"In his
De caelo, Aristotle depicts the universe as being constituted of concentric spheres rotating in
circular motion, and with time this cosmic schema, which is also taken into account in the Kor'an
(suras XXIII,17 and LXV,12) "became transformed into a symbol which provided the backround for
man's spiritual journey" (Nasr 1967: 50-51). The Neoplatonic, Hellenic, Pythagorean, Gnostic and
Hermetic traditions adapted the Aristotelian universal design to man's spirituality, and thus
conceived a primordial human being fallen into mortality and having to symbolically ascend the
concentric spheres of the universe in order to be reunited with the Divinity. The Prophet's Mi'raj
is perhaps the foremost example of the Islamic elaboration of the ancient cosmic leit motiv, while the Hebrew text 3 Enoch or the Book of the Hekhalot would represent the Hebrew
spiritual rewriting of the same venerable tradition. Dante's Divine Comedy, greatly indebted to Islamic
sources, as Asín Palacios has demostrated (Asín 1919) represents the Christianization of the spiritual
journey through the spheres, but it is not by any means the only one: Francisco Rico offers a good number
of additional European spiritual writers who reformulate the image of the soul as "small heaven". (Rico 1970).
But the Sufis were perhaps the most introspective of all of these cosmological pilgrims:
Michael Sells underscores the inward look they displayed in their spiritual path or asfar . This
"ascent from the sublunary world of mortality to the divine throne [..] can also be seen as a
progressively deeper descent into the self. In this sense it is a process of remembrance (dhikr )
and of symbolic and transformative interpretation (ta'wil ) from the exterior reality (zahir )
to the interior and hidden (batin )"
(Sells1989: 101)."
