122 AN INTRODUCTION TO SUFI DOCTRINE

(as-sirr), and this is the inapprehensible point in which
the creature meets God. Ordinarily the spiritual reality
of the heart is veiled by the egocentric consciousness ;
this assimilates the heart to its own centre of gravity
which will be either mind or feeling according to the
tendencies of the particular being.

The heart is to the other faculties what the sun is
to the planets: it is from the sun that these receive both
their light and their impulsion. This analogy, which is
even more clear in the heliocentric perspective than in
the geocentric system of the ancients where the sun occu-
pies the middle heaven between two triads of planets, !
was developed by ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jili in his book
al-Insan al-Kamil (‘“ Universal Man”’). According to
this symbolical order Saturn, the most distant of the
planets that are visible to the naked eye corresponds to
intellect-reason (al-‘agl). Just as the heaven of Saturn
includes all the other planetary heavens, intellect-reason
embraces all things ; moreover the “ abstract,” cold and
““saturnian  character of reason is opposite to the solar
and central nature of the heart, which marks intellect
in its ““total ”” and ¢ existential >> aspect. Mercury sym-
bolises thought (al-fikr), Venus imagination (al-khiyal),
Mars the conjectural faculty (al-wahm), Jupiter spiritual
aspiration (al-himmah) and the moon the vital spirit
(ar-rah). Anyone with some knowledge of astrological
““aspects >’ can readily deduce from this outline both the
beneficent and the harmful ‘‘conjunctions” of the

Cf. the author’s Cle spirituelle de I’ Astrologie musulmane accordirg to
Ibn ‘Arab1 Paris, 1950, Les Editions Traditionnelles.