Like Attracts Like: principles of Kubravi esotericism in Mevlevi esotericism

Abstract

Samâ’– musical listening accompanied by whirling – is one of many practices used in Sufism with the aim of opening the individual’s mind and heart to their greatest potential. Just as with zikr (repeating the Names of God), samâ' is considered a means of releasing spiritual energy, that is, of allowing the portion of divine light which lies dormant in the mystic to awaken, uniting with its counterpart in the Cosmos. The spiritual hermeneutics which governs the principle of ‘like attracts like’, widely discussed by philosopher Henry Corbin in his L'Homme de Lumière dans le Soufisme Iranien, was established between the 12th and 13th centuries by the Persian mystic Najmuddin Kubra and continued by his direct disciple ʿAlāʾ-al-Dawla Semnānī. Considering the parts which make up the human being as fragments of their cosmic counterparts, Kubra developed an esoteric physiology of subtle organs of perception (lataif) in which each subtle organ or center is associated with a metaphysics of reflected light in Infinity. This law of mutual attraction and recognition of like for like, illustrated by Kubra in the most diverse ways, is based on the communication between the human and The Divine, the seeker and The Sought, the contemplator and The Contemplated, the lover and The Beloved. Kubravi esotericism connects – this has been my insistent hypothesis – Mevlevi esotericism to its deepest roots. And it is precisely these roots that provide the necessary elements for understanding the principles which govern the practice of samâ’. Some of these principles can be expressed in the following terms: samâ’ is ‘the art of spreading the inner wings’; ‘an intensive transformative process between the two poles: Heaven and Earth’; its objective is, through the ‘balancing of the interior with the exterior’, to lead the individual to the experience of the divine energy.