The Nomadic Alternative – Page 184

name from their practice of passing from door to door (dar - door; vis -
) with their begging bowls. The proverbial beggars' rags - a patched and tattered frock - replaced the woolen robe. Our English word 'rag' comes from the Old Norse raegg - "a tuft of fur".

A shaman will tear such strips of fur from his animal costume when trance comes upon him, and a dervish will often have his believers believe he has shredded his own outfit in ecstatic communion with the divine, the 'lights of heavenly grace' being thought to shine through the patches. But dervishism is open to decadent abuse, and in the Punjab I have seen adoring women tear strips from their silks and muslins to contribute to the plumage of fattened fakirs. Such also was Joseph's coat of many colours, and in his gift of prophecy, his sense of his own omnipotence and his horror of lying with Potiphar's wife we can surely see traces of the feminized shamanic personality.

The true Sufi "wanders for God". Sufis spoke of themselves as "travellers on the Way" - migrants along a spiritual ll-rah that leads to Heaven. Spiritual cairns illuminate the Way, but the traveller needs a pilot if he will slough off his carnal worldly self and achieve spiritual health. "Man", said Rumi, "is the Astro-labe of God, but it needs an astronomer to read the astrolabe."

The Guides or Masters of the Path distinguish for their initiates seven Stations on the Way or valleys through which the road passes - Conversion, Fear of the Lord, Renunciation, Poverty, Endurance, Trust in God and Contentment. The final stage of being 'lost in God' signifies a state of catatonic trance, foreign to pain and pleasure alike. "Every wrinkle of the traveller's brow is smooth ... whatever happens to him is a blessing."

Rumi, the most intelligible of Sufi ecstatics, explained the sensation of final enlightenment. The man who has 'arrived' is a "dead man walking", one "who has died before his death". He walks the earth "like a living man, yet he is dead and his spirit has gone to Heaven". Death of the body is deathless. The enlightened man is twice born and the problem of bilocation is solved. The