“When the motion of the heavens in three hundred and sixty thousand years,
Shall have described a minute about its centre,
Then shall be manifest what had been manifest before,
Without any divergence to the right or to the left.”
The great revolution with them, according to the word of Berzasp, the disciple of Tahamúers, is of three hundred and sixty thousand solar years: that is, as the motions of the heavens take place in a circle, their positions are necessarily determined; when, according to that revolution, the positions of the heavens manifest themselves so that from the contiguities, the adwár and ikwár,[124] “the cycles,” the zatk and fatk, “the shutting and opening,” from the conjunctions of the whole and from the unions, all parts of the phenomena show the very same necessarily determined position, in its reality without increase and decrease. In the books of the Persian sages is stated that, as the motions of the heavens are circular, certainly the compasses return to the same point from which the circumference began to be drawn, and when at a second revolution the compasses run over the same line upon which the former circumference was drawn, undoubtedly, whatsoever has been granted in the former circumference, shall be granted again; as there is no disparity between two circumferences, there will be no disparity between their traces; because the phenomena, having returned to that order in which they were found in the beginning, the stars and heavens, having made their revolution about the former centre, the distances, contiguities, appearances, and relations having in no aspect been contrary to the former aspects, certainly the influences which manifested themselves from yonder origin shall in no manner be different.
This is called in Persian mahín cherkh, “the great circle;” and in Arabic dawrah-i kabra.
Fárábi[125] says: the vulgar form to their own sight their belief according to the shape of their imagination, and will continue to form it so, and the place of their imaginations will be a body of the heavenly bodies. The venerable Shaikh Maktul tends to establish in his demonstrations, that the heavenly bodies are places of imaginations of the inhabitants of heaven, and that beneath the heaven of the moon, and above the globe of fire is a spherical body, without motion, and this is the place of the imaginations of the inhabitants of hell.
It is to be known, that this sect hold the world to be eternal, and say that, as the sun’s light is to the heaven, so is the world to God. Nothing was that had not been, and nothing will be that is not. Further, according to the expounders of theological law, the world is a phenomenon of time. The philosophers assert, the meaning of that phenomenon is “procreation;” and the phenomenon of procreation is not contradictory to “permanency;” infinite permanency coalesces with time.
[107] امكان imkan, “possibility,” signifies that, the existence or non-existence of which, is the necessary consequence of the essence of a thing. The philosophers distinguish by name four sorts of possibility: 1. imkan zati, “possibility with respect to essence;” 2. imkan istidadi, “possibility by disposition,” also called mokúni, “eventual;” 3. imkan khaz, “special possibility;” and 4. imkan âam, “general possibility.”—(See on this subject Jorjani’s Definitions, Notices et Extraits des MSS., vol. XI pp. 82-83.)
[108] The word âkl has a manifold and therefore often vague meaning; it corresponds sometimes to Holy Ghost. I thought it right to translate it hereafter by “intelligency,” in the double acceptation of “unbodied spirits” and “wisdom;” and also by “reason.”