MDPI - Publisher of Open Access Journals

24 pages, 2062 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

The Divine Feminine Presence in Ibn ‘Arabi and Moses de Leon

by Julia Alonso

Religions 2021, 12(3), 156; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12030156 - 27 Feb 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 7196

This paper is an investigation of the divine feminine power as depicted in the texts of Hispanic mystics from Sufi, Hebrew, and Christian traditions. This work is intended to investigate the origin and subsequent development of a transcendent reconciliation of polarity, its diverse manifestations, and the attainment of a common goal, the quintessential of the Perfect Human Being. The architect of the encounter that leads to Union is “Sophia”. She is the Secret. Only those who are able to discern Her own immeasurable dimension may contemplate the Lady who dwells in the sacred geometry of the abyss. Sophia is linked to the hermetic Word, She is allusive, clandestine, poetic, and pregnant with symbols, gnostic resonances, and musical murmurs that conduct the “traveler” through dwellings and stations towards an ancient Sophianic knowledge that leads to the “germinal vesicle”, the “inner wine cellar”, to the Initium, to the Motherland. She is the Mater filius sapientae, who through an alchemical transmutation becomes a song to the absent Sophia whose Presence can only be intuited. Present throughout the Creation, Sophia is the axis around which the poetics of the Taryuman al-ashwaq rotates and the kabbalistic Tree of Life is structured. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Spanish Mysticism)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

12 pages, 292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Ontology, Arrangement, and Appearance of Paradise in Castilian Kabbalah in Light of Contemporary Islamic Traditions from al-Andalus

by Avishai Bar-Asher

Religions 2020, 11(11), 553; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11110553 - 26 Oct 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2931

Abstract

This study is a comparative analysis of the appearances of the lower and upper Paradise, their divisions, and the journeys to and within them, which appear in mystical Jewish and Islamic sources in medieval Iberia. Ibn al-‘Arabī’s vast output on the Gardens of divine reward and their divisions generated a number of instructive comparisons to the eschatological and theosophical writing about the same subject in early Spanish Kabbalah. Although there is no direct historical evidence that kabbalists knew of such Arabic works from the region Catalonia or Andalusia, there are commonalities in fundamental imagery and in ontological and exegetical assumptions that resulted from an internalization of similar patterns of thought. It is quite reasonable to assume that these literary corpora, both products of the thirteenth century, were shaped by common sources from earlier visionary literature. The prevalence of translations of religious writing about ascents on high, produced in Castile in the later thirteenth century, can help explain the sudden appearance of visionary literature on Paradise and its divisions in the writings of Jewish esotericists of the same region. These findings therefore enrich our knowledge of the literary, intellectual, and creative background against which these kabbalists were working when they chose to depict Paradise in the way that they did, at the time that they did. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Spanish Mysticism)

Search Results (2)

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI

Saved Queries

Search Filter Reset All

Years

Feature Papers

Subjects

Journals

Article Types

Countries / Regions

Search Results (2)

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI