The mythological beginning of the Shahnameh casts a lasting shadow over the rest of the Persian epic. Human civilization as we know it begins to appear during this period, as do forces of good and evil, invention and destruction, creativity and corruption. Basic human instincts, like love and hatred, ambition and jealously, are also introduced in this stage. But first and foremost, we get to know how humanity first appeared on this earth. The charge of Kiyumars, the very first king ever, is in fact to bring humanity at large together to form a civilization. Under Kiyumars, humans learn the first two civilizing components of their communal life: how to dress themselves and how to make food. During the reign of Kiyumars, forces of evil enter human affairs. Siyamak, Kiyumars’s son, becomes the target of Ahriman, the Supreme Demon, who dispatches his son to kill Siyamak and destroy Kiyumars’s kingdom. Kiyumars is oblivious to this plot. Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Good, sends his emissary, Sorush, to warn Siyamak, who mobilizes an army against the son of Ahriman, but he is killed in hand-to-hand combat with him, leaving Kiyumars in mourning and his kingdom in ruins. The course of human civilization is thus interrupted by the demonic intervention of the forces of Ahriman, the Evil. These mythic battles define the course of human destiny, both internal to the Shahnameh and external to it, with ceremonial royalty, filial duties, successive wars, unsuspected treacheries, and wanton murder. The polychronicity of the Shahnameh narrative is here set on a solid mythic stage that embraces the rest of the text.
The first pattern of murder and revenge in the Shahnameh is established right here when in the mythological section Siyamak’s son, Houshang, mobilizes an army of humans and beasts on behalf of his grandfather, Kiyumars, and avenges the death of his father, killing the son of Ahriman in a heroic battle. The pattern will be repeated multiple times in the Shahnameh and underscores its “Oedipal” foregrounding in multiple phases. Houshang rules for many years after the death of his grandfather and spreads peace and justice all over the world. His critical contribution toward making human civilization possible is to discover ore. He becomes the first blacksmith and invents the ax, the saw, and the hammer. He is also known for having invented agriculture. He devised a sophisticated system of irrigation. Under his reign people became self-sufficient in making food. He is also the one who discovered fire, by accidentally noticing a flash of light when trying to kill a serpent and prayed to the fire as a sign of Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Good.12 This became the origin of the Iranian festival of Saddeh in winter. Rituals are thus initiated in human civility. Houshang also domesticated animals and used them for agricultural labor. The mythic foregrounding of history, as we read it here, thus expands apace for the rest of the Persian epic. History is anticipated with civilizational forestructures and warring factions. As we proceed to read the rest of the Shahnameh we remember how a polysonic poetics begins to resonate when this mythic state yields narratively to the heroic and the historical.
The battle between the forces of good and evil continue well through the reign of Tahmoures, Houshang’s son, who succeeds his father. His title is Tahmoures the Binder of Demons. He consults with his vizier, Shidasb, and devises magic to capture the Leader of the Demons, Ahriman, then mounts him like a beast and rides on him to tour the world. The demons come back together and launch yet another battle against Tahmoures. He defeats them again, and this time around they plead for mercy and in return teach him the art of writing. They teach Tahmoures some thirty different languages and scripts. He also discovers the art of textile manufacturing and the use of barley and hay as food for domesticated animals. He then proceeds to identify game and cultivate the art of falconry. But the most significant event of his reign is the discovery of writing. Why should Ferdowsi acknowledge and attribute the most enduring feature of human civilization to forces of evil? What did the demons do to humans by teaching them how to write? What demonic device is the act of writing, jealously guarded by forces of evil, until they taught it to humans in a dubious compensation for their freedom? Or might we not reverse the question: did humanity not learn its most sacrosanct definition of civilization, the very alphabet of our cultured life, from our demonized enemies? Should we therefore not dare to overcome the fear of those thus othered for a gift hidden in their alterity? These and many other similar questions quietly begin to rise as we follow Ferdowsi telling us how the very alphabet of our civilized life came about. It is impossible to ignore or forget these earliest passages of the Shahnameh in its mythic part when we come to read its historical sections, where the narrative suspension he has created here comes to full fruition in the textual totality of his epic there.
Jamshid is Tahmoures’s handsome and valiant son, the king under whose reign civilization as we now know it begins to take full shape. Jamshid becomes the first king, Mubad, combining political and religious authority that is at once royal and pastoral. He spends many years in the crafting and manufacturing of armaments. He perfected the art of making garments and distinguished between warring gear and dress for feasts. He also created the first social groups and divided his subjects into four castes: the Priests, the Warriors, the Peasants, and the Workers. He put the Demons in his possession to work and made them construct buildings and monuments. He invented the art of mining, excavating for precious metals while discovering perfumes and the art of bodily adornment. He was the first navigator. He invented the ship and traveled over the seas. He also invented the art of flying. He had himself a beautiful throne made and told the Demons to fly him over the lands. He was like a sun in the sky. All these achievements took hundreds of years, and Iranians celebrated him every year in their Noruz Festival, at the precise moment of the vernal equinox. He ruled for more than three hundred years, and during his reign he discovered the secret of immortality and taught it to his people. Jamshid’s achievements, especially his victory over mortality, lead to hubris and a claim to Divinity. The nobles among his subjects do not dare to object. But Ahura Mazda takes back his charisma, and thus he begins to lose his gift of grace. During his reign time and history stand still, as earth, water, air, and fire fuse together. In each one of these early mythological phases we are rehearsing the momentous occasions when the very idea of “the human” is invented. Jamshid’s reign is the epitome of a full mythic panorama of human existence—and as such his time becomes emblematic of the polychronic liminality of time and space in which the entirety of the Persian epic is cast.
Zahhak (the son of King Marda) is the evil king who comes to destroy Jamshid. Ahriman, the Supreme Evil, turns himself into a handsome and attractive man and appears to Zahhak. Ahriman seduces Zahhak to kill his father and ascend his throne. When Zahhak becomes the king, Ahriman changes his appearance and comes to Zahhak as a handsome cook. In gratitude to his new cook, Zahhak grants him any wish he has. Ahriman asks to kiss Zahhak’s two shoulders. He does so and then instantly disappears. Two monstrous serpents grow precisely where Ahriman had kissed him. Zahhak’s guards kill the serpents, but they immediately grow back. Ahriman now appears as a wise physician and tells Zahhak that his only cure is to feed the serpents the brains of two young men every day, so that they will not devour him. It is at this time that a group of Iranian nobility invites Zahhak to invade Iran and conquer Jamshid’s kingdom. Jamshid escapes to the borders of China and lives yet another one hundred years in hiding. But Zahhak finally finds him and has him cut in half by a saw. We read these fantastic stories and we wonder, and we carry that wonder with us from the mythic to the heroic and from there to the historical phases of the Shahnameh. There is an organicity to these syncretic suspensions of times and narratives. We read these stories as if in a different world, on a different plane. We never know where we are, who is telling us these stories, and how they are hanging in suspense our very conception of truth and reality.
Zahhak rules over Iran and attends to his two serpents by killing young men and feeding them on their brains. Jamshid had two beautiful daughters, Shahnaz and Arnavaz.13 Zahhak captures and marries them and forces them to atte
nd to his serpents. The two princesses secretly work with two pious men, Armayel and Garmayel, who were in charge of Zahhak’s kitchen, to release the young men that have been captured to be killed fed to the serpents and instead feed the brains of two sheep to Zahhak’s serpents. Despite such an act of heroism, Zahhak still rules for many years over the Iranians with tyranny and feeds his serpents on their brains. Finally, he has a dream one night that is interpreted for him by a daring interpreter as his reign coming to an end with a certain Fereydun coming and destroying him. Zahhak now desperately looks for this Fereydun. The reign of Zahhak is the epiphany of evil, pitting the force of his darkness against the Iranian realm. He is the negative force of history, setting it in motion. Before his demise, Zahhak’s diabolic force is resisted by a defiant but leaderless nation, which becomes a nation by surviving Zahhak. Zahhak’s reign is the mythic moment when Iran as a nation and Iranians as a people enter their history via a trauma. The trauma is ahistorical, anachronistic, narratively suspended on an immaterial moment when history was yet to begin, but the world was dreaming its dangerous dreams. It is a strange sensation to read these stories happening in a space whose location and logic are beyond our grasp. We are inside a world that has no material referent to it. The infinity of this moment lacks any beginning or end, totality or locality. Can there be a world literature without coming to terms with the factual immateriality of this inner world of the Shahnameh?
Fereydun is born to a certain Abtin and his wife, Faranak, in a remote part of the kingdom. Abtin traces his ancestry to Tahmoures the Binder of Demons. Abtin is captured and murdered by Zahhak’s retinue. Faranak is desperate to save her son. She takes Fereydun to a certain prairie in which a famous cow named Bormayeh is pasturing. She entrusts Fereydun to the owner of Bormayeh and asks him to take care of her son, save her from Zahhak, and feed him on Bormayeh’s milk. Fereydun grows up on Bormayeh’s milk for three years, until Zahhak discovers his whereabouts, at which point Faranak comes back, rescues her son, and takes him to Alborz Mountain and entrusts his upbringing to a pious man. Zahhak captures Bormayeh and kills the good cow. Fereydun grows up with the pious man in Alborz Mountain. At the age of sixteen, he comes down to his mother and asks her who his father is. Faranak tells Fereydun who Abtin was and why he was killed by Zahhak. Fereydun swears to kill Zahhak and avenge his father. Faranak warns him that Zahhak is very powerful. But Zahhak is petrified by the prospect of Fereydun’s coming and avenging his father and all other innocent men he has murdered to feed their brains to his serpents. Zahhak summons all the nobles of the realm and forces them to sign an affidavit that he has been a just and kind king. The rise of Fereydun in the company of his single mother and absence of any father fixes the enduring mother-son relationship as definitive to the familial trauma of the epic. In every turn of the narrative, the unfolding stories anticipate and reflect back on one another. The mythic world becomes a self-reflecting collage of mirror images generating, sustaining, reflecting back and forth the collective unconscious of the text.
Every episode of the Shahnameh, as we see, is contingent on the episode before and suspended by the next. Kaveh we soon learn is a blacksmith who storms into Zahhak’s court exactly at the moment that he is collecting signatures on an affidavit testifying to his just rule. Kaveh admonishes the complacent nobles, denounces Zahhak for having killed his sons to feed his serpents, rescues his last remaining son, storms out of the tyrant’s court, and leads a revolutionary uprising against Zahhak and on behalf of Fereydun. He makes a leather banner from his blacksmith apron and leads the popular uprising toward Fereydun’s hideout. With the march of Kaveh soars the mythic and heroic components of the Shahnameh toward its historical ends, with every episode the myth of human origin advancing toward its heroic dimensions and historic consequences. By now we have completely exited the normative narrative of the world and find ourselves lost in the collective unconscious of the Persian epic.
Fereydun listens to people’s complaints, adorns the leather banner of Kaveh with royal jewelry in his possession, puts on his crown and royal robe, goes to his mother, Faranak, to secure her blessing, and leads a war against Zahhak. First he summons his two brothers and commissions them to have the blacksmiths make him a special mace with the head of an ox, for which he draws the model on the ground. He then leads his army toward Zahhak’s palace. At night during an encampment a handsome man appears to him and teaches him the secrets of Zahhak’s fortresses and how to conquer them. Fereydun takes this as a sign of Divine intervention on his behalf. The following day he marches toward Zahhak’s palace. He reaches Arvandrud, where the sailors refuse to let him use their boats. He marches into the river, and his army follows him toward the palace. Zahhak is not in his palace. Fereydun destroys his guards, rescues Shahrnaz and Arnavaz, ascends Zahhak’s throne, and sits Jamshid’s two daughters at his side. He throws a lavish party at Zahhak’s palace. Kondro, Zahhak’s chamberlain, secretly escapes the palace and reports to his king of the events. Zahhak initially refuses to believe that his nightmare is coming to pass, until he hears that Fereydun is intimate with his two wives, Shahrnaz and Arnavaz, Jamshid’s daughters. Zahhak invades his capital, but his subjects attack his army. He secretly escapes the battlefield and goes to his palace, where he sees Fereydun intimate with his wives, Shahnavaz and Arnavaz. In a furious rage, Zahhak attacks the two princesses, but Fereydun strikes him with his ox-headed mace. About to kill Zahhak, Fereydun is stopped by the same Divine Emissary, who tells him to chain Zahhak on Damavand Mountain because it is not yet time to kill the tyrant. Fereydun does accordingly and straps Zahhak inside a cave in Mount Damavand, and rules over his realm with justice and fairness. At this point in the Shahnameh we have a solid sense of dramatic balance in historical narrative. Mythic figures appear and disappear, rise and fall, the un-time of a mythic world unfolds, history awaits itself.
WHEN HISTORY REMEMBERS ITSELF
From this point forward, we begin to see the unfolding drama of world history dreamed inside the memorial consciousness of the Shahnameh, in what we can now see is the collective unconscious of the Persia epic. Fereydun and his three sons become the focal points of the next story of the Shahnameh, by which event we now exit its mythological and enter its heroic phase. Fereydun ascends the royal throne in the month of Mehr (September–October) at the autumnal equinox—henceforth the Mehregan Festival becomes a Persian festive occasion. Fereydun’s mother, Faranak, becomes instrumental in her son’s spreading justice and fairness in the realm. Fereydun has three sons: Iraj, Salm, and Tur. Fereydun commissions his vizier, Jandal, to find three suitable sisters to marry his sons. Jandal goes around the world and decides that the daughters of the king of Yemen are best suited for Fereydun’s sons. He asks the Yemenite monarch for the hands of his three daughters for the sons of Fereydun. The king is ambivalent because he is interested in the union but is reluctant to be separated from his daughters. He is also afraid of refusing Fereydun’s request and inciting his anger, having the history of Zahhak freshly in mind. The Yemenite generals are offended by their monarch’s weakness and ask him to be steadfast in his decision, either send off his daughters to marry Fereydun’s sons with dignity or, if does not wish so, to simply ask Fereydun for certain impossible things in return that he will not be able to provide. The imperial power of the house of Fereydun has now reached its fullest potential. History, as provisioned by the mythic force of The Book of Kings, is now unfolding apace.
The imperial geography of the Shahnameh now begins to expand proportionately. The Yemenite monarch sends a message to Fereydun through Jandal in which he tells him that of course he would be honored if his daughters were to be married to his sons. However, he wishes to see his future sons-in-law in person, and would the Persian king mind sending them off to Yemen? Fereydun is wise and knows that his Yemenite counterpart is reluctant to send off his daughters. So he teaches his sons how to tell the three princesses from one another, because they look very much alike. Alerted to the Yemeni
te king’s stratagem, Fereydun’s sons go to Yemen and skillfully distinguish among the three princesses, marry them respectively, and head back to Iran. But the Yemenite king was relentless. He planted a number of other magical stratagems to trap the Persian princes. But having been bestowed with the Divine Gift of Grace, Royal Glory (Farrah-e Izadi), Iraj, Salm, and Tur undid all his magic and returned home in safety. Before they reach their father’s palace, however, Fereydun himself decides to test his sons’ wisdom and appears as a dragon to them, with which they again deal with caution and reason. Assured of his sons’ capabilities, Fereydun welcomes his daughters-in-law and gives them Persian names: Arezu to the oldest, who marries his oldest son, Salm; Mah to the middle princess, who marries his second son, Tur; and Sahi to the youngest, who marries his youngest son, Iraj. By the end of this story Ferdowsi’s gift of storytelling and expanded geography of the Persian Empire assume evident historical proportions. The heroic phase weds the mythic into the historical via a purgatorial phase that enables the world of the Persian epic to resonate with what we know and what we wish we knew about history. The heroic phase enables the mythic to connect with the historical seamlessly.
The Shahnameh Page 15