The Seven Valleys: A Letter That Maps the Journey of the Soul

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh, which sets out the circumstances and the contents of the Seven Valleys. The passages in quotation marks are Bahá'u'lláh's own words, as rendered in the authorized English translation of the Seven Valleys.

Some of the Word of God comes as law, and some as prayer, and some as the chronicle of a Cause. And some of it comes as a map — a description of the very journey that a soul must make if it would draw near to its Maker. Among the most beloved of all the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh is one such map: a mystical Tablet, revealed during the years of His exile in Baghdád, that traces the ascent of the human spirit to God through seven stages. It is called the Seven Valleys. And it began, Adib Taherzadeh records in The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, not as a book Bahá'u'lláh set out to write, but as the answer to a single sincere question.

A question from a Ṣúfí judge

In the years after His return from the mountains of Kurdistán, Bahá'u'lláh lived in Baghdád, and His fame as a source of wisdom spread far beyond the circle of the exiles. Among those drawn to Him was a man of standing in the mystical tradition of Islám: Shaykh Muḥyi'd-Dín, a Ṣúfí and a judge — a qáḍí — of the town of Khániqayn, near the Persian frontier. He was learned in the language and the lore of the Ṣúfí path, the centuries-old discipline by which seekers in that tradition strove to journey from the world of the senses toward union with God.

Shaykh Muḥyi'd-Dín wrote to Bahá'u'lláh, putting to Him questions about that inner journey. And Bahá'u'lláh answered. But He did not answer in the cramped, technical vocabulary of the schools. He took the very framework the Ṣúfís knew — the idea that the soul ascends to God by passing through successive "valleys" or stages — and He filled it with a light and a sweetness and an authority that the tradition had never before contained. The answer He sent back became the Tablet known to the Bahá'í world as the Haft-Vádí, the Seven Valleys.

Taherzadeh draws out the wonder of this. A Manifestation of God, addressing a practitioner of an established mystical path, did not dismiss that path. He met the seeker where he stood, in the language the seeker already loved, and then lifted that language to a station it could not have reached on its own. The Word of God, here, does not crush the sincere searching of the past; it crowns it.

The road of seven stages

The Seven Valleys describes the soul's journey to God as a passage through seven successive valleys, each with its own character, each demanding that the traveller leave behind what the previous one had given.

The first is the Valley of Search. Here the journey begins, and Bahá'u'lláh sets the price of entry: patience, detachment, and an unwearying effort that does not give up. "It is incumbent on these servants," He writes, "that they cleanse the heart... from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge, and the allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy." The seeker must "never... rest for a moment" and "never... grow despondent." The steed of this valley, He says, is patience; without it the traveller will reach no goal.

The second is the Valley of Love. Here reason is left behind, for love is a fire that consumes the harvest of the intellect. "Love accepteth no existence and wisheth no life," Bahá'u'lláh writes; the lover, set aflame, no longer counts the cost of the journey. It is in this valley that He sets down the line that has become, for countless readers, the watchword of the whole Tablet: "O My Brother! Until thou enter the Egypt of love, thou shalt never come to the Joseph of the Beauty of the Friend."

The third is the Valley of Knowledge — not the borrowed knowledge of books, but the true knowledge that love makes possible, the sight by which the traveller comes to see the hidden wisdom in all things and to find, in apparent calamity, the mercy of God. The fourth is the Valley of Unity, in which the traveller, looking out at last with the eye of oneness, sees the signs of God in all created things and the seal of one Sun upon every mirror.

Beyond these lie the higher and stranger valleys. The fifth is the Valley of Contentment, where the soul, freed from want, finds in poverty the riches of the spirit and feels "the joy of the good-pleasure of God." The sixth is the Valley of Wonderment, where the traveller is "tossed in the oceans of grandeur," lost in awe before the immensity of what is revealed, so that "every moment he beholdeth a wondrous world, a new creation."

The last valley

The seventh and last is the Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness. Here the journey arrives at a destination the world would never call a destination at all: not the gaining of some great possession, but the complete emptying of self before God. The poverty Bahá'u'lláh means is not the lack of money but the death of self-will — "dying to self and living in God, being poor in self and rich in the Desired One." The traveller who reaches this valley has nothing left of his own; and precisely because he has nothing, he is filled.

Taherzadeh emphasises how much is held in so short a compass. The Seven Valleys is not a long book. Yet within its few pages Bahá'u'lláh has charted the whole arc of the spiritual life — from the first restless stirring of the search, up through the burning of love and the opening of true knowledge and the vision of unity, to the heights of contentment and wonder, and at last to the self-forgetfulness in which the soul is at home with God. It is, in the most practical sense, a description that a seeker in any age can lay alongside his own life and ask: which valley am I in? What is the next one asking of me?

A letter that became a treasure

The man who first received it, Shaykh Muḥyi'd-Dín, had asked his questions as one practitioner asks a master he admires. He could not have known that the answer sent back to him would become one of the most treasured of all the mystical writings of the Bahá'í Revelation, copied and recited and pondered by believers across the world for generations after his own name had grown obscure. This is part of what the Feast of Words holds before us: that a single revealed letter, written in answer to one honest seeker, can carry within it a light that outlasts empires and reaches souls the writer's contemporary never met.

The transforming power of the Word is nowhere clearer than here, for the Seven Valleys does not merely describe the soul's transformation — it works it. Read with attention, the Tablet does to the reader what it depicts: it kindles the search, fans the love, opens the knowledge, and draws the heart, valley by valley, toward the poverty that is the truest wealth. Bahá'u'lláh had written, in the Valley of Love, that the seeker must enter the Egypt of love to come to the Joseph of the Friend. The letter He sent to a Ṣúfí judge in Baghdád has been, for multitudes since, one of the surest roads into that Egypt.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh, and the Seven Valleys itself in the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 1 — Baghdád 1853-63)*. George Ronald.