I have recently been overly fascinated with the ancient Pythagorean ideas of geometric reduction. The concept that existence is built up from a point whose motion generates a line and then a plane and so on into higher dimensions. These ideas have more recently found new life, incarnated in modern string theory. In many of Baha’u’llah’s mystical writings these ideas are cast in the symbology of divine lettering:

“A black teardrop sprinkled down upon the Tablet whereupon the Point (al-nuqṭa) was made manifest in the world of origination (`ālam al-badā’). This Point assumed the primordial shape upon the mirrors of the letters in the beings of the Names. The [Arabic letter] “A” (al-alif) received it [within itself] before all the other letters, in the [pre-eternal] elemental particles of things (fi dharr al-ashyā’) for thus did this Divine Point take on the form of this Eternal [Arabic letter] “A” (alif). This inasmuch as the merciful breezes blew upon it from the Source of Singleness whereupon the Countenance of the Divine Singularity (wajh al-wahidiyya) was disclosed from behind the Green Veils.”(provisional translation by Stephen Lambden)

So creation is imagined as the movement of the pen of God, rendering letters. It begins with a primal point and moves to form the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, Alif (the Arabic version of the Hebrew Aleph) which geometrically is a straight line. This linkage between the Pythagorean line and divine lettering is made explicit for example in one of Baha’u’llah’s more esoteric works, the Lawh-i Kimiya. Here he quotes the famous Persian polymath Jabir’s rendering of a quote attributed to Plato:

“Then know that God, blessed and exalted be He, took a [cosmic , alphabetical] trace [line] (khaṭṭ an) and cleft it in the middle [lengthwise] (bi’l-ṭūl). Then he made one of these two [lines] rotate about the other. And between the two he made the Cosmos (al-`ālam). But the cosmic [alphabetical] line (al-khaṭṭ) came into being from the Point (al-nuqṭa) and derived its motion from it. So understand that which we say!” (provisional translation by Stephen Lambden)

I recently realized that Jabir’s quote is possibly a retelling of the following quote from Plato’s Timaeus, where he describes the creation of the ‘World Soul’:

“..This entire compound he divided lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point; and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle the motion of the other or diverse.” (Timaeus 34b-37c).

This symbolism of divine lettering is very powerful since it not only contains the ancient ideas of geometry and math, but also in the construction of words, the more modern ideas of information, it’s organizing and creative power. So the analogy of God as the ‘author’ operates on several levels.

Baha’u’llah in several of his writings expresses the idea that the revelation he and his predecessor the Bab, brought in the mid to late 19th century, unleashed a torrent of creativity on the world. That new doors of understanding on the consciousness of humanity would be opened. He also explained that this new rising consciousness will unfold in a gradual manner. In Baha’u’llah’s Tablet of Wisdom, it is put this way:

“ Through the mere revelation of the word “Fashioner,” issuing forth from His lips and proclaiming His attribute to mankind, such power is released as can generate, through successive ages, all the manifold arts which the hands of man can produce. This, verily, is a certain truth. No sooner is this resplendent word uttered, than its animating energies, stirring within all created things, give birth to the means and instruments whereby such arts can be produced and perfected. All the wondrous achievements ye now witness are the direct consequences of the Revelation of this Name. In the days to come, ye will, verily, behold things of which ye have never heard before. Thus hath it been decreed in the Tablets of God, and none can comprehend it except them whose sight is sharp. In like manner, the moment the word expressing My attribute “The Omniscient” issueth forth from My mouth, every created thing will, according to its capacity and limitations, be invested with the power to unfold the knowledge of the most marvelous sciences, and will be empowered to manifest them in the course of time at the bidding of Him Who is the Almighty, the All-Knowing.”

With this in mind I have been particularly interested lately in a long Tablet of Baha’u’llah’s which concerns a commentary on the famous light verse of the Quran and the mysterious disconnected letters which preface several of the Surah’s. This work deals at length with the various symbolism of the Alif. In one place he describes the “hidden dimensions” of Alif, and explains that Alif is “expressive of mysteries relative to all sciences” . This Tablet was completed in 1857 or 58 and addressed to early Bābī-believer and Bahā’ī martyr [Ḥajjī] Āqā Mīrzā [Āqā] Rikab-Sāz Shīrāzī. Rikab-Saz was put to death years later in Shiraz in 1871.

Aleph one

Not long after, the young mathematician Georg Cantor began work published in 1874, which would culminate in his new concept of an uncountable set. This new mathematical concept is itself somewhat reminiscent of the ideas of another ancient Greek philosopher Zeno. Cantor realized that in the approach to one, the number of divisions possible represented a type of uncountable infinity which in fact was greater than the so-called countable infinity of natural numbers such as 1,2,3,… This kind of infinity he termed transfinite numbers. He believed that this understanding was given to him as a revelation from God. Interestingly the symbol which came to denote these different types of infinities was the Hebrew letter Aleph. Cantor himself was born in 1845 the year after the Bab’s momentous declaration in 1844 which marked the birth of the Baha’i dispensation.

About 50 years later in 1920 Srinivasa Ramanujan, dreamt a vision of the Hindu goddess Namagiri. In these vision were revealed to him new so-called mock-modular function which he wrote down in his notebook prior to his passing at the young age of 32. In 2012 via the Umbral Moonshine conjecture, it would come to be understood that these functions represented the energy levels of the vibrating strings for various breeds of string theory. Also in 1919 the mathematician Theodor Kaluza generalized Einstein's new General theory of relativity from 3 spatial plus one time dimensions to four spatial plus one time, and by doing so was able to produce Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism. This provided a mathematical pathway to unite gravity and electromagnetism. To simplify the mathematics, Kaluza used the so-called cylinder condition, which claimed that the 5th dimension was independent of the other dimensions. Later In 1926, Oskar Klein gave this cylinder condition meaning by postulating it represented the fact that this extra dimension was curled up and microscopic.

Mock Modular Functions

In 1970 about hundred years after the Rikab-Saz was put to death, a primitive version of string theory was born, when Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, and Leonard Susskind each independently came up the idea for using 1 dimensional strings as a possible representation of the nuclear force. This later would be abandoned in favor of the quark model and quantum chromodynamics. However it was discovered that this idea coupled with Kaluza’s extra dimensions, hidden in a manner described by Klein, could describe a graviton as well as many other fundamental particles and forces. In this manner modern string theory was fashioned.

What I find interesting is that all these discoveries seem to have some connection to the symbolism of the drawn line (Alif) in this Tablet of Baha’u’llah’s. Alif both assumes a meaning of the unit 1 symbolic of the unity and transcendent infinity of God as well as the primal Pythagorean line from which the universe is created. So we have Cantor who uncovered hidden in ‘one’ a new and greater kind of uncountable infinity and string theory with threads vibrating in hidden dimensions from which it is postulated the universe is rendered.