ABSTRACT
In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letters N T and the number 2; the date stamped on the face is 1929. Belief in the Zahir is of Islamic ancestry, and dates, to some time in the eighteenth century. The introduction said that the author proposed to "gather into a single manageable octavo volume every existing document that bears upon the superstition of the Zahir, including some articles held in the Habicht archives and the original manuscript of Philip Meadows Taylor's report on the subject". The Kabbalists believed that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe, everything would be—everything, even the unbearable Zahir. Dawn often surprises the author upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking about that passage in the Asrar Nama where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil.
