The Seven Valleys

Teresa’s castle is a map of the soul seen from within: a building, still and luminous, with its master at the centre. The map in this essay is made of movement. It is a journey across a landscape, undertaken by a crowd of travellers, most of whom die on the way. It comes from twelfth-century Persia, and it is one of the great poems of the world: the Manṭiq al-ṭayr of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, known in English as The Conference of the Birds.

The story is simple to tell. The birds of the world gather and agree that they need a king. The hoopoe tells them they have one, the Sīmurgh, who lives far away beyond the mountain of Qāf, and offers to lead them to him. Most of the birds make excuses; the hoopoe answers them, one by one, with stories. At last a great company sets out. To reach the Sīmurgh they must cross seven valleys. Of the many thousands who begin, only thirty arrive. And when they come before their king, they discover who he is.

The speech of the birds§

The title comes from the Qurʾān. In the sura of the Ant, Solomon tells the people that he has been taught the speech of the birds (Palmer 1880, 27:16), and a few verses later it is the hoopoe who brings him news of the Queen of Sheba (Palmer 1880, 27:20–28). In ʿAṭṭār’s poem the hoopoe is again the messenger, the bird who has travelled and knows the way. He has been Solomon’s companion and messenger, and wears his crest like a crown. In Sufi terms he is the guide, the shaykh, without whom no one crosses the valleys.

The other birds are the rest of us. Each has a reason not to go, and the reasons are the attachments that keep the soul from setting out. The nightingale is in love with the rose and cannot leave it. The parrot wants only the water of immortality. The peacock, who was once in paradise, wants to go back there and nowhere else. The duck will not leave the water, the partridge its jewels, the hawk its place on the king’s wrist, the owl its ruins where it hopes to find treasure. Each excuse is reasonable. Each, the hoopoe shows, mistakes a part for the whole, a reflection for the source.

The hoopoe’s answers are stories, and the poem is mostly stories: of kings and beggars, saints and lovers, madmen who speak the truth. The most famous is the tale of Shaykh Ṣanʿān, a revered teacher who falls in love with a Christian girl and gives up everything for her, his learning, his reputation, his religion, and ends by tending her pigs. His disciples abandon him; then, ashamed, they pray for him, and he returns. The story is shocking by design. It says that love, when it comes, is no respecter of piety, and that the seeker must be ready to lose even what seemed most holy.

A feather in China§

Before the birds set out, the hoopoe tells them how the Sīmurgh was first known. One night, he says, the Sīmurgh flew over China, and a feather fell from him. Everyone who saw it made a picture of it, and every image in the world is drawn from that one feather. Had that feather not appeared, there would not be so much talk about him in the world. It is the poem’s account of how the divine is known before it is found: through traces, reflections, rumours. Every beauty the birds love is a copy of the feather. The journey is from the copy to the original.

The hoopoe also tells them what kind of king they are seeking. He is near, though they are far from him. His dwelling is hidden, and no tongue can say his name. Before him hang a hundred thousand veils of light and darkness. To seek him is to give up the self, for he cannot be reached by one who keeps anything back.

The seven valleys§

When at last the birds are ready, they ask the hoopoe how long the road is. He tells them that there are seven valleys to cross, and that no one who has crossed them has come back to say how far they extend (ʿAṭṭār 1984, The Valleys of the Way). He names them in order: the valley of the quest; the valley of love; the valley of insight into mystery; the valley of detachment; the valley of unity; the valley of bewilderment; and, last, the valley of poverty and nothingness, beyond which there is no further road.

The first valley: the quest§

The first valley is the quest (ṭalab). Here the traveller meets a hundred difficulties at every moment, and must give up everything: possessions, comforts, the good opinion of others. The seeker must strip the heart until it is bare, and then, when the heart is pure, a light from the divine presence begins to shine in it, and the longing becomes a thousand times stronger. What marks this valley is not achievement but seeking itself: a desire so strong that the seeker would throw himself into fire for it, and would not stop to ask whether he would reach the end.

The second valley: love§

The second valley is love (ʿishq). Whoever enters it is plunged into fire, and must become fire. The lover is reckless, careless of good and evil, of faith and unbelief; he gives away a hundred worlds without a thought. Reason, ʿAṭṭār says, cannot live here: it calculates and hesitates while love has already leapt. The valley of love is where the quest catches fire, and where the seeker learns that the journey is not an inquiry but a burning.

The third valley: insight§

The third valley is insight into mystery, maʿrifat, the knowledge of the gnostic. Here ʿAṭṭār makes a point that will matter at the end of this series: the paths divide. No two travellers cross this valley the same way. Each goes according to their own capacity, and each is given the knowledge they can bear. When the sun of insight rises, each sees according to the light given, and finds its proper place. The valley of insight teaches that the way is one, and the ways are many.

The fourth valley: detachment§

The fourth valley is detachment, istighnāʾ, a word that also means self-sufficiency, and is used of God’s independence of everything. Here a cold wind blows, ʿAṭṭār says, so fierce that in a moment it lays waste a whole country. The seven seas become a puddle, the seven planets a spark, the heavens a corpse. Everything the traveller valued is seen as nothing beside what he seeks. In this valley he learns that the divine needs nothing from him, neither his devotion nor his sins, and that the worlds could vanish without any loss. It is the valley where the seeker stops bargaining.

The fifth valley: unity§

The fifth valley is unity, tawḥīd. Here all the many become one. Whatever the traveller sees, whether one or many, is only one; whatever is counted, it is the same number. The one the seeker sought is not one among others: it is beyond number altogether, beyond both oneness and multiplicity. In this valley the seeker sees that he and his goal, the road and the traveller, the lover and the beloved, are not finally separate. Everything he looks at is that one, looking back.

The sixth valley: bewilderment§

One might expect the journey to end there. ʿAṭṭār does something stranger. After unity comes bewilderment, ḥayrat. The traveller who has seen that all is one is now lost in astonishment and grief. Each breath is a sword; each moment a lament. He does not know whether he exists or not, whether he is inside or outside, mortal or immortal. If he is asked whether he is drunk or sober, he says he does not know; he does not even know that he does not know. He is in love, but with whom he cannot tell. His heart is full of love, and empty of love, at the same time.

This is one of the most original features of ʿAṭṭār’s map, and one of the truest. It says that the vision of unity does not leave the seeker serene. It undoes him. Everything by which he knew himself, the distinctions between self and other, knowing and not knowing, has been taken away, and what remains is wonder that is almost indistinguishable from sorrow. Other traditions have their own names for this: the dark night, the cloud of unknowing, the great doubt. ʿAṭṭār places it after the vision of unity, not before.

The seventh valley: poverty and nothingness§

The last valley is poverty and annihilation, faqr and fanāʾ. Here, ʿAṭṭār says, there is no speech: only forgetfulness, deafness, muteness and loss of self. A hundred thousand shadows vanish in the light of a single sun. When the ocean stirs, the patterns on its surface are lost in it. The drop that falls into the sea is the sea. Whoever is lost here is at peace, and is lost forever.

The poem tells a story about this valley that has become one of its best known. One night the moths gathered, wanting to know what the candle was. One flew to a palace, saw a light in a window and came back to report. Their leader said that he knew nothing of the candle. A second went closer, brushed the flame with its wings and returned; still, the leader said, it knew nothing. A third flew into the flame, and was consumed, and became one with it. Only that one, the leader said, knows what the candle is; and it has no news to bring (ʿAṭṭār 1984, The Valley of Poverty and Nothingness).

Thirty birds§

The birds set out. ʿAṭṭār does not describe the journey in detail; he tells us only that many died. Some drowned, some were lost in the deserts, some were killed by heat or by beasts, some turned aside to the pleasures they found on the way. Of the thousands who began, only thirty reached the end of the road, broken, featherless and exhausted, with nothing left.

Even then they are not at once admitted. A herald comes out and tells them to go back: the king has no need of them, and their coming means nothing to him. They answer that they will not leave, even if they are scorned; like the moth, they would rather burn. At last a door opens. They are given a record of everything they have done, and as they read it they are overcome with shame. And then the sun of the divine presence shines on them, and they look, and they see the Sīmurgh.

What they see is themselves. There were thirty birds, sī murgh in Persian, and the king they sought is the Sīmurgh. When they look at the Sīmurgh, they see thirty birds; when they look at themselves, they see the Sīmurgh. They do not know whether they are the one or the other. And without speaking, they ask the Sīmurgh to explain.

His answer is the poem’s answer. I am a mirror, the Sīmurgh says (ʿAṭṭār 1984, The Conclusion of the Story). Whoever comes sees himself in it. You came as thirty, and so you see thirty; had you been forty or fifty, you would have seen forty or fifty. You have travelled far, and everything you passed through was your own doing; but I am beyond all of it, beyond your sight and your understanding. Lose yourselves in me, and you will find yourselves in me. And they do. The thirty birds are lost in the Sīmurgh, as a shadow is lost in the sun.

The pun on sī murgh, thirty birds, has delighted readers for eight centuries, and it is more than a pun. It says that the goal of the quest is not a stranger. What the birds find at the end of the road is what they truly are, which they could not see until everything they thought they were had been taken from them. The king was a mirror; the seekers were the sought.

Annihilation and return§

One more line of the story is easy to overlook. After a hundred thousand generations, ʿAṭṭār says, the birds were given back to themselves, without their having chosen it. Having passed away into the Sīmurgh, they came to subsist in him. Here he stops. What they then knew, he says, cannot be told; it would need another book, and another kind of telling.

This is the Sufi doctrine of fanāʾ and baqāʾ, the passing away of the self and its subsistence in God. The great Sufi teachers before ʿAṭṭār, among them Junayd of Baghdad, had taught that fanāʾ is not the end. The one who has passed away from himself is returned, sober, to the world, and lives in it as God’s servant, no longer as his own. ʿAṭṭār’s poem gestures to that return in its last lines, and leaves it there. Its map is a map of the going.

What this map teaches§

Set beside Teresa’s castle, the Conference of the Birds shows how much two maps of seven stages can share and how differently they can be drawn.

Both begin with renunciation and end in union. Both say the goal is not foreign to the seeker: for Teresa it is at the centre of the soul, for ʿAṭṭār it is the soul’s own face in a mirror. Both are wary of ecstasy taken on its own. Teresa tests every experience by humility and love; ʿAṭṭār, through his hoopoe, mocks every bird that mistakes a pleasant place for the destination.

But they differ in ways that matter. Teresa’s map has a single turning point, where effort gives way to grace. ʿAṭṭār’s has a sequence of crises: the burning of love, the cold wind of detachment, the undoing of bewilderment. Teresa’s soul is betrothed and married, and remains herself; ʿAṭṭār’s birds are annihilated, and the poem’s language strains towards identity. Teresa writes for the individual soul in its cell; ʿAṭṭār for a company, most of whom fail. And ʿAṭṭār places a valley of bewilderment after unity, where Teresa places the trials before the marriage.

Perhaps the most important lesson of ʿAṭṭār’s map is the third valley’s: that each traveller goes by their own road, according to their capacity. A map of seven valleys does not promise that everyone will cross them in the same way, or see the same things. It promises only that the road leads somewhere, and that the one who arrives will be changed beyond recognition.

The next essay goes to India, to a vast dialogue between a sage and a prince, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, and to a map of seven stages of knowledge that begins not with prayer or with longing but with a question: why am I living like this?