, or something of the kind. But why should I write you all this? I could have conveyed it better and more circumstantially by word of mouth. For I shall see you in a fortnight. I must again behold my dear, sweet angelic Clara. My evil mood will then be dispersed, though I must confess that it has been struggling for mastery over me ever since her sensible but vexing letter. Therefore I do not write to her today. A thousand greetings, etc.

Nothing more strange and chimerical can be imagined than the fate of my poor friend, the young student Nathaniel, which I, gracious reader, have undertaken to tell you. Have you ever known something that has completely filled your heart, thoughts and senses, to the exclusion of every other object? There was a burning fermentation within you; your blood seethed like a molten glow through your veins, sending a higher color to your cheeks. Your glance was strange, as if you were seeking in empty space forms invisible to all other eyes, and your speech flowed away into dark sighs. Then your friends asked you: ‘What is it, my dear sir?’ ‘What is the matter?’ And you wanted to draw the picture in your mind in all its glowing tints, in all its light and shade, and labored hard to find words only to begin. You thought that you should crowd together in the very first sentence all those wonderful, exalted, horrible, comical, frightful events, so as to strike every hearer at once as with an electric shock. But every word, every thing that takes the form of speech, appeared to you colorless, cold and dead. You hunt and hunt, and stutter and stammer, and your friends’ sober questions blow like icy wind upon your internal fire until it is almost out. Whereas if, like a bold painter, you had first drawn an outline of the internal picture with a few daring strokes, you might with small trouble have laid on the colors brighter and brighter, and the living throng of varied shapes would have borne your friends away with it. Then they would have seen themselves, like you, in the picture that your mind had bodied forth. Now I must confess to you, kind reader, that no one has really asked me for the history of the young Nathaniel, but you know well enough that I belong to the queer race of authors who, if they have anything in their minds such as I have just described, feel as if everyone who comes near them, and the whole world besides, is insistently demanding: ‘What is it then – tell it, my dear friend?’

Thus was I forcibly compelled to tell you of the momentous life of Nathaniel. The marvelous singularity of the story filled my entire soul, but for that very reason and because, my dear reader, I had to make you equally inclined to accept the uncanny, which is no small matter, I was puzzled how to begin Nathaniel’s story in a manner as inspiring, original and striking as possible. ‘Once upon a time,’ the beautiful beginning of every tale, was too tame. ‘In the little provincial town of S____ lived’ – was somewhat better, as it at least prepared for the climax. Or should I dart at once, medias in res, with “‘Go to the devil,” cried the student Nathaniel with rage and horror in his wild looks, when the barometer-dealer, Giuseppe Coppola . . .?’ – I had indeed already written this down, when I fancied that I could detect something ludicrous in the wild looks of the student Nathaniel, whereas the story is not comical at all. No form of language suggested itself to my mind which seemed to reflect ever in the slightest degree the coloring of the internal picture. I resolved that I would not begin it at all.

So take, gentle reader, the three letters. which friend Lothaire was good enough to give me, as the sketch of the picture which I shall endeavor to color more and more brightly as I proceed with my narrative. Perhaps, like a good portrait-painter, I may succeed in catching the outline in this way, so that you will realize it is a likeness even without knowing the original, and feel as if you had often seen the person with your own corporeal eyes. Perhaps, dear reader, you will then believe that nothing is stranger and madder than actual life; which the poet can only catch in the form of a dull reflection in a dimly polished mirror.

To give you all the information that you will require for a start, we must supplement these letters with the news that shortly after the death of Nathaniel’s father, Clara and Lothaire, the children of a distant relative, who had likewise died and left them orphans, were taken by Nathaniel’s mother into her own home. Clara and Nathaniel formed a strong attachment for each other; and no one in the world having any objection to make, they were betrothed when Nathaniel left the place to pursue his studies in G___ . And there he is, according to his last letter, attending the lectures of the celebrated professor of physics, Spalanzani.

Now, I could proceed in my story with confidence, but at this moment Clara’s picture stands so plainly before me that I cannot turn away; as indeed was always the case when she gazed at me with one of her lovely smiles. Clara could not by any means be reckoned beautiful, that was the opinion of all who are by their calling competent judges of beauty. Architects, nevertheless, praised the exact symmetry of her frame, and painters considered her neck, shoulders and bosom almost too chastely formed; but then they all fell in love with her wondrous hair and coloring, comparing her to the Magdalen in Battoni’s picture at Dresden. One of them, a most fantastical and singular fellow, compared Clara’s eyes to a lake by Ruysdael, in which the pure azure of a cloudless sky, the wood and flowery field, the whole cheerful life of the rich landscape are reflected. Poets and composers went still further. ‘What is a lake what is a mirror!’ said they. ‘Can we look upon the girl without wondrous, heavenly music flowing towards us from her glances, to penetrate our inmost soul so that all there is awakened and stirred? If we don’t sing well then, there is not much in us, as we shall learn from the delicate smile which plays on Clara’s lips, when we presume to pipe up before her with something intended to pass for a song, although it is only a confused jumble of notes.’

So it was. Clara had the vivid fancy of a cheerful, unembarrassed child; a deep, tender, feminine disposition; an acute, clever understanding. Misty dreamers had not a chance with her; since, though she did not talk – talking would have been altogether repugnant to her silent nature – her bright glance and her firm ironical smile would say to them: ‘Good friends, how can you imagine that I shall take your fleeting shadowy images for real shapes imbued with life and motion ?’ On this account Clara was censured by many as cold, unfeeling and prosaic; while others, who understood life to its clear depths, greatly loved the feeling, acute, childlike girl; but none so much as Nathaniel, whose perception in art and science was clear and strong. Clara was attached to her lover with all her heart, and when he parted from her the first cloud passed over her life. With what delight, therefore, did she rush into his arms when, as he had promised in his last letter to Lothaire, he actually returned to his native town and entered his mother’s room! Nathaniel’s expectations were completely fulfilled; for directly he saw Clara he thought neither of the Advocate Coppelius nor of her ‘sensible’ letter. All gloomy forebodings had gone.

However, Nathaniel was quite right, when he wrote to his friend Lothaire that the form of the repulsive barometer-dealer, Coppola, had had a most evil effect on his life. All felt, even in the first days, that Nathaniel had undergone a complete change in his whole being. He sank into a gloomy reverie, and behaved in a strange manner that had never been known in him before. Everything, his whole life, had become to him a dream and a foreboding, and he was always saying that man, although he might think himself free, only served for the cruel sport of dark powers These he said it was vain to resist; man must patiently resign himself to his fate. He even went so far as to say that it is foolish to think that we do anything in art and science according to our own independent will; for the inspiration which alone enables us to produce anything does not proceed from within ourselves, but is the effect of a higher principle without.

To the clear-headed Clara this mysticism was in the highest degree repugnant, but contradiction appeared to be useless. Only when Nathaniel proved that Coppelius was the evil principle, which had seized him at the moment when he was listening behind the curtain, and that this repugnant principle would in some horrible manner disturb the happiness of their life, Clara grew very serious, and said: ‘Yes, Nathaniel, you are right. Coppelius is an evil, hostile principle; he can produce terrible effects, like a diabolical power that has come visibly into life; but only if you will not banish him from your mind and thoughts. So long as you believe in him, he really exists and exerts his influence; his power lies only in your belief.’

Quite indignant that Clara did not admit the demon’s existence outside his own mind, Nathaniel would then come out with all the mystical doctrine of devils and powers of evil. But Clara would break off peevishly by introducing some indifferent matter, to the no small annoyance of Nathaniel. He thought that such deep secrets were closed to cold, unreceptive minds, without being clearly aware that he was counting Clara among these subordinate natures; and therefore he constantly endeavored to initiate her into the mysteries. In the morning, when Clara was getting breakfast ready, he stood by her, reading out of all sorts of mystical books till she cried: ‘But dear Nathaniel, suppose I blame you as the evil principle that has a hostile effect upon my coffee? For if, to please you, I drop everything and look in your eyes while you read, my coffee will overflow into the fire, and none of you will get any breakfast.’

Nathaniel closed the book at once and hurried indignantly to his chamber. Once he had a remarkable forte for graceful, lively tales, which he wrote down, and to which Clara listened with the greatest delight; now his creations were gloomy, incomprehensible and formless, so that although, out of compassion, Clara did not say so, he plainly felt how little she was interested. Nothing was more unbearable to Clara than tediousness; her looks and words expressed mental drowsiness which she could not overcome. Nathaniel’s productions were, indeed, very tedious. His indignation at Clara’s cold, prosaic disposition constantly increased; and Clara could not overcome her dislike of Nathaniel’s dark, gloomy, boring mysticism, so that they became mentally more and more estranged without either of them perceiving it. The shape of the ugly Coppelius, as Nathaniel himself was forced to confess, was growing dimmer in his fancy, and it often cost him some pains to draw him with sufficient color in his stories, where he figured as the dread bogy of ill omen.

It occurred to him, however, in the end to make his gloomy foreboding, that Coppelius would destroy his happiness, the subject of a poem. He represented himself and Clara as united by true love, but occasionally threatened by a black hand, which appeared to dart into their lives, to snatch away some new joy just as it was born. Finally, as they were standing at the altar, the hideous Coppelius appeared and touched Clara’s lovely eyes. They flashed into Nathaniel’s heart, like bleeding sparks, scorching and burning, as Coppelius caught him, and flung him into a flaming, fiery circle, which flew round with the swiftness of a storm, carrying him along with it, amid its roaring. The roar is like that of the hurricane, when it fiercely lashes the foaming waves, which rise up, like black giants with white heads, for the furious combat. But through the wild tumult he hears Clara’s voice: ‘Can’t you see me then? Coppelius has deceived you. Those, indeed, were not my eyes which so burned in your breast – they were glowing drops of your own heart’s blood. I have my eyes still – only look at them!’ Nathaniel reflects: ‘That is Clara, and I am hers for ever!’ Then it seems to him as though this thought has forcibly entered the fiery circle, which stands still, while the noise dully ceases in the dark abyss. Nathaniel looks into Clara’s eyes, but it is death that looks kindly upon him from her eyes

While Nathaniel composed this poem, he was very calm and collected; he polished and improved every line, and having subjected himself to the fetters of metre, he did not rest till all was correct and melodious. When at last he had finished and read the poem aloud to himself, a wild horror seized him. ‘Whose horrible voice is that?’ he cried out. Soon, however, the whole appeared to him a very successful work, and he felt that it must rouse Clara’s cold temperament, although he did not clearly consider why Clara was to be excited, nor what purpose it would serve to torment her with frightful pictures threatening a horrible fate, destructive to their love. Both of them – that is to say, Nathaniel and Clara – were sitting in his mother’s little garden, Clara very cheerful, because Nathaniel had not teased her with his dreams and his forebodings during the three days in which he had been writing his poem.

He was even talking cheerfully, as in the old days, about pleasant matters, which caused Clara to remark: ‘Now for the first time I have you again! Don’t you see that we have driven the ugly Coppelius away?’

Not till then did it strike Nathaniel that he had in his pocket the poem, which he had intended to read. He at once drew the sheets out and began, while Clara, expecting something tedious as usual, resigned herself and began quietly to knit. But as the dark cloud rose ever blacker and blacker, she let the stocking fall and looked him full in the face. He was carried irresistibly along by his poem, an internal fire deeply reddened his cheeks, tears flowed from his eyes.

At last, when he had concluded, he groaned in a state of utter exhaustion and, catching Clara’s hand, sighed forth, as if melted into the most inconsolable grief: ‘Oh Clara! – Clara!’ Clara pressed him gently to her bosom, and said softly, but very solemnly and sincerely: ‘Nathaniel, dearest Nathaniel, do throw that mad, senseless, insane stuff into the fire!’

Upon this Nathaniel sprang up enraged and, thrusting Clara from him, cried: ‘Oh, inanimate, accursed automaton!’

With which he ran off; Clara, deeply offended, shed bitter tears, and sobbed aloud: ‘Ah, he has never loved me, for he does not understand me.’

Lothaire entered the arbor; Clara was obliged to tell him all that had occurred. He loved his sister with all his soul, and every word of her complaint fell like a spark of fire into his heart, so that the indignation which he had long harbored against the visionary Nathaniel now broke out into the wildest rage. He ran to Nathaniel and reproached him for his senseless conduce towards his beloved sister in hard words, to which the infuriated Nathaniel retorted in the same style. The appellation of ‘fantastical, mad fool,’ was answered by that of ‘miserable commonplace fellow.’ A duel was inevitable. They agreed on the following morning, according to the local student custom, to fight with sharp rapiers on the far side of the garden. Silently and gloomily they slunk about. Clara had overheard the violent dispute and, seeing the fencing-master bring the rapiers at dawn, guessed what was to occur.

Having reached the place of combat, Lothaire and Nathaniel had in gloomy silence flung off their coats, and with the lust of battle in their flaming eyes were about to fall upon one another, when Clara rushed through the garden door, crying aloud between her sobs: ‘You wild cruel men! Strike me down before you attack each other. For how can I live on if my lover murders my brother, or my brother murders my lover.’

Lothaire lowered his weapon, and looked in silence on the ground; but in Nathaniel’s heart, amid the most poignant sorrow, there revived all his love for the beautiful Clara, which he had felt in the prime of his happy youth. The weapon fell from his hand, he threw himself at Clara’s feet. ‘Can you ever forgive me, my only – my beloved Clara? Can you forgive me, my dear brother, Lothaire?’

Lothaire was touched by the deep contrition of his friend; all three embraced in reconciliation amid a thousand tears, and vowed eternal love and fidelity.

Nathaniel felt as though a heavy and oppressive burden had been rolled away, as though by resisting the dark power that held him fast he had saved his whole being, which had been threatened with annihilation. Three happy days he passed with his dear friends, and then went to G___ , where he intended to stay a year, and then to return to his native town for ever.

All that referred to Coppelius was kept a secret from his mother. For it was well known that she could not think of him without terror since she, as well as Nathaniel, held him guilty of causing her husband’s death.

How surprised was Nathaniel when, proceeding to his lodging, he saw that the whole house was burned down, and that only the bare walls stood up amid the ashes. However, although fire had broken out in the laboratory of the apothecary who lived on the ground-floor, and had therefore consumed the house from top to bottom, some bold active friends had succeeded in entering Nathaniel’s room in the upper story in time to save his books, manuscripts and instruments. They carried all safe and sound into another house, where they took a room, to which Nathaniel moved at once. He did not think it at all remarkable that he now lodged opposite to Professor Spalanzani; neither did it appear singular when he perceived that his window looked straight into the room where Olympia often sat alone, so that he could plainly recognize her figure, although the features of her face were indistinct and confused. At last it struck him that Olympia often remained for hours in that attitude in which he had once seen her through the glass door, sitting at a little table without any occupation, and that she was plainly enough looking over at him with an unvarying gaze. He was forced to confess that he had never seen a more lovely form but, with Clara in his heart, the stiff Olympia was perfectly indifferent to him. Occasionally, to be sure, he gave a transient look over his textbook at the beautiful statue, but that was all.

He was just writing to Clara, when he heard a light tap at the door; it stopped as he answered, and the repulsive face of Coppola peeped in. Nathaniel’s heart trembled within him, but remembering what Spalanzani had told him about his compatriot Coppola, and also the firm promise he had made to Clara with respect to the Sandman Coppelius, he felt ashamed of his childish fear and, collecting himself with all his might, said as softly and civilly as possible: ‘I do not want a barometer, my good friend; pray go.’

Upon this, Coppola advanced a good way into the room, his wide mouth distorted into a hideous laugh, and his little eyes darting fire from beneath their long grey lashes: ‘Eh, eh – no barometer – no barometer?’ he said in a hoarse voice, ‘I have pretty eyes too – pretty eyes!’

‘Madman!’ cried Nathaniel in horror. ‘How can you have eyes? Eyes?’

But Coppola had already put his barometer aside and plunged his hand into his wide coat-pocket, whence he drew lorgnettes and spectacles, which he placed upon the table.

‘There – there – spectacles on the nose, those are my eyes – pretty eyes!’ he gabbled, drawing out more and more spectacles, until the whole table began to glisten and sparkle in the most extraordinary manner.

A thousand eyes stared and quivered, their gaze fixed upon Nathaniel; yet he could not look away from the table, where Coppola kept laying down still more and more spectacles, and all those flaming eyes leapt in wilder and wilder confusion, shooting their blood red light into Nathaniel’s heart.

At last, overwhelmed with horror, he shrieked out: ‘Stop, stop, you terrify me!’ and seized Coppola by the arm, as he searched his pockets to bring out still more spectacles, although the whole table was already covered.

Coppola gently extricated himself with a hoarse repulsive laugh; and with the words: ‘Ah, nothing for you – but here are pretty glasses!’ collected all the spectacles, packed them away, and from the breast-pocket of his coat drew forth a number of telescopes large and small. As soon as the spectacles were removed Nathaniel felt quite easy and, thinking of Clara, perceived that the hideous phantom was but the creature of his own mind, that this Coppola was an honest optician and could not possibly be the accursed double of Coppelius. Moreover, in all the glasses which Coppola now placed on the table, there was nothing remarkable, or at least nothing so uncanny as in the spectacles; and to set matters right Nathaniel resolved to make a purchase. He took up a little, very neatly constructed pocket telescope, and looked through the window to try it. Never in his life had he met a glass which brought objects so clearly and sharply before his eyes. Involuntarily he looked into Spalanzani’s room; Olympia was sitting as usual before the little table, with her arms laid upon it, and her hands folded.

For the first time he could see the wondrous beauty in the shape of her face; only her eyes seemed to him singularly still and dead. Nevertheless, as he looked more keenly through the glass, it seemed to him as if moist moonbeams were rising in Olympia’s eyes. It was as if the power of seeing were being kindled for the first time; her glances flashed with constantly increasing life. As if spellbound, Nathaniel reclined against the window, meditating on the charming Olympia. A humming and scraping aroused him as if from a dream.

Coppola was standing behind him: ‘Tre zecchini – three ducats!’ He had quite forgotten the optician, and quickly paid him what he asked. ‘Is it not so ? A pretty glass – a pretty glass ?’ asked Coppola, in his hoarse, repulsive voice, and with his malicious smile.

‘Yes – yes,’ replied Nathaniel peevishly; ‘Good-bye, friend.’

Coppola left the room, but not without casting many strange glances at Nathaniel. He heard him laugh loudly on the stairs.

‘Ah,’ thought Nathaniel, ‘he is laughing at me because, no doubt, I have paid him too much for this little glass.’

While he softly uttered these words, it seemed as if a deep and lugubrious sigh were sounding fearfully through the room; and his breath was stopped by inward anguish. He perceived, however, that it was himself that had sighed.

‘Clara is right,’ he said to himself, ‘in taking me for a senseless dreamer, but it is pure madness – nay, more than madness, that the stupid thought of having paid Coppola too much for the glass still pains me so strangely. I cannot see the cause.’

He now sat down to finish his letter to Clara; but a glance through the window assured him that Olympia was still sitting there, and he instantly sprang up, as if impelled by an irresistible power, seized Coppola’s glass, and could not tear himself away from the seductive sight of Olympia till his friend and brother Sigismund called him to go to Professor Spalanzani’s lecture. The curtain was drawn close before the fatal room, and he could see Olympia no longer, nor could he upon the next day or the next, although he scarcely ever left his window and constantly looked through Coppola’s glass. On the third day the windows were completely covered. In utter despair, filled with a longing and a burning desire, he ran out of the town-gate. Olympia’s form floated before him in the air, stepped forth from the bushes, and peeped at him with large beaming eyes from the clear brook. Clara’s image had completely vanished from his mind; he thought of nothing but Olympia, and complained aloud in a murmuring voice: ‘Ah, noble, sublime star of my love, have you only risen upon me to vanish immediately, and leave me in dark hopeless night?’

As he returned to his lodging, however, he perceived a great bustle in Spalanzani’s house. The doors were wide open, all sorts of utensils were being carried in, the windows of the first floor were being taken out, maid-servants were going about sweeping and dusting with great hairbrooms, and carpenters and upholsterers were knocking and hammering within. Nathaniel remained standing in the street in a state of perfect wonder, when Sigismund came up to him laughing, and said: ‘Now, what do you say to our old Spalanzani?’

Nathaniel assured him that he could say nothing because he knew nothing about the professor, but on the contrary perceived with astonishment the mad proceedings in a house otherwise so quiet and gloomy. He then learnt from Sigismund that Spalanzani intended to give a grand party on the following day – a concert and ball – and that half the university was invited. It was generally reported that Spalanzani, who had so long kept his daughter most scrupulously from every human eye, would now let her appear for the first time.

Nathaniel found a card of invitation, and with heart beating high went at the appointed hour to the professor’s, where the coaches were already arriving and the lights shining in the decorated rooms. The company was numerous and brilliant. Olympia appeared dressed with great richness and taste. Her beautifully shaped face and her figure roused general admiration. The somewhat strange arch of her back and the wasp-like thinness of her waist seemed to be produced by too tight lacing. In her step and deportment there was something measured and stiff, which struck many as unpleasant, but it was ascribed to the constraint produced by the company. The concert began. Olympia played the harpsichord with great dexterity, and sang a virtuoso piece, with a voice like the sound of a glass bell, clear and almost piercing. Nathaniel was quite enraptured; he stood in the back row, and could not perfectly recognize Olympia’s features in the dazzling light. Therefore, quite unnoticed, he took out Coppola’s glass and looked towards the fair creature. Ah! then he saw with what a longing glance she gazed towards him, and how every note of her song plainly sprang from that loving glance, whose fire penetrated his inmost soul. Her accomplished roulades seemed to Nathaniel the exultation of a mind transfigured by love, and when at last, after the cadence, the long trill sounded shrilly through the room, he felt as if clutched by burning arms. He could restrain himself no longer, but with mingled pain and rapture shouted out, ‘Olympia!’

Everyone looked at him, and many laughed. The organist of the cathedral made a gloomier face than usual, and simply said: ‘Well, well.’

The concert had finished, the ball began. ‘To dance with her – with her!’ That was the aim of all Nathaniel’s desire, of all his efforts; but how to gain courage to ask her, the queen of the ball? Nevertheless – he himself did not know how it happened – no sooner had the dancing begun than he was standing close to Olympia, who had not yet been asked to dance. Scarcely able to stammer out a few words, he had seized her hand. Olympia’s hand was as cold as ice; he felt a horrible deathly chill thrilling through him. He looked into her eyes, which beamed back full of love and desire, and at the same time it seemed as though her pulse began to beat and her life’s blood to flow into her cold hand. And in the soul of Nathaniel the joy of love rose still higher; he clasped the beautiful Olympia, and with her flew through the dance. He thought that his dancing was usually correct as to time, but the peculiarly steady rhythm with which Olympia moved, and which often put him completely out, soon showed him that his time was most defective. However, he would dance with no other lady, and would have murdered anyone who approached Olympia for the purpose of asking her. But this only happened twice, and to his astonishment Olympia remained seated until the next dance, when he lost no time in making her rise again.

Had he been able to see any other object besides the fair Olympia, all sorts of unfortunate quarrels would have been inevitable. For the quiet, scarcely suppressed laughter which arose among the young people in every corner was manifestly directed towards Olympia, whom they followed with very curious glances – one could not tell why. Heated by the dance and by the wine, of which he had freely partaken, Nathaniel had laid aside all his ordinary reserve. He sat by Olympia with her hand in his and, in a high state of inspiration, told her his passion, in words which neither he nor Olympia understood.

Yet perhaps she did; for she looked steadfastly into his face and sighed several times, ‘Ah, ah!’ Upon this, Nathaniel said, ‘Oh splendid, heavenly lady! Ray from the promised land of love – deep soul in whom all my being is reflected !’ with much more stuff of the like kind. But Olympia merely went on sighing, ‘Ah – ah!’

Professor Spalanzani occasionally passed the happy pair, and smiled on them with a look of singular satisfaction. To Nathaniel, although he felt in quite another world, it seemed suddenly as though Professor Spalanzani’s face was growing considerably darker, and when he looked around he perceived, to his no small horror, that the last two candles in the empty room had burned down to their sockets, and were just going out. The music and dancing had ceased long ago.

‘Parting – parting!’ he cried in wild despair; he kissed Olympia’s hand, he bent towards her mouth, when his glowing lips were met by lips cold as ice! Just as when he had touched her cold hand, he felt himself overcome by horror; the legend of the dead bride darted suddenly through his mind, but Olympia pressed him fast, and her lips seemed to spring to life at his kiss. Professor Spalanzani strode through the empty hall, his steps caused a hollow echo, and his figure, round which a flickering shadow played, had a fearful, spectral appearance.

‘Do you love me, do you love me, Olympia? Only one word! Do you love me?’ whispered Nathaniel; but as she rose Olympia only sighed, ‘Ah – ah!’

‘Yes, my gracious, my beautiful star of love,’ said Nathaniel, ‘you have risen upon me, and you will shine, for ever lighting my inmost soul.’

‘Ah – ah!’ replied Olympia, as she departed. Nathaniel followed her; they both stood before the professor.

‘You have had a very animated conversation with my daughter,’ said he, smiling; ‘So, dear Herr Nathaniel, if you have any pleasure in talking with a silly girl, your visits shall be welcome.’

Nathaniel departed with a whole heaven beaming in his heart. The next day Spalanzani’s party was the general subject of conversation. Notwithstanding that the professor had made every effort to appear splendid, the wags had all sorts of incongruities and oddities to talk about. They were particularly hard upon the dumb, stiff Olympia whom, in spite of her beautiful exterior, they considered to be completely stupid, and they were delighted to find in her stupidity the reason why Spalanzani had kept her so long concealed. Nathaniel did not hear this without secret anger. Nevertheless he held his peace. ‘For,’ thought he, ‘is it worth while convincing these fellows that it is their own stupidity that prevents their recognizing Olympia’s deep, noble mind?’

One day Sigismund said to him: ‘Be kind enough, brother, to tell me how a sensible fellow like you could possibly lose your head over that wax face, over that wooden doll up there?’

Nathaniel was about to fly out in a passion, but he quickly recollected himself and retorted: ‘Tell me, Sigismund, how it is that Olympia’s heavenly charms could escape your active and intelligent eyes, which generally perceive things so clearly? But, for that very reason, Heaven be thanked, I have not you for my rival; otherwise, one of us must have fallen a bleeding corpse!’

Sigismund plainly perceived his friend’s condition. So he skillfully gave the conversation a turn and, after observing that in love-affairs there was no disputing about the object, added: ‘Nevertheless, it is strange that many of us think much the same about Olympia. To us – pray do not take it ill, brother she appears singularly stiff and soulless. Her shape is well proportioned – so is her face – that is true! She might pass for beautiful if her glance were not so utterly without a ray of life – without the power of vision. Her pace is strangely regular, every movement seems to depend on some wound-up clockwork. Her playing and her singing keep the same unpleasantly correct and spiritless time as a musical box, and the same may be said of her dancing. We find your Olympia quite uncanny, and prefer to have nothing to do with her. She seems to act like a living being, and yet has some strange peculiarity of her own.’

Nathaniel did not completely yield to the bitter feeling which these words of Sigismund’s roused in him, but mastered his indignation, and merely said with great earnestness, ‘Olympia may appear uncanny to you, cold, prosaic man. Only the poetical mind is sensitive to its like in others. To me alone was the love in her glances revealed, and it has pierced my mind and all my thought; only in the love of Olympia do I discover my real self. It may not suit you that she does not indulge in idle chit-chat like other shallow minds. She utters few words, it is true, but these few words appear as genuine hieroglyphics of the inner world, full of love and deep knowledge of the spiritual life, and contemplation of the eternal beyond. But you have no sense for all this, and my words are wasted on you.’

‘God preserve you, brother,’ said Sigismund very mildly almost sorrowfully. ‘But you seem to me to be in an evil way. You may depend upon me, if all – no, no, I will not say anything further.’

All of a sudden it struck Nathaniel that the cold, prosaic Sigismund meant very well towards him; he therefore shook his proffered hand very heartily.

Nathaniel had totally forgotten the very existence of Clara, whom he had once loved; his mother, Lothaire – all had vanished from his memory; he lived only for Olympia, with whom he sat for hours every day, uttering strange fantastical stuff about his love, about the sympathy that glowed to life, about the affinity of souls, to all of which Olympia listened with great devotion. From the very bottom of his desk he drew out all that he had ever written. Poems, fantasies, visions, romances, tales – this stock was daily increased by all sorts of extravagant sonnets, stanzas and canzoni, and he read them all tirelessly to Olympia for hours on end. Never had he known such an admirable listener. She neither embroidered nor knitted, she never looked out of the window, she fed no favorite bird, she played neither with lapdog nor pet cat, she did not twist a slip of paper or anything else in her hand, she was not obliged to suppress a yawn by a gentle forced cough. In short, she sat for hours, looking straight into her lover’s eyes, without stirring, and her glance became more and more lively and animated Only when Nathaniel rose at last, and kissed her hand and her lips did she say, ‘Ah, ah!’ to which she added: ‘Good night, dearest.’

‘Oh deep, noble mind!’ cried Nathaniel in his own room, ‘you, you alone, dear one, fully understand me.’

He trembled with inward rapture, when he considered the wonderful harmony that was revealed more and more every day between his own mind and that of Olympia. For it seemed to him as if Olympia had spoken concerning him and his poetical talent out of the depths of his own mind; as if her voice had actually sounded from within himself. That must indeed have been the case, for Olympia never uttered any words whatever beyond those which have already been recorded. Even when Nathaniel, in clear and sober moments, as for instance upon waking in the morning, remembered Olympia’s utter passivity and her painful lack of words, he merely said: ‘Words words! The glance of her heavenly eye speaks more than any language here below. Can a child of heaven adapt herself to the narrow confines drawn by a miserable mundane necessity?’

Professor Spalanzani appeared highly delighted at the intimacy between his daughter and Nathaniel. To the latter he gave the most unequivocal signs of approbation; and when Nathaniel ventured at last to hint at a union with Olympia, his whole face smiled as he observed that he would leave his daughter a free choice in the matter. Encouraged by these words and with burning passion in his heart, Nathaniel resolved to implore Olympia on the very next day to say directly and in plain words what her kind glance had told him long ago; namely, that she loved him. He sought the ring which his mother had given him at parting, to give it to Olympia as a symbol of his devotion, of his life which budded forth and bloomed with her alone. Clara’s letters and Lothaire’s came to his hands during the search; but he flung them aside indifferently, found the ring, pocketed it and hastened over to Olympia. Already on the steps, in the hall, he heard a strange noise, which seemed to proceed from Spalanzani’s room. There was a stamping, a clattering, a pushing, a banging against the door, intermingled with curses and imprecations.

Let go – let go! Rascal! – Scoundrel ! – Body and soul I’ve risked upon it! – Ha, ha, ha! – That’s not what we agreed to! – I, I made the eyes! – I made the clockwork! – Stupid blockhead with your clockwork! – Accursed dog of a bungling watch-maker! – OR with you ! – Devil ! – Stop ! – Pipe-maker! – Infernal beast! – Stop ! – Get out! – Let go!’

These words were uttered by the voices of Spalanzani and the hideous Coppelius, who were raging and wrangling together. Nathaniel rushed in, overcome by the most inexpressible anguish.
Hoffmann/Sandmann: Gavarni (1843) – 9

The professor was holding a female figure fast by the shoulders, the Italian Coppola grasped it by the feet, and there they were tugging and pulling, this way and that, contending for the possession of it with the utmost fury. Nathaniel started back with horror when in the figure he recognized Olympia. Boiling with the wildest indignation, he was about to rescue his beloved from these infuriated men. But at that moment Coppola, whirling round with the strength of a giant, wrenched the figure from the professor’s hand, and then dealt him a tremendous blow with the object itself, which sent him reeling and tumbling backwards over the table, upon which stood vials, retorts, bottles and glass cylinders. All these were dashed to a thousand shivers. Now Coppola flung the figure across his shoulders, and with a frightful burst of shrill laughter dashed down the stairs, so fast that the feet of the figure, which dangled in the most hideous manner, rattled with a wooden sound on every step.

Nathaniel stood paralyzed; he had seen but too plainly that Olympia’s waxen, deathly-pale countenance had no eyes, but black holes instead – she was, indeed, a lifeless doll. Spalanzani was writhing on the floor; the pieces of glass had cut his head, his breast and his arms, and the blood was spurting up as from so many fountains. But he soon collected all his strength.

‘After him – after him – what are you waiting for ? Coppelius, Coppelius – has robbed me of my best automaton – a work of twenty years – body and soul risked upon it – the clockwork – the speech – the walk, mine; the eyes stolen from you. The infernal rascal – after him; fetch Olympia – there you see the eyes!’

And now Nathaniel saw that a pair of eyes lay upon the ground, staring at him; these Spalanzani caught up, with his unwounded hand, and flung into his bosom. Then madness seized Nathaniel in its burning claws, and clutched his very soul, destroying his every sense and thought.

‘Ho – ho – ho – a circle of fire! of fire! Spin round, circle! Merrily, merrily! Ho, wooden doll – spin round, pretty doll!’ he cried, flying at the professor, and clutching at his throat.

He would have strangled him had not the noise attracted a crowd, who rushed in and forced Nathaniel to let go, thus saving the professor, whose wounds were immediately dressed. Sigismund, strong as he was, was not able to master the mad Nathaniel, who kept crying out in a frightening voice: ‘Spin round, wooden doll!’ and laid about him with clenched fists. At last the combined force of many succeeded in overcoming him, in flinging him to the ground and binding him. His words were merged into one hideous roar like that of a brute, and in this insane condition he was taken raging to the mad-house.

Before I proceed to tell you, gentle reader, what more befell the unfortunate Nathaniel, should you by chance take an interest in that skilful optician and automaton-maker Spalanzani, I can inform you that he was completely healed of his wounds. He was, however, obliged to leave the university, because Nathaniel’s story had created a sensation, and it was universally considered a quite unpardonable trick to smuggle a wooden doll into respectable tea-parties in place of a living person – for Olympia had been quite a success at tea-parties. The lawyers called it a most subtle deception, and the more culpable, inasmuch as he had planned it so artfully against the public that not a single soul – a few cunning students excepted – had detected it, although all now wished to play the wiseacre, and referred to various facts which had appeared to them suspicious. Nothing very clever was revealed in this way. Would it strike anyone as so very suspicious, for instance, that, according to the expression of an elegant tea-ite, Olympia had, contrary to all usage, sneezed oftener than she had yawned ? ‘The former,’ remarked this fashionable person, ‘was the sound of the concealed clockwork winding itself up. Moreover, it had creaked audibly.’ And so on.

The professor of poetry and eloquence took a pinch of snuff, clapped the lid of his box to, cleared his throat, and said solemnly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, do you not perceive where the trick lies? It is all an allegory – a sustained metaphor – you understand me – sapient! sat.

But many were not satisfied with this; the story of the automaton had struck deep root into their souls and, in fact, a pernicious mistrust of human figures in general had begun to creep in. Many lovers, to be quite convinced that they were not enamoured of wooden dolls, would request their mistresses to sing and dance a little out of time, to embroider and knit, and play with their lapdogs, while listening to reading, etc., and, above all, not merely to listen, but also sometimes to talk, in such a manner as presupposed actual thought and feeling. With many the bond of love became firmer and more entrancing, though others, on the contrary, slipped gently out of the noose. One cannot really answer for this,’ said some. At tea parties yawning prevailed to an incredible extent, and there was no sneezing at all, that all suspicion might be avoided. Spalanzani, as already stated, was obliged to decamp, to escape a criminal prosecution for fraudulently introducing an automaton into human society. Coppola had vanished also.

Nathaniel awakened as from a heavy, frightful dream; as he opened his eyes, he felt an indescribable sensation of pleasure glowing through him with heavenly warmth. He was in bed in his own room, in his father s house, Clara was stooping over him, and Lothaire and his mother were standing near.

‘At last, at last, beloved Nathaniel, you have recovered from your serious illness – now you are mine again!’ said Clara, from the very depth of her soul, and clasped Nathaniel in her arms.

It was with mingled sorrow and delight that the bright tears fell from his eyes, as he answered with a deep sigh: ‘My own – my own Clara!’

Sigismund, who had faithfully remained with his friend in his hour of trouble, now entered. Nathaniel stretched out his hand to him. ‘And you, faithful brother, have you not deserted me?’

Every trace of Nathaniel’s madness had vanished, and he soon gained strength under the care of his mother, his beloved and his friends. Good fortune also had visited the house, for a miserly old uncle of whom nothing had been expected had died, leaving their mother, besides considerable property, an estate in a pleasant spot near the town. Thither Nathaniel decided to go, with his Clara, whom he now intended to marry, his mother and Lothaire. He had grown milder and more docile than ever he had been before, and now, for the first time, he understood the heavenly purity and the greatness of Clara’s mind. No one, by the slightest hint, reminded him of the past.

Only, when Sigismund took leave of him, Nathaniel said: ‘Heavens, brother, I was in an evil way, but a good angel led me betimes on to the path of light! Ah, that was Clara!’

Sigismund did not let him carry the discourse further for fear that grievous recollections might burst forth in all their lurid brightness.

At about this time the four lucky persons thought of going to the estate. It was noon and they were walking in the streets of the city, where they had made several purchases. The high steeple of the townhall was already casting its gigantic shadow over the market-place.

‘Oh,’ said Clara, ‘let us climb it once more and look out at the distant mountains!’

No sooner said than done. Nathaniel and Clara both ascended the steps, the mother returned home with the servant, and Lothaire, who was not inclined to clamber up so many stairs, chose to remain below. The two lovers stood arm-in-arm on the highest gallery of the tower, and looked down upon the misty forests, behind which the blue mountains rose like a gigantic city.

‘Look there at that curious little grey bush,’ said Clara. ‘It actually looks as if it were striding towards us.’

Nathaniel mechanically put his hand into his breast pocket – he found Coppola’s telescope, and pointed it to one side. Clara was in the way of the glass. His pulse and veins leapt convulsively. Pale as death, he stared at Clara, soon streams of fire flashed and glared from his rolling eyes, he roared frightfully, like a hunted beast.Then he sprang high into the air and. punctuating his words with horrible laughter, he shrieked out in a piercing tone, ‘Spin round, wooden doll! – spin round!’ Then seizing Clara with immense force, he tried to hurl her down, but with the desperate strength of one battling against death she clutched the railings.

Lothaire heard the’ raging of the madman – he heard Clara’s shriek of agony – fearful forebodings darted through his mind, he ran up, the door to the second flight was fastened, Clara’s shrieks became louder and still louder. Frantic with rage and anxiety, he threw himself against the door, which finally burst open. Clara’s voice was becoming weaker and weaker. ‘Help – help save me!’ With these words the voice seemed to die on the air.

‘She is gone – murdered by that madman!’ cried Lothaire.

The door of the gallery was also closed, but despair gave him a giant’s strength, and he burst it from the hinges. Heavens! Grasped by the mad Nathaniel, Clara was hanging in the air over the gallery – with one hand only she still held one of the iron railings. Quick as lightning, Lothaire caught his sister and drew her in, at the same moment striking the madman in the face with his clenched fist to such effect that he reeled and let go his prey.

Lothaire ran down with his fainting sister in his arms. She was saved. Nathaniel went raging about the gallery, leaping high in the air and crying, ‘Circle of fire’spin round! spin round!’

The people collected at the sound of his wild shrieks and among them, prominent for his gigantic stature, was the advocate Coppelius, who had just come to the town, and was proceeding straight to the market-place. Some wished to climb up and secure the madman, but Coppelius only laughed, saying, ‘Ha, ha – just wait – he will soon come down of his own accord,’ and looked up like the rest Nathaniel suddenly stood still as if petrified.

Then, perceiving Coppelius, he stooped down, and yelled out, ‘Ah, pretty eyes – pretty eyes!’ with which he sprang over the railing.

When Nathaniel lay on the stone pavement with his head shattered, Coppelius had disappeared in the crowd.

Many years afterwards it is said that Clara was seen in a remote spot, sitting hand in hand with a kind-looking man before the door of a country house, while two lively boys played before her. From this it may be inferred that she at last found a quiet domestic happiness suitable to her serene and cheerful nature, a happiness which the morbid Nathaniel would never have given her.

(Translation by John Oxenford)

 

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                          Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann – Biography

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (January 24, 1776-June 25, 1822) was originally named Ernst Theodor Wilhem Hoffmann. Around 1813 in honor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he changed his middle name from Wilhelm to Amadeus (although Hoffman would continue to use Wilhelm in official documents.) He wrote under the name E. T. A. Hoffman. He is renowned for his writing, music composition, and painting. Hoffman became a prominent figure in European Romanticism with his supernatural stories in which the dark and disturbing sides of human nature are explored.

The fantastical and lyrical nature of Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s literature lent itself to musical interpretation. Richard Wagner adapted selections from Die Serapionsbrüder for the composition of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Die Serapionsbrüder would also serve as the source text for scores by Jacques Offenbach and Paul Hindemith. Perhaps most famously, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky used a Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann story as the basis for The Nutcracker.

On January 24, 1776, Hoffmann was born in Konigsberg, Prussia. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was the youngest of three children. His parents separated when he was young. His mother moved young Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann into the care of her relatives. His mother, her sisters and her brother, Otto Wilhelm Doerffer, were instrumental in raising Hoffmann. Although Hoffmann was fond of his aunts, he would lampoon his uncle.

From 1781 until 1792, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was educated at the Burgschule where he was trained in the classics. Hoffmann also learned drawing and musical counterpoint during this time. His creativity flourished, and Hoffman augmented his education by reading Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, Sterne, and Jonathan Swift. In 1792, Ernst Theodor Amadaues Hoffmann attended lectures given by Immanuel Kant at the University of Konigsberg.

Hoffmann was a talented piano player and gave music lessons. These lessons led to one of the more contentious events in his life. He was infatuated with Dora Hatt, a married student who was ten years Hoffman’s senior. Her family objected to the instructor’s attentions. The family cajoled one of Hoffman’s relatives to get him a provincial posting in Prussian Silesia.

In 1798, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (who was the clerk of Johann Ludwig Doerfler, his uncle) moved with his uncle’s office from Glogau in Prussian Siliensia to Berlin. During Hoffmann’s residence, he continued with his examinations while pursuing his creative vision. He attempted to have his operetta Die Maske produced. Unfortunately by the time a theater responded, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann had left the city.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann served as a Prussian law officer in the Polish territories from 1800 until 1806. In 1802, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann married Marianna Teckla Michalina Rorer (Trchinska.) Part of his employment responsibilities was to create surnames for the Jewish population. His entire attitude towards his entire work life was negative if his drawings of himself drowning in mud while being surrounded by peasants are indicative. In 1804, Hoffmann was transferred to a post in Warsaw. He became part of the literary community that included Rahel Levin, Friedrich de la Motte-Baron Fouque, and Adelbert von Chamisso. This period helped shaped Hoffman’s later writing.

When Napoleonic forces seized Warsaw, they dismantled the Prussian governmental machinery. Most of Ernst Amadeus Hoffmann’s colleagues fled, but a prolonged illness prevented the young Hoffmann family a real chance of escape. An attempt to leave the occupied zone failed since the French forces refused to issue Hoffmann a passport. Removed from his bureaucratic form of employment Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, his wife and young daughter eventually moved to Berlin. French-occupied Berlin was a difficult environment for Hoffman to eke out a living. He resorted to borrowing money. He often starved, and his daughter would die during this period.

In 1808. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann and his wife moved to Bamberg. Hoffmann was employed as theater manager. However, Hoffman was unable to improve the performances at the theater. Hoffmann was forced out of this job. The newspaper Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung hired Hoffman as a music critic. In writing about music, he garnered acclaim. Ludwig van Beethoven would admire Hoffmann’s criticism on his music.

In 1809, Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck was a crucial story in his oeuvre. In this tale, Hoffmann presents a man who believes he meets the composer Christophe Willibald Gluck decades after his death. This story marked a moment when Hoffmann’s reputation amongst his contemporaries was secured. The unsettling character and the uncanny beauty of the music described in the piece highlight Hoffmann’s skill at the production of a style that left its mark on Romanticism.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was hired by the Bamberg Theatre in 1810. He worked in many capacities including decorating, writing and performing the duties of a stagehand. He also resumed giving music lessons, but as before he was infatuated with one of his students. In this occurrence, the students family found a husband for the young lady with the hopes that this would prevent Hoffman from escalating his intentions.

In 1813, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann became the musical director for Joseph Seconda’s opera company, which was at the time in Dresden. Renewed war between Prussian and Napoleonic forces complicated the travels. When the Hoffmanns arrived in Dresden, they discovered that Seconda had already left for Leipzig. Hoffmann again tried to follow, but the bridges out of the city had been destroyed. Hoffmann spent his day observing the carnage of the fighting. In late May, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was finally able to render-vu with the opera company.

The armistice in June allowed the company to return to Dresden, but after the end of the armistice the Hoffmanns had to leave their home. Because of the hostilities, Horrman witnessed many deaths. Hoffmann’s observations on the Battle of Dresden were recored in Vision auf dem Schlachtfeld bei Dresden.

After a period of contention with Seconda, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann returned to his legal profession. The period after Napoleon’s defeat marked a turning point in Hoffmann’s bureaucratic career. Hoffmann was appointed to the court of appeals (1814) and he eventually became a councilor (1816.)

Hoffmann turned more intently to his musical interests. In 1811, he wrote and staged the ballet Arlequin. In 1816, Hoffmann composed Undine. an opera. During 1816, he also wrote Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier. His reputation was bolstered by this publication. To address the aesthetic his aesthetic project, Hoffman wrote “The Perfect Stage Manager.” In the passage below (translated by Francis J. Nock), Hoffmann explains the nature of art is that:

“If perhaps you have not already noticed it yourselves, I will herewith reveal to you that the poets and musicians are in an extremely dangerous league against the audience. For their aim is nothing less than to drive the spectator out of the real world where he is so well off…when they have complelety separated him from everything that he previously knew and liked, to torment him with all possible emotions and passions extremely prejudicial to his health.”

His creative career was also reaching a high mark. Publication sought Hoffmann’s contributions. At times his work in the latter period was spotty, many of Hoffmann’s most significant works also dated from this period. Tribulations, however, were soon to file. Alcoholism and syphilis led to a creeping paralysis which seems to have fully incapacitated him by 1821. His work from 1822 had to be dictated to his wife or an assistant. He was also caught up in a purge of liberal thinkers. He was never officially reprimanded, but his loyalties were questioned and his reputation tarnished. He finally died of the June of 1822.

The writings of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann include Die Elixiere des Teufels, and Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler, Nachtstücke, Die Serapionsbrüde, and Die Maske.

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Please note also :

https://www.academia.edu/4663791/_Secret_Mechanism_Les_Contes_dHoffmann_and_the_Intermedial_Uncanny_in_the_Metropolitan_Operas_Live_in_HD_Series

कॅशीर کٔشِیر कश्मीर کشمیر‎ RESHIYYAT

Reshiyyat, Mysticism and Metaphysics

From the perspective of perennialism one could say that the term Reshi is Indian way of referring to Logos, the Light of Muhammad, and the Christ-Reality. If the first Reshi was Ahmad Reshi and the latter is synonymous  with the pole of Existence, the Universal Man, the envoy of the Absolute  as elaborated in Sufi metaphysics then Reshiyyat is an integral tradition and formulation of the Sanatana Dharma, the primordial Din, the Sophia perennis, javidaan khird.  This makes it truly universalistic. Reshiyyat’s history  doesn’t extend only to 4000 years as some have argued but to all eternity, to preeternity.  Specifying Muhammad as the first Reshi is not to restrict Reshiyyat to post-Islamic period. In fact the Prophet’s name is Ahmed in heaven in Islamic tradition.  Sheikh Nuruddin’s specification of the name as Ahmed Reshi seems to be an allusion to this heavenly or timeless transhistorical Muhammad. It is also established that Reshiyyat in Kashmir predates the birth of the Prophet of Islam. The Reshi’s journey is from pre-eternity to post-eternity and we are all, willy nilly summoned to take this great expedition. We are all fellow travelers on the path of Reshiyyat because to be a Reshi  is to be concerned, ultimately concerned with our Ground of Being, which is none other than God who is none other  the Self, the ideal pole of man.
What is common between Buddhism, Saivism, Tantricism and Sufism is the religious experience, the fruit of which is the peace that passeth all understanding. The path is transcendence of ego to realize the Infinite, the Unconditioned. Theologies are only different conceptual schemes to make sense of the religious experiences of the prophets and saints and are dispensable. Metaphysics which is the science of the supraphenomenal, the science of the Infinite and the Unconditioned transcends the theologies as it speaks of direct vision or gnosis (irfan). It is non-dualistic and takes Absolute or Godhead rather than the personal God of theology as the Ultimate Reality. Enlightenment/deliverance/ gnosis/ vision of God or the kingdom of God dissolves all questions that conceptual intellect raises. Theologies and forms are transcended as their supraformal referent and ground is realized. The great end is not merely mystical realization but metaphysical realization where the there is no limitation of finitude or individuality and knowing and being are merged as subject-object duality is finally transcended. Transcendence of the desiring self is the unifying element of all traditional religions. Perennialists convincingly argue that that there is no important difference between different mystical paths which constitute the inner reality of all religions. There can’t be any difference in the fruit either. They claim to derive logical conclusion from the Quranic verses that speak of the universality of revelation and ad-Deen and that describe the Quran as the testifier of previous revelations. Tawhid, Sufistically interpreted as ‘There is no truth but Truth or there is no reality but Reality,’ is seen to be the essence of all religious and mystical traditions. Iqbal’s description of the Prophet in such verses as Lowh b tou, kalm bi tou, tera wujood alkitab, Aayai Kaiyinat ka main-i- dareyaab tou/ niklae teri talash mai kafla haay rang-o boo, Nigahi isq-o- masti mai wahi awwal wahi aakhir approximates the metaphysical understanding of Muhammad (upon whom be peace and blessings – the very name Muhammad means the praised one. Organized ritual blessing on him is a practice in vogue in Kashmir. Praising Muhammad is, metaphysically speaking, praising and blessing Existence or Life. Durood is at root indicative of the attitude of yes-saying to life which could be contrasted to absurdist attitude of rebellion or nihilistic despair) that perennialists put forward in defence of their thesis that Muhammad is universally acknowledged by traditional communities. Muhammed, seen in mystical and metaphysical terms as the Pole of Existence, the Logos, the Principle of Manifestation, the positivity of existence, the envoy of the Absolute, the First stage of the Tanazullat-i-Sitta, the Praised One in the capacity of perfection of man, the ideal pole of man, the essence of Aadamiyat, the Light that was created before Adam, the revealer of Divine Attributes, the unfragmented integrated perfected manhood, the transhistorical or metahistorical or archetypal Muhammad is not denied by any integral religious tradition. Islam, metaphysically and mystically interpreted as the surrender of the finite self before the Infinite, the Totality, the Existence, is not a religion among other religions but the Religion. It is the religion of all prophets. Islam is not a set of propositions or a mere creedal system. It claims to be the Truth or Reality (Allah’s denotative name is al-Haqq) that is Manifest. Allah is the Manifest Truth according to the Quran. Islamic kalima is translatable in such terms that only a spiritually blind person who deliberately chooses to veil or cover the truth. Kafir, in the Quranic parlance, is one who denies the truth that is made manifest to him with dazzling clarity and not the one who denies certain theological proposition. The Quran is not reducible to theology. In fact it is not understandable in purely theological terms. Traditional Muslims have never encouraged kalam. At the stage of metaphysical realization the theological plane which is dualistic and inherently limited is transcended so that no question of exclusivist labels and identities is there. So the question whether Lalla was a Saivite or Muslim belonging to the theological plane cannot be entertained from the metaphysical plane.
Reshiyyat is not to be designated as a religion but as a metaphysic and esotericism that grounds different religions. This metaphysics assumes different forms in accordance with different religious traditions. This metaphysics forms the unifying element of all traditions religions. Religions are adaptations according to different human receptacles of the truths of metaphysics. Doctrinal content or dogmas of different religions are reducible to metaphysical principles. There is a difference between religion and metaphysics. As Guenon points out the metaphysical point of view is purely intellectual while as in  the religious or theological point of view the presence of a sentimental element affects the doctrine itself, which doesn’t allow of it complete objectivity.1
The fact that Reshi is a transreligious term and can’t be spoken of as belonging to only a particular religious universes means we have to see the underlying metaphysical truths that he comes to realize. Forms are relative; only the Absolute is absolute. Theologies are forms. The supraformnal truth that Reshi comes to cognize allows him to penetrate the forms from within and then at the same time transcend them. The fact that Reshis have arisen within specific religious traditions and have remained loyal to a particular religious universe disproves crude syncretistic view that dissolves forms as irrelevant. Forms are also divine though relative. They conceal an esoteric supraformal truth of which they are clothing. It is for the insider only that a journey to the centre of religious universe which is Godhead is possible according to the perennialists. Ad-Deen is the eternal truth that different sha’ria and theologies express and it is the later that vary across time and space in the history of religions. By virtue of crossing the dark night of the soul and attaining to the stage of haqq-ul-yakeen the Reshi or the Sufi is able to have unmediated vision of truth that ad-Deen is. A Muslim Reshi is born in the bosom of Islam and lives Islam but that doesn’t mean the truth in previous revelations is thereby negated but only relived in a different form. Reshiyyat is not approachable as a particular philosophical system. It because it refers to the Universal, the Unlimited can’t be contained in a particular system. Metaphysics, being the truth of Universal Principles or the Infinite and All-Possibility isn’t definable. One can’t make a system or ideology out of it. Only reason constructs systems or ideologies. Darsanas of Indian origin and Sufism are not philosophical schools in the Western sense of the term. So those authors who use such phrases as Reshi ideology, Reshi philosophy or Saivite philosophy misuse the terms. Western philosophy lacks complete metaphysics and is not what Plato meant by it: a way of life and love of wisdom. Philosophy in the primordial sense of the term that prepares one for death and assimilation to God as Plato said is not a rational logical abstract discipline only and is allied to gnosis, a way of life or realization of the good. It is not a prerogative of ratio or mental faculty of reason but of nous, the supraindividual universal faculty of intellect. Metaphysics, the science of supraphenomenal universal principles, the Infinite, that transcends all binaries and dualisms that have plagued the Western philosophical and theological tradition, and resolves all contradictions in the One, the Absolute, coincidentia oppositorum, is intellectual (non-discursive intelligence) rather than rational discipline and postmodern critiques are hardly relevant to it as it is not dualistic, “structuralist,” or to be identified with metaphysics of presence. It is not a mere theoretical rational inquiry but a realization, intellection or noetic vision that transcends subject-object duality and demands something like ethical discipline that Plato argued for. Platonic philosophy, understood as a spiritual and contemplative way of life leading to illumination or enlightenment; an intellectual discipline based on intellection culminating in union (henosis) with ideal Forms; his “Orphic”-Indian conception of philosopher as one who seeks release from the wheel of cyclical term  concurs with the perennialist understanding of metaphysics and Indian understanding of darsana. Reshiyyat is a philosophy in this sense and not in the typical Western sense.
Reshi metaphysics is not rational construction. It is not a totalizing system either. It is not a metaphysics of presence either as the Supreme Principle or Absolute in Buddhism, Kashmir Saivism or Sufism is not Being but pure Being or Beyond-Being or Non-Being best described as Void or Northing in Reshi literature. Deconstruction and other postmodern philosophies problematize rational metaphysics and theology only. Reshiyyat also doesn’t take a humanist view of self which postmodernism challenges. Postmodernism has indirectly helped to strengthen the realm of unreason that mysticism takes care of. Mystical traditions such as Reshiyyat transcend all thought constructions and the binaries of dualistic mind and thought. Reshi talks about the language of silence, of prelinguistic prereflective witnessing of phenomena and deconstruction can do nothing to discredit this “discourse” of silence.
History shows that mysticism in Kashmir has been the defining element of Kashmiri tradition and identity. Buddhism and Saivism are essentially mystical religions. Ritualism had been  questioned from the very beginning in the history of religious thought in Kashmir. Buddhism that coloured Kashmir religious  landscape before the advent of Saivism is strongly critical of ritualism. Saivist sages emphasized relativity and even dispensability of forms. Kashmir Saivism was especially Unitarian or nondualistic like Sufism that followed it.  Tantricism was  extreme development of  esoterical viewpoint that led ultimately to disregard of law. Muslim Kashmir’s greatest  sons have been mystics. Our greatest poets have been mystics. Our art is a reflection of our mysticism.

Reshiyyat: Key to Kashmir Religion and Philosophy

Muhammad Maroof Shah

 
Kashmir is traditionally held to be a sanctified or blessed land of the Spirit. Kashmir is indeed a pir-waer and the garden of paradise on earth if paradise is the name of saints’ dwelling. Kashmir as the fairyland of peace and contentment warped round the devotion and silence of the Himalayas, musical streams and limpid lakes is an ideal location for japa or zikr, for contemplation or meditation. It is no wonder that the history of Kashmir is a history of its saints and sages who have provided the life style and culture to its people. The valley itself was founded and established by a legendry mystic, Kashyapa who drained the waters of “Sati Sar.” He recognised the sacredness of the land and designed it to be the abode of saints. If there is any land where the order of eternity and the order of time, the heaven and the earth, intersect and overlap, where celestial lights illumine everything it is Kashmir.
Our aim is to argue that it is the mystic that defines the ideal of Kashmiri consciousness. Throughout history it is mysticism that has given identity to Kashmiris. It is not dualistic exoteric religion but esoteric or mystical thought that has been central to the definition of Kashmiri culture in all its different forms – Buddhist, Saivist or Islamic. If history is any guide to the determination of present identity then mysticism emerges as a strong candidate for it. Kashmiri culture has been and is mystically oriented. It has upheld a mystical or philosophical (more precisely metaphysical) outlook and not simply a religious worldview which could easily lend itself to communal or sectarian appropriation. Kashmir, historically speaking, has never been a theologically oriented culture. Its religiosity can’t be measured in terms of more conventional parameters and amazement expressed by many scholars regarding the Kashmiri’s lax religiosity is not difficult to comprehend. In this paper it is argued that the traditional mystical identity of Kashmir needs to be understood from metaphysical rather than religious perspective and that it could be deployed in charting a response to  a host of current challenges – social, economical, religious and  environmental. Mysticism has sample resources for us to squarely face the problems that bedevil  the postmodern West and a world condemned to live in the midst of divergent cultures and identities . So far there has been no comprehensive attempt to study diverse religious traditions of Kashmir simultaneously especially in relation to modern secular thought currents and exclusivist theological voices. In the absence of any attempt to apply by comparativists any comprehensive methodology to deal with divergent religious world-views  we have yet to develop outlines of what could be called as Kashmir philosophy. If the most important task of comparative philosophy is to understand common basis of different traditions as Ananda Coomaraswamy said we can say that Kashmiri scholars have yet to contemplate such vital a task.  In this paper the task before us is:
Identifying mystical/metaphysical basis of different religious traditions that have informed our heritage.
Attempt to argue for the centrality of the mystical in Kashmir religion and culture.
Salvage the mystical worldview of Kashmir against its modern day critics especially exotericist critics.
Identify misappropriations of the mystical in occultist and pseudomystical circles.
Critique  exploiting power structures that  trade in the name of the mystics.
I shall be taking a series of questions and attempt to answer them from the perennialist viewpoint to establish the basic theses that Reshiyyat is the integrating and unifying element of all the important religio-philosophical traditions of Kashmir and that the state of Reshi, identified as the sage or the mystic in less precise terms, is the ideal posited by different traditions. The thesis of the paper is that transtheological, transsectarian  and thus metaphysical Reshiyyat as Kashmir’s quintessential  tradition and its defining identity. Reshiyyat approached from the framework of traditional metaphysics unites diverse theological traditions without denying the validity of particular religious traditions. It is unfortunate that it has not been approached from this perspective so far and in fact there is no systematic presentation of Reshi metaphysics available. A lot of religious/theological, sociological and historical studies of it have been done but the profound metaphysical grounding of it has yet to be attempted. Understanding Reshiyyat from metaphysical perspective serves to foreground the essential transcendent unity of contributing traditions and help evolve a response to pluralism and multiculturalism that has become the reality of the postmodern world. The questions I shall take for discussion include What is Reshiyyat and its history? Who is a Reshi? What is the relation between exoteric and esoteric dimensions of religions? Could traditions be under threat from “rival” traditions and in need of revival.
Who is a Reshi?
How does one become a Reshi and who qualifies as a Reshi? The answer is a good Muslim or Sufi is a Reshi according to Sheikh Nuruddin. The Reshi is Sanskrit equivalent of mystic or inspired person, one to whom the vision of God has been vouchsafed. It signifies mystical consciousness which precedes or transcends diverse theological formulations or expressions. Reshi is a generic term for mystic or enlightened person or anyone who seeks to realize the esoteric aspect of his religious tradition. The fruit of the path that he follows is self realization. “Know thyself” is first commandment of all mystical traditions, Eastern and Western. Reshi goes on the great adventure to know this self.  The debate over Persian vs. Sanskrit origin of the term is hardly warranted in view of the fact that the mystic is a bird of lamakaan for whom these things hardly matter.  There has been an attempt by Hasan and certain other scholars to Islamize the term Reshi, its origin and the whole chronology that Nurrudin gives in his famous verses. This should be understood from the same perspective and we need not fight over the literal or historical validity of this Islamized history of Reshiyyat in Kashmir. We need to caution against confounding literal with the symbolic and historical with metahistorical and absolutizing the names and labels.  The Reshi, the sage, the self realized one, the inspired poet, is the image of primordial man or Adam. One becomes a Reshi by transcending desiring self or ego and becoming a mirror to Reality or God.  When the realm of the known ceases, when thoughts cease, when the mind is transcended, when carnal self goes, man becomes a fit receptacle of divine tajalliyat.  When nafs or hawa don’t speak, God speaks.  The Quran must be revealed to us for authentic existential response from our side, as Iqbal has famously said in his Urdu couplet.  The Reshi is name of a medium, an empty receptacle (where no fog of passions and mind obstructs the Unknown, the revelation to descend), a flute, a clean slate on which God writes with his own qalm.  One must be gone to be able to assimilate the mighty speech of God.  No earthly tongue can be vouchsafed the ability to utter God’s word.  The ego or the lower self must be annihilated so that only God remains as happened in case of Mansur. The Reshi passes away from this phenomenal world, as the Beloved’s word consumes him, burns him.  One can’t live (as the ordinary self) and know God.  That is what is the purport of the following verses of the Sheikh, the revivalist, the resurrector of Reshi movement in the 14th century A.D. “The reading of the Quran should have broken the flashy talisman of your life. In reading the Quran  Mansur annihilated himself.”  These verses explain the meaning and making of a Reshi.  God can only speak through man/ to man when man is no longer man in the ordinary sense of the term.  To let God speak man must be silent.  He must pass through that severe mystical discipline and control his mind and self.  It needs, to quote our Shiekh, “Consecrating life to the search for Truth.” One who “tighten the belly to learn (the virtues of) patience/Gives up his ego/ Contemplates Him in seclusion” could be eligible for the lofty station of the Reshi.  Shiekh Nuruddin, identifying true Muslim with the Reshi, explicates attributes of him.  “Who longs to live by the sweat of one’s mind/ Who shows fortitude in provocation/who shares meals with the hungry / who is obsessed with the idea of removing huger, who scorns anger, greed, illusion, arrogance and self conceit.”  The Reshi reaches  arsh by the load of his nobler actions and then only “the grace of the Omnipotent embraces him.” The Reshi is one “who remains humble despite his substance and sits  very low on the wheel of life.”  Consuming himself in the fire that the kalima generates and realizing the mirage of existential unity he finds the Eternal and transcends space.  The Reshi may be ummi or unlettered but by knowing the meaning of kalima which is “the source of all knowledge”, he appropriates all the essential metaphysical, eschatological and moral truths that are contained in the kalima.  The Reshi kindles the lamp of knowledge and religion as he realizes the essence of all knowledge contained in alif, lam and mim. The Reshi realizing the oneness of existence (what Shaikhul Aalam calls kunyr) radiates peace.  There is no “other” for him as he has realized unity by transcending all dualities and dualism.  His principle of nonviolence extends to all nature, inanimate and animate.  His Unitarian weltanschauung dissolves all exclusions and marginalization. He isn’t guilty of any epistemic violence.  He is one with Existence.  He makes no claims over and against it.  He surrenders to Reality and that is why he attains peace within and without.   Islam as another name of peace and non-violence and an ethic of social justice has been practically realized by the Reshis. For Nuruddin the Reshi is more a name of a consciousness than a name of particular historical or concrete personality and by virtue of that belongs to all of us.  We are all, by virtue of being humans, Reshis or Reshis is the making.  This world is the Vale of Reshi making and the Reshi in widest sense of the term is Spirit or its archetypal image.  The Reshi possesses the essence of all religious traditions and is heir to everything grand and noble in the history of humanitarian and mystical thought.  He sacrifices his desires for the good of others.  That is the meaning of his vegetarianism and faqr.  He has no self or ego and is epitome of altruism. To be a Reshi is a realization that mere creedal formulae can’t save. It is to be the object of one’s knowledge or belief. It is not merely consent to a proposition but whole hearted effort to submit to the Truth that makes one a Reshi. Becoming a Reshi is a process and not an event. It is lifelong commitment to follow a different life. It is not consummated at some point of time. It is lifelong odyssey. God is the name of perpetual creativity.  Life divine is an unfinished project. One never reaches God. God is a perpetual quest, unattainable ideal. Reshi life is a matter of choices that one makes every moment. Seeing God is the last luxury of life and very few can afford it. It costs one everything including one’s soul. It is idle to debate who is a Sufi or a Reshi from outside. Forms must be transcended according to all Sufis if one has to make the great leap to God. There is no address of the man of God. The man of God is trackless, traceless as Rumi says. One wonders how one can judge Sufis or Reshis on the basis of the world of forms which they have realized in depth and then transcended.
Reshiyyat, Mysticism and Metaphysics
From the perspective of perennialism one could say that the term Reshi is Indian way of referring to Logos, the Light of Muhammad, and the Christ-Reality. If the first Reshi was Ahmad Reshi and the latter is synonymous  with the pole of Existence, the Universal Man, the envoy of the Absolute  as elaborated in Sufi metaphysics then Reshiyyat is an integral tradition and formulation of the Sanatana Dharma, the primordial Din, the Sophia perennis, javidaan khird.  This makes it truly universalistic. Reshiyyat’s history  doesn’t extend only to 4000 years as some have argued but to all eternity, to preeternity.  Specifying Muhammad as the first Reshi is not to restrict Reshiyyat to post-Islamic period. In fact the Prophet’s name is Ahmed in heaven in Islamic tradition.  Sheikh Nuruddin’s specification of the name as Ahmed Reshi seems to be an allusion to this heavenly or timeless transhistorical Muhammad. It is also established that Reshiyyat in Kashmir predates the birth of the Prophet of Islam. The Reshi’s journey is from pre-eternity to post-eternity and we are all, willy nilly summoned to take this great expedition. We are all fellow travelers on the path of Reshiyyat because to be a Reshi  is to be concerned, ultimately concerned with our Ground of Being, which is none other than God who is none other  the Self, the ideal pole of man.
What is common between Buddhism, Saivism, Tantricism and Sufism is the religious experience, the fruit of which is the peace that passeth all understanding. The path is transcendence of ego to realize the Infinite, the Unconditioned. Theologies are only different conceptual schemes to make sense of the religious experiences of the prophets and saints and are dispensable. Metaphysics which is the science of the supraphenomenal, the science of the Infinite and the Unconditioned transcends the theologies as it speaks of direct vision or gnosis (irfan). It is non-dualistic and takes Absolute or Godhead rather than the personal God of theology as the Ultimate Reality. Enlightenment/deliverance/ gnosis/ vision of God or the kingdom of God dissolves all questions that conceptual intellect raises. Theologies and forms are transcended as their supraformal referent and ground is realized. The great end is not merely mystical realization but metaphysical realization where the there is no limitation of finitude or individuality and knowing and being are merged as subject-object duality is finally transcended. Transcendence of the desiring self is the unifying element of all traditional religions. Perennialists convincingly argue that that there is no important difference between different mystical paths which constitute the inner reality of all religions. There can’t be any difference in the fruit either. They claim to derive logical conclusion from the Quranic verses that speak of the universality of revelation and ad-Deen and that describe the Quran as the testifier of previous revelations. Tawhid, Sufistically interpreted as ‘There is no truth but Truth or there is no reality but Reality,’ is seen to be the essence of all religious and mystical traditions. Iqbal’s description of the Prophet in such verses as Lowh b tou, kalm bi tou, tera wujood alkitab, Aayai Kaiyinat ka main-i- dareyaab tou/ niklae teri talash mai kafla haay rang-o boo, Nigahi isq-o- masti mai wahi awwal wahi aakhir approximates the metaphysical understanding of Muhammad (upon whom be peace and blessings – the very name Muhammad means the praised one. Organized ritual blessing on him is a practice in vogue in Kashmir. Praising Muhammad is, metaphysically speaking, praising and blessing Existence or Life. Durood is at root indicative of the attitude of yes-saying to life which could be contrasted to absurdist attitude of rebellion or nihilistic despair) that perennialists put forward in defence of their thesis that Muhammad is universally acknowledged by traditional communities. Muhammed, seen in mystical and metaphysical terms as the Pole of Existence, the Logos, the Principle of Manifestation, the positivity of existence, the envoy of the Absolute, the First stage of the Tanazullat-i-Sitta, the Praised One in the capacity of perfection of man, the ideal pole of man, the essence of Aadamiyat, the Light that was created before Adam, the revealer of Divine Attributes, the unfragemented integrated perfected manhood, the transhistorical or metahistorical or archetypal Muhammad is not denied by any integral religious tradition. Islam, metaphysically and mystically interpreted as the surrender of the finite self before the Infinite, the Totality, the Existence, is not a religion among other religions but the Religion. It is the religion of all prophets. Islam is not a set of propositions or a mere creedal system. It claims to be the Truth or Reality (Allah’s denotative name is al-Haqq) that is Manifest. Allah is the Manifest Truth according to the Quran. Islamic kalima is translatable in such terms that only a spiritually blind person who deliberately chooses to veil or cover the truth. Kafir, in the Quranic parlance, is one who denies the truth that is made manifest to him with dazzling clarity and not the one who denies certain theological proposition. The Quran is not reducible to theology. In fact it is not understandable in purely theological terms. Traditional Muslims have never encouraged kalam. At the stage of metaphysical realization the theological plane which is dualistic and inherently limited is transcended so that no question of exclusivist labels and identities is there. So the question whether Lalla was a Saivite or Muslim belonging to the theological plane cannot be entertained from the metaphysical plane.
Reshiyyat is not to be designated as a religion but as a metaphysic and esotericism that grounds different religions. This metaphysics assumes different forms in accordance with different religious traditions. This metaphysics forms the unifying element of all traditions religions. Religions are adaptations according to different human receptacles of the truths of metaphysics. Doctrinal content or dogmas of different religions are reducible to metaphysical principles. There is a difference between religion and metaphysics. As Guenon points out the metaphysical point of view is purely intellectual while as in  the religious or theological point of view the presence of a sentimental element affects the doctrine itself, which doesn’t allow of it complete objectivity.1
The fact that Reshi is a transreligious term and can’t be spoken of as belonging to only a particular religious universes means we have to see the underlying metaphysical truths that he comes to realize. Forms are relative; only the Absolute is absolute. Theologies are forms. The supraformnal truth that Reshi comes to cognize allows him to penetrate the forms from within and then at the same time transcend them. The fact that Reshis have arisen within specific religious traditions and have remained loyal to a particular religious universe disproves crude syncretistic view that dissolves forms as irrelevant. Forms are also divine though relative. They conceal an esoteric supraformal truth of which they are clothing. It is for the insider only that a journey to the centre of religious universe which is Godhead is possible according to the perennialists. Ad-Deen is the eternal truth that different sh’aria and theologies express and it is the later that vary across time and space in the history of religions. By virtue of crossing the dark night of the soul and attaining to the stage of haqq-ul-yakeen the Reshi or the Sufi is able to have unmediated vision of truth that ad-Deen is. A Muslim Reshi is born in the bosom of Islam and lives Islam but that doesn’t mean the truth in previous revelations is thereby negated but only relived in a different form. Reshiyyat is not approachable as a particular philosophical system. It because it refers to the Universal, the Unlimited can’t be contained in a particular system. Metaphysics, being the truth of Universal Principles or the Infinite and All-Possibility isn’t definable. One can’t make a system or ideology out of it. Only reason constructs systems or ideologies. Darsanas of Indian origin and Sufism are not philosophical schools in the Western sense of the term. So those authors who use such phrases as Reshi ideology, Reshi philosophy or Saivite philosophy misuse the terms. Western philosophy lacks complete metaphysics and is not what Plato meant by it: a way of life and love of wisdom. Philosophy in the primordial sense of the term that prepares one for death and assimilation to God as Plato said is not a rational logical abstract discipline only and is allied to gnosis, a way of life or realization of the good. It is not a prerogative of ratio or mental faculty of reason but of nous, the supraindividual universal faculty of intellect. Metaphysics, the science of supraphenomenal universal principles, the Infinite, that transcends all binaries and dualisms that have plagued the Western philosophical and theological tradition, and resolves all contradictions in the One, the Absolute, coincidentia oppositorum, is intellectual (non-discursive intelligence) rather than rational discipline and postmodern critiques are hardly relevant to it as it is not dualistic, “structuralist,” or to be identified with metaphysics of presence. It is not a mere theoretical rational inquiry but a realization, intellection or noetic vision that transcends subject-object duality and demands something like ethical discipline that Plato argued for. Platonic philosophy, understood as a spiritual and contemplative way of life leading to illumination or enlightenment; an intellectual discipline based on intellection culminating in union (henosis) with ideal Forms; his “Orphic”-Indian conception of philosopher as one who seeks release from the wheel of cyclical term  concurs with the perennialist understanding of metaphysics and Indian understanding of darsana. Reshiyyat is a philosophy in this sense and not in the typical Western sense.
Reshi metaphysics is not rational construction. It is not a totalizing system either. It is not a metaphysics of presence either as the Supreme Principle or Absolute in Buddhism, Kashmir Saivism or Sufism is not Being but pure Being or Beyond-Being or Non-Being best described as Void or Northing in Reshi literature. Deconstruction and other postmodern philosophies problematize rational metaphysics and theology only. Reshiyyat also doesn’t take a humanist view of self which postmodernism challenges. Postmodernism has indirectly helped to strengthen the realm of unreason that mysticism takes care of. Mystical traditions such as Reshiyyat transcend all thought constructions and the binaries of dualistic mind and thought. Reshi talks about the language of silence, of prelinguistic prereflective witnessing of phenomena and deconstruction can do nothing to discredit this “discourse” of silence.
History shows that mysticism in Kashmir has been the defining element of Kashmiri tradition and identity. Buddhism and Saivism are essentially mystical religions. Ritualism had been  questioned from the very beginning in the history of religious thought in Kashmir. Buddhism that coloured Kashmir religious  landscape before the advent of Saivism is strongly critical of ritualism. Saivist sages emphasized relativity and even dispensability of forms. Kashmir Saivism was especially Unitarian or nondualistic like Sufism that followed it.  Tantricism was  extreme development of  esoterical viewpoint that led ultimately to disregard of law. Muslim Kashmir’s greatest sons have been mystics. Our greatest poets have been mystics. Our art is a reflection of our mysticism.
Genealogy of Reshiyyat
Reshiyyat has been the Great Tradition of Kashmir from preIslamic times. The origins of the Reshi movement go back to pre-Islamic times in the Vedic period. The founder of the Muslim Reshi movement in Kashmir, Nuruddin Nurani (1377-1440), moulded the pre-existing Reshi tradition, transforming it into a vehicle for the spread of Islam, using local institutions and methods to make Islam more comprehensible  to the Kashmiris. After Nuruddin Reshi movement made deep inroads in Kashmir. Mystical ethos found newer expressions and continues vigorously in the form of Sufis and their shrines. Most Kashmiris are followers or admirers of some local Sufi.
The first Reshi, from traditional metaphysical and mystical viewpoints is Logos, the Pole of Existence, the Principle of Manifestation.  He brings into consciousness the archetype of God. The term Reshi should be seen as a “perspective, a standpoint, an archetype of certain dominant historical personalities and even dominant images, a way of looking at experience as a whole, a way of interpreting certain fundamental features of human existence” (Khan, 1994). Shiekh Nuruddin has used the term Reshi in this universal transhistorical and transempirical sense. This is evident in his famous eulogization of the ‘legendry’ Reshis.  He wants to convey something more valuable than an elementary historical definition of the term.  Mystical quest is perennial.  In this sense one could well argue that the Reshi movement didn’t originate in the 14th century but has been always there. Consciousness has no beginning in time; rather it creates time and history. The Reshi is the name of this consciousness. The Reshi lives in eternity, in timeless moment. The present author strongly disagrees with traditional historical approach to phenomenon of Reshiyyat which belongs more to metahistory than history and it is only metahistoric or transhistoric dimension of the Reshi movement that makes it perennially relevant. The origin and evolution of the Reshi movement  should be discussed in terms of its metahistorical archetypal image rather than in purely historical terms.
All the great names in Kashmir’s religion and mysticism which include such Buddhist sages, philosophers and kings as Nagasen, Mender, Nagarjuna, Kumarajivia, Gautama Sanghadeva, Punyatrata, Vimalaksa, Dharmamitra, Ashogosh, Varsobando etc. and suchKashmiri Saivite sages and philosophers as SriKantha, Vasugupta, Kallata, Prodyumna Bhatta, Prajnarjuna, Somanand, Utpal Dev, Abhinavgupta, Jayaratha are links in the Reshi chain.  Lalla connects Saivism with Islamized  Reshiyyat of Shiekh Nuruddin.  Great Khulafa (disciples) of Shiekh Nuruddin and Khulafa of those Khulafa and the Sufi appropriation of Reshi movement by Shiekh Makhdoom and from then on a galaxy of Reshis of 3rd period (Ist period is up to Shiekh Nuruddin and from him up to Harda Reshi is 2nd period and from then on may be labeled) as third period when Reshis modified their socio-economic structure by abandoning strict “monkish”  asceticism and began to earn their own livelihood) have been keeping alive the great Reshi tradition. The Sufi poets of Kashmir have been vital in preservation and transmission of Reshi message. Sufi poetry represents the essence of Reshiyyat.  Thus not only the great Reshis such as Bamuddin, Zainuddin, Latifuddin, Nasiruddin, Payamuddin, Lacham Reshi, Reshi, Rupa Reshi, Sangam Dar, Hardi Reshi and later day representatives like Shankar Reshi, Aali Baba Saeb, Rajab Baba Saeb but also great Sufi poets of Kashmir whose names are too well known are links in the great chain of Reshiyyat.  Intellectual and religious history of Kashmir is the history of Reshiyyat.
Islam and Development of Reshiyyat
We now take up the discussion of development of Reshiyyat in relation to Islam in Kashmir to foreground the centrality of the mystical in the whole process of conversion and consolidation of power by Muslims. The story of Islam in Kashmir is one of the most interesting stories in the history of civilizational dialogue. There is hardly any similar example in history of peaceful takeover of one religion and culture by the other. This feat became possible because of the role of Sufis. It is a unique story exemplifying Islam’s resilience and potential to appropriate alien traditions. It shows contours of interfaith dialogue in action. It refutes the dominant perception of Islam as monolithic exclusivist legalistic tradition. The story of Islam in Kashmir is an interesting case of larger story of cultural transformation brought about by mysticism. How mysticism approaches and solves certain important problems is illustrated in Kashmir.
We need to know historical reasons for the ascendency of Islam in Kashmir.  Saivism had lost vitality. It degenerated in the course of time as traditions do. No major thinker was produced by Kashmir Saivism after the 12th century. Spirituality had given  place to occultism. Buddhism had already yielded to dominant tradition and even adopted the latter’s many forms. Masses had been alienated from decadent religiosity and oppression of priestly class. Prof. Rattan Lal Hangloo has, for instance, argued in his The State in Medieval Kashmir that the mass conversion to Islam was facilitated by the then “Hindu society and polity” which produced “deteriorating social system, the broadening crisis in economy or political insecurity” (Hangloo, 2000).  According to him the spread of Islam appeared as an answer and solution to the “problem of injustice, disharmony and the people’s misery.” Islam filled the vacuum quite admirably. It was Sufism that was destined to play historical role in consolidating and revitalizing centuries of spiritual heritage. Mysticism has been the religion of man from the very beginning. It has adapted itself to diversity of forms. Men are programmed to worship God according to the Quran. There is no escape possible from God who is our Environment, our Origin and our End.
Mansur al-Hallaj, the famous mystic-martyr, is said to have visited Kashmir. It took many centuries, until the advent of Sufis from Central Asia and Persia, for the process of conversion to significantly transform religious and cultural landscape of Kashmir.  Islam won mass conversion in the 14th century and from then on it has been the dominant tradition displacing both the already enfeebled Buddhism and the decadent Saivism.
The thousands of years long heritage of Reshiyyat easily adapted to the Sufistic face of Islam. Reshiyyat got Islamized at the hands of Sheikh Nuruddin and his followers. Native thought currents thus got assimilated` in the new “synthesis” of the Shaikh, popularly called Shaikhul Alam or Jagat Guru. Masses didn’t feel alienated from their tradition in embracing Islam at the hands of Sufis and Reshis as Islam’s spiritual dimension converged significantly with the Hindu-Buddhist Unitarianm outlook. Ibn Arabi’s wajudi Unitarian version of Islam that Syed Ali Hamdani, the great leader of about 700 Sufis that constituted organized mission for Islamizing Kashmir, advocated could easily get acceptability in already monistically oriented mind of Kashmir. It has been amply demonstrated that conversion to Islam was either by Reshis or Sufis rather than state sponsored enterprise.
New life was breathed into the age old Reshi tradition by Shiekh Nuruddin.  He transformed it from the perspective of Sufism and gave it a social dimension.  As is usual with the mystics, hardly anything is known with certainty about his life.  And we needn’t know! One wonders why biographers and historians exhaust so much energy on these issues. The Sufi comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere.  Indeed from nothingness to nothingness is man’s journey.  God who is our Origin and End is both Void or Nothing or Sunyata (in the tradition of negative divine) and Fullness or Plenitude of Being, Goodness, Beauty and Truth or Truth, Existence and Bliss (in the tradition of positive divine). Only God is, man as an independent self subsisting entity isn’t.  Man can attain baqa only when he ceases to be, when he transcends his “I” or ego consciousness and only mirrors God by total surrender.  This is the essence of mysticism of which Shiekh Nuruddin is the exponent.  Body and details of its earthly career which subject of biographies are hardly of any significance from the mystical point of view.  So our historians’ obsession with the facts or concrete details of worldly life of saints is unwarranted.  What isn’t important for a saint because of his transcendence of all labels, all the coordinates of space and time that could be used to fix his position, shouldn’t of much importance to us also and our obsession with it creates such needless controversies as ‘Was Nunda Buddhist or Muslim?’ or ‘Was Lalla Savite or Muslim?’  These questions needn’t be asked and can’t be answered and even if answered by careful sifting of historical evidence, Reshi’s cause isn’t served – who essentially belongs to the supraformal world and not to the realm of nasut, to metahistory and not to history.  India, the land of the seers, never cultivated history as a discipline in the modern sense of the term.  To the extent modern man (and modernist Kashmiri historian) has lost the sense of the Sacred, the Immutable, the  Metahistorical, to that extent he is interested in prying in historical facts and details. We have, generally speaking, no biographies of saints available. We need not either. Historical life of a saint has not to do much with the essence of the thing for which  mysticism stands.  The earthly period of a saint hardly matters as he lives in eternity. The Spirit (which is the purely divine element in man as is clear from the Quranic verse nafiktu fir-ruhi as distinguished from soul) is never born and never dies. It transcends history and time completely. Our inmost reality is constituted by spirit. This is why, generally speaking, saints don’t care for biographies. As individuals or egos saints don’t exist. They are nobodies, nameless, trackless gone in the experience of fana. Only God is absolutely real; only God’s Face abides and everything else is annihilated and strictly speaking nothing is existent in the real sense.
That is why most modern historians (and this is true of G.M.D. Sufi, A.Q. Rafique and to some extent Ishaq Khan though the last mentioned takes great care to approach it from within and go against the orthodox rationalist historical viewpoint) can’t make sense of hagiological literature with its preponderances of the supernatural. It is modernist historians’ credulous attitude towards the myth and metanarrative of rationalistic scientism that makes him incredulous towards the element of supernatural in the lives of Reshis.  The present author is much pained to see misappropriations of hagiographical accounts of our Reshis in rationalist naturalist reductionist framework of modernist historians. Modernist Kashmiri historians’ representations/appropriations of hagiographical sources or miraculous or supernatural  element in the lives of the Reshis have serious limitations and sometimes we see gross distortions on account of their rationalist modernist assumptions. There is no space here to elaborate the point.
While analyzing the question of Islam in Kashmir from a theological viewpoint serious misunderstanding have arisen and scholars are still fighting over unresolved issues regarding the distinctive character of Kashmiri Islam or the relationship between Sufism and Reshiyyat, the religious identity of Lalla, communalist vs. secular interpretation of Reshi movement etc. A purely historical approach has led to unending problems for scholars of Kashmir Studies. There is a need to situate Islam and Reshiyyat in the context of pre-Islamic heritage of Kashmir by foregrounding metaphysico-spiritual dimensions of the respective traditions that have contributed to the formation of Kashmiri identity and culture. The theological as against the metaphysical approach adapted by communalists needs to be transcended. This will put in proper context the role of Saivite mystic Lalla vis-à-vis Islam’s emergence in the Valley. The origin and evolution of the Reshi movement  should be discussed in terms of its metahistorical archetypal image rather than in purely historical terms. Is Reshiyyat different from Sufism in the same manner in which Saivism and other religious tradition of Kashmir are different from Islam? Is Islamic framework dispensable in Reshiyyat as it developed after Nuruddin? The issue of religious affiliation of Lalla or Buddhist influence on Sheikh Nuruudin is also very controversial. How to make sense of popular perception of Sufi connection of this Saivite mystic? These and other problems are best approached, in the opinion of the present author, by taking recourse to insights of perennialist scholars which are represented by Ananda Coomaraswamy in India.
The story of Islam in Kashmir has largely been a story of Islamic mysticism or Reshiyyat as Islam entered the valley through the efforts of mystics called Sufis and Reshis. The legalist exotericist exclusivist version of Islam that attained dominance in certain regions in the world today could not take roots in Kashmir. Kashmir has been a pir-waer, the land of saints and it is mysticism which has been instrumental in determination of its  sensibility. The modernist rationalist historian or an exoteric exclusivist theologian can’t fully deal with the transcendery phenomenon of Reshiyyat, the former being uncomfortable with the supernatural ambience surrounding it while as the latter being uncomfortable with its inclusivism and sulhi-kul (peace with all).
Reshiyyat and the Question of Conversion
Another issue that has been subject of much controversy is Reshis’ role in conversion of non-Muslims.  This is also made more complex issue by sensitive issue of conversion itself.  For such scholars as Rafiqi the Reshis “didn’t go out to seek adherents to Islam as proclaimed “conscious missionaries”, like the immigrant Sufi and their Kashmiri followers.  Not did they act as “high priests” but as the saints who were willing to help the needy on the spiritual path.” (Rafiqi:). In contrast Khan credits them with primary role in Islamization of Kashmir.  Again esotericist or metaphysical perspective of perennialist authors could be used as a corrective to limitations of traditional historical scholarship.  It is a fact of history that despite their tolerance of other faiths and inclusivism the Sufis from Central Asia and Persia and the Reshis have been instrumental in Islamization of Kashmir. It is only in the integral tradition of a particular religious tradition the seed of mysticism grows and fructifies pace the belief of our syncretists and secularists.  Sufism is understandable only in the light of Islam. The question of syncretism and borrowing doesn’t arise if we understand what Frithjof Schuon calls universal orthodoxy of mysticism.  The Sufis/Reshis needed to preach Islam as an integral tradition so that the souls could be weaned for their spiritual growth.  Esoterism can’t be practiced in isolation from exoteric religion, despite what libertine mystics like Osho and Krishnamurti assert.  What I want to point out is that conceptual framework of our scholars of Reshiyyat and Kashmir history suffers from certain limitations, which could be redressed by recourse to perennialist insights.   Then only could the sensitive issue of conversion and the Reshis’ role in it be clarified and the process of Islamization of Kashmir understood in its proper context.
Orthodoxy of Reshiyyat
There is also not much warrant for doubting orthodox credentials of Reshi version of Sufism.  From the insider’s perspective there is hardly anything such as borrowing from any alien source. The form of spiritual practices and discipline don’t constitute the essence of a mystical tradition like Sufism.  Masters of tariqah know that in the path of enlightenment or irfan any practice or mode and discipline are substitutable.  It is only a saint like Nuruddin who can decipher the esoteric significance of exoteric dimension (sh’aria) of Islam.  There are as many kinds of spiritual practices and disciplines as there are men.  There is no such thing as orthodoxy in this context.  There is a lack of sound scholarship on mysticism and metaphysics in literature on Reshiyyat.  It needs a metaphysician and a mystic of the calibre of Frithjof Schuon (Isa Nuruddin) to clarify the question of origin, orthodoxy/heterodoxy and borrowings in case of Reshi movement.  It is the end of the quest or path i.e., enlightenment or irfan (gnosis) that is important for the mystic.  Paths, the practices and the modes of discipline  are variable even within the same silsilah sometimes.  These can’t be made the basis for labelling and categorizing such saints as Nuruddin and Lalla.
One can’t properly speak of Reshiyyat as Reshiyyat because “ism” has the connotation of an ideological system. However the suffix ism has now been used widely on even such non-ideological traditions as Sufism so we may retain the use of such terms as Reshiyyat but without understanding thereby that it is name of an ideology. One can say that Reshiyyat is not a name of some entity over and against different integral religious traditions. It is not a rival religious or philosophical tradition. It is the esoteric and metaphysical content of these religions.
The God of Islam is synonymous with truth (God is named the Truth in the Quran) and truth has infinite faces, aspects and layers. One can’t impose a version of Islam as orthodox and disqualify all divergent interpretations. The Quran and the Prophetic traditions contain inexhaustible treasures of meaning and are vulnerable to potentially countless interpretations. Purely literal understanding of Islam is impossible. Even an uncompromising Zahiri exotericist or literalist theologians is bound to resort to non-literal interpretation at certain places. All truths are mediated through our linguistic, cultural and conceptual filters. So labelling certain interpretation such as Reshi interpretation of Nurudduin as deviant or heterodox is to be guilty of what Lyotard calls meaning closure. Strictures of certain exoteric authorities regarding the Islamic credentials of mystically inclined Kashmiri people’s understanding of Islam reflect an imposition of certain totalistic and totalizing preconceived ideological reduction of Islam at the hands of these exotericists. Islam has not outlawed any interpretation as long as the frame of reference is the Quran and Sunna. Islam resists and transcends all totalistic ideological reductions because of its universality and timelessness.
There are some huge misunderstandings about the Reshis’ attitude to orthodox religious forms. For instance, the issue of Sufi connection of this Saivite mystic Lalla is a problem for exoteric authorities.  She inherited and organically fused in her own way Saivism, Upansadic wisdom and Sufism. Her transcendence of dualist plane is revealed by the fact that her religious identity is still a matter of dispute. The message of Nuruddin and Lalla is hardly distinguishable. Saivism comes close to Islamic metaphysical doctrines and Sufistic “wahdatul wajoodi” thought  and that accounts for Lalla being at home in either of them. It doesn’t regard phenomenal world as unreal but as the self expression of Siva, His poem, His art. It, like Islam, sees God both as Immanent (Shakti) as well as Transcendent (Siva). A Reshi is a bird of lamakaan and every attempt to circumscribe him in conceptual categories or theological labels that are derived from makaan or time is a category mistake. The realm of eternity is incommensurable with the realm of time. In God’s proximity all labels must drop as that station is attained only by the surrender of finite self and individuality before the Nameless Infinite.
One can loosely take Reshiyyat as Perennial Philosophy as it developed in India. Islam is simultaneously a religion and a metaphysic. So Reshiyyat as traditional metaphysics itself is part of integral Islamic tradition. As Sufism can’t be practiced outside the formal religious universe of Islam according to perennialists so Reshiyyat after Nuruddin needs the supposing framework of Islam. Esotericism isn’t realizable in religious vacuum despite the assertion of libertine mystics to the contrary. Without the background particular religious forms Reshiyyat becomes almost impossible to become a concrete reality. One can loosely say that Reshiyyat as tariqat is the fruit of sha’ria. Over and above Islamic sha’ria Reshiyyat has no inalienable doctrinal or practical principle. Reshiyyat is Kashmiri version of Sufism and if it appropriates and accommodates influence of certain local or indigenous practices it is in keeping with the principle that in every age Sufism needs new formulations and adaptations in consonance with the spirit of that age. Kashmir’s collective unconscious, its archetypal inheritance necessarily needs to be taken into consideration when a spiritual genius such as Nuruddin wishes to Islamize it. Reshi version of Islamic Sufism is the best creative adaptation of Islam with religious universe of Kashmir that had moulded it from centuries. Local context has always affected the expression of the “alien” religious tradition. Such praiseworthy innovations as the  practices of loud recitation of durood and awrad in Kashmir make smooth assimilation and penetration of “alien” religious universe possible.
Limitations of Historical Approach to Reshiyyat
No purely historical approach will be able to clarify what Reshiyyat is and make sense of its diverse and rich literature. Only the shell of Reshiyyat enters history. That is why our historians have created more controversies than they have been able to resolve. The core of Reshiyyat which consists of ineffable experience of God can’t be philosophically, theologically or historically approached and analyzed. The Life of Sprit which Reshiyyat actualizes is living life in a spirit of detachment, as a witnessing self. The Spirit transcends all the humdrum of life. It watches and watches without identifying with any of life’s actions and experiences. The philosophy of actionless action or wu wei wei is what mystics or Reshis advocate. The Reshi transcends mind and lives in the space of no-mind as God is revealed only when we transcend time and mind. A purely historical approach that gives much importance to the life lived in time and the life of mind can’t do justice to such a person such as Reshi and his thought that transcends all discursive thought. Authentic life or the life of freedom in mystical perspective is possible only when one transcends ego and the dualistic plane of action, the fret and fever of the life of mind. The joy that the Reshi finds in God is expressed either through dance as in Lalla or in aesthetic contemplation or poetry of love and bliss or in selfless service. What is visible to the historian from the life of Reshi is only a surface or outward face of it.
Reshiyyat does enter history as an institution in a particular spatio-tempioral setting which, however, is to be differentiated from the eternal essence of religion or mysticism. We must not confound the eternal and the temporal dimensions of the Reshi movement. For the temporal setting historical and phenomenological approaches do have ample relevance but must caution against the reductionist tendency that is quite fashionable with modern academic disciplines. It is not a name of an historical movement that began somewhere at sometime in history. It is not in its essence a merely human thing. It is a celestial song, a celestial feast. It is celebration of love and peace that passeth all understanding. It is Kashmiri adaptation of perennial wisdom that is the common property of all traditional civilizations. The modernist rationalist historian or an exoteric exclusivist theologian can’t fully deal with the transcendery phenomenon of Reshiyyat, the former being uncomfortable with the supernatural ambience surrounding it while as the latter being uncomfortable with its inclusivism and sulhi-kul. From the perennialist perspective only a Reshi can authentically talk about Reshiyyat. Reshiyyat aims at self realization which is something very personal and beyond the jurisdiction of any categorical propositional framework. It can’t be discussed, analyzed, proved or refuted in the usual sense of these terms. It is too existential an affair to be handled by abstract philosophical theorizing. It is more akin to a love affair with the Absolute rather than to an abstract philosophy or religious ideology. It is a celestial song, a grand and life long adventure of spirit. It demands transcendence of subject-object duality and that is what metaphysical meaning of tawhid implies. It is a monologue of the Self, heard in silence. It is an unheard melody. It is not a matter of kal (talk) but hal (existential state or taste). It is a concrete living experience. It is synonymous with innocence of becoming and the repose of being. No categorizing conceptual framework could deal with it. Historical/philosophical analytical and ideological appropriations of Reshiyyat may miss its kernel. It is a matter of experience or realization and not of discourse or debate. It demands the whole of our life, a free response to the call from the Absolute.
Societial Dimension of Reshiyyat
Mysticism isn’t a flight into dreamy foggy subjectivity but as manifested in concrete historical milieu is Eternity permeating and informing time as supernatural order suffusing natural order, as heaven showering life giving rain on earth, as Presence transmitting and transforming our baser elements into gold.  It is deeply concerned with this worldly problems also.  It has a deep social concern.  The mystic doesn’t enjoy the solitary bliss of divine vision but like Buddhisatva is concerned with salvation of whole humanity. He returns from his cave, having reached the other shore after crossing the dark night of the soul, into the world of time and space, of evil and suffering, to transform it in accordance with his transcendary vision.  He celebrates mystery and beauty of life and shares woes and sufferings of his fellows and leaves forests to jackals and monkeys and caves to rats.  He in no way denies life or this world at the cost of the other world, but only uplifts it, transforms it. All these characteristics of mysticism are evidenced in Reshiyyat and its history.
Political readings of Sufism need to be cautiously appraised. Sulhi kul of Sufis is not passive resignation in the face of adverse socioeconomic and political realities. Though Sufism as such has no ideological commitments but it seeks realization of the God of justice. Sufi care of the self is not at the cost of the world of form and colour. Both Saivism and Sufism transcend the dichotomy of the sacred and profane and take ample care to beautify the world. Both are conscious of our historicity, our temporality. The world is not left to dogs. It is a belief of Sufis that rulers are first chosen in the higher world and monitored strictly according to divine standards of justice. Sufism need not be dragged into the service of one’s political belief.   Political appropriations of spirituality are at the cost of spirituality itself and always dangerous.
The Sufis have played very important role in the political life of Kashmir.  They have been informal advisors to kings. They have been influential in some important decision making. It is a widely shared belief amongst Kashmiri Muslims  that Sufis play key role in making and marring of the kingdoms. Most rulers from the great Budshah to Farooq Abdulla, the chairperson and former chief minister, paid obeisance to Sufis, living and dead. The Sufis have been, according to popular belief, closely monitoring performance of authorities in terms of rendering social justice.
Mass Appeal of Sufism
Reshi/Sufi thought has deeply impacted on the development of artistic and literary culture of Kashmir. Sufism has become an integral part of Kashmiri artistic sensibility.  Most of the great names in the history of Kashmir Sufism have been great poets. There exists a strong oral literary tradition amongst Sufis. Most Sufis and their students remember  great number of verses by heart and routinely sing Sufi poetry in sama gatherings.  There are numerous Sufi poets in Kashmir. Almost every Sufi writes poetry as if the latter  is a spontaneous expression of a heart tuned to the divine. Sufism has shaped Kashmiri music and given rise to a distinct brand of classical music in Kashmir called Sufiana music All great names in Kashmir literature, until recent times,  have been either Reshis or influenced by Reshiyyat. Poetry in Kashmir is either mystic poetry or sort of romantic poetry that we can subsume under the head of mysticism. Many Kashmiris believe that Habba Khatoon wasn’t married to Yusuf Shah and that their relationship was spiritual or platonic. Even modern poets such as  Mehjoor, Rahi and Kamil  couldn’t afford to extricate themselves from Sufi influences. We need not to be surprised that a mystic verse occurs all of a sudden in their romantic poems. Legends and myths too have been appropriated in mystical terms e.g., five Kashmiri mystic poets have versified the folk story of “Aka-Nandun” and appropriated mystic themes in it. The same is the case with “Heemal Naagraj.” The Gulrez of Maqbool Shah Kralwari, the “Bakawali” of Lassa Khan Fida and such mathnavis and narrative poems as “Heemal Nagraj” appear love poems when superficially read but are “essentially a journey from an outer world towards the inner.” The poet is called gwanimath – a word charged with mystic connotations. Didacticism and certain artistic lacunae don’t generally mar the merit of great mystical poetry of Kashmir.
Sufism in Kashmir embodies one of the most interesting experiments in world spirituality. Here is a test case for integration of different traditions. Reshiyyat appropriates the  central insights of four different religions of the world. It expresses the metaphysical core of all religions. Though Reshiyyat no longer survives in the form of a movement it continues to live in and impact essentially Sufistic tradition of Kashmir. The shrine of Nuruddin is still the most respected shrine of Kashmir. Nuuddin is called Alamdar or standard bearer of Kashmir. There is hardly any room for any sectarian or fundamentalist outlook in a predominantly Sufistic culture. But the unfortunate political legacy has precipitated certain communal problems which have been misappropriated by political forces.
Walter Lawrence wrote about Kashmir in his famous The Valley of Kashmir that no niche is without a shrine here. It may well be said that Sufism is today the most popular tradition in Kashmir. It has resisted all attacks and campaigns from legalistic theological schools in recent years. Almost every Kashmiri is a Sufi in  making. Sufi gatherings and festivals are spread round the year. Kashmir’s prayer food culture, niyaz culture and shrine culture all testify to the deep influence of Sufism. Kashmir is traditionally called as a land of mystics (pir waer). Here even many mentally deranged people are respected because suspected to be majzoob Sufis. Most families have a family saint. Though newer generations are critical of antinomian tendencies in some Sufis and of pseudoSufis for promoting polytheistic interpretation of Sufism. However the fact remains that Kashmir culture remains an essentially mystical culture.
Perennity of Mysticism in Kashmir
Mysticism survives the change of religious guises in the course of history. The Quran makes it clear that God’s words can’t change or don’t change. The eternal element in religions that perennialists designate as Sophia perennis and the Quran subsumes in the notion of Ad-din  is the living element of mysticism. It ensures continuity of religious thought across millennia. Exoteric religion or the form of religions changes but the essence that forms seek to express remains the same. Metaphysics can’t change by definition. God is unchangeable. The Truth is timeless. Metaphysical foundation of all traditional religions is one as perennialists have demonstrated.  In Kashmir different traditions have been living and displacing one another and in a way continue to live in different forms today. In fact one may remark here that traditions hardly ever die in the course of history. They get transformed and their spirit gets adapted to newer vehicles. They continue to influence even after their supposed death substituting traditions. This point is illustrated in the fate of Buddhism in Kashmir.
Reshiyyat and Impact of Buddhism
Buddhism penetrated into the heart of Hinduism and transformed it from within so much so that the greatest Vedantic philosopher Sankara is accused to be a cryptobuddhist. Buddhism changed its guise and continued to flourish in Saivism of Kashmir. Similar remarks could be made and applied in case of Islam. Neither Buddhism nor Saivism died here. Their essential spirit and many peripheral practices  continued to be, in one or the other form, in Rishiyyat or post-Nuruudin Islam in Kashmir. Risshiyyat has appropriated key Buddhistic elements in its practice. A poem composed in honour of Buddha by Sheikh Nuruddin is ample evidence of impact of Buddhist tradition. Buddhist metaphysics of Void, its eightfold path, its four noble truths, its silence towards speculative metaphysical theological issues, its emphasis on orthopraxy rather than any particular view of Ultimate Reality, its pragmatism, its monkish culture, its ahimsa and vegetarianism all could be traced in Risshiyat of Kashmir in the Muslim period. Kashmiris continue to use, both consciously and unconsciously key Buddhist concepts and formulations in their discourse. Kashmiris blame their karma rather than any external factor or force for their suffering. Whenever something untoward happens he cries panien gunah, aamali baden hienz shamat (My bad karma, bitter fruit of bad actions). Many proverbs and folk stories have possible connection with Buddhism. Many traditional Kashmiris seek refuge in God and in Pir which seems to echo Buddhist practice of talking refuge in the Buddha. The world is described as a place of suffering by common Kashmiri (dunya chu tawan). Impermanence of everything is asserted by such common sayings as dunya chu napayidar, yaet kya chu rozwun(nothing stays long in the world). “Permanence” is attributed to Spirit or Absolute only, to Void in Buddhist terms. “Rozuwun chu bas tamsund naw”(God’s name or Essence alone is permanent) is a common saying in Kashmir. One can cite many more similar expressions used in different contexts of which we can find equivalent in Buddhism.
Kashmir remains a land of the Buddha despite centuries of oblivion of Buddhism. Buddhism never really disappeared in Kashmir. It impacted on deeper structures and in subtle ways on Kashmir’s history, religion and culture and its impact continues. It continues to live in Muslim Kashmir, not to speak of Leh etc. Contemporary Muslim Kashmir is not understandable without appreciating impact and living presence of Buddhism.
Islam in Kashmir is a fulfillment of socially engaged egalitarian Buddhist project rather than a new faith that negated the spirit of Buddhism and usurped its throne by force. Buddhism is not history here and its study is not of merely historical importance. It lives in archetypes and as a metaphysical and mystical darsana it can’t be exiled from the collective unconscious of Kashmiris. Of course its distinct identity may be nonexistent now but it doesn’t bother about its distinct identity. Wherever people attempt to conquer suffering and identify desire, the desiring self (nafsi amara) as the culprit) and seek the light (nur in the Quranic terminology) out of existential darkness that constitute samsaric becoming there Buddhism lives. Buddha will have nothing new to teach our Sufis and Sufism, properly understood and shorn of its theological dress, is living and authentic expression of timeless wisdom of which historical Buddhism was one expression.
Buddhism has a very sublime conception of tawhid, understood metaphysico-mystically. Originally it rejected image worship. It completely rejected anthropomorphism in its theology. It guarded against shirk so successfully that even now after centuries of development and even distortion Buddhism refuses to allow any human conception of the Ultimate Reality any validity and strictly advocates silence. Kashmiri Sufi poets have appropriated essential Buddhism in their conceptions of fana, devotion to Unitarianism, and sublime conception of divine transcendence. Qadir Sb Keyna is a Sufi poet who has specifically composed verses on void. “I am the Void, you are the Void/ What shall I speak of the Void.” Lalla’s vaakhs too have echoes of the Buddhist formulation regarding the Void. Nuruddin Reshi, popularly called the Sheikhul Alam (world teacher) has emphasized mingling of the Void and Shiva and thus foregrounding Islamic integral metaphysical formulations that take care of both the positive and the negative divine. Negation of all gods in Islamic terminology is what Buddhism asserts in its doctrine of impermanence of all manifested things. Kashmiri Sufi vision is strongly centred on this negative view of divine. A Kashmiri is fond of using tasbih and forms of collective meditation such as durood and azkar. Relic culture has Buddhist origins. Keeping photographs of pirs and parents and grandparents is a substitute for image culture which flourished from Buddhist times in Kashmir.
Though none can deny differences at theological plane the question is what differentiates Islam from Buddhism in such sharp terms at metaphysical or ethical plane. Metaphysical unity of diverse traditions which claim to be founded on religious experience of its founders has been amply demonstrated by various scholars, most importantly and most cogently and forcefully by perennialists. Theological differences when translated in terms of more foundational metaphysical or esoteric principles (of which theologies are distant and inexact or crude translations) get dissolved and can be easily reconciled. Let us analyze differences between Buddhism and Islam of which such critics as Harun Yaha make much fuss.
The doctrine of rebirth, anatta, absence of theism or “agnosticism,” different doctrines concerning hell and heaven, asceticism or world negation, which are part of Buddhism are found to be irreconcilable with Islam according to most scholars. But a deeper analysis of all these doctrines reveals remarkable convergence with Islamic doctrines. Here a very brief explication of these doctrines could be attempted in the following paragraphs.
There is no such thing as rebirth understood in animistic sense of transmigration of soul or personality in integral traditions according to Comaraswamy. God is the only transmigrant as Shankara put it. There is no reality behind the façade of ego/personality which could survive and transmigrate according to all religions. As long as man is trapped in the illusion that there is really a person So and so he is condemned to suffer and in the symbolic language of Scriptures to rebirth. Really there is no birth, no autonomous soul or self, no death. The Buddha taught suffering bred from illusion of desiring self and a way of escape from it. About the whither and whence of souls he is not concerned. His problem is salvation or conquest over suffering and ignorance. Islam too has not entertained discussion over  those questions which have no bearing on human salvation. Discussion divine Essence, destiny, eschatological states, origin of the world of manifestation are not encouraged. The only problem is correct knowledge or right view which leads to right conduct, to God or Truth.
The doctrine of annata is the integral part of Islamic conception. Only the Spirit, a transindividual faculty, the luminous centre of consciousness/knowledge is immortal or divine element in man. The body and  the soul are subject to sin and suffering. The Spirit transcends all the individualities of existence and is not liable to sin or corruption. The Spirit constitutes our buddha nature. Nirvana is a blissful experience because our Spirit is made of the substance of joy or ananda. Sufism ceaselessly talks about transcendence of nafs or desiring soul. The Quran asserts mortality of the soul (nafs) in clear terms (“for every individual soul is death” it says). All compounded things are mortal but the spirit is not a compounded thing. It is not born and death can’t approach it.
About the posthumous states there also is little difference amongst traditions. The final destination is no destination, the Garden of Essence where there is no separate individual desiring self hankering for pleasures. It is a state of utter contentment where Spirit comes to enjoy its eternal repose. Like parinirvanic state it is a state of unalloyed bliss. All seeking, all questioning is laid to rest. Nirvana is unimaginable as is the joy of contemplating God in the other world. Seeing God one is lifted above all cares and transcends all desires. Nirvana too is a state of cessation of desires. For the soul under divine tuition there are states and stations in hells and heavens according to Buddhism. Islam is in essential agreement with the conception of posthumous life on different planes. Hell is not the everlasting abode of any sinner. The flames of hell are finally cooled. Eternity belongs to God only and not to any created or manifested realm. God is the only Permanent entity. “Everything is annihilated and only God’s face remains” declares the Quran.
The question of theism/atheism loses its significance from the Sufistic metaphysical viewpoint. When doctrine of tawhid is approached as Unity of Existence the question of personal divinity is almost bracketed off. Personal God of Muslim theology is not the Absolute of  Buddhism and Islamic metaphysics. The former is in Divine Relativity and the Absolute transcends it.
It must be acknowledged that Buddhism is less open to the graces emanating from the world of hue and colour. Islam takes a more positive view of the world, of women and sexuality, of seculer pursuits. However Buddhism too, according to Mahayana school, declares samsara and nirvana as one. It too is compatible with worldly pursuits taken up in the sprit of detachment.
Attachment to doctrines, to rituals, to forms is to be transcended for attaining the ultimate goal. Buddhism has no quarrel with any religion, no truck with identity problem. The dispute for superiority of a doctrine or creed is vain from a Buddhist viewpoint thatis committed to no-view or transcendence of all views. Buddha is a mirror with no form of its own. It is the plain light of Spirit that shines inside all of us. Kashmiri Sufis have often used the metaphor of mirror for the arrived souls and for expressing the mystery of creation. The only significant question from Buddhist viewpoint is how free we are from the bondage of desires and attachments to perishing things. All other questions are secondary. Buddhism can enter into a dialogue with world traditions so readily because it has no views of its own to impose. Kashmir as a land of Rishis has been a land of Buddhist Reshis. Reshi movement of Kashmir has appropriated Buddhist wisdom and made it a part of Kashmir culture and heritage.    What emerges from the above discussion is that there is little divergence at deeper mystical-metaphysical plane between Buddhism and Islam. It is no wonder that Islam found a receptive audience in the Buddhist world.  I wonder why some Buddhist leaders of Kashmir  should be pained at Rinchana’s conversion and see it as betrayal of Buddhist community.
The Question of Identity
It is the question of identity of Kashmiris that has been hotly debated in recent times. In the light of perennialist insights this vexed issue could be resolved in a satisfactory way. We can’t write off any period of history or any of the major traditions Kashmir has been hosting in determining its present identity. Here we may turn to Reshiyyat and its revivalist Nuruddin who is acknowledged as the patron saint of the valley by both Hindus and Muslims. He is remembered as Sheikhul Alam or Jagat Guru (The World Teacher) by Muslims and as Shahjanand (The Blessed One) by Hindus. Reshiyyat that can’t be identified with or subsumed under any one historical movement or religious tradition and thus provides a transcendentally grounded identity. Nationalistic and religious appropriations of Kashmiryat (lately introduced term for Kashmiri consciousness and identity) are not quite warranted have been increasingly questioned in recent times. We must note that Kashmir’s identity can’t be defined in isolation from the distinct mystical and metaphysical ethos that has traditionally defined Kashmir. Kashmir has housed or appropriated most of the major world traditions. It has been argued that to its sacred ambience most of great religions and civilizations – Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim – have contributed. Reshiyyat seeks to transcend all local, regional, divisive identities perpetrated by various groups and to be grounded in the universal or cosmic or divine Reshi identity that duly encompasses and appropriates other identities as well.  Shiekh Nuruddin and Lalla, the patron saints of Kashmir, have emphasized transcendence of  all identities of self, caste, race, nationality and even religion taken in its exclusivist sense. In the Sheikh’s universalistic inclusivist humanitarian transcendental cosmopolitan vision of Reshiyyat could alone be true Kashmiriyat grounded. Kashmir has been hosting some of the most important world religions and has been largely unfamiliar with sectarian strife.  Its values of tolerance and non-violence are attributable to its mystical (Reshi) identity. Reshiyyat should be taken not in the narrow historical sense as a cult of Sheikh Nuruddin but in the wider sense as mystical dimension of Kashmir and that alone safeguards its universalism.
Kashmir’s resistance to all sectarian divisive identities and cults, to exclusivist fundamentalist dogmatic theological voices and to this worldly oriented secular visions that are divorced from the wellsprings of transcendence is attributable to its deep mystical ethos. It has been more interested in exploring inner landscape, in the great adventure of consciousness than in looting and plundering the neighboring territories. Believing in the gospel of truth and love it has not worshipped the Mammon of power and it has too readily succumbed to political subjugation from non-natives. Its cosmopolitan consciousness has assimilated Sayyids and Pathans, Mugals and Dogras. It knows no nationalism in the constricted sense of the term. Like India it has been a soft target of all imperialist forces. But it must be noted that the hell modern man is in is because the mystical gospel of love and compassion that has been promulgated by Reshis has been forgotten. In a postmodern globalized transnationalistic world only the kind of identity that mysticism gives could give us an abiding peace. All borders are becoming irrelevant and it is the renunciatory ethic that gives us transcendent grounding and identity that needs to be foregrounded.
Reshiyyat vis-à-vis Hinduism and Islam
It is also to be noted that Hinduism or Buddhism and Islam are not as divergent at deeper level as exotericist theological reading of Islam would have us believe. Originally every human collectivity has been blessed by the presence of prophets according to the Quran. Vedanta, Kashmir Saivisnm and Buddhism are not dualistic or polytheistic but essentially Unitarian or tawhid centred traditions if one grants Sufistic-metaphysical understanding of tawhid as the correct view of it in place of dualistic theological reading.  These are all Absolute-centric tradition and this Absolute is not to be subsumed under the theistic theology. At the level of Absolute (Zat) theism is transcended. Islam and other religions are not opposed in fundamentals of faith as all have originally been recipients of revelation in accordance with the Quranic dictum that all human collectivities have received revelation. Despite distortions and extrapolations in subsequent centuries it is still possible to unearth the core of Tawhid in these religions. Spiritually or mystically one can easily see how all religions are oriented towards God and none allows associating partners with God, the popular “polytheistic” idolatrous interpretation or mask of Hinduism not withstanding as it is quite heterodox reading of originally monistic/monotheistic traditions. Tawhid, according to the Quran, is the one message of all prophets and if we presently see anything that deviates from pristine conception of Unitarianism or Tawhid it is surely a product of misinterpretation according to perennialists. But one must first be sure that some doctrine alleged to be polytheistic/animistic etc. is really so. It needs great mastery in comparative religion to be able to understand different doctrinal formulations in different religions. There are few comparativists in the world, not to speak of Kashmir. Dismissive remarks and generalizations are too readily made betraying one’s ignorance of the traditions in question. Just one instance may suffice here. Abdul Wahid Yaha and  Isa Nuruddin, arguably the greatest metaphysicians and authorities on comparative religion in the 20th century, demonstrate that there is no pantheism, no idealism, no rebirth, no individualist subjectivist mysticism  as ordinarily understood in orthodox Hindu traditions.
Some critics here are needlessly apologetic about using the word Reshi by Sheikh Nuruddin. It suffices to mention that it was the Sheikh  who opted for this terminology and found no need of another term such as Wali for describing himself and his disciples. Had the Shiekh    adopted the strategy suggested by our critics which emphasizes differences instead of common points and wishes to prove that the advent of Islam was a radical break from the traditional past of Kashmir Islam could hardly have been firmly planted in Kashmir. It was great catholic, assimilating and appropriating genius of the great Shiekh to Islamize Reshi movement and it opened natives for Islam. Loud recital of durood, awrad etc. was another strategy to show Islam’s assimilating potential. Thank God Syed Ali Hamdani had no advisors to censure him for these “unIslamic” innovations as otherwise Islam’s diffusion in the masses would have been more difficult.  Our Sufi poets have appropriated pre-Islamic notions and allusions and nothing can be done to edit them from a supposedly Islamic perspective. Sufis are at home in different traditions and don’t feel Islam is polluted or in danger if one appropriates other than Islamic mythological or linguistic resources.
It must be noted that Sufism can’t be practized outside the doctrinal framework of Islam. The fact is that the post-Nurudin Kashmir is Islamic Kashmir that has already appropriated the best of spiritual genius of India. Islamized Reshiyyat appropriates, for all practical purposes, Buddhist, Saivite and other Indian traditional philosophical thought currents and is not to be construed as an appendage to them. By practicing Islam in all its depths, one practices all religions, as Abdul Wahid Yaha (Rene Guenon) said who wrote, despite being a Muslim, many greatly acclaimed and sympathetic work on Hinduism. We must not allow encroaching of Islamic identity of Sufism or present day Reshiyyat in the name of superficial syncretism. It is not for nothing that many of the greatest spiritual minds of the 20th century in the West became Sufis. Muslims don’t need to look here and there in the past for inspiration and metaphysics. Saivism, Buddhism etc. are to be read as historical religions in Kashmir and as independent traditions and not to be confounded with or grafted with or privileged in any sense against the Islamic context and framework of present Reshi thought. We need to respect uniqueness of all traditions and not attempt syncretism.
Some further clarifications are in order to put in right perspective the charge of Brahamanism against Kashmiri Muslims. Sufism isn’t to be confused with Vedantic Islam or Islam in Vedantic dress. Rumi’s or Ibn Arabi’s Unitarian (as distinguished from dualist monotheistic exoteric Islamic) perspective has also been well appropriated in orthodox terms. Islam has shielded diverse theological, mystical and philosophical schools in its history. Its tradition is far more catholic than usually conceded. The catholicity of Sufism is well known and if we grant that Sufism is indeed the esoteric dimension of Islam and not an alien growth on its soil we hardly need to argue for universalism or catholicity of Islam. Some passages of Ibn Arabi would appropriate even seeming atheists in the salvific scheme. In fact much to the delight of many ecumenists Islam transcends theistic/nontheistic binary. Islam is acceptance of truth in its widest sense. It isn’t an interpretation of truth despite the claim of exclusivists to the contrary. Islam doesn’t talk about truth but talks truth. It is witnessing the truth and that truth is the truth of Infinite and All-Possibility. The Quran identifies God as Al- Haqq or the Real. Truth has no face; it has infinite aspects. Whatever partakes of the Reality or truth is affirmed in Islamic shahadah which is translated by the Sufis and perennialists as “There is no reality but Reality.” Islam means surrender to God, Truth and Reality, for God is Al- Haqq.  It is too inclusive to be guilty of any exclusion which Foucault and others fear Thus Islam shields a great heterogeneity and the image of pure monolithic homogenous traditional Islam isn’t vindicated by its history, the protest from certain ultra orthodox sections notwithstanding. To be a Muslim is to be in a placeless place. He declares with Rumi (who is generally recognized by the orthodoxy as one of the greatest representatives of esoterism):
I have expelled duality from myself. I have seen the two worlds as one
Let me seek one, say one, know one and desire one
He the First, He the Last, He the Manifest, He the Hidden./Without Him and other than Him  nothing else I know.
I am drunk with the soul of love and the two worlds have passed from my hand
Further remarks seem to be warranted here for elaborating Sufi view of man- God relationship which has been misinterpreted by exoteric critics of Islam and Hinduism. The first premise of the doctrine of unity to which Rumi and the Ibn Arabi adhered is the vision of God in man, be it male (Shams in case of Rumi) or female (Nizam in case of Ibn Arabi) before which one feels one’s nothingness. It is after this vision of God, and love for it, that one strives to attain God Himself and finally becomes His vision, His proof (Ali), His testimony, Shahid (Hallaj) or His manifestation (Ibn Arabi), the perfect man. God and the world/man according to the Quran aren’t two poles apart. God is the other, the ideal pole of man as far as the latter is the Spirit or the abode of the Spirit (God having breathed the Spirit in him). Man as an ego or soul, as creature is of course not one with God. Ibn Arabi for whom God is the essence of all existence including man was nevertheless emphatic in maintaining that man can never become God and vice versa. Islam rejects hulul in no uncertain terms. It is only when the ego is gone in the experience of fana and only God remains that An’al Haq (I am the truth can be asserted). In fact this claim is made by the Spirit which is in man but is not his. The Quran’s conception of Unity perceives both God and the man as the two aspects of reality by underlying the apparent duality of God and the world/man on the one hand and their essential oneness on the other. This is best manifested in the Quranic conception of Jesus, who was a man like any other human being but he was at the same time the word of God (kalimatullah) or the one in whom God had breathed His own spirit (Ruhullah). The Sufi conception of the perfect man or Insan-i-Kamil also problematizes the absolutization of man-God polarity. The question of man’s relation to God is better approached from the Absolute-relative rather than the Lord-creature framework as the perennialist metaphysicians have argued. Theological controversies are resolvable at the metaphysical plane and it is losing sight of this point that has contributed to unwarranted dualistic polemical quibbles between Sufis and different theological schools and between Hindus and Muslims. The Quran emphasizes both God’s transcendence  as well as His immanence in creation (man/world). A typical verse in this connection is “Nothing is like Him and He is the Hearing, the Seeing.”
How perennialists reread theological differences may be shown with reference to the notion of Avatara in Hindu traditions. As Schuon explains:

Muhammad was not and could not be an Avatara; but this is not really the question because it is perfectly obvious that Islam is not Hinduism and notably excludes any idea of incarnation (hulul); quite simply, and using Hindu terminology, which is the most direct or the least inadequate, we would reply that a certain Divine aspect took on under particular cyclic circumstances a particular earthly form, something in full conformity with what the Envoy of Allah testified as to his own nature…,
In any case, if the attribution of divinity to an historical personage is repugnant to Islam, that is because its perspective is centred on the Absolute as such, as is show for instance in the conception of the final leveling before the Judgment: God alone in this conception remains ‘living’ and all else is leveled in universal death including the supreme Angels, and so also even the ‘Spirit’ (Er-Ruh), the divine manifestation at the luminous centre of the cosmos (Schuon,1963:90-91).
For Schuon (Isa Nuruddin) Islam is the way of intelligence; it is simply objective perception of the Reality. Allah means Reality, Truth as such which both transcendent and immanent. Islam in its deepest meaning is ‘that which is everywhere’ And ‘that which has always been’(Schuon, 1963:104) and the Prophet represents both universality and primordiality (Schuon, 1963:104). Perennialist perspective conceives Muhammad as Logos, as pole of existence, as one through whom God is known, manifested. As a spiritual principle the Prophet is not only the Totality of which we are separate parts or fragments, he is also the Origin in relation to which we are so many deviations; in other words the Prophet as norm is not only the ‘Whole Man’ but also ‘Ancient Man’(Schuon, 1963:103). Thus to be as Muslim doesn’t require belief in a certain proposition, a certain narrative or an ideology. It transcends all linguistic and conceptual categories and thought constructions. Metaphysics isn’t absolutization of certain viewpoint or aspect to the exclusion of other possible perspectives. It is the vision of totality of the Real as such and this is achieved by transcendence of merely rational faculty, by becoming a mirror that will reflect the truth, the Essence. Intuition of the mystic isn’t subject to any critique such as that of deconstruction. It is prereflective prelignuistic apprehension.
Schuon explains the limitations of the theological approach and thus of all those statements made by exoteric authorities while appraising doctrines of other traditions.
The ordinary monotheist theologies are hardly capable of giving adequate account of theism, owing to the fact that they operate only with the utterly inadequate alternatives of the “created and the uncreated.” For these theologies there is only God and the world m the creator and the created, whereas inn reality, there is first of all the Absolute and the relative, and then within Relativity itself, the Uncreated Creator, not the Uncreated in itself and all creation… .The alternative in question could be transposed to the Divine level and the distinction between the “created” and the “Uncreated” expressed instead as a distinction between the’ “personal God” and the “impersonal Divinity”, and hence between “Being” and “Beyond-Being”( Schuon, 1963: 185-86).
Schuon doesn’t see any essential contradiction between Muslim and Hindu eschatologies unlike exoterism that finds them simply irreconcilable. He finds the meeting point between the monotheistic eschatology of Islam and Indian “transmigrationism” in the concepts of Limbo and Hell and also in the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ in which the being isn’t however invested with a new individuality (Schuon, 1969:139). Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon and other perennialists reject popular animistic conception of rebirth as do they reject exotericist conception of afterlife, of perpetuity of hell or eternal damnation.
Sufism and nondualistic Saivism are, from the perennialist viewpoint, subsumable under the rubric of common traditional metaphysics as both share the conceptions of Absolute and nondualism. Both advocate almost analogous schemes of descent of the Absolute towards the increasingly grosser or impure states of existence. Both share a realist ontology taking the world of phenomena as real rather than illusory as they share the understanding of Divine Relativity or Maya. We see affirmative transcendence in both of them. Both recognize the importance of diverse approaches to God realization. Both are against a renunciatory life negating ascetism as they believe in metaphysical transparency of phenomena. Sufistic Unitarian perspective harbours an epistemology that could readily appropriate Kashmir Saivistic doctrine of recognition or pratibijna. Both see man as microcosmos. Mystical disciplines or meditational techniques and spiritual anthropology and psychology in both traditions show a remarkable convergence. Exoteric/esoteric division and a respect for exoteric formulations are noticeable in both traditions. One can also discern convergence in metaphysics of Beauty between the two traditions.  However if we approach the two traditions from purely theological viewpoint certain differences are easily noticeable. Theology and metaphysics are confusingly mixed in usual expositions of Saivism. A lack of philosophical rigour in theistic appropriations of  Saivism is evident. Panentheistic reductionist tendency in most of modern expositions of nondualistic Saivism compromises orthodox or traditional character of Saivism. There is a need of approaching Saivism from the perennialist perspective to put Saivism in the proper context of traditional Indian darsanas. Dualistic schools of Saivism are to be seen as stopping short of pure metaphysics. We need to reject against fashionable uniformitarian syncretistic approach to Saivism and Sufism and attempt to situate them in their respective traditions of Vedantic and Islamic frameworks that respects their unique character and different theologies while also emphasizing their shared metaphysics.
Reshiyyat and Environmentalism
Perennialists have made major strides in ecological reading of the sacred scriptures. The great relevance of perennialist perspectives lies in pointing out metaphysical errors of modern man and science that have contributed to ecological crisis. However they have been compelled to lean primarily on premodern traditional civilizations while showing the concrete examples of practice of ecological wisdom. I think we could point out to Kashmir as living example of traditional outlook that concretely embodies ecological consciousness even today. A very important dimension of Reshi thought is its ecological consciousness and that makes it vitally relevant to the world that has lost ecological health. The Reshi’s aversion to causing injury to all animate beings including plants, insects and animals; their concern for conserving  forests; dissuading hunters from hunting hangul; personal care of pets, tamed animals and birds; planting trees throughout the length and breadth of Kashmir – all these things show how deeply  eco-conscious has been the Reshi movement.  Long before ecological crises occurred Shiekh Nuruddin had anticipated it.  Mysticism provides the only valid ideological framework for practizing sound ecology.  Kashmir has traditionally been ecologist’s paradise. How ecological consciousness has been achieved in Kashmir is a forgotten chapter of history of ecology and it is again our duty to present ecological face of Kashmiri Reshiyyat to the world.  Shiekh Nuruddin could well be proposed as patron saint of ecology.
Appraisal of Major Criticisms of Kashmir Mysticism
Kashmir’s mystical credentials have been questioned only very recently by some circles. Progressivist writers found fault with Kashmir’s mystical bias. More recently some exotericist theologians have questioned authenticity of Kashmiri Muslim identity as they believe mysticism to be alien to Islamic tradition. Sheikh Nuruddin has been seen as social reformer and preacher rather than a mystic. To these points one may reply that for good or worse Kashmiris are mystically oriented. I think it is for good in the age that swears by pluralism and is fed up with self styled advocates of God. It is gross misreading of the text of Sheikh Shruks and history to write off the mystic in the great Sheikh. Sufism understood as spiritual dimension of Islam is inalienable from it. Nothing in Islam makes sense except in light of this spiritual dimension. AntiSufi rhetoric is modernist heresy. It is good to censure excesses and perversions and misuses of Sufism in Kashmir but to reject the esoteric in the name of literalism and supposed fidelity to scripture is quite unacceptable. Sufism is the metaphysical face or even basis of Islam. History of Islam is largely the history of its saints and philosophers and mystically oriented ulema. The most illustrious thinkers of Islam have been influenced by Sufism. Islamic art and architecture is incomprehensible without the knowledge of Sufi symbolism. Kashmir’s arts and crafts express Sufi symbolism. From turban to carpets everywhere we see symbolism in work. No wonder the Dargahs of Hazratbal, of Makhdoom Saheb and of Sheikh Nuruddin continue to attract millions of Kashmiris today.
Mysticism in Kashmir has been attempting to obliterate class and creedal divisions. Shrines have been acting as public guest houses providing food and shelter to anyone regardless of class. Shrines act as cohesive and integrating centers. They are retreat centers. Today newer generations nostalgically recall their immediate past that is believed to incarnate certain values of simplicity, honesty, purity of conduct and thought which we usually associate with saintly life.
One may point out that class analysis of Kashmir society is yet to be made. But one needs to note that Reshis were not complicit with ruling class. Neither were they associated with the rich. It might be objected that they were parasitic on common people’s properties. This too is contravened by history. It is only recently that a class of beggers and begger priests has been thriving in the name of past saints.
Mysticism is a million dollar industry in Kashmir according to critics. Of course abuse of mysticism is a huge industry in itself but we need to note that mysticism contributes significantly to Kashmir economy. Shrines are amongst the most visited tourist spots. Local tourism is largely concentrated on shrines. Much donation money is with Wakf Board which could be used to finance thousands of welfare projects if steps are taken in this direction. The Board could well experiment with a variation of interest free Grammein banking or Islamic banking that could potentially benefit thousands. Prayer food culture is a huge industry in Kashmir that contributes to cohesion of social bonds as well.
There is a pir class, occultist class and the class of so-called majzoobs that largely exploit the name of mysticism and contribute to discrediting it in the eyes of many. A large number of social drop outs and parasites support their living by masquerading as mystics. Salafi onslaught against abuses of mysticism in Kashmir is not quite unwarranted. Illiteracy and gullibility of local people contributes to their exploitation at the hands of many dabblers in the spirit business, black magic and the like.
Mystic class continues to be among the most influential one in today’s Kashmir though some mystics claim that there is hardly any genuine mystic living today. Too many are masquerading as mystics as mysticism sells like anything and could be resorted as a means of livelihood by all kinds of charlatans.
Mysticism is the best antidote to communalism and sectarianism. Communal violence does flare up occasionally. But it is ironic to note that the religious group playing the card of mysticism (Berelvees) is also the most dogmatic in certain issues and highly rejectionist and exclusivist. There are few traceable or accessible authentic mystics and mystical thinkers in Kashmir today. The serious and systematic study of mysticism is yet to be a prerogative of any academic institution. Masses are either simplistic believers in claimants of mystical power or alienated from the founts of traditional mystical wisdom on account of propaganda from certain antimystical quarters.
Reshiyyat vs. Humanism
Reshiyyat is often labelled as humanistic tradition . This is incorrect because humanism is a loaded term that arose in the Western against theocentricism of traditional Christianity. Reshiyyat though stressing the dignity of man as a mystical and metaphysical worldview is an antithesis of humanism which severs all ties with transcendence and defies man at the cost of God.. It shifts the emphasis from Being to being, from Nature to man, from universalism to individualism, from metaphysics to science. It rejects heart in favour of head. In place of traditional pontifical man it puts Promethean Faustian man. Man is considered as an end in himself. It takes man for granted as he stands, and takes man the world of man’s experience as it has come to seem to him. Man is defined as or identified with  Ego. Science and reason are its idols. Supernatural or higher degrees of reality or vertical dimension is rejected by such different varieties of humanism as Huxley’s evolutionary humanism, Sartre’s existential humanism, secular theological humanism or scientific humanism, Marxist humanism. Humanism  in Guenon’s words  implies a pretension to bring everything down to purely human elements and thus to exclude everything of a supraindividual order. Sartre thus gives a representative humanist statement “There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity… This is humanism, because we remind  man that there is no legislator but himself: that he himself, thus abandoned must decide for himself” It surrenders not to God but to human finitude and severes all ties with transcendence.  Humanistic theologian by identifying the Truth of God with this worldly truth degrades the essence of religion.
Contemporary Significance of Reshiyyat
Regarding contemporary significance of Reshiyyat which has been challenged by certain modernists it may be remarked that for modern man salvation and recovery of meaning could be possible only through the mystical. If theology no longer convinces and philosophy stands challenged from various quarters it is mysticism alone that fits the bill – it is no wonder that many (post)modern writers and philosophers are mystically oriented. Reshiyyat as a formulation of timeless perennial philosophy can’t be dead as long as man remains man in need of transcendence. Reshis have not been inflexible with regard to any dietary, juristic, theological, meditational prescriptions. No institutional framework is indispensable for practising mysticism. All of us who take transcendence or sacred seriously are Reshis or would-be-Reshis, to a little or greater extent. Man is condemned to be a meaning seeking or self transcending  creature. He is bound to transcend himself and look heavenward if he is not to be reduced to beastly status. God is the ideal pole of man. He is our “ultimate concern.” Any search for fuller and larger life, a more creative life, a more celebratory and more authentic life, is basically a search for God as God is really another name for Life. This is the purport of the Quranic name al-Hayy for God. God is our Environment (al-Muhit) as the Quran says. We live by transcendence and breath it. Transcendence is accessible through search for values. According to Plato anyone who chooses to seek beauty, truth and goodness (the three defining attributes of God) would qualify as a lover of wisdom or mystic. Man is properly called human only when he seeks to realize these values. In broader terms we can say that we are all travellers on the path (salikeen) of Reshiyyat. All travelers on the path of life who have faith in life and seek to beautify it are in a way Reshis.
There is something about Kashmir mysticism whether Saivist or Sufistic that  makes it quite interesting and relevant for modern man. Its attitude of affirmative transcendence, affirmation of world and life, despite its renunciatory ethic or asceticism characterizes Kashmiri mysticism. If Shiva is all or God is the only existent then by affirming life we affirm God. The body too is a temple of God and thus its needs can not be ignored. There is no escapism but positive acceptance of Immanent existence. “Don’t torment your body with the pangs of thirst and hunger/Whenever it feels exhausted take care of it.” For a non-dualist Reshi like Lalla there is no difference between “I” and the “other”(par te pan); immanence and transcendence, universal and individual; consciousness, subjective and objective reality being but aspects of the  ultimate reality  which is indivisible.
Reshiyyat is not dead or history; it continues to live as it has always been living in the unconscuious or preconscious of Kashmiris. It continues to inform our movement forward in history and every aspect of Kashmiri culture and spirituality. “Shiekh Nuruddin’s verse dominates preacher’s sermon at pulpit, it has been lulled on the strings of Sufiana musician, it along with Lal waakh devises the introductory tunes of light  music Chakri, it is quoted by the house wife  when the souring prices exhaust has small purse and it is usually quoted by common voters against the monkeys of such ruling cheques which misrule the country. The piercing sarcasm against Mulla retains its freshness.”  He is living in the language that he helped to shape.  One could well transpose the words of French president de Gaul about Sartre on him and assert, “Shiekh is Kashmir.”
Eco-conscious earthly “matriarchal” socially conscious world-view of Reshiyyat is presently being advocated as a remedy of so many ills that affect not only Kashmir but also the whole globe. The need is to interpret Reshi message in contemporary language. This contemporary language that postmodern man can understand is not the language of moralism or theology but the wordless language of mysticism. Only the religion of the heart, whose language is silence, is experiential and existential and is synonymous with selfless service of man could be the religion of (post)modern man and in the context of Kashmir what else besides Reshiyyat, which after Nuruddin is an adaptation of Islamic esoteric kernel, could provide it.  Sufism of which Reshiyyat now is a tested historical manifestation has the best resources to address our post-Nietzschean postmodern ages that claims to be posttheological.
Notes
1    The emotional element nowhere plays a bigger part than in the “mystical” form of religious thought. Contrary to the prevalent opinion he declares that mysticism, from the very fact that it is inconceivable apart from the religious point of view, is quite unknown in the East. (Guenon, 1945:124) “The influence of sentimental element obviously impairs the intellectual purity of the doctrine. This falling away from the standpoint of metaphysical thought occurred generally and extensively in the Western world because there feeling was stronger than intelligence and this has reached its climax in modern times.” (Guenon, 1945:125) Modern theistic appropriations of mystical experience by choosing to remain at the level of theology and not cognizing the metaphysical point of view (that brilliantly and convincingly appropriates such apparently divergent varieties of mystical and metaphysical realization as that of Buddhism and Christianity) cannot claim total truth as theology itself cannot do so.  And it is not always possible to fully translate metaphysical doctrines in terms of theological dogmas. Antimetaphysical anthropomorphism  comes to the fore in this realm of individual variations. Reshiyyat is thus misdescribed as mystical. However it has been almost universally used to describe it by scholars. So we may follow the accepted though inaccurate description while at the same time qualify it by foregrounding the metaphysical content of it and its supraindividual and intellectual character
References
Guenon, Rene, Rene Guenon, An Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines, 2000 (1945) Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi,
Hagloo, R. L., The State in Medieval Kashmir, Manohar Publishers , New Delhi, 2000.
Khan, Ishaq, Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of Rishis, Manohar Publishers, New Delhi,1994.
Lawrence, Walter, The Valley of Kashmir.
Rafique, A. Q., Sufism in Kashmir, Varanasi, Bharatiyya Publishing House, n.d.
Schuon, Frithjof. Dimensions of Islam trans. T.N. Townsend George Allen & Unwin, 1969
Schuon, Frithjof, Understanding Islam .George AlIen &Unwin, 1963,
Wani, M A., Islam in Kashmir Oriental Publishing House, Srinagar, 2005.

Published as theme paper by the Institute of Kashmir Studies, Kashmir University (2010)

The Raga Pravaham

 नज्ञावचश्च शून्यानि संख्या: कटपयादय:|
मिश्रे तूपान्त्यहल् संख्या न चचिन्त्यो हलस्वर:||

nanyāvacaśca śūnyāni saṃkhyāḥ kaṭapayādayaḥ
miśre tūpāntyahal saṃkhyā na ca cintyo halasvaraḥ

THE MELAKARTA SYSTEM OF SOUTH INDIA

The first chakra is named Indu which means moon owing to the fact that the earth has only one moon.

The second chakra is called Netra owing to the fact that we have two eyes.

The third chakra is named agni due the existence of 3 agnis according to our scriptures           (namely fire, lightning and sunlight )

The fourth chakra is called Veda as the Vedas are four.

The fifth chakra is called Baana owing to the 5 arrows used by Kamadeva.

The sixth chakra is called Rutu after the six seasons in nature.

The seventh chakra is called Rishi after the Saptarshis.

The eight chakra is known as Vasu after the eight sons of Ganga.

The ninth chakra is known as Brahma due to the existence of nine brahmas

The tenth chakra is called Disi due to the 10 directions.

The eleventh chakra is called Rudra after the 11 Rudras.

The twelfth chakra is called Aditya after the 12 Adityas.

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Raga Pravaham

Raga Pravaham is an outstanding compilation work done by Kalaimamani Smt. D.Pattammal with the support of her husband Dr. M.N.Dhandapani.

They have provided the Arohanam and Avarohanam for over 5000 ragas classified into the representative mela ragas and chakras, referring to over 45 books in 5 languages.

Dr. M.N. Dhandapani and Mrs. D. Pattammal have used 59 sources in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and English in their compilation work. Each of the sources have been given a symbol like A, D, AG, etc and these symbols are marked against each Arohanam and Avarohanam. Whenever, any raga has more than one Arohanam and Avarohanam and you want to know the source, please refer the Bibliography to identify the source.

Late Sangeetha Kalanidhi Sri. Ramanatha Iyer was an initiator, motivator and the guiding force for this monumental work.

This will benefit all mucisians, musicologists, teachers, students of carnatic music and music lovers.

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Please click image above to read the book

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Mathematics of carnatic music

Mathematics Miscellany MATHEMATICS IN CARNATIC MUSIC         Music is an extremely subjective experience.  Some of the sound waves that reach the human ear are perceived to be pleasant while others are unpleasant and merely termed as noise.  Thus, music is the art of combining sounds with a view to beauty of expression of emotion.  Musically good melodies are thus harmonious in character.     Mathematics is the basis of sound wave propagation, and a pleasant sound consists of harmony arising out of musical scales in terms of numerical ratios, particularly those of small integers.   Mathematics is music for the mind while music is mathematics for the soul.      A suitable permutation and combination of some basic notes gives rise to melodious music which enthrals and transports one to a new enjoyable experience.  While theoretically infinite possibilities can be thought of, only 279 had been in vogue. In Carnatic music, seven notes or swaras as they are called, form the foundation of the various permutations and combinations. Theoretically, one can mathematically think of 7! = 5040 possibilities.  But only 72 of them, called Janaka ragas, have been analyzed and found to have practical usage from the melody point of view.  A raga thus has a set of rules that specify what notes of the octave must be used under the given rule and how  to move from one note to the other. A Melkartha raga must necessarily have Sa and Pa and one of the Mas, one each of the Ris and Ga’s, and one each of the Dhas and Nis, and further Ri must precede Ga and Dha must precde Ni, and thus we have 2 x 6 x 6 =72 possibilities of the Melakartha ragas.     It was Venkata Makhi who first thought of classifying these 72 ragams or combinations of swaras, and later Govindacharya adopted a slightly different combination.  The basic swaras in Carnatic music and those that correspond to the basic notes in Western music are as follows:                          Western system:   C    D   E   F   G   A   B                          Carnatic music:    Sa  Ri  Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni In the equal tempered system of Western music, the successive notes have a ratio of twelfth root of 2 as shown below:                             Note                  Ratio                               C                       1                   Minor second C    1.059463                   Major second C    1.122462                   Minor third           1.189207                   Major third           1.259921                   Perfect fourth       1.334840                 Augmented fourth  1.414214                   Perfect fifth          1.498307                   Minor sixth           1.587401                   Major sixth           1.681793                   Minor seventh      1.781797                   Major seventh      1.887749 In the Carnatic music system also, just as in the Western music system, some of the swaras have small variants, and according to some scholars, 22 such notes are possible with the ratios as given below to the fundamental Sa.                    Swara              Ratio           Frequency I Hz                       Sa                    1                     240                       Ri1                32/31                 248                       Ri2                16/15                 256                       Ri3              10/9                     266.6                       Ri4               9/8                      270                       Ga1              32/27                   284.4                       Ga2              6/5                       288                       Ga3              5/4                       300                       Ga4             81/64                    303.7                       Ma1              4/3                      320                       Ma2             27/20                   324                       Ma3             45/32                   337.5                       Ma4             64/45                   341.3                       Pa                 3/2                     360                       Dha1             128/81                379                       Dha2               8/5                   384                       Dha3               5/3                   400                       Dha4              27/16                405                       Ni1               16/9                   426.6                       Ni2                9/5                    432                       Ni3               115/8                 450                       Ni4                31/16                465 But according to some scholars, Ma has only 2 variants while Ri, Ga, Dha and Ni have only 3 variants each while Sa and Pa are fixed, and Venkata Makhi has followed this system in his classification of the ragas in vogue.  Although many ragas might have been in existence earlier, it was first Venkata Makhi who made a classification of the ragas by allotting them a number in what is called the Melakartha system, by adding prefix to the existing ones wherever necessary, following the katapayaaadi system of numbering; he considered a raga to be a Melakartha raga only if all the 7 swaras were present in the regular order in the ascending as well as descending mode.  Govindacharya, however, allowed some freedom in this respect, and permitted deviation of the order as well as absence of any particular swara in either mode provided all the 7 swaras were present.       Melakartha ragas have a swara pattern, with arohanam and avarohanam, the latter being the mirror image of the former, and both together make a musical palindrome!      The 72 Melakartha ragas, according to Venkata Makhi, consisting of all the 7 swaras in the ascending as well as descending mode in proper order, are called Janaka ragas or parent ragas, and other ragas which arose out of them with absence of one or more of the 7 swaras were called Janya ragas (offspring ragas).  The Janya ragas are derived from the 72 fundamental set by the permutation and combination of various ascending and descending notes, and matematically about 3000 such janya ragas are possible. The 72 Melakartha raga system was responsible for the transformation  of the raga system of carnatic music.  Many new ragas came into existence and were popularised by great musical savants like Saint Thyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar etc. and many different kinds of musical compossitions were developed with different structural arrangements. The musical forms included Varnam, Kriti, Padam, Javali, Tillana, Swarangal, Swarajati etc.      The genius of the musician consists in how he can move to intermediate frequencies between those specified by the seven basic notes, and create microtones melodious and pleasing to the ear, called gamakas.  (When one talks of the intermediate frequencies one is reminded of the Raman Effect discovered by the renowned Indian Nobel Laureate in Physics, Sir C.V.Raman.  While studying the spectra of fluids, he found that there were frequencies intermediate between those predicted according to Bohr’s postulates, and he was able toexplain them as being due to intermediate energy levels arising out of further degrees of freedom of the fluid molecules giving rise to vibrational, rotational etc. spectra).           (The list of the Melakartha ragas and the number of the Melakartha to which the raga belongs is decided according to the katapayaadi system of numeration as prevalent in ancient India, which is as follows:      The following verse found in Śaṅkaravarman’sSadratnamāla explains the mechanism of the system.  नज्ञावचश्च शून्यानि संख्या: कटपयादय:| मिश्रे तूपान्त्यहल् संख्या न चचिन्त्यो हलस्वर:|| nanyāvacaśca śūnyāni saṃkhyāḥ kaṭapayādayaḥ miśre tūpāntyahal saṃkhyā na ca cintyo halasvaraḥ Translation: na (न), nya (ञ) and a (अ)-s i.e. vowels represent zero. The (nine) integers are represented by consonant group beginning with ka, ṭa, pa, ya. In a conjunct consonant, the last of the consonants alone will count. A consonant without vowel is to be ignored. Explanation The assignment of letters to the numerals is as per the following arrangement. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ka क kha ख ga ग gha घ nga ङ ca च cha छ ja ज jha झ nya ञ ṭa ट ṭha ठ ḍa ड ḍha ढ ṇa ण ta त tha थ da द dha ध na न pa प pha फ ba ब bha भ ma म – – – – – ya य ra र la ल va व śha श sha ष sa स ha ह – – Consonants have numerals assigned as per the above table. For example, ba (ब) is always three 3 whereas 5 can be represented by either nga (ङ) or ṇa (ण) or ma (म) or śha (श). All stand-alone vowels like a (अ) and ṛ (ऋ) are assigned to zero 0. In case of a conjunct, consonants attached to a non-vowel will not be valueless. For example, kya (क्या) is formed by k (क्) + ya (य) + a (अ). The only consonant standing with a vowel is ya (य). So the corresponding numeral for kya (क्या) will be 1. There is no way of representing Decimal separator in the system. Indians used the Hindu-Arabic numeral system for numbering, traditionally written in increasing place values from left to right. This is as per the rule aṅkānām vāmato gati (अङ्कानाम् वामतो गति) which means numbers go from left to right.      The moment the name of a raga is given, the above system is used to find the Melakartha of that raga.  Sometimes to fix the correct number, the name of the raga is slightly changed, as for instance, Sankarabharanam is called Dheerasankarabhaaranam, and Kalyani is called Mechakalyani and so on.     Let us consider some examples.  Take Mayamalava Gowla. Here, Ma stands for 5 and ya stands for 1. So, the number we get is 51, and as per the reversing rule, the number of the Melkartha is 15.     Then, consider Simhendra Madhyamam. Sa stands for 7, and Ma for 5.  The number is 75 and on reversing it is 57, which is the Melakartha of this raga. (The second consonant ha has number 8, and on reversal would give 87 as melakartha raga which is nonexistent. Hence, ma is taken in simha as the second consonant).     Now, consider Vachaspati. Va stands for 4, and cha for 6, and the number is 46 which on reversing gives 64 as its Melakartha. Sa and Pa are taken as fixed for all the Melakartha ragas.      The question arises which variant of Ri, Ga, Ma, Dha, Ni figures in what parent raga.        For ragas whose Melakartha number is 36 or less, M1 is chosen and for ragas whose Melakartha number is 37 or more, M2 is chosen.     Regarding the choice of the variant of Ri, Ga, Dha and Ni, this is decided with a little bit of mathematics.  This method, which was perhaps prevalent earlier was refined to generate the entire raga by Ajay Sathyanath in April 1999 and published under the title “Mathematical Fundas in Indian Classical Music” and this gives an elegant method to determine the variants needed. (cf. http://ajaysat.tripod.com/carnatic.html ) Step 1: First, find the number of the Melakartha raga using the Katapayaadi system.  Suppose it is K. Step 2:  Consider [[K/6]], called the ceiling function of K/6, that is, the integer which is equal to greater than K/6.  e.g. Suppose K is 31.  Then 31/6=5.1…, and [[K/6]] is 6.  If K is 30, then [[K/6]] = 5. If [[K/6]] > 6, then take mod 6 of that number arrived at. Step 3: Now, consider K modulo 6.  Since this number will lie between 0 and 5 only, we make this lie between 1 and 6 by setting 0 as 6.  If K is 31, then 31 = 1 mod 6.  So, we consider only 1 for the procedure to be followed as outlined below. Step 4: Consider a 3 x 4 upper triangular matrix, as shown below:                                1          2          3                               ….        4          5                               ….     …..         7, and we identify these elements as: 1        = (1,1) 2        = (1.2) 3        = (1,3) 4        = (2.2) 5        = (2.3) 6        = (3,.3) The matrix can now be written for convenience as :                     (1,1)     (1,2)     (1,3)                      ….       (2,2)     (2,3)                      ….        ……    (3,3)   In the example considered in step 2, we have the number 6 corresponding to (3,3), we have Ra3 and Ga 3. Step 5: In step 3, we had 1 as residue after dividing 31 by 6.  So, 1 corresponds to (1,1) as indicated above. So, the swaras chosen are Dha1 and Ni3. 31 < 36, and hence we have Ma1. So, the raga characteristic of Melakartha raga 31 (Yagapriya) is:            Sa  Ra3 Ga3 Ma1 Dha1 Ni1 and S  in arohana and            Sa Ni1 Dha1 Ma1, Ga3, Ra3 and S in avarohana. Ex.:Now, let us consider another example: consider Shubhapanthuvarali: Sha stands for 5 and bha stands for 4, so, the number is 54, which on reversal gives 45. 45 > 36, and hence we have Ma2. To sum up, if [[K/6]] is as defined above, then in this case [[45/6]] =8 = 2 mod 6. 2 corresponds to (1,2), and hence we have Ri1 and Ga2.   45 = 3 mod 6.   3 corresponds to (1,3) in the matrix, and so, we have Dha1 and Ni3. To sum up: (i)                Find the Melakartha number of the raga with the katapayaadi system. Suppose it is K. (ii)              If K = 36 or <36, then we have Ma1. If K >37, we have Ma2. (iii)            Consider [[K/6]] = a. If a is > 6, take mod 6 of a, suppose it is a*, then find the element in the matrix corresponding to a* which lies between 1 and 6 only. That will decide Ri and Ga. (iv)            Now, consider K = b mod 6.  Find the element corresponding to b in the matrix, and that will decide Dha and Ni.  A list of the Melakartha (Janaka) ragas as well as the janya ragas under them and also those not associated with them or whose scales are not yet added is given in appendix 1.

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