Shams al-Din Tabrizi is well known as the muse who inspired Rumi's embrace of poetry as a vehicle to express the ecstatic and ineffable. In a large percentage of his ghazals, Rumi (1207-73 CE) lavishes encomiastic praise on Shams, in a symbolic discourse that virtually apotheosizes him, and at the same time emulates or impersonates him (Rumi regularly uses the takhallos of Shams in his Divan, as if speaking in the voice of Shams). And yet, Rumi speaks of a multiplicity of guides and saints in his poetry, indeed sketching out in the Masnavi a doctrine of the hierarchy of saints (variously designated as vali, imam, qutb, pir, shaykh, etc.). Rumi also relays the "teachings" of particular Sufi saints of the historical past: Shebli, Ma'ruf-e Karkhi, Bayazid, Ebrahim-e Adham, Jonayd, Hallaj, etc. After the departure of Shams from Konya (1247-48 CE), Rumi also quite remarkably shifts the object of his hagiologic encomia first to Salah al-Din Zarkub (d. 1258 CE), and then to Hosam al-Din Chelebi (d. 1284 CE), in a fashion that seems to replace Shams with other living figures. This paper analyzes Rumi's hagiological discourse by: 1) identifying the specific symbolic roles played by the past historical saints named in his poems; 2) assessing the successive transference of the language of apotheosis from Shams al-Din to Salah al-Din and then Hosam al-Din, and how they are made to represent the living saintly guide; 3) comparing Rumi's poetic representations of the Prophet with that of the saints; and 4) evaluating the extent to which Rumi intended his pronouncements on the hierarchy of saints as theosophic doctrine, or theopoetic discourse.