  Relevant to Islamic—and Maimonidean—ideas about the active intellect's role in knowing and prophecy in particular is Aristotle's additional description of this active intellectual principle as analogous to light. Especially for the Neoplatonic Islamic readers of De Anima, this reference to light opens an interpretive floodgate, offering a clear crossover from talk of a separable, immortal active intellect (in De Anima 3.5) to overtly illuminationist and emanationist Neoplatonic doctrines (in the Theology of Aristotle). For, in the Theology of Aristotle (as in Plotinus' original Greek writings, and as in Neoplatonic texts more generally), one finds abundant metaphors of light used to describe the elusive process of emanation through which the world exists. Looking to the Neoplatonic cosmologies of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, we additionally find metaphors of light to describe the unique influence that the active intellect casts over the sublunar world. In the metaphorical idea of a light pouring down from active intellect, there emerges the ontological idea that this intellect emanates forth the very form of the world. There emerges too the epistemological idea of illumination—the idea that human knowledge is actualized not by mere encounter with the world, and not merely by some mechanism internal to the individual's mind, but by the active intellect as a “source of enlightenment” which pours down on it, as it were. Here seen in its epistemological role, the active intellect “illuminates” the human mind, enabling it to become filled with truths (in one or another way; see previous section on differences in this regard between al-Farabi and Avicenna). For Al-Farabi and Avicenna, as for Maimonides, this illuminationist tendency (rooted at least in part, we might say, in the De Anima 3.5 notion of light) goes hand in hand with a complex Aristotelian account of the workings of the individual human mind in the attainment of knowledge. Their commitment to a complex Aristotelian epistemology and psychology, however, is tempered with a doctrine of illumination on which the active intellect plays a key role in the final attainment of knowledge—including prophecy. For Maimonides, as for his Islamic predecessors, active intellect is like a light: it is the overflowing illuminating fount of human intellection and prophecy.