The Lantern of Spirits

Misbâh ul-arvâh, or The Lantern of Spirits, is a comparatively little known Sufi didactic Persian poem written in the 12th century by the next to unknown Shaikh Shams ud-dîn Muhammad b. Îl-Tughân Bardasîrî Kirmânî. It is not a very long poem, covering only 1099 double verses (bait), but it contains both a quite comprehensive compendium of Sufi teachings and a very interesting description of the soul’s journey to the Other World. The latter furnishes fascinating parallels with Dante’s Divina Commedia. The book gives a detailed description of the contents of the poem, with many examples of it’s eloquent verse in translation. The main part of the book, however, gives a critical edition of the Persian text, based on the twelve oldest known manuscripts that contain the poem. Fortunately, the eight oldest of those are dated, and this makes a detailed reconstruction of the original text possible. This reconstruction demonstrates how a strict application of a stemmatic method may be used in the establishment of a 800 years old text. This also makes it possible to follow the textual history of the poem as mirrored in the complete set of variant readings that are given in the apparatus. This work would thus be of particular interest to students and scholars of Classical Persian literature and Sufism as well as those interested in the comparative study of visionary tales of journeys to the Other World.