The Compendium of Spiritual Practices:
Thresholds of transcendence into the ethereal divine – Touba, Senegal
Focusing on the holy city of Touba in Senegal and the Grand Magal Festival, The Compendium of Spiritual Practice investigates the notion of threshold as well as a lexicon of specific architectural tropes that powerfully communicate a sense of spirituality.
Recollecting intangible esoteric experiences and understanding how the diasporic memory of faith communities can be tangibly archived and experienced by others, gives insight into the experiences of theethereal heavens across geographies, through collective rituals of worship.
Eric Ross denotes this symbolism through the Islamic concepts of Zahir and Batin. Zahir forms the material world that is manifest, but never complete, only through the understanding of Batin. Batin is an ethereal understanding of space and the hidden aspects of reality (Ross, 2006: 29).
The way in which a believer experiences the transition between the material and ethereal is through a threshold of Barzakh. Zahir, Batin and Barzakh form the earthly, the threshold as well as the ethereal layers or, experiential interpretations thereof, all connected by the cosmic axis of qutb, the cosmic pole. Eric Ross refers to qutb as the cosmic pole that incarnates the covenant between man and God, the temporal world and eternity (Ross, 1995: 7). In a state of transcendence experienced in Batin, an ‘Imaginal Realm’ is considered to be an imagined place where all ideas, thoughts and actions are manifested, including supernatural experiences.
The Recollection and analysis of these esoteric memories through tangible expressions, passed on knowledge and experience can start to document an alternative archive for the diaspora of the Sufi-practicing community. The Grand Magal Festival as a progression of spiritual practices, is a successful spiritual landscape that denotes the experiences of the ethereal and cosmological nature of the unseen world of Batin.
The material architectural tropes studied in this compendium form examples of how the atmosphere of spiritual practice in physical tropes are translated through collective spiritual practices into an ethereal atmosphere that can be experienced devoid of geographical location and provides an entry point to translate these experiences to the diasporic community of Sufism.
Using this data of atmosphere, metrics, urban fabric and ritual, a proposed architecture intends to pierce the thresholds between heaven and earth, the seen and the unseen and transcends space and person into the ethereal realm.
