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The Messenger

Thus by night we were Above and by day below until we saw a hoopoe enter through a
window greeting us on a moonlit night. In its beak was a short note sent from the right
side of the Valley at the blessed spot (Qurʾān 28:30). And it said to us, “I have descended
down for the purpose of liberating the two of you, for I come to you from Sheba with a
Message that is certain (Qurʾān 27:22) which is detailed in this letter from your Father!”
And when we read the Message, it said: “this is from your Father, the Guide, and it is In
the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful!”96

The Messenger is the third card of the NUR Tarot’s Major Arcana and replaces the Magus

in the conventional system of Tarot. As the messenger between the Spirit and matter, this

card is primarily represented by the hoopoe (hudhud) – the messenger bird appearing in the

story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in Qurʾān 20-40 – and who upon being queried, as

its first utterance, matter of factly says to God’s own divine Messenger, King Solomon, the

supreme theurgist and white sorcerer of his age:

96
Suhrawardī, The Tale of the Occidental Exile, para. 9-11 (my trans.)

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ِِ
ْ ُ َْ َ ُ
ِ َ ‫َأ‬
ِ

I have encompassed [in knowledge] what you have not encompassed!97

In Sufi literature there are countless interrelated meanings to the trope of the

hoopoe. In Farīduddīn ʿAttār’s Conference of the Birds (manṭiq al-ṭayr), for instance, the

hoopoe primarily symbolizes with mystical wayfaring and the spiritual journey to the

Divine as the guide to the other birds seeking the Simorgh such that the hoopoe acts

throughout as the Simorgh’s messenger.98 In other words, it is the terrestrial murshid (guide)

who itself is guided by the celestial.99 To wit,

Salutations, O hoopoe, who has become the Guide

Who in Reality has become the Messenger from each [seven] Valley!100

O may your journey to the frontiers of Sheba have been well

May your conference of the birds with Solomon have been well!101

97
Qurʾān 27:22.
98
The standard English translation of this epic is the one by Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi Farid Ud-Din
Attar: The Conference of the Birds (Penguin Books: London, 1984). However, this standard and popular translation
is not the entire work by ʿAttār, nor is it always a faithful or even a literal translation of the text.
99
Symbolized by the Simorgh.
100
Meaning, ‘search’ (ṭalab) to ‘annihilation and subsistence’ (fanāʾ va baqāʾ).
101
Manṭiq al-ṭayr: maqāmāt-i-ṭuyūr (ed.) Siyyid Sadiq Gowharin (shirikat-i-intisharat-i-ilmi va farhangi: Tehran,
1374 solar), lines 616-17: 35 (my trans.)

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In the commentary on Suhrawardī’s Tale of the Occidental Exile, the meaning of the

hoopoe is glossed as being the “potent power of [divine] inspiration” (quvvat-i-ilhām),102 which

by definition would be revelatory such as the manner in which the hoopoe first informs

Solomon about the kingdom of Sheba and its Queen that he didn’t know about previously

as the Quranic account details.103 As such this symbol is in many ways analogous to how the

notion of a ‘divine messenger’ is taken in scripture, especially as the word or logic (manṭiq)

of this bird in the symbolism provided here possesses the power – even magic – of

influencing kings and moving empires, and notably in bringing two powerful hearts

together (ostensible contraries and at ideological odds) as in the love story between the

monotheist prophet Solomon and the pagan sun-worshiping Queen of Sheba. Thus, as a

courier between heaven and earth, a guide, and simultaneously as a powerful sorcerer in

its own right who was responsible for instigating Solomon’s ultimate infatuation with

Sheba, it is only fitting that the hoopoe qua The Messenger be the replacement for the

Magus of the conventional Tarot.

The Depiction of the Card

Here in the center of the card of The Messenger we find the hoopoe in mid air carrying in

its claws the ancient Mesopotamian symbol of sovereignty: the rod and the ring.104 One wing

102
(Ed.) Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr Shihāboddīn Yaḥyā Sohravardī: OEUVRES PHILOSOPHIQUES ET
MYSTIQUES, Tome III (Tehran: Reprint, 1993): 280.
103
We find a distinct but subtle parallelism occurring between Qurʾān 27:22 and Qurʾān 96:5-8 such that if the
hoopoe be taken as the power of divine inspiration, as Suhrawardī’s anonymous commentator suggests, then
the Divine teaching Its Perfect Human (al-insān) what it didn’t know per 96:5 - in order to call it back to Itself
(96:8) - parallels the function of the hoopoe vis-à-vis Solomon in calling him to the Queen of Sheba. This
specific point will be further elucidated below.
104
See Arthur E. Whatham “The Meaning of the Ring and Rod in Babylonian-Assyrian Sculpture,” The Biblical World,
vol. 26, no. 2 (Aug., 1905): 120–123. We note it is closely related to the ancient Egyptian ‘Shen ring,’ which

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points vertically down with the other being horizontal in a downward slope in the process

of moving upward. The first wing symbolizes the celestial influxes pouring down with the

other wing receiving them. Three colors depict our hoopoe – brown (which in this card is

amphibolous while being synonymous with red and green), white and dark blue – with the

rod and the ring it carries in its claws being a golden yellow denoting its jabarūtī

sovereignty. Behind the hoopoe filling the horizon there is a double-headed Simorgh in

dark lazuli blue on red. The imagery of the Simorgh here strongly evokes three of

Suhrawardī’s visionary narratives: the Red Intellect, the Sound of Gabriel’s Wing and the

Simorgh’s shrill cry.105 Above its head crowning it is the solar disk of Šamaš (Utu) which we

found in the last card but, once again, here in lazuli blue on red and conveying the notion

of the ‘midnight Sun’. This specific color configuration here is also communicating the

ʿazamūtī on nāsūtī element of the card and the celestial Simorgh’s epiphany as the terrestrial

hoopoe. But here especially the solar disk of Šamaš is in reference to the form of worship

the people of Sheba are noted for per the Quranic narrative to which the hoopoe first

informs Solomon about. On another level, our Simorgh here also appears as a fish vertically

sloped downward from the horizons, fish being a symbol of Christ in early Christianity,

instancing such christic divine influxes projecting themselves into the ziggurat since here

this ziggurat, among other meanings, symbolizes with the ladder of love to the Eternal

Goddess.106

some have translated as ‘eternal’ and ‘encircle’. In short, it is a symbol of both eternal protection by the divine
as well as its encirclement and envelopment, cf. our benediction formula given in the Book of Guidance (kitāb
al-hudā), i.e. ‘In the Name of God the Ultimate Encircler, the Supreme Guide’ (‫ا ى‬ ‫ا‬ ). Here in the NUR Tarot
the rod and the ring and Shen symbol will be used interchangeably.
105
See Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi: The Philosophical Allegories and the Mystical Treatises, A Parallel English-
Persian Text (ed.), (trans.), (intro.) Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Mazda Publishers: Costa Mesa, 1999): 8-19; 20-
32; 9-107.
106
Cf. Qurʾān 41:53, “We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves…”

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We also observe that the double-headed Simorgh here bears a conspicuously

feminine form. This is the form our Eternal Goddess takes in this card of The Messenger;

but it is also a reference to Sheba Herself because the Hebrew gematria of Her name (‫)שבא‬

is 303. We will return to this point again in the next card, but we will mention that here

there is a deliberate amphiboly and reversal of role being suggested in a key point to the

narratival plot of this tale as to who the real actor and initiator of the communication

between Solomon and Sheba actually is – not to mention on whose behalf the hoopoe itself

is really acting as The Messenger – because Sheba as a locus of the Manifestation of the

Eternal Goddess (and so the Simorgh) is the One here Who from the interior world of the

bāṭin has arranged events in such manner that it is She Who is the One really summoning

Solomon to Herself, and not the other way around, as the love that will develop between

the two of them, and his infatuation with Her, will in our augmention of this tale act as the

Path towards the eventual completion of Solomon’s own tawḥīd, particularly given as She is

the very Manifestation of the Pillar of Beauty of the Tree of Reality itself. In the card of

Solomon, we will see just what this means. The larger horizon of the alchemical dialectic to

this last point should be deeply contemplated because it touches upon a significant issue

underlying the dynamism behind the coincidentia oppositorum.

Below the Simorgh and the hoopoe, in the terrestrial range at the bottom, we find a

desert landscape occurring in the night. Three triangular, pyramid-looking mounds - or

hills - occur on each side with the winds depicted as rising from all six of them. There are

two palm trees on the right and left side, both bearing fruit. In the center is a ziggurat

divided into eight but colored by a division of seven. We note that as the scholarly and

archeological evidence suggests, ziggurats were originally all ornately painted, ornamented

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and stylized with color,107 but the division in the layers of the ziggurat here with its specific

colors loosely (but not exactly) correspond with the color scheme given by Niẓāmī Ganjavī

(d. 1209) in his khamsih tale of Haft-Paykar.108 Above the ziggurat is a triangular horizon in

lazuli blue. On each side of it joining the bottom of the Simorgh - or the head of the fish -

there is yet another triangular formation within which is depicted the Pleiades. Seated on

the left of the ziggurat is a dervish with a tāj dressed in red (i.e. the color of the earth) with

a falcon on his hand who has a yellow halo formed around it. This falcon is the falcon from

the Soul of Holiness: The Recital of Life, which represents the dervish’s own wayfaring and

ascending soul, hence the halo. To his right and at the center base of the ziggurat a flame

burns within a large ancient brazier with the same geomantic symbol of the one dot above

two that we saw in the first card, here appearing at its center. All of this is meant to be a

depiction of the kingdom of Sheba upon the hoopoe’s arrival to deliver Solomon’s message

to its Queen.

The Associations of the Card of The Messenger in Divination

107
Pirjo Lapinkivi The Neo-Assyrian Myth of Ištar’s Descent and Resurrection (The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus
Project: Helsinki, 2010): 80.
108
In fact, here in this card, they correspond more closely to the ancient Mesopotamian scheme than the one
offered by Niẓāmī: viz. Moon (green or silver), Mercury (turquoise or sandal), Venus (white or lazuli), Sun
(yellow), Mars (red), Jupiter (sandal or white), Saturn (black or lazuli), see Peter James and Marinus Anthony
van der Sluijs “Ziggurats, Colors, and Planets: Rawlinson Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 60 (2008):
57-79. And note how on the blue level of our card there are 6 x 3 single dots above two (= 18 = ّ ). The
numerical value of hudhud ( ) (hoopoe) itself is 18 and so equivalent to ḥayy (Alive), hence it occurs to us
that this numerological correspondence may have acted as yet another motivation for the Bāb to name his
first 18 disciples as the Letters of the Living since to him they were as the terrestrial hoopoes guiding to him
as the Manifestation of the Simorgh. For the Haft Peykar of Niẓāmī, see (trans.), (intro.) and (annot.) Julie Scott
Meisami The Haft Peykar: A Medieval Persian Romance (Hackett Publishing: Indianapolis, 2015); also see, Cameron
Cross “The Many Colors of Love in Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar: Beyond the Spectrum,” Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval
European Literatures, no. 2, 2016: 52-96.

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Within the Tree of Reality this card of the The Messenger is associated with the letter jīm

(‫ )ج‬which is the 8th pathway of the Tree of Reality stationed horizontally in the Empyrean

realm of jabarūt on the Pillar of Majesty connecting the fourth Sphere, the Powerful ( ‫)ا‬,

with the fifth, the Knowing ( ‫)ا‬. In Liber Nomeni Angelis the letter jīm (‫ )ج‬is associated with

the constellation of Taurus  whose angelic correspondence is the angel Wāḥāʾīl, i.e. the

masculine Intelligence of Taurus. This angelophany is the fully entified instantiation of the

crystallized archetypal tenuity of Being (kawn) (‫ ) ن‬in its consummated, realized principle.

In turn this full ontological crystallization of the principle of Being within this angelophany

establishes, for its part, the second of the metaphysical limits which is Being (kawn) (‫) ن‬.

Although horizontally located in the Tree of the Reality, the angel Wāḥāʾīl is among the

longitudinal order of angelophanies belonging to the third among the angels of the angelic

concourse of Jibrāʾīl, the concourse associated with the second sigil of the calligram of the

Greatest Name. In the Tree of Reality this letter and its angel are also to be corresponded

with the tenuity and archetypal form-principle (i.e. metaphysical container) of the human

heart. The Lunar Mansion associated with it is al-thurayā (the Pleiades).109

Al-thurayā (the Pleiades), as the third Lunar Mansion and the traditional

ruler over the letter jīm (‫)ج‬, per our reckoning, occurs between 26° 60’ of Aries to 11° 60’ of

Taurus. While the letter jīm (‫ )ج‬is ascribed to the element of the earth, according to al-Būnī

“whensoever the moon alights upon al-thurayā, being a star of mixed substance, by the permission

of God, the All-High, a theurgic spirit of mixed heat and cold is generated from it.”110 He goes on to

109
Some have consistently translated the name of this mansion in English as the “many little ones” without
further gloss. Indeed this is what it literally means. However, as al-Būnī as well as all Islamic astronomers,
astrologers and occultists have unanimously maintained, the many little ones is an obvious nomenclature for
the Pleiades (i.e. the Seven Sisters).
110
Cordero edition, ibid.

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say that it is an auspicious time for talismanic workings, any work that is beneficial to

women, administering medication for colds,111 travelers, and a good time for financial

profit.112 It is also a good time for meetings with kings and rulers and correspondences with

them, marriage, and the purchase of captive slaves,113 for whatever is properly managed

under this Lunar Mansion will come to fruition and whatever is devised in it will come to a

good outcome because at this time the moon is in balance without the Sun.114 And whoever

is born under the Lunar Mansion of al-thurayā will become felicitous,115 will loathe vice,

love piety, and will associate with the company of the learned and the upright.116

‫ادراك‬ ‫ح رق را ا ار ر‬

Without the confusion of any doubt, I can comprehend illuminated surfaces via the path of

unveiling!117

111
Or, even the ‘distillation of cooling medication’ as Amina Inoles has rendered it, see Shams al-Maʿarif: An
Arabic Grimoire, Selected Translation (Revelore Press: Olympia, 2021): 94.
112
Ibid.
113
In a modern context, this can be read instead as the ‘acquisition of staff ’, ‘retainers’ and similar.
114
Beirut edition, ibid. This is because Aries is a favorable position at this time as well as the moon when it
enters Taurus, and this Lunar Mansion spans both Aries and Taurus.
115
Or, happy.
116
Cordero edition, ibid. Agrippa says about this Mansion that “it is profitable to sailors, huntsmen, and alchemists,”
Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ibid. See also Warnock: 48.
117
Being the reply of the hoopoe to the owls in chapter 7 of Suhrawardī’s The Language of the Ants (loghat-i-
mūrān), in OEUVRES PHILOSOPHIQUES ET MYSTIQUES, Tome III, ibid.: 303 (my trans.)

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