Sufi Archetypes and Symbols
Walk the Hushed Walls of Sufism and Mysticism
Mysticism and the Sufi path
Mysticism refers to the spiritual, communal with the divine to reach the ultimate reality.
Sufism is the mystical path in Islam. The term Sufi is variously traced to the Arabic word Suf, wool, either the simple cloaks the early Sufi mystics wore, or possibly the state of spiritual purity they seek to achieve ṣāf, purity.
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Love, unity, and the wayfarer's journey
The Sufi path understands love as an epistemology leading to divine knowledge, wherein the heart's cry toward spiritual consciousness fulfills the Sufi's mission of vicegerency; only through this fulfillment the Sufi realizes the self and, by knowing the self, he comes to know God, whose divine presence dwells within.
To discover moreArchetypes
The modern usage of the term archetype in European languages is closely associated with the works of Jung, Campbell, and Vogler.
C. G. Jung
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
“…[A]rchetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, they are patterns of instinctual behaviour.”
C. G. Jung
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those that have inspired… the basic images of ritual, mythology, and vision.”
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Christopher Vogler
The Writer’s Journey
“[Archetypes are] constantly repeating characters or energies which occur in the dreams of all people and the myths of all cultures.”
Christopher Vogler
The Writer’s Journey
Sufi archetypes
European “archetypes” are known as Fixed Entities in Sufi philosophy “al-aʿyān al-thābita” as developed in Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics. They are the immutable, permanent entities, the things eternally known to the divine, and whose appearance marks the cosmos.
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The archetypes of the path
On the journey, the wayfarer comes across archetypes. Turn the astrolabe — touch each circle to read its sign.
The Tree
Rooted in the earth, reaching for the divine — the axis between worlds.
Archetypes and creativity
The aesthetic value of these archetypes derives from the Divine Reality they represent. Imagination becomes the wayfarer’s path of knowledge.
Creativity is the wayfarer’s means to articulate what classical language, doctrinal language, cannot fully utter.
Creativity is an embodied transmission of an experience of divine reality, which entails that Sufi knowledge is a “lived philosophy” (Ellison and McClure, 2020).