Image: Anselm Kiefer “Im Herz des Bergs” (In the Heart of the Mountain) 2021
Photo: Charles Duprat

Event Description

Restoring the broken order

A seminar exploring some themes from the Wisdom of Breathing Out in the Word of Seth, the second chapter of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam (The Ringstones of Wisdom).

“He [God] it is who gives everything its nature, whom then He guides.” (Quran Surah 20).

In this chapter, Ibn ‘Arabi presents the prophet Seth as a gift given to his father Adam, from whom he originates and who asked for him as a present. Adam asked for this gift in order to ease his pain and restore the order that was broken by the murder of his son Abel at the hands of his other son, Cain.

This has great resonance today. According to Ibn ‘Arabi, in Seth we see and find the secrets of Adam. “And indeed God gave him as a gift to Adam and it is the first that He bestowed, except that this was from him because the son is the mystery of the father. He came out of him and belonged to him.”

Thus, according to Ibn ‘Arabi we need to know that nothing comes to us as gift except from our own selves, and we can know this in various ways, but the best way of knowing it, is by knowing that it is our own predisposition that is the origin of all the gifts we receive.

It is in this spirit of the universality of Ibn ‘Arabi that we will ask to be elevated to the contemplation of gift-giving and reception, and to explore what it means to “Know that the gifts and grants which are manifest in the universe upon the hands of His servants and upon other than their hands are of two sorts: of these one is Essential gifts and the others is gifts by the Names, and these are differentiated one from the other by the people of taste.”

The October Gallery,
24 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AL

Refreshments Provided