May 15 | Love is the star map (Fire in the Wineglass #5)

In today’s lesson, we went on to the first of several stories Rumi tells throughout the Masnavi, narratives which I immediately began to think of as parables.

On Wikipedia a parable is defined as “a succinct, didactic story in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles.” In the West we would most commonly associate this type of storytelling with Jesus, but it was actually quite a popular teaching tool in the ancient East, so I don’t personally think it’s inappropriate to refer to these stories as such.

Today’s parable concerned a king, a maiden, a healer, and a goldsmith. The king happens to see a servant or slave girl and becomes completely entranced with her. He secures her possession and brings her to his court, but when she arrives she immediately sickens. The king commissions doctors and healers to heal her, but none of them can (Rumi makes it clear that all of these healers are incredibly arrogant, and that the more tactics they try, the more she sickens).

Finally, the king, deeply grieved, runs barefoot to the mosque and wails out his prayers to God to help, drenching the rugs with his tears.

This is clearly the corrective needed to the arrogance of the doctors, and the king receives a dream that a healer will come who can help.

The next day, the healer arrives – a humble and gentle soul who comes and discovers the ailment: love.

The girl, he discovers, is heartsick over a goldsmith living in a town where she used to live.

The rest of the tale doesn’t go like how you’d expect! The healer and the king converse, and send messengers to bring the goldsmith to the king’s court! They lure him there with flattery, and he leaves behind his children and friends. He is then wedded to the girl, and they spend six months of bliss before the king fixes a poison potion and begins to slowly feed it to the goldsmith. As he sickens, his beauty and strength fade, until the girl loses interest. Finally, at his death, she is freed and falls in love with the king.

I was fascinated by this story and desperate to know how to interpret it, particularly when it ended and Rumi immediately chastises the reader for hating the king! He insists that the king is not doing wrong in poisoning the goldsmith, but I couldn’t fully understand why until I listened to Omid-jan’s lesson.

Omid-jan explains that, like any parable, the characters all represent something beyond their simple titles and individual lives. They are not separate beings based on real people, he said, but represent faculties or tendencies within all of us.

The king is the intellect, or spirit. These things which are often separated between cold logic and warm creativity in the Western mind are not necessarily separate things in Islam. The king is the desire within us for union with God, the one that holds wisdom.

The maiden is the jaan, or soul, a pure and innocent thing which is often subject to unhealthy desires.

The goldsmith is the ego, or the nafs. Omid-jan referred to it quite delightfully as “the Gollum self.” He only wants more, no matter how much he already has.

Finally, the healer is understood to be a spiritual teacher, although it’s not necessarily a figure outside of us. We have that figure within us too.

The parable therefore becomes a story about the intellect liberating us from the abusive ego.

Knowing this changed my understanding dramatically. My first emotion at the conclusion of the story was annoyance with the king. Omid-jan laughed as he said, “Those of us who are Marxists might not immediately like this story! The ruler always gets what he wants while the working man gets bumped off! But it’s not about that.” And the more I considered the story from this new perspective, the more entranced I was by the king’s actions.

The king chooses his jaan (he even refers to her as “the jaan of my jaan”) heedless of her poverty and invites her into a new possible world of delight and love. The intellect is not in conflict with the soul – it desires union. In her innocence, however, she immediately begins to miss what’s left behind in her old world, including this ego, an old love who seems fickle and easily flattered. He leaves behind everything at the behest of these messengers, including his children, not because he desires the jaan but because they flatter him, calling him noble and beautiful and praising his work as a goldsmith.

What struck me most was that neither king nor healer judge the girl for her heartsickness. In fact, they bring her the object of her desire, and give her time to indulge her love – and in the Richardson translation I used, it clarifies “until she is wholly restored to health.”

What really struck me, though, was reading this story with a lens of abuse. If we imagine this jaan-maiden in a sort of abusive relationship with the ego, the actions of the king become heroic. He doesn’t force her to fight her own battles against her abuser. He also doesn’t use strength or brute violence against the abuser himself. Rather he invites this abuser to his place, offering a safe environment to both of them where he can observe them both. He then uses subtle measures to show the jaan clearly what kind of a person the smith is, without judging her choice of him.

Rather than using force and the shallow attraction to beauty, both of which will fade over time, the king uses long-lasting tactics, like cunning. He allows her to see the truth, without forcing her or making decisions for her. He allows her to choose her own path forward.

How awesome is that?

Something else that really delighted me was the exploration of the astrolabe. I was first introduced to these Medieval star map devices through Omid-jan’s book Radical Love. I had never heard of them, and had a wonderful time marveling over pictures of them online. Omid-jan expands upon a lovely saying within this passage: “Love is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God.”

I wasn’t quite sure how astrolabes worked, and somehow knowing that through his explanation made the intent of the passage much clearer. When lost, say in the desert or at sea, one is meant to take the device and point it at the sky, lining it up with the stars that are visible. It gives us pinpoints through which to orient ourselves.

Love, Omid-jan then explained, particularly radical love, is our astrolabe to God’s mysteries. Looking through the lens of radical love will show us the way home, the way to God.

I actually bought an astrolabe pendant just before going into social isolation. I wanted to remember the saying. Wearing it now will give me an even greater joy.

Praise be to God, lord of the worlds, for the gift of love, and for the persistence of our intellect in bringing us to the garden of God’s delight.