MOKADDASA, AL-SAFER
(8th and 9th centuries)--the best of the dream readers and dream hunters. Legend has it that when he put together the masculine part of the Khazar encyclopedia, while the feminine part was compiled by Princess Ateh. Al-Safer did not want to write his part of the encyclopedia (of Khazar dictionary) for his contemporaries or descendants, and so he compiled it in the 5th-century Khazar language, which none of his contemporaries understood; he wrote is exclusively for his ancestors, for those who had once dreamed about their part of Adam Cadmon's body, the part that will never be dreamed again. The Khazar Princess Ateh was Al-Safer's mistress, and there is a legend about how he laved her breasts with his beard dipped in wine. Al-Safer ended up in captivity, and the reason for it, according to one source, was a misunderstanding between Princess Ateh and the Khazar kaghan. The argument was caused by a letter the princess had written but never sent, but which had fallen into the kaghan's hands all the same. Since it referred to Al-Safer, it aroused jealousy and anger in the kaghan. It said:
I planted roses in your boots; I have a wallflower growing out of your hat. As I await you in my lone and eternal night, the days snow upon me like shreds of torn missives. I put them together and read out your loving words letter by letter. But I read only the little I can, because an unknown handwriting sometimes appears, and a piece of some other letter gets mixed up with yours: somebody else's day and letter interferes with my night. I await your return, when letters and days will no longer be necessary. And I wonder: will the other one still write to me then, or will it still be night?
According to other sources (which Daubmannus connects with the manuscript of the Cairo Synagogue), this letter or poem was never intended for the kaghan, but for Al-Safer himself, and it referred to him and Adam Cadmon. In any event, the letter aroused the jealousy or political suspicions of the Khazar kaghan (because the dream hunters were Princess Ateh's strong opposition party, which put up resistance to the kaghan). Al-Safer was punished by being locked in an iron cage and suspended from a tree. Every year, through her dreams, Princess Ateh sent him the key to her bedchamber, but all she could do to ease his plight was to bribe the demons to have someone briefly replace Al-Safer in the cage. And so Al-Safer's life consisted partly of the lives of other people, who alternated in lending him a few of their own weeks. Meanwhile, the lovers exchanged messages in a special way of their own: he would scratch a few words with his teeth on the back of a tortoise or crab caught from the river underneath his cage and would return them to water, and she would answer in the same way, sending her messages of love inscribed on living tortoises into the river that merges with the sea underneath the cage. When the devil divested Princess Ateh of her memory and obliged her to forget the Khazar language, she stopped writing, but Al-Safer continued sending messages, trying to remind her of his name and the words of her poems. Several hundred years after this event, two tortoises with messages inscribed on them were caught on the shores of the Caspian Sea, messages from a woman and a man who had loved each other. The tortoises were still together, and the messages of the loving couple could be red on their backs. The man's message read:
You are like the girl who always rose late; when she married in the next village and for the first time had to rise early, she saw the hoarfrost on the fields and said to her mother-in-law, "We don't have that in our village!" Like her, you think there is no love in the world, because you have never been awake early enough to encounter it, although every morning it is there on time. . .
The woman's message was shorter, amounting to just a few words:
My native land is silence, my food--muteness. I sit in my name like an oarsman in a boat. I hate you so much I can't sleep.
Mokaddasa was buried in a grave shaped like a goat.
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