NOVEL FOLKLORE

ON SADEGH HEDAYAT’S

THE BLIND OWL

JASON REZA JORJANI

Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

San Francisco

2018

Copyright © 2018 by Jason Reza Jorjani

All rights reserved

Cover image:

The Burney Relief, British Museum, representing Ereshkigal or Ishtar, southern Mesopotamia, circa. 1800–1750 BCE

Cover design by

Kevin I. Slaughter

Published in the United States by

COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.

P.O. Box 22638

San Francisco, CA 94122

USA

http://www.counter-currents.com/

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-64264-103-5

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64264-104-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-64264-105-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jorjani, Jason Reza, 1981- author.

Title: Novel folklore : on Sadegh Hedayat's The blind owl / Jason Reza

Jorjani.

Description: San Francisco : Counter-Currents Publishing, 2018. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019458 (print) | LCCN 2018022877 (ebook) | ISBN

9781642641059 (e-book) | ISBN 9781642641035 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9781642641042 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Hidayat, Sadiq, 1903-1951. Buf-i kur. | Hidayat,

Sadiq, 1903-1951--Knowledge--Folkore. | Folklore in literature.

Classification: LCC PK6561.H43 (ebook) | LCC PK6561.H43 B8355 2018 (print) |

DDC 891/.5533--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019458

Sadegh Hedayat laughing at the Jorjani home in Tehran. Late 1940s.

Photograph by Reza Jorjani, now in the archive of Fereidun Jorjani.

This book is dedicated to Jeffrey J. Kripal,

the Professor X to whom I owe my doctorate.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. An Untimely Madman’s Angel of Destiny

Chapter 2. Soul Mates & Psychic Shadows

Chapter 3. Poisoned Wine & the Serpent Power

Chapter 4. The Eighth Clime

Chapter 5. Star Blood

About the Author

Come away O’ human child,

to the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand

For the world’s more full of weeping

than ye can understand.

—W. B. Yeats, “Stolen Child”

INTRODUCTION

Sadegh Hedayat is the most significant modern Persian literary figure, and The Blind Owl is his masterpiece. My grandfather was his best friend, reputed among Hedayat’s inner circle to have been the only man who could tolerate “dear Sadegh” on a daily basis. The Blind Owl epitomizes the role that Iran has played as the center of cultural cross-fertilization throughout human history. The conflict between Iran and America is ultimately a struggle over succession—over the question of whether America will supplant Iran in its traditional role as the civilizational melting-pot of the world. By the time of the Tehran Conference of 1943, in the last years of Hedayat’s life, and after a couple of centuries of decadent corruption during the Qajar dynasty, Iran had already largely ceded that role and was—on a material level—reduced from a world empire to a Third World country. The Pahlavi Dynasty tried, with some success, to restore Persian national grandeur—but in too artificial a manner.

What is so fascinating about Hedayat, from this cultural-historical perspective, is that as early as the 1940s his work crystallized a radically different vision for a Persian Renaissance in a modern context. Hedayat loathed Islam and the uncivilized Arabs who brought it to Iran. He sought to revitalize Iran’s connection to its pre-Islamic culture, in a much more sophisticated and profound sense than Pahlavi state propaganda spoke of it, but he also wanted to re-open Iranian culture to philosophical and spiritual influences from India and Europe.

The Blind Owl was written and published in Bombay, in the course of Hedayat’s Indian sojourn, and its author committed suicide during one of his extensive stays in Paris—where he was well-connected with French literary and artistic circles. Jalal al-e-Ahmad, whose xenophobic concept of “Westoxification” was central to the ideologues of the 1979 Islamic Reaction (I wouldn’t call it a “Revolution”), viewed Hedayat as a key culprit. Those who came to see Hedayat as having poisoned the emerging modern Persian literary culture with a decadent, and even suicidal, western nihilism overlooked his role as a conduit for Indian influences as well as Western ones. Often, such “critics” had read little of his writings for themselves, an oversight condoned by a widely-held Persian superstition that The Blind Owl is cursed and that to read it with any care leads one to commit suicide.

In the generation that has elapsed since the founding of the Islamic Republic, a large segment of the Persian youth—who are rabidly anti-Islamic, pro-Western, and interested in Eastern mysticism—have embraced Sadegh Hedayat as their most beloved native cultural hero. This generation is as ardently nationalistic as it is emphatically cosmopolitan, the seeming contradiction being resolved by the fact that they view Iran’s perennial role as the crossroads of world civilization as integral to the Persian national identity. They see the “revolution” that resulted in the Islamic Republic as a miserably failed attempt to reestablish this perennial role, one that was reactionary in its response to the ascendancy of Western power and uprooted from the syncretistic pre-Islamic wellspring of Persian culture.

To many of the literati in his own time, Hedayat was known primarily as a folklorist. He had published two studies of Persian fairy tales. The first book is Owsâneh (1931), which is the old Pahlavi word for Afsâneh, or “Fairy Tale.”[1] The Persian paery is an Indo-European cognate of the Celtic faery, and paeris—who are often depicted as ethereal not-quite-human maidens—feature prominently in Iranian folktales. Hedayat’s second, more substantive study is Neyrangestân (1933).[2] Neyrang is a Persian word meaning “trap,” “trickery,” “artifice,” “craft,” or “witchcraft.” Combined with estân, meaning “Land,” it suggests the enchanted abode of the crafty faeries.

On the one hand, Hedayat draws on modern rationalistic European scholars and social scientists to argue that the superstitious cast of mind fundamental to folklore, which is found equally in the most primitive cultures and the most advanced civilizations, has evolutionary roots in our ape ancestry.[3] He makes some observations about the behavior of dogs in response to unusual and unsettling stimuli, and suggests that early man’s superstitions may be rooted in similar instinctual responses to eclipses, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, thunder, and lightning: their chief aim being to make it possible to endure such shocking occurrences and abide more securely in a world where they happen without knowledge of how and why they take place.[4] For example, earthquakes happen because the Earth is supported by the horn of a bull—who is in turn standing on a fish—and when the bull gets tired, he tosses the Earth from one horn onto the other.[5]

In this vein, Hedayat argues that superstitions and other retarding folk beliefs have a life of their own only so long as they are transmitted unreflectively through oral tradition—especially by women, to the small children that they raise. The best remedy for them is to collect, categorize, and document them in a work that is printed and receives wide distribution, a work that brings an analytical eye to bear on the socio-historical context of their genesis.[6] He laments that the nascent modern European field of “folklore” studies—a term that he coins in its Persian translation as farhangé tudeh—has collected the folk traditions of African tribes, Australian Aborigines, and the most cultured European peoples, but to date there has not been a single serious and trustworthy study of Iranian folklore.[7]

On the other hand, Hedayat’s approach to the folklore of Iran in particular runs counter to this scholastic naturalism and psychologizing, with its aim of exorcizing ignorant people of superstitious and regressive traditions. First of all, any naturalistic reading of his approach to folklore should be checked by his thesis that enterprising individuals construct the formal structures of knowledge in any culture from out of the deeper substratum of folklore by translating this lore into principles and precepts.[8] In such a view, sociology and social psychology, as rationalistic sciences, can never encompass folklore in a purely reductive and eliminative manner. Hedayat had already taken this view in Owsâneh, where he not only sees folk songs as the most primordial expression of the soul of a people, but as a force that can assimilate scientific and technological advancements in a way that fosters progress while keeping a civilization rooted in its primordial spirit.[9] He notes the German origin of the word Volkskünde, where künde means not just “lore” but “history” in the deepest and most originary sense possible (as compared to historiography).[10] Furthermore, it is fairly clear that in Neyrangestân, Hedayat is only intent on exorcising the Iranian Volk of foreign lore that has infected their ethos with deleterious and degenerative attitudes in the course of the many conquests and migrations Iran has suffered as the crossroads of the Earth.[11]

He draws an especially sharp contrast between the Aryan lore that forms the most primordial stratum of the Iranian cultural mentality and the Semitic lore that Iranians were subjected to, and eventually psychically subjugated by, in the course of several successive waves, beginning with the Chaldeans and Babylonian Jews, and ending with the catastrophic Arab invasion. The negation of free will through an obsession with astrologically determined Fate and bloody animal sacrifices that the superstitions of the Semitic peoples introduced into Iran to satisfy their terrifying egomaniacal divinities particularly aggrieves Hedayat, who takes note of the fact that—as both Zarathustra and Siddhartha Gautama attest—such inhumane sacrifices were alien to Aryan spirituality, whose cornerstone is the faith in free will or personal choice and spiritual cultivation based on conscientious discernment.[12] He is also indignant that the Semites, and even Persian-language writers brainwashed by them, have co-opted and re-written so many ancient Iranian folktales in such a way as to attribute the valorous deeds of heroes such as Jamshid and Rostam to the likes of King Solomon, in an apparent attempt to divest the Iranian people of their historical consciousness—as if conquering their land did not suffice.[13] Even whole Persian masterpieces, such as the Hezâr Afsân of the Sassanian period that was corrupted into the Arabian Nights or A Thousand and One Nights, have been passed off as Semitic literature after their originals were consigned to flames when the invading Arabs burned down the Sassanian libraries.[14]

What is especially interesting is the fact that, despite his study of Pahlavi, in Neyrangestân Hedayat does not draw a simple contrast between an idealized pre-Islamic Zoroastrian Iran and a post-Islamic Iran that has been Judaized by the Arabs. He notes that a careful study of current Iranian folk beliefs reveals a number of them that conflict even with the Zoroastrian worldview promulgated by Zarathustra and other contributors to the Avesta. For example, there is the folk tradition of talking not just to the most humble creatures, but also to trees and plants, as if they were somewhat conscious.[15] Despite the Zoroastrian view that some level of soul is distributed throughout the creation, such a degree of animism is pre-Zoroastrian.[16] The Avesta preaches against an older magical worldview of the Ancient Aryans—after all, the word “magic” comes from the “Magi” (moghân) of the Iranian tribe of Medes, the magus as the Greeks called them.[17] Hedayat is explicitly concerned with excavating and preserving these proto-Iranian folk beliefs; in fact, he views it as a patriotic duty.[18]

But what is revealed in The Blind Owl is that he most certainly does not aim to do so with the attitude of a conservative antiquarian. Rather, he is drawing on the archaic, even pre-Zoroastrian past of paeris (faeries) and such, with a view to resisting an intolerable present and redefining the future of his fallen people. This folkloric orientation towards the future can already be seen in Owsâneh, where Hedayat recognizes the progress on all fronts that Iranian society is making under Reza Shah’s regime, but he is concerned to make sure that technical advancement and the rationalistic knowledge bound up with it does not cost the Iranian people the lore that connects them to a past that is not only pre-Islamic, but that is even pre-Persian and primordially Aryan in spirit.[19] This spirit can and should foster folklore that more adequately addresses modern scientific-technological pressures.[20]

I propose to explore in what sense The Blind Owl is an attempt at a novel folklore. What will jar the reductionist reader (if he has not already jumped ship by then) is that, at least in The Blind Owl, Hedayat takes fairy tales quite seriously. When we refer to something as “just a fairy tale” in a dismissive and pejorative sense, we have lost touch with the folkloric consciousness. For the common folk of olden times, among the Persians just as much as among their Celtic cousins, the queer beings and enchanted places of their popular lore were not “tall tales”—they were the very element and atmosphere of their lives, an expression of their secret longings and their deepest fears. Folklore is not like organized religion, with its scholastic doctrines that must be accepted on “faith” despite being (poorly) rationalized and its long-dead scriptures that may be interpreted allegorically. Fairies are not abstract divine intelligences with proper roles in a celestial hierarchy ordained by an ethical God for the moral betterment of mankind. You will be damn sure of that if they ever come to take you, or worse yet steal away your children in the night.

My exegesis of the novella is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, I examine the themes of Conscience and Time. The ethereal girl is identified as the hypostatization of conscience that the Zoroastrians referred to as the fravarti or “guardian angel” Daena, a maiden that meets the soul on the bridge to the afterlife and is a spectral projection of one’s own inner conscience. I show how this idea was reinterpreted by a Zoroastrian heresy of the Sassanian period known as Zurvanism. The interpretation of the nature of Time that Hedayat tacitly forwards in The Blind Owl is examined from the perspective of Zurvanite views on the relationship between measurable finite time and eternal duration.

I discuss Hedayat’s extensive research into pre-Islamic Iranian texts and his study of the Pahlavi language in Bombay as a context for his development of these ideas in The Blind Owl. The chapter culminates in the suggestion that the neo-Zurvanite way in which Hedayat understands Conscience (daena) in the light of Eternal Time (zurvan akanarang) parallels Friedrich Nietzsche’s own reversal of the ethical dualism of orthodox Zoroastrianism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It does so, however, within the native context of Persian culture with which Hedayat had a living relationship, and in view of an earlier Zurvanite attempt to subvert this duality of which Nietzsche was unaware and which he unconsciously repeats.

The second chapter stays with Nietzsche for a while, taking as its point of departure a comparison between the existentialist view of mass man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the contempt for the rabble that we see in the narrator of The Blind Owl. I then suggest a Persian Gnostic pedigree for the existentialist vision of a radical separation between mass man and authentic individuals who are each other’s soul mates, and show how Hedayat had a more direct access to the Manichean mystical dualism from which these ideas arose than Nietzsche did. This does not bring him to more clearly crystallize this distinction, but to radically deconstruct it from within the context of the same heretical Gnostic milieu in which it gestated.

By means of conflating the major male characters in The Blind Owl with one another, as psychic shadows of the narrator, and by presenting the principal female figures as identical with the ethereal girl who is his soul mate, or psychic twin, Hedayat alludes to Mazdakite and Mahayana ideas that bear on the relationship between reincarnation, orgiastic communism, and incestuous sex. There follows an exegesis of passages in The Blind Owl relevant to Mazdakism, a revolutionary antinomian Gnostic spiritual and political movement of the late Sassanian and early Islamic period with which Hedayat was familiar. The incestuous and orgiastic imagery of these passages are also set in the context of the larger theme of reincarnation in the novel, with a view to exploring what esoteric Buddhist influences, if any, may be at work in them. To this end, the second chapter draws to a close with a brief but substantive comparison of The Blind Owl to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The third chapter picks up on the question of reincarnation and proposes a way of understanding its centrality to The Blind Owl despite Hedayat’s interest in the materialist natural philosopher Omar Khayyam, whose fingerprints also appear in the novel. After reviewing Hedayat’s somewhat eccentric understanding of Khayyam’s worldview, as exemplified by his introduction to his own carefully selected editions of the Rubaiyat, the use of Khayyamic symbols in his masterwork is examined. The most prominent of these symbols is wine. However, in The Blind Owl the wine is poisoned with cobra venom and is intimately connected with the serpentine Indian “lingam temple” dancer Bugam Dasi, the narrator’s mother, and other allusions to the Shaivite and Tantric spirituality of India. The disparaging references to the quatrains of Khayyam, as superficial jingles sung by drunken louts, and what appear to be extensive allusions to Tantra (whose libertinism so far exceeds Khayyam’s supposedly scandalous but really tame hedonism) suggest that in The Blind Owl Hedayat has undertaken to decisively move beyond his youthful reverence for Omar and into much deeper and darker waters.

Specifically, I discern esoteric references to both the kundalini shakti or “Serpent Power” and the Left-Hand Path. I argue that, on one level, Hedayat intended Bugam Dasi to be Shakti in the guise of the Black “Mother” Goddess Kali Ma, and the other female figures often conflated with her are emanations or avataras of Kali known as Mahavidyas in Tantra—by means of which Kali manipulates and empowers Shiva. Instead of being the means to oblivion that Khayyam took it to be, wine becomes an elixir that imbues the narrator with an amoral and maddening Vital Force. It seems that not all of Hedayat’s time in India was spent poring over Parsi scriptures.

It is well known that The Blind Owl takes place in two time frames—that of medieval Rey and the city of modern Tehran that has risen from out of its ruins in Hedayat’s own time. In the fourth chapter of this study, I argue that it takes place in a third time as well, namely the Future or the Futural (in a quasi-Heideggerian sense) that is a timeless place of no place equally accessible to the past and present. This is the strange futuristic city that the narrator repeatedly wanders into, often while in an altered state of consciousness, both in modern Tehran and in the medieval city of Rey. I would be tempted to call it “Ray City” (as in “Ray Guns” and “Death Rays”) if there were not already a name for such a place in the Persian philosophical tradition. That name is Na-Koja-Abad, a word coined by the twelfth-century martyred heretic Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi to mean “The Land of Nowhere,” which is located in “The Eighth Clime.”

I explain how Persian geographers divided the world into Seven Climes and how Suhrawardi envisioned an Eighth Clime outside of ordinary space-time, or perhaps situated in a parallel dimension. Drawing on the extensive research of the French Iranologist Henry Corbin on this subject, I propose to interpret the weird geometric city in The Blind Owl in terms of Suhra-wardi’s concepts of the Imaginal World (âlamé mesâl) and the faculty of Active Imagination needed to travel there by means of one’s Imaginal Body (jismé mesâl). Against Corbin, I argue that Na-Koja-Abad is quite explicitly “utopia” in the original Greek sense of the word, and so it just as easily falls prey to dystopian critiques of utopia in science fiction and fantasy literature.

This is indeed what The Blind Owl is up to. To support this claim, I draw out the implications of what appear to be allusions to the Haft Paykar of Nezami. This text makes use of the mystical symbolism of the Climes, combining them with astrological and astronomical motifs that raise it into a more cosmic context. Hedayat reinterprets Haft Paykar around its tale of “The Black Dome” in such a way as to affirm the existence of an Imaginal World but to deny it a transcendental divine underpinning, and to thereby call into question the assumption that it would be utopian rather than dystopian. The identity of the blue flowers that grow in the futuristic city (entwining its austere ash-grey buildings) with the type of flower offered by the ethereal girl to the bent old man, who turns out to be the narrator himself, suggests that she is from that city. Both her gruesome fate and the description of the city from which she hails calls into question the Persian conception of utopia and of the perfection of our celestial counterparts who are believed to be dwelling there. This existentialist take on Suhrawardi’s paranormal notions of Active Imagination and the Eighth Clime are key in setting up the concluding chapter.

The fifth and final chapter is the longest and perhaps also the most bizarre, but then Hedayat was a very strange individual, and it takes an equally eccentric mind to fathom his deepest insights. While Hedayat might have been the first serious writer to attempt novel folklore, this genre that at first glance strikes one as a contradiction in terms has of late developed a life of its own. By comparing it to The Blind Owl, we can better appreciate Hedayat as a genius who heralded this development. The genre of novel folklore to which I am referring is the so-called “UFO” literature of Close Encounters, such as the masterpiece Communion: A True Story by the novelist Whitley Strieber.[21]

In the final chapter, I isolate some of the very same elements that cut across fairy and UFO lore in The Blind Owl, drawing a particularly provocative comparison between certain features in Hedayat’s novel and Strieber’s Communion. The idea of the Active Imagination that Corbin develops out of Suhrawardi remains central here, as does the idea of our celestial counterparts, who—from the perspective of Eternal Time—are already living in the Eighth Clime. The transformational dimension of the Imaginal as identified by the psychologist and psychical researcher, Frederick Myers, becomes relevant in this regard. The study concludes with a reflection on mankind’s relationship with its own posthuman future, as well as the relationship of the narrator of The Blind Owl and his fellow men in both time frames to the celestial maiden and other “ethereal ghosts” who haunt the futuristic fairy city.

While this study appears to be an exhaustive interpretation of The Blind Owl, it is both less and more than that. Less, because there are times when I deliberately do not explore a certain influence or parallel. For example, it is clear that Hedayat develops the theme of incest, touched upon in the second chapter, under the influence of Fakhruddin Gorgani’s medieval romantic epic Vis and Ramin. Hedayat wrote “Some Notes on Vis and Ramin.” I am not aware of anyone having used these “notes” as a basis for drawing the comparison, but it is obvious when one looks at how the childhood relationship between Vis and Ramin almost makes the latter a substitute for Vis’ first husband, Viru, who was her biological brother, and especially at the central role of the Nanny who, as in The Blind Owl, suckled both Vis and Ramin in their infancy and who mediates their relationship as it turns from one between adoptive siblings to one between lovers. The present text is, on account of deliberate oversights like this one, also something more than an exhaustive study of The Blind Owl.

The logic of its diverse comparisons and references to other philosophical, literary, and artistic works is not directed towards an objective interpretation but towards the provocation of original philosophical insights. What Hedayat says, on the second page of his novel, may also apply here—it may be asking too much to “draw a general conclusion from it all.” I dare say that this study does, nevertheless, penetrate deep into the mind of the most brilliant man in modern Iran—perhaps even deeper into his unconscious than he himself could fathom. Had he consciously internalized all that I have excavated from out of his magnum opus, he would not have committed suicide.

In this sense, the present text is what in Persian hermeneutics is referred to as a ta’wil rather than a tafsir. The latter, tafsir, is a straight interpretation. It may be an exhaustive and very erudite scholarly interpretation, but it does not move beyond the clarification of the intended meaning of certain metaphors and narrative structures with reference to documentable sources—whether in the form of other literary texts or by means of factoring in the influence of socio-historical context insofar as this can be reconstructed from sociological or historiographical studies. Ta’wil also means “interpretation,” but in the sense of a spiritual or properly hermeneutic exegesis, wherein the difference between metaphor and symbol is recognized. Metaphors or allegories have a literal significance that can be unpacked from the imagery that encodes them. Symbols cannot be reduced in this way. They have an archetypal basis that transcends the kind of social and historical context captured by the reductive methods of sociology and historiography. These symbols are integral to the horizon of the world of meaning that situates the existence of the author whose creative imagination engages with them in a more dynamic fashion than the average man whose personal and social being would be unthinkable without these archetypal images, even if he never reflects on them.

Of course, the author, insofar as he is any good as an artist, engages with these symbols partly—or even mainly—on an unconscious level. The task of ta’wil is to interpret a text through undergoing essentially the same experience of the symbolic realities encountered by the author, but to do so even more consciously and consequently to return the text to its archetypal sources. Such a technique of esoteric exegesis has its veritable historical origins in the zand of the Avesta, and Gnostics have since brought it to bear on all sacred texts. It is one reason that they so often burned at the stake. Such exegesis presumes the ability to come into more direct contact with the divine than any mere “messenger” of revelation, who may not have been able to fathom the full array of forces authoring “his” text and to freely define his relationship with respect to them. Hedayat was certainly freer in his relationship to archetypal forces than Muhammad, and The Blind Owl—which is a prophetic text for our benighted epoch—is an incomparably greater literary masterpiece than the Qur’an was even in its own naïve time.

Nevertheless, had Hedayat been able to carry out a ta’wil of his own text, I doubt that he would have committed suicide in such a sordidly depressing manner (i.e. by gassing himself with his stove). Finally, it is worth reflecting on the curse of The Blind Owl—the widespread Persian belief that reading the novel, at least in a serious way, leads the reader to suicide. This curse would most mercilessly come to bear on one who attempted to tread Hedayat’s psychical footsteps by means of the ta’wil of his text—unless one oversteps the paths tread by him and opens them out in other ways. Let this stand as my exegetical apologia.

CHAPTER 1

AN UNTIMELY MADMAN’S

ANGEL OF DESTINY

The central image of The Blind Owl is the vision that our narrator sees through the ventilation hole at the top of his closet, the likeness of which he seems to unconsciously paint on all of the pen case covers that he decorates:

On the open ground outside my room I saw a bent old man sitting at the foot of a cypress tree with a young girl—no, an angel from heaven—standing before him. She was leaning forward and with her right hand was offering him a blue flower of morning glory. The old man was biting the nail of the index finger of his left hand.[22]

The cypress tree was a prominent symbol for Truth in Zoroastrianism. A huge ancient cypress tree grows at the site that is thought to be Zarathustra’s birthplace. The ethereally beautiful youths of classical Persian poetry are also described as being of “cypress stature,” which offers an obvious contrast to the bent old man.

The most important element of this iconic scene is the feminine “angel,” who the narrator goes on to meet in person in the present time frame and who, as we shall see, bears so many resemblances to both his wife and his mother from his past lifetime in Rey, that she must in some sense be one and the same figure as them. This “angel,” glimpsed only for a moment, is unforgettable to the narrator because she is “so intimately bound up with” his “own existence,” and yet at the same time he beholds “all the wretchedness of [his] existence” in “the glory and splendor of the star.”[23] Later on, he makes another relevant remark regarding stars: “If it is true that everyone has his own star in the sky mine must be remote, dark and meaningless. Perhaps I have never had a star at all.”[24] This thought occurs to him just as he hears the cries of “the bitch,” his wife, in childbirth—or perhaps it is a muezzin’s call to prayer or a dog howling. Finally, our narrator repeatedly tells us that he knows the angel’s name and that he has long known it—but he will not mention it for fear of defiling her; it is too sacred to utter amidst this world of lies.[25]

Her name is Daena. In Zoroastrianism, individuals are each thought to have an “angel” who greets them after death. This angel assumes the form of a wizened girl or very young woman, a youthful, ageless maiden. Whether she is radiant, pure, and beautiful or a hideously vulgar whore is shaped by the actions of the person to whom she appears. She is an embodiment of the person’s own inner “conscience” or daena, and depending on what state it is in, she may help or hinder the person’s crossing over the Chinvat Peretu, or “sorting bridge,” between the world of the living and the spirit world. Although the imagery associated with this angelic encounter is fully developed only in middle Persian texts of the Sassanian period, such as the Vendidad, the Hadhokht Nask, and Mainog-i Khirad,[26] Zarathustra does make mention of it in his own hymns: “The daena of the deceitful truly abandons the path of the Upright. Their daena openly upbraids them before the sorting bridge on account of their words and deeds.”[27] Daena is so central to the message of Zarathustra that the native name of the Zoroastrian religion is actually Daena Vanuhi, or “the good conscience.”[28]

The inner angel was also referred to as a fravarti, a celestial counterpart that folk belief came to equate with a star in the heavens—one’s “lucky star” keeping watch as one’s “guardian angel.”[29] The middle Persian word fravarti or fravashi is derived from the Avestan concepts of farvahar (modern Persian forouhar) and frashgard. The former is the depiction of the soul in a winged disk, holding a ring of promise in one hand and pointing the way forward with the other. It is ubiquitous in ancient Persian ruins, has been misidentified in folk culture as a depiction of Ahura Mazda, and has even come to symbolize Zoroastrianism itself. The second concept, that of frashgard, is the world’s purification, or literally its “re-freshening” (frash is an Indo-European cognate of “fresh,” and gard means “turning”) at the end of time through a molten fire, in the heat of which all abiding beings are forged into their spiritually perfected forms. So the fravarti is that aspect of the soul which runs ahead of itself as one’s own perfected form or archetype, drawing one’s earthly self towards union with its celestial counterpart.[30]

The Avestan root of the word daena is di, meaning “to see,” “to perceive,” or “to conceive.”[31] Thus the Daena-Fravarti is conceived within a person as if his manner of life were her womb and she is born from out of him upon his separation from the physical body.[32] The gestation of daena within oneself may take a long time, so as not to miscarry.

The nature of Time is quite obviously a major theme in The Blind Owl. Our narrator says that he has chosen his stupefying trade of pen case decorator “in order somehow or other to kill time.”[33] In the present, he repeatedly volunteers the time frame of “two months,” corrected to “exactly, two months and four days ago,” as if he is struggling to reinstall himself in the dimension of measurable chronological time.[34] This seems less important to the narrator as we encounter him in the past life in Rey: “All the thoughts which are bubbling in my brain at this moment belong to this passing instant and know nothing of hours, minutes and dates. An incident of yesterday may for me be less significant, less recent, than something that happened a thousand years ago.”[35] Interestingly, he speculates that the untimely quality of his experience is bound up with his isolation from other people, who would tether him to his time and place: “Perhaps for the very reason that all the bonds which held me to the world of living people have been broken the memories of the past take shape before my eyes. Past, future, hour, day, month, year—these things are all the same to me.”[36] The more he is left alone to contemplate his angel (in her various forms), the more he becomes unstuck in time.

Hedayat closely connects the various temporal slippages, dilations, and contractions that he evokes throughout the course of the novel with the narrator’s proximity to his angel. When he is in the presence of the angel, a moment of time ceases to have measurable duration and seems to dilate into hours or perhaps even an eternity: “. . . that second, that hour or eternity was suffocating me.”[37] It is his encounter with her that has caused him to experience time in a different way than people ordinarily do, or rather to understand time experientially rather than conceptually. The narrator’s first experience of timelessness is just after catching a glimpse of the unearthly sight of his angel through the ventilation hole of his closet, whereupon he lays down the bottle of wine that he was trying to retrieve for his “uncle” and “trembling, in a state of mingled horror and delight,” he holds his head in his hands for “how many minutes, how many hours” he does not know. We only know that by the time he comes to his senses and leaves his room, bottle in hand, his “uncle” has departed and “left the room door agape like the mouth of a dead man.”[38] Even though opium is an aid in doing so, it is the contemplation of his angel’s eyes staring out from both portraits that allows the narrator to become unstuck in time, and to begin to experience the events of his life in reverse in all their richness.[39]

Ultimately, this leads him back beyond his time in the womb, which Hedayat portrays as his being “suspended from a slender hook in the shaft of a dark well” before falling through unobstructed blackness—the classic falling dream that is said to be a memory of birth.[40] It allows him to take the inchoate memories of a past life of which he had occasionally had a fleeting sense in relation to the theme of his pen case paintings,[41] and crystallize them into a reliving of another world, “a world which at the same time was closer and more natural to [him] than the other” one, of his “present” life.[42] The coinage current in each time period[43] allows us to definitively establish that the two lives take place in the epochs of Hedayat’s own early Modern Tehran and its medieval antecedent, Rey.

In order to understand the connection between Time and the angel, one needs a rudimentary grasp of the key elements of a Zoroastrian heresy of the Sassanian period (224–651 AD) known as Zurvanism. After Alexander invaded and conquered the first Persian Empire (circa 330 BC), chaos ensued in the wake of his premature death. Instead of the Cosmopolis that he dreamed of crafting, his generals cut up Greater Iran into various feudal territories. Over the course of several hundred years, native Iranians reasserted their control over these lands, but only through a process of intermarriage with Greeks and a Greco-Persian cross-fertilization that has come to be known as “Hellenistic” (rather than Hellenic) culture. While this process introduced Greek philosophy into Persia, where it would be assimilated and developed before being safeguarded and handed back to Europeans after the dark ages of Catholicism, it also undercut the more philosophical elements of Zarathustra’s own spiritual teaching. Towards the end of promoting a convergence of Greek and Persian popular religion, the Hellenized Seleucid and Parthian princes anthropomorphized the theosophical principles of Ahura Mazda and Angra Maynu into the antagonistic figures of Ohrmazd and Ahriman.[44]

In the original teaching of the sage Zarathustra, as we find it in his Gathas when read apart from later accretions of the Avesta,[45] the divinity Ahura Mazda was the “Great Living Spirit of Wisdom.” This makes Ahura Mazda somewhat analogous to how the Greek Noûs came to be understood by Hermeticists of the Hellenistic era. With respect to Ahura Mazda, there were two coequal mentalities: Spenta Maynu, or the generous, broadminded renovating spirit of bounteous “progression,” and Angra Maynu or the petty, narrow-minded conservative spirit of “constraint” and consequent stagnation. The Great Living Spirit of Wisdom could be sought through the progressive mentality, but it was nothing like a being with agency that would in any way impinge on one’s choice to act out of the constrictive mentality. The whole thrust of Zarathustra’s message is that human beings have the free will to choose between the two mentalities.

It must also be said that these two mentalities were respectively associated with Asha, or “truth,” and Drough, or “deceit.” Asha literally means “Righteousness” in the sense of the Right Order of the Cosmos (something like Natural Law in its scholastic connotation), so that Drough, or “the Lie,” is deceit in the sense of disharmony with Nature. Zarathustra viewed the daeva (later div), the gods of the Indo-European pantheon, as promulgators of Deceit and the followers of the priesthood as partisans of the Lie. The Gathas begin with “the soul of Mother Earth” (Gaya) calling forth the partisans of Truth (ashavan) to become her good stewards by defeating great deceivers (droughvan) and liberating her from their violent oppression.[46] Zarathustra refers to the “Living Earth” as “our True dwelling, rather our endurance and strength” and as “the joy-bringing World.” One of the most life-affirming and down-to-earth passages of the Gathas reads: “Indeed, he destroys the doctrine who considers it wrong to look at the world and the sun with plain eyes . . .”[47]

Although Zoroastrianism was established as the state religion of Iran by the Sassanid descendants of the priest Papak at the founding of the third Persian Empire (224 AD), centuries of Hellenization had turned it into something radically different from the sagacious wisdom of Zarathustra as we find it in the Gathas and as it may still have been understood by spiritual and intellectual elites during the first Persian Empire of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. The Greco-Persian Seleucids (312 BC—63 BC) and Parthians (247 BC—224 AD) had lowered Ahura Mazda to the level of an anthropomorphic deity, namely Ohrmazd, and moreover one modeled on the Heavenly Lord Zeus rather than the embattled rebel Prometheus—who would certainly have been a more appropriate analogue from the Greek pantheon. Meanwhile, Angra Maynu was raised to the level of Ahura Mazda as his eternal adversary, Ahriman. What was Spenta Maynu simply became an attribute of Ohrmazd, although its “progressive” spirit was perverted, if not lost, since Sassanid Zoroastrian orthodoxy was very litigious, ritualistic, and conservative.

Ohrmazd became the Lord of Light and Truth, and Ahriman the Lord of Darkness and Deceit. Moreover, the purely ethical dualism of Zarathustra was transformed into a metaphysical dualism wherein the earthly realm of material existence was Evil, the product of an attack by Ahriman and his demons on the purely luminous celestial abode of Ohrmazd and his angels. It has long been acknowledged that orthodox Zoroastrianism was the only major world religion not confronted with the problem of evil, because Ohrmazd, although omniscient, is not omnipotent.[48] There was, however, a problem of how to reconcile this fact with a faith in the ultimate triumph of Good on Judgment Day (a Zoroastrian idea introduced into Judaism during the Babylonian exile).

The Zurvanite heresy evolved out of an attempt to resolve this theological problem with recourse to Time. Some Zoroastrian theologians thought that the triumph of Ohrmazd could be construed in terms of an agreed-upon partition of Time and world sovereignty in the following manner. The first epoch of the world was an epoch of pre-existence of the timeless archetypes of all good things. The second epoch was the creation of the physical world by Ohrmazd, based on the celestial archetypes. The third epoch was one wherein Ohrmazd agrees to a deliverance of this creation over to the Lordship and Bondage of Ahriman. The fourth and final epoch is that wherein the forces of Light triumph over the forces of Darkness, who are cleansed from the world through a great purifying fire (tan pasin), and the dominion of Ohrmazd is reestablished over a refreshed creation (frashgard). Each of these epochs spans three thousand years, so that the cosmic epic unfolds over a total of twelve thousand years. The twelve days of Nowruz, the Persian New Year ceremony, commemorate this cosmic cycle. There is also a thirteenth day of Nowruz, whose symbolic reference to the collapse of the cosmos into Chaos after a full cycle survives in the folk tradition of literally heading for the hills, to camp in the countryside, lest misfortunes befall one within the house or the city on that day. To stay at home on the Sizdeh (“the thirteenth”) at the conclusion of Nowruz is considered an invitation to very bad luck, the kind of accursed jinxes that are associated with the owl in Persian culture.

The narrator of The Blind Owl tells us more than once that his humanly incomprehensible and catastrophic experiences take place on the “thirteenth day of Nouruz,”[49] adding that he has shut himself up in his own room to concentrate on his painting, even closing the window, while: “Everyone [else] had gone out to the country.”[50] He calls himself “ill-starred” and “unlucky.”[51] The experience that the narrator has while having stayed indoors on the thirteenth has left an “evil impression” on him “to a degree that surpasses human understanding” and has “poisoned [his] life for all time to come.”[52]

What is it about the cosmic Time of Nowruz that is so catastrophically portentous? Certain Zoroastrian theologians of the Sassanid era did not find it credible that Ohrmazd would make a pact with Ahriman in which he willingly agrees to surrender his sovereignty over the Creation for even a day, let alone an entire benighted epoch of three millennia. They devised a different myth.[53] The struggle between Ohrmazd and Ahriman takes place through Time, because the two of them are engendered by Time. Zurvan—the androgynous deity of Time—conceived of Ohrmazd within itself as a light that would creatively manifest the forms of all beings latent within itself. However, the very latency of this Creation and the need to make it manifest attests to a primordial lack and lust for overcoming Nothingness that is itself tainted by the Nothingness that it desperately desires to overcome. Through this seductive lust, hypostatized as the feminine demon Az, the primordial doubt of Zurvan results in a miscarriage whose product is Ahriman. Zurvan had promised himself that he would delegate his sovereignty to the first-born child he was conceiving within himself, but through this miscarriage Ahriman is born before Ohrmazd—who is the fully-formed product of a secondary conception. This is why Ohrmazd must yield sovereignty to Ahriman, even if the latter only lords it over the world as it falls into the finite time (zamâne brîn kanârak) of action (zamânak koneshn) and perpetual decay (kâr frazhâmeshn). By contrast, Ohrmazd reigns in Eternity, or more literally “Immeasurable Time” (akanarak zamâne). The distinction is significant, because this is not a dimensionless and homogenous Eternity, but one consisting of heterogeneous archetypal events that endow certain periods of time with a personal aspect, each having a cohesive unity, as the others do, even if certain ones are months and others are days, or even one or another hour from the perspective of measurable time.[54] Think of the unique spirit of a fateful hour, or of Marianne as the archetypal event of the French Revolution. Months and days of the Persian calendar are named after these kinds of celestial events. Indeed, Bahman and Khordad have taken on a similar meaning as Marianne.

Henry Corbin attributes a Zurvanite origin to the two concepts of time in the thought of the tenth-century Persian philosopher Mohammad bin Zakarya Razi, who was called Rhazes by the Latin Scholastics because he was the most famous denizen of the medieval city of Rey or Rhaghes[55]—the setting Hedayat chooses for most of The Blind Owl. Orthodox Muslims attacked Razi for being a “Sabaean philosopher.”[56] For them, Sabaenism was a generic term for “the mystery religion of Babylon.” Now, it should be remembered that cosmopolitan Babylon—although presently outside the borders of Iran—was the capital of both ancient Persian Empires, the Achaemenian imperial rivals of Greece and the Sassanian adversaries of the Romans. It was during this second period that Zurvanism arose, and most scholars trace its origin to Sassanian Babylon—also known as Ctesiphon. Corbin sees Zervan akanarak and Zervan-i derang-xvatai, respectively, in Razi’s concepts of an immeasurable time of absolute duration (mudda or dahr) and limited time as a chronologically measurable temporality determined by the movements of the celestial spheres (zaman mahsur).[57] The latter temporality is an abstraction that loses its meaning in the former’s enduring flux. The narrator of The Blind Owl makes two references to this “flux of eternity” or “eternal infinite flux.” On both occasions, his experience of it is described in terms of his having become “a madman” and “a miniature God,” of his being driven to an ecstatic state of divine madness by his masochistic lust for his wife, suggesting that it is the lust of Zurvan for Az:

I understood now that I had become a miniature God. I had transcended the mean, paltry needs of mankind and felt within me the flux of eternity. What is eternity? To me eternity meant to play hide-and-seek with the bitch on the bank of the Suran, to shut my eyes for a single moment and hide my face in the skirt of her dress.[58]

. . . I had become like a madman and I derived an exquisite pleasure from the pain I felt. It was a pleasure which transcended human experience, a pleasure which only I was capable of feeling and which the gods themselves, if they existed, could not have experienced to such a degree. At that moment, I was conscious of my superiority. I felt my superiority to the men of rabble, to nature and to the gods—the gods, that product of human lusts. I had become a god. I was greater than God, and I felt within me the eternal, infinite flux . . . She came back. So then she was not as cruel as I had thought. I rose, kissed the hem of her dress and fell at her feet, weeping and coughing. I rubbed my face against her leg and several times I called her by her real name. It seemed to me that the sound of her name had a peculiar ring. And at the same time in my heart, in the bottom of my heart, I said, ‘Bitch … bitch!’ I kissed her legs; the skin tasted like the stub-end of a cucumber, faintly acrid and bitter. I wept and wept. How much time passed so I do not know. When I came to myself she had gone. It may be that the space of time in which I had experienced all the pleasures, the caresses and the pain of which the nature of man is susceptible had not lasted more than a moment.[59]

The eleventh-century Persian philosopher Naser Khosrow developed the Zurvanite concept of durational time preserved by Razi. It is possible, he argued, for the soul to directly experience the Eternal. Khosrow saw immeasurable Time as the horizon of the finitely bounded World, and he thought Time itself takes place within the horizon of the Soul qua Angel.[60] This inner angel has access to all of the archetypal Events that appear to manifest sequentially only under the aspect of limited time.[61] This brings us to what is for our purposes the most relevant element of this Zurvanite heresy devised in the Sassanian period, namely its consequence for the daena. In accordance with Zurvanite temporality, daena, or the inner angel of “conscience” becomes the “personal destiny” of a soul “on the road” to becoming itself by appropriating its existence in the immeasurable time of “Eternity.”[62] When death brings one face-to-face with her, she says, “I am thine Eternity.” The daena as destiny radiated the light of xâvârnah (or later, khowrra), a psychical aura symbolized by the halos or aureoles surrounding the heads of those bound for great events. (This convention later entered both European Christian and Mahayana Buddhist art via Persian influence.) Note this passage from The Blind Owl:

And by this time not merely did I love her but every atom in my body desired her. And, more than any other part of me, my loins—for I refuse to hide real feelings behind a fanciful veil of ‘love’, ‘fondness’ and such-like theological terms: I have no taste for literary huzvaresh. I felt as though both of us had pulsating in our loins a kind of radiation or aureole like those which one sees depicted around the heads of the prophets and that my sickly, diseased aureole was seeking hers and striving with all its might towards it.[63]

Huzvaresh is a convention of literary allusion characteristic of Middle Persian (Pahlavi) texts contemporaneous with the rise of Zurvanism—Sassanian texts which Hedayat himself translated into modern Persian—wherein a word of Aramaic origin is chosen to replace a Pahlavi term that would be considered too vulgar, especially in a sexual sense. Hedayat’s transference of the aureole from the head to the genitals sits particularly well with the Zurvanite transformation of daena into personal destiny.

The context for the passage above is the narrator’s account of how his wife forced him to marry her through a deceitfully designed seduction. This is a reflection of the onto-theological seduction of Zurvan, the god that the narrator sometimes feels he has become, at the hands of Az, the feminine hypostatization of Lust and Need through whom Zurvan engenders both Ohrmazd and Ahriman. The unidirectional apocalyptic temporality of orthodox Zoroastrianism (which was later borrowed by Judeo-Christianity and Islam) has been compromised in such a way that the eventual triumph of Ohrmazd, which was the original problem that inspired Zurvanite speculations, has become an event of only relative duration. The seduction of Zurvan by Az takes place before epochal time, but also after it—after the “triumph” of Ohrmazd. It is the pivotal chaos between the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.[64] It is that catastrophic event symbolized by the Thirteenth Day of Nowruz.

In this light, the sacred love for the pure daena, in other words the beautification of one’s own conscience, becomes inseparable from the profane lust for a harlot woman of flesh and blood.[65] The inner angel being birthed from within one’s soul becomes the demoness who bears one’s body between her thighs. This is what lies behind Hedayat’s conflation of the heavenly angel and the narrator’s “bitch” of a wife, who refuses to be possessed by any man and marries him only to have an alibi for her libertinism. Personal destiny qua Divine Providence becomes amor fati—personal destiny qua seizing Fortuna.

We will return to more deeply explore Hedayat’s conflation of angel and whore, of Daena and Az, but now by way of the idea of love of one’s fate or making love to one’s own Eternity, we cannot further delay the question of Friedrich Nietzsche’s special relationship to Zarathustra and its bearing on the crypto-Zurvanism of Hedayat’s “existentialist” novel. Nietzsche read Kleuker’s German translation of a French version of the Avesta that had been discovered by Anquetil-Duperron among the Parsi Zoroastrians of India,[66] the same community in which Hedayat embedded himself for his own studies of Zoroastrianism at just the period in his life when he was writing The Blind Owl. Nietzsche saw in the figure of the Iranian sage Zarathustra the perfect vehicle for his own revaluation of all values. To that end, he introduces Zarathustra in The Gay Science and then writes an entire novel with Zarathustra as his mouthpiece. Some have seen the latter work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as Nietzsche’s magnum opus. It was adapted into an orchestral piece by Richard Strauss and was a major inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Nietzsche saw European nihilism as leading to a moment where a complete devaluation of all values would spur a momentous revaluation by an elite of supermen, whose progenitor was a mysterious Antichrist for whom he chose the symbol of the Second Coming of Zarathustra. There are two passages in particular where Nietzsche prophesies this neo-Zoroastrian and anti-Christian second coming; the first is from the conclusion of Book II of The Genealogy of Morals and the second is from Chapter 3 of Ecce Homo:

“What are you really doing, erecting an ideal or knocking one down?” I may perhaps be asked. . . . If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law . . . Man has all too long had an “evil eye” for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his “bad conscience.” An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—that is, to wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world. To whom should one turn today with such hopes and demands?

One would have precisely all the good men against one; and, of course, the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the sentimental, the weary . . .

. . . The attainment of this goal would require a different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in the present age . . . But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality—when it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness—he must come one day.

But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point it behooves me only to be silent; or I shall usurp that to which only one younger, “heavier with future,” and stronger than I has a right—that to which only Zarathustra has a right, Zarathustra the godless.[67]

I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created the most calamitous error, morality; consequently he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only had he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker—after all, the whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called “moral world order”—what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the “idealist” who flees from reality; Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers taken together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows, that is Persian Virtue.—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.[68]

These passages are straightforward enough that a gloss of them would be redundant. What is most important for our purposes here is the dialectical relationship between Truth and History that Nietzsche uniquely attributes to the Persians. It is worth briefly noting that the two great German thinkers of History as a dialectical development, namely Hegel and Schelling, read Kleuker’s translation of the Avesta before Nietzsche did.[69] In Iranian Studies circles, Hegel is known as the first Iranologist for his treatments of ancient Iranian thought in The Phenomenology of Spirit, his Aesthetics, and Philosophy of History. Although Schelling’s connections to Iranian Studies are more tenuous, The Ages of the World reads as if it could have come straight out of a Pahlavi treatise on the metaphysical epochs in the struggle between the affirming force of Ohrmazd and the negating will of Ahriman, leading to an ultimate rejuvenation of the world (frashgard).[70] Later, Rudolf Steiner, who was deeply influenced by Schelling, would explicitly adopt the archetypal idea of Ahriman into his own theosophical system—at the core of which we find a neo-Zoroastrian idea of free will. Nietzsche recognizes the indebtedness of the Philosophy of History characteristic of modern German thought to the ancient Persians, to the extent that he claims, “Only the Persians had a philosophy of history.”[71] Nietzsche may not have realized the extent to which this dictum applied to his own case; more than one Iranologist has held the view that Nietzsche was “a Zervanist Parsi without knowing it.”[72]

Nietzsche recognizes the unique veneration of Truth (as opposed to Deceit) in ancient Persian spirituality, and he also acknowledges the innovative ancient Persian conception of world epochs that see substantive social change, driven by the “progressive mentality” (spenta maynu) over the course of a unidirectional Time. This is a radically different conception of time than that of the classical Europeans or the cyclical time of tribal cultures as extrapolated from natural seasons, even when the later takes as sophisticated a form as it does in orthodox Hindu cosmology. The ancient Persian understanding of History that Nietzsche praises is, rather, a precursor of (and probably a direct source for) the modern European concept of phased historical Progress towards an “end of History”—which was especially developed by the Germans and culminated in Marxist dialectical materialism.

What Nietzsche sees as his unique adaptation of this Persian idea is that instead of leading to an ethical utopia, the will to Truth reverses itself in a recognition of the metaphysical groundlessness of all established values and of any future values with which one might wish to replace them. This effects a fundamental change in the nature of the expected “end of History.” What the Zoroastrian texts with which Nietzsche was familiar refer to as “the Great Event of Choice”[73] and what Nietzsche himself calls “this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again” becomes the Death of God—or, more accurately, the gruesome murdering of God. Everything else in Time is fatefully leading to this Event.

This is the subject of Nietzsche’s famous parable of “The Madman” in section 125 of The Gay Science.[74] Amidst a marketplace, the madman preaches that we are all the murderers of God, that this murder has turned the world into a Chaos lacking orientation—a twilight zone, and that in order to wash the blood from our hands we should have to become gods ourselves and forge for our progeny a new higher history beyond the one that we have brought to an end with this most tremendous deed. Some of the madman’s listeners mock him, while others are dumbfounded or astonished. He realizes that he has “come too early,” and that while in some metaphysical sense this murder has already been committed, like lightning striking before the sound of its thunder, people have yet to realize it. The Event needs Time for the murderers of God to catch up to who they already really are, so as to claim their Destiny. The madman’s message is untimely; it speaks of an Event enduring in the fabric of Eternity, but as of yet not manifest in finite time.

The parallels to The Blind Owl are unmistakable. The narrator’s madness is a contagion that is passed on to him by his own future self, the murderer of Daena that he has “long ago” been destined to become: “The walls of my room must have contained some virus that poisoned all of my thoughts. I felt sure that before me some murderer, some diseased madman, had lived in it.”[75] In the hearse on the way to the burial site, the narrator feels the “weight of her dead body and the coffin in which it lay” as if it “had for all time been pressing” on his chest.[76] On the way back, as he lay in the trench of the hearse meant for a coffin, he remarks that a “wonderful sense of tranquility” pervades his being, and all that he could feel is “the jar pressing against [his chest] with the weight of a dead body.”[77] We should remember what was said above regarding Persian folk beliefs of Zoroastrian origin, concerning one’s lucky star as one’s guardian angel (Fravarti), when the narrator adds that as he looked up into the night sky from the hearse: “In the gaps between the clouds the stars gazed down at the earth like gleaming eyes emerging from a mass of coagulated blood.”[78] As we have seen, this metaphysical murderer repeatedly tells us that he is becoming “a god” who is “greater than God.”[79]

All of the key elements of Nietzsche’s parable of the Madman are here, and it cannot even be said that Daena, the butchered heavenly angel, takes the place of God—because, as we have seen, the God whose murder Nietzsche has his madman announce is the divinity of Zarathustra. Under the heading Incipit tragoedia (“the tragedy begins”), Zarathustra is introduced[80] towards the conclusion of the same book that features, as its crescendo, the parable of the madman, so that The Gay Science is a prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[81] Furthermore, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra the untimely requiem of the madman is preached by Zarathustra as the abyssal wellspring of his own gospel of the supermen.[82] Consequently, we may conclude that the madman is the second coming of Zarathustra, who has returned earlier than he was supposed to and whose proper Parousia remains in the future. Such a view also recognizes Nietzsche’s seemingly contradictory views of Zarathustra qua the Antichrist as a future figure and also as himself; it is himself only as the untimely madman.

What Adler and Corbin meant when they claimed that Nietzsche was “a Zervanist Parsi without knowing it” is that the dialectical inversion of Zoroastrian onto-theology for which Nietzsche sees himself as responsible had already been essentially accomplished by the Zurvanites of the Sassanian period. While Nietzsche did read the Avesta, the scriptures of the Zurvanite heretics were not yet available to Germans of his period.[83] Had he been familiar with the transformation that Daena undergoes in these texts, Daena who proclaims to the liberated soul that harbors her “I am thine Eternity!” he would have seen the refrain in “The Seven Seals” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as that of a Zurvanite hymn: “Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O eternity. For I love you, O eternity!”[84] He would have seen Daena transfigured as the life-affirming creatrix harlot Az, in the feminine divinity to which he dedicates The Gay Science with the words, “For my joyful Sophia.”

Hedayat treasured Rilke’s Notebooks, which he obtained during one of his stays in Paris. He was the foremost Persian interpreter of Kafka, and he admitted to being influenced by Dostoevsky and Poe.[85] So there can be little doubt that he carefully read both Nietzsche’s parable of the madman and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, what is striking is that when the neo-Zurvanite elements of The Blind Owl are recognized, one sees that its parallels with Nietzschean existentialism actually stem from an ancient Persian source with which Hedayat was far more familiar than Nietzsche.

Hedayat went to Bombay in order to study middle Persian literature from the Zoroastrian community that had been established there by refugees who fled to India in the face of the Islamic Conquest of Iran. In fact, The Blind Owl was first published in Bombay. The original edition contains the notice “Publication and Sale in Iran forbidden,” which Hedayat inserted himself in retaliation against the uproar of Iranian censors in 1934 over a disparaging cartoon of the prophet Muhammad that he had sketched for the cover of a book published by one of his friends.[86] Even in the era of Reza Shah, which is looked back on as a period of exceptional anti-Arab Persian nationalism, Hedayat believed that Iran was too separated from her pre-Islamic civilizational heritage. His contempt for the Arab “savages” and his hatred of the Muslim religion that they imposed on the highly civilized Persians is made plain in such scathing nationalist works as the drama Parvin: Daughter of Sassan and his satire The Islamic Mission to European Lands.

During his stay in Bombay, Hedayat learned Pahlavi and translated numerous Zoroastrian texts of the Sassanian period into literary new Persian so as to make them accessible at least to the literati class of modern Iran. Among these was the apocalyptic Pahlavi text Zandé Bahman Yasht[87] (or Vohuman Yasn in the Avestan original), which claims that the followers of Zarathustra will be dealt a devastating defeat and will dwindle over the course of history to the point that theirs will almost vanish as the smallest faith in the world. This prophetic text was written well before the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran in the seventh century AD, at a time when Zoroastrianism—if taken together with its offshoots, such as the Manichean heresy—was the dominant world religion.

In Hedayat’s time, before the neo-Zoroastrian renaissance of recent years in Iran, only three hundred thousand Zoroastrians remained worldwide, with most of them concentrated in the exile community of Persians, or “Parsis,” in Bombay. According to Zandé Bahman Yasht, only when all of his believers had denied him would Zarathustra return to them as their messianic savior or Saoshyant—literally, a “life-healer” who comes to establish faithful guardianship of Mother Earth.[88] As this opening section of the present study draws to a close, let us compare these ideas that inspired Hedayat in Bombay to two passages from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Zarathustra spoke to the people: I teach you the Superman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even to go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Superman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants? Behold, I teach you the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth . . . Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.[89]

Now I go alone, my disciples, You, too, go now, alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you . . . One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves; and only then when you have all denied me will I return to you . . . that I may celebrate the great noon with you. . . . “Dead are all gods: now we want the Superman to live”—on that great noon, let this be our last will. Thus spoke Zarathustra.[90]

CHAPTER 2

SOUL MATES & PSYCHIC

SHADOWS

In Nietzsche’s worldview, the greatest threat to the advent of the Superman is the last man.[91] The last men are all-too-human beings who no longer have a goal in light of which they despise themselves so as to creatively overcome themselves. They are self-satisfied. Their small pleasures and even their work have become a kind of entertainment with the sole “aim” of furnishing them a “happiness” that is no more than contemptible contentment. They neither seek the life of an aristocrat, nor could they bear a life of poverty in the pursuit of some ideal. They have taken all of the highest values as trinkets to be derided, and discoveries that were once wrested through the most strenuous effort are passed off as familiar factoids. They are so jaded that every last trace of reverence has been drowned in a sarcasm and irony born of their higher education. Anyone who does not think like them, who is not as like unto them as they all are to each other, is either mocked or locked up as a madman. If any one of them should feel out of sorts with the common sentiment of the others, he even willingly labels himself mentally deranged and seeks “help” and “treatment.” They take the whole of the human past, when individuals fought and died for their ideals, as one vast spectacle of mass insanity. Only now they have been cured. No longer will they have Caesars. Not one of these last men has the strength to be a commander; he lacks even the slave’s discipline to obey one. The last men are like a flea-beetle infestation that has covered the Earth. Though each of them is a small critter, the swarm of them hopping about together have made everything of genuine grace and grandeur seem small in their midst. They have left the vast expanses and high climbs where it is hardest to live, where one is also afforded the greatest perspective, and have huddled together for a life of warm and cozy comfort.

The last man is, for Nietzsche, the triumphal perfection of “the rabble.”[92] He speculates that many ascetics denied life simply because they did not want to share in its pleasures together with the rabble, who poison the water of the well of life by staring into it with the eyes of blinking idiots. Rabble-rousing turns the noble soul off to politics altogether, unless he becomes one of those great destroyers who were really just intent on annihilating the rabble or at least putting a boot down their throats to stop up their foul mouths. The cries of the rabble for social “justice,” construed as the “equality of all men,” are driven by a lust for revenge against superior souls, a lust as poisonous as the bite of a tarantula.[93] The tarantulas live in a dark hole next to a titanic temple whose steps contradict each other as they soar into the sky like the Tower of Babel. They do not realize that creative development requires individuating strife, or if they do realize it—because they are very smart and all-too-well educated—then they simply reject it; they have no strength to become something beyond themselves. Those who push them to do so are branded and burned as heretics or delivered over to a gleefully self-righteous lynch mob.

For a long while, Nietzsche has Zarathustra think that he has somehow managed to carve out a pure life for himself in the rarefied atmosphere of spiritual mountaintops, in the company of eagles and far above the filthy rabble.[94] Yet, this is only possible insofar as the rabble is still mere rabble and has not become the fulfillment of its type—namely, the last man. Zarathustra ultimately succumbs to a “nausea” that runs as deep as the core of his being, and collapses into an immobilizing prolonged illness, upon realization that the rabble qua the last men are as necessary to the grand scheme of things as the Superman.[95] The one is the condition of possibility for the other, and their lives are bound together in a cosmic nexus of causality that repeatedly reproduces them in the totality of their lives, sharing the world together, for all eternity.

In the wake of Nietzsche’s untimely demise, this nausea of the authentic individual over the phenomenon of mass man has become a staple of existentialist philosophy and literature. We meet with it again in Kafka, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. On the face of it, Hedayat appears to have worked all of its major features into The Blind Owl. The narrator’s first reference to “the rabble” comes in the course of contemplating how he has become unstuck in time:

The various phases of childhood and maturity are to me nothing but futile words. They mean something only to ordinary people, to the rabble—yes, that is the word I was looking for—the rabble, whose lives, like the year, have their definite periods and seasons and are cast in the temperate zone of existence.[96]

Only shortly thereafter, when he is describing Rey—the “Bride of the World’—as the greatest city on Earth in his time, he effectively equates this city that he looks out at through his two windows with “the world of the rabble.”[97] He says that the solitary mirror hanging in his room, which affords him the ability to study his own face “is a more important thing than the world of the rabble-men which has nothing to do with me.”[98] Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the narrator of The Blind Owl tries to separate himself as much as possible from the rabble: “Among the men of the rabble I had become a creature of a strange, unknown race, so much so that they had forgotten that I had once been a part of their world.”[99] If they were to become aware of him, their persecutory and vengeful spirit would certainly drive them to tie him up on a scaffold as a deranged criminal; even his beloved aunt would see to it.[100] One and all, they are epitomized by the band of drunken policemen who the narrator is convinced will ultimately come to arrest him.[101]

We are told that the “central feature” of the rabble-men landscape, and perhaps the epitome of the rabble, is the butcher’s shop and the butcher who clearly enjoys carefully cutting up two sheep a day and cheerfully dispensing them to his customers.[102] Hedayat seems to suggest that even the neighborhood’s stray dog has more “humanity” than this butcher, since the dog gazes regretfully at the butcher’s hand and seems to understand that the man actually enjoys his work.[103] The narrator takes “the rabble-people,” with “the bustle, noise and pretence” that fills their lives, to all have been “turned out of the one mould” in “body and soul.”[104] He feels as if he is different and has nothing to do with this counterfeit world of theirs. He wants to see as little of them as possible, since he has long concluded that any one of them can stand in for all the rest:

I wandered without set purpose among the rabble-men as they hurried by, an expression of greed on their faces, in pursuit of money and sexual satisfaction. I had no need to see them since any one of them was a sample of the lot. Each and every one of them consisted only of a mouth and a wad of guts hanging from it, the whole terminating in a set of genitals.[105]

The closer and closer he comes to his own death, or rather the more deeply he stares into the ever-present face of Death, the more the unreflective, almost vegetable happiness of the rabble folk makes him want to vomit:

For some reason all activity, all happiness on the part of other people made me feel like vomiting. I was aware that my own life was finished and was slowly and painfully guttering out. What earthly reason had I to concern myself with the lives of the fools, the rabble-people who were fit and healthy, ate well, slept well, and copulated well and who had never experienced a particle of my sufferings or felt the wings of death every minute brushing against their faces?[106]

For all their apparent affinity with the existentialist contempt for mass man, these passages in The Blind Owl are actually expressive of a more sophisticated idea that is unique to Hedayat and that is, once again, adapted from ancient Persian spirituality. As we shall see, when they are put side-by-side with passages in which the angel/bitch is portrayed as the narrator’s soul mate and the rabble men are recognized to be shadows cast from out of his own psyche, the interconnection of the authentic individual and the rabble becomes a far more nauseatingly intimate one than even Nietzsche’s vision of the interdependence of Superman and last man in light of the eternal recurrence. This is not to say that the dichotomy of noble souls and rabble men that Nietzsche passes down to his existentialist heirs is not already influenced by Zoroastrian ideas. Indeed, it is. Yet, what sets Hedayat’s understanding of the relationship between the authentic individual and the mass man apart from that of other “existentialists” in Nietzsche’s wake is that he has access to that primordial wellspring of ancient Persian Gnosticism from which Nietzsche drew to develop these ideas, more direct and deeper access than Nietzsche.[107]

Still, the Zoroastrian elements of the Nietzschean vision of the Superman and last man are worth noting on the way to seeing how far Hedayat goes beyond them. In particular, recall two Zoroastrian ideas excavated in the first chapter: the “sorting bridge” (chinvat peretu) that separates those who have the “progressive mentality” (spenta maynu) to “cross over” it from those who do not; and the conscience as an angel (daena) to which one gives birth within oneself through one’s thoughts, words, and deeds—a guardian angel that may take the form of a lucky “star” in the heavens (fravarti). One will recall that she meets and guides the noble soul across the bridge. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we find both sets of symbols. Here are a few of Nietzsche’s bridge metaphors with respect to the Superman:[108]

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end . . . I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over . . . I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit. . . . I love him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience: thus he goes gladly over the bridge.

Here is Nietzsche’s description of the last man as one who, on account of his “constrictive mentality” (angra maynu), can no longer give birth to a star:[109]

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.

Nietzsche even briefly alludes to the Zoroastrian vision of the frashgard, the Future fire of molten metal that will burn away the deceivers while at the same time being experienced as refreshing and purifying to the noble: “On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks. Verily, no nourishment which the unclean might share: they would think they were devouring fire and they would burn their mouths.”[110]

Nietzsche believes that he upsets the Zoroastrian dualism of the just, pure, and noble soul and the deceitful, ignoble little man by showing the interdependence and eternal co-existence of last man and Superman. For him the care of the daena, the cultivation of “conscience”[111] and the commitment to “truthfulness”[112] that were so central to the gospel of the sagacious teacher of the ancient Persians, means crafting one’s very own values beyond the moral dualism of “good and evil,”[113] which Nietzsche takes none other than Zarathustra to have introduced into the wheelwork of history. In sum: the self-overcoming of morality out of a valuation of Truthfulness (Asha) and a hatred of lies (Drough) that is far more primordial than that of any other faith. Yet, although he suggests that the last man lies within Zarathustra as his own shadow[114] trailing along behind him, or as the dwarf[115] weighing him down on his ascent up the mountain, he establishes an abiding duality between the rabble and the supermen destined to become a “new nobility” defined by the depth of the souls, rather than the depth of the pockets, of those who constitute it.[116]

This is not fundamentally different from the eternal opposition between nobly progressive and niggardly constrictive spirits[117] that formed the ideological backdrop of Zarathustra’s rebellion against the litigious priesthood (karapan) and the hereditary aristocracy (kavian) that used religion to oppress and manipulate the ignorant masses of ancient Iran.[118] He aimed to establish a “noble-minded fellowship” (aryaman maga) as the new aristocracy (kshatriya)[119] defined by wisdom and honor rather than wealth. As was briefly explained above, Zarathustra’s reformation was reversed by the Hellenization of Iranian folk religion and a new Zoroastrian priestly orthodoxy that had emerged by the Sassanian era—the period whose Pahlavi literature formed the focus of Hedayat’s ancient Iranian studies in Bombay. In the last section I examined the ideas of Time and the Angel in The Blind Owl in the context of one of the Zoroastrian heresies that arose in opposition to this new orthodoxy, namely Zurvanism. Presently, we will see how Hedayat’s adaptation of ideas from a different Sassanian-era Gnostic heresy leads him to a far more radical understanding of the relationship between the authentic individual and the filthy rabble than that which Nietzsche was willing to contemplate.

The germ of this heresy was an idea current in Sassanian Zoroastrianism to the effect that not everyone has an inner angel, a daena, or “conscience.”[120] What appear to be individual persons in the material world could be earthly parts of larger, finite wholes, syzygoi, and it may be that each can only rejoin their own celestial counterpart through union with others who are, as it were, sparks of light from the same star.[121] This is one of the earliest onto-theological formulations of the idea of a soul mate. In the first section of this study, I mentioned the place in Zoroastrian cosmology of an epoch before the physical creation. This idea of soul mates is predicated on a fixed number of celestial archetypes of individuals having existed, or rather existing, in that epoch before and beyond measurable time. This number does not have a one-to-one correspondence with incarnated human beings. The latter are numerous shadows projected from out of a lesser number of psyches that must strive to recollect their true ethereal identities, by reconciling themselves with their other selves and thereby banishing their shadows.[122] These ideas of the soul mate and the psychic shadow are central to The Blind Owl. On one level, the novel is an account of an attempt on the part of one particular syzygy to re-collect the psychical parts of its dismembered celestial angel. Hedayat suggests that nearly all of the main characters are shadows cast by the narrator’s own fragmented psyche, with the significant exception of the angel, who Hedayat portrays as his soul mate and who is transfigured into the “bitch” only by the darkness within his own unconscious.

The narrator clearly views the angelic ethereal girl as his soul mate, and he is quite explicit that what separates him from her is the shadowy old man:

The radiance of her eyes, her complexion, her perfume, her movements, all appeared familiar to me, as though, in some previous existence in a world of dreams, my soul had lived side by side with hers, had sprung from the same root and the same stock and it was inevitable that we should be brought together again. It was inevitable that I should be close to her in this life. At no time did I desire to touch her. The invisible rays which emanated from our bodies and mingled together were sufficient contact. As for the strange fact that she appeared familiar to me from the first glance, do not lovers always experience the feeling that they have seen each other before and that a mysterious bond has long existed between them? The only thing in this mean world which I desired was her love; if that were denied me I wanted the love of nobody. Was it possible that anyone other than she should make an impression upon my heart? But the hollow grating laughter, the sinister laughter of the old man had broken the bond which united us.[123]

When he first meets her in person, waiting on the stone bench outside the door to his house, he tells us that “[i]f I had never seen her before I should still have known her.”[124] The narrator seems to believe that the angel was made only for his eyes. Like him, she is “a creature apart,” and he feels “sure that beneath the glance of a stranger, of an ordinary man, she would have withered and crumpled.”[125]

Within the first few paragraphs of the opening section of the novel, the narrator’s “disease” is described as a “reverberation of the shadow of the mind.”[126] He also tells us that the catastrophe that has befallen him has “shattered” his “entire being.”[127] By the end of the prefatory prelude to the narrator’s account of his experiences, he has already set up this entire theme. He repeatedly claims to be writing only to make himself known to his own shadow, to open a path of communication between himself and his shadow that is cast upon the wall and devouring his words with an insatiable appetite.[128] He then describes his self-imposed isolation from “the rest of mankind.” He has broken his last remaining ties to them, not only “to attain a better knowledge” of himself, but also because he suspects that “the rest of mankind” who outwardly appear to have the same basic constitution as him and “the same needs and the same passions” may actually “exist” only in order to “cheat” him. He wonders if they are not all “a mere handful of shadows which have come into existence only that they may mock and cheat” him.[129]

At the beginning of the fourth chapter, when the narrative begins again from the perspective of the past life in Rey, the narrator again claims to be writing out his entire “confession” only so as “to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil-lamp . . . studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly.”[130] Sometimes he prefers to sit in total darkness, which in the context of Persian culture is particularly striking. Hedayat describes this darkness as a “dense liquid which permeates everything and every place,” and from out of it “forgotten fears” and “unbelievable ideas that had been lurking in some unknown recesses” of the narrator’s mind take shape as “menacing figures” that sit in the corners of his room. He speculates that these shadows “had been born along with” him and “moved within the restricted circuit” of his existence. When he would go to turn on the lamp, such specters would disappear, but once he can see his reflection in the mirror again by the lamplight, he remarks, “My reflection had become stronger than my real self and I had become like an image in a mirror. I was afraid that if I tried to run away he would come after me.”[131] This is not the only passage where he fears that his shadow selves are becoming stronger than the narrow persona with which he identifies himself. There is also this key passage, whose reference to the owl namesake of the novel we will have occasion to discuss later:

In the light of the smoky oil-lamp my shadow, in the sheep-skin jacket, cloak and scarf that I was wearing, was stretched motionless across the wall. The shadow that I cast upon the wall was much denser and more distinct than my real body. My shadow had become more real than myself. The old odds-and-ends man, the butcher, Nanny and the bitch, my wife, were shadows of me, shadows in the midst of which I was imprisoned. I had become like a screech-owl, but my cries caught in my throat and I spat them out in the form of clots of blood. Perhaps screech-owls are subject to a disease which makes them think as I think. My shadow on the wall had become exactly like an owl and, leaning forward, read intently every word I wrote. Without a doubt he understood perfectly. Only he was capable of understanding. When I looked out of the corner of my eye at my shadow on the wall I felt afraid.[132]

During his past life in Rey, the narrator relates how he feels himself disintegrating, as if he lacked a solid core of selfhood that would bind the various elements of his psyche together—let alone integrate his body and soul:

A sensation which had long been familiar to me was this, that I was slowly decomposing while I yet lived. My heart had always been at odds not only with my body but with my mind, and there was absolutely no compatibility between them. I had always been in a state of decomposition and gradual disintegration. At times I conceived thoughts which I myself felt to be inconceivable. At other times I experienced a feeling of pity for which my reason reproved me. Frequently when talking or engaged in business with someone I would begin to argue on this or that subject while all my feelings were somewhere else and I was thinking of something quite different and at the same time reproaching myself. I was a crumbling, decomposing mass. It seemed to me that this was what I had always been and always would be, a strange compound of incompatible elements . . .[133]

The narrator’s uncle is an identical twin of his father, and he also resembles the narrator himself “in a remote, comical way like a reflection in a distorting mirror.” The uncle and father, who both fall in love with the same Indian temple dancer who becomes the narrator’s mother, are described with the same cloak, turban, hare-lip, very sparse beard, hairy chest, and bone-chilling, hollow, grating laugh as the bent old “Indian fakir” at the foot of the tree in the pen case illustrations. The hearse driver has the same scarf and exactly the same laugh.[134] It is implied that the antique vase from Rey in the present time frame is the same vase that the old odds-and-ends man has kept for himself as the only reminder of his youth as a potter.[135] This adds another dimension to the fact that the hearse driver, who is much like the odds-and-ends man, gives the vase to our narrator as a gift by which to remember him. He would, in that case, be giving him the vase that he himself crafted, while he was still alive in medieval Rey and before he had become a spectral hearse driver. We later find out that the narrator’s wife in Rey has taken the odds-and-ends man as one of her many lovers, and this explains why he would have had her portrait painted into the panel on the flower vase that he crafted.

Later, the description of “the old odds-and-ends man” in medieval Rey also begins to conform to this very characterization, and when he is looking in the mirror after having murdered his wife, the narrator tells us that he “had become the old odds-and-ends man.”[136] This mutation occurs quite rapidly, since Hedayat gives us enough information at various points—for example, at the bathhouse[137]—to conclude that our narrator is ‘in fact’ a young man around twenty years of age:

Whoever saw me yesterday saw a wasted, sickly young man. Today he would see a bent old man with white hair, burnt-out eyes and a harelip. I am afraid to look out of the window of my room or to look at myself in the mirror for everywhere I see my own shadow multiplied indefinitely.[138]

He has become a different man, and yet he denies that there has been any radical break between his old persona and his new one: “But when I looked into the mirror a moment ago I did not recognize myself. No, the old ‘I’ has died and rotted away, but no barrier, no gulf, exists between it and the new one.”[139] This is because he has really been the odds-and-ends man—and the butcher, and even his wife—all along:

I rose to my feet, snuffed the lamp-wick and stood in front of the mirror. I smeared the particles of soot over my face. How frightful was the face that I saw! . . . [he contorts his face every which way] My face had a natural talent for comical and horrible expressions. I felt that they enabled me to see with my own eyes all the weird shapes, all the comical, horrible, unbelievable images which lurked in the recesses of my mind. They were all familiar to me, I felt them within me, and yet at the same time they struck me as comical. All of these grimacing faces existed inside me and formed part of me: horrible, criminal, ludicrous masks which changed at a single movement of my finger-tip. The old Koran-reader, the butcher, my wife—I saw all of them within me. They were reflected in me as in a mirror; the forms of all of them existed inside me but none of them belonged to me . . . At all events I now knew what possibilities existed within me, I appreciated my own capabilities.

Suddenly I burst into laughter. It was a harsh, grating, horrible laugh which made the hairs on my body stand on end. For I did not recognize my own laughter. It seemed to come from someone other than me.[140]

The question becomes how these fragments of a single celestial being separated at Earth are to be reunited. For that we need to understand how what I referred to above as the germ of a Zoroastrian heresy other than Zurvanism was cultivated into a radical libertine Gnostic worldview that Hedayat seems to draw on as a solution to this dilemma. The first person to take the Sassanid Zoroastrian ideas of psychical twins and celestial counterparts and run with them in a heretical direction was the Iranian prophet Mani (born 216 AD), an illuminated manuscript painter from a Judeo-Christian community in Babylon who, like an ancient William Blake, illustrated his own visionary writings. Mani himself claimed to have a spiritual twin who would occasionally appear to him and help him along in his mission. The Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf has written a compelling biographical novel on his life, The Gardens of Light. Mani was known as a great Traveler. His most portentous sojourn was to northern India, which was after all simply the easternmost province of the Persian Empire in his time. He was already familiar with the idea of metempsychosis from the Platonism that had been brought to the Persians by the Greeks who settled in Greater Iran after Alexander’s conquest. In India, Mani recognized Buddha as one of three great World Teachers—along with Christ and Zarathustra before him. He took the Buddhist concept of reincarnation and combined it with the scheme above concerning soul mates and psychic shadows.

Manichaeism became a major world religion. Before being exterminated by Catholicism in Europe, by Islam in the Persian Empire, and by Confucian feudalists in Asia, it had spread outwards from its Iranian heartland as far west as southern France and as far east as western China. Seeing as theirs was perhaps the first conscious attempt at a universal religion—in its attempt to unify the followers of Zarathustra, Buddha, and Christ—although they were pacifistic, they were seen as a universal threat. Manicheans, or “Manichees,” fell prey to persecution by Zoroastrians, Christians, and even Buddhists. Manichean Gnosticism was rooted in an idea that the Persian Sufis would later inherit from them, namely that there is a division between the exoteric (zaher) content of religious scriptures and their esoteric (batin) meaning, and that an esoteric “chain of gnosis” (selseleye erfan) extends throughout history behind the scenes of the exoteric missions of diverse prophets. Whereas these prophets appear to be preaching different faiths, they are only exoterically adapting a single message to their own time and place so as to foster the evolution of the consciousness of human communities towards a preparation for the public revelation of the esoteric Truth of all scriptures at the end of history.

This idea was most crystallized by a Manichean offshoot developed in the third century AD by a certain Zaradusht Khuragan, a renegade Magi of Pars (greater Shiraz) who used this tactic of esoteric interpretation (ta’wil) of the inner meaning (batin) to “return” the corrupted Avesta back to the original Truth preached by Zarathustra.[141] By the fifth century AD, this obscure heresy made its way to the capital district of the Persian Empire in Mesopotamia, the region around Ctesiphon (the old Babylon), which became its new center of gravity. It had also found a charismatic leader in a man widely known by the name Mazdak Bamdad (mazdak means “the Wise”). Mazdak radicalized the emphasis of his sect on esotericism to the point where it became so antinomian that the characteristically ascetic and transcendentalist ethic of Manichean dualism reversed itself into Gnostic libertinism.

Where this all becomes very relevant to Hedayat is in the decisive role that Mazdakism played in the period leading up to and immediately following the Islamic Conquest of Iran. In the 520s AD, the Mazdakite movement successfully led a rebellion against the aristocracy and orthodoxy of the Sassanian Empire. They managed to convert the Sassanian Emperor Kavad himself to their Gnostic faith, and emboldened by his patronage, the oppressed masses of Persia joined the movement by the droves and attacked granaries, storehouses, and aristocratic mansions, where they broke up harems, liberated their women, and practiced free love.[142] As their banner of revolt they adopted the Sorkh Alam, or “red flag,” heralding its use in modern times by the Communist International. It evoked the Zoroastrian Eternal Fire of Wisdom, the Wine of Mystical Union, and the blood that flows through all of our veins regardless of race, class, or gender. Ultimately, the clergy and the feudal lords overcame their state of shock and staged a coup deposing Kavad and rewarding Mazdak with the martyr’s fate that so many Manicheans had faced before him, beginning with Mani himself. After a staged debate with the orthodoxy at the Royal Court (darbar) in Ctesiphon, Mazdak and his highest comrades were buried alive, planted head down and feet up, in a terribly sarcastic allusion to their hope of bringing forth a “human garden” of paradise on Earth. A massacre of Mazdakites and large-scale book burnings of their scriptures followed immediately afterwards in the Imperial capital.[143] Still, they were not eradicated. Mazdak’s widow took the movement underground.

To put all this in a Western context, imagine the Gnostics of Alexandria turning from the perverse fringe religious movement that they were widely taken to be into a sociopolitical force that successfully leads a rebellion in the city of Rome, one that wins the support of a Caesar, and is on the point of revolutionizing the entire Roman Empire. That was the scale of the seditious threat from within that confronted the Sassanian landed aristocracy and the Persian legions, tired by successful but long, drawn-out battles against the armies of Byzantium, just before the Islamic Conquest of Iran. It may have been what made this otherwise incomprehensible conquest possible in the first place.

The Mazdakites might even initially have welcomed the Arabs, thinking that these desert barbarians were far too uncivilized to have staying power but could be useful in sweeping away the weakened Sassanian monarchy and Zoroastrian orthodoxy. When they realized the seriousness of their miscalculation, Mazdakite resistance movements largely based in northern Iran began to wage war on the Arab occupiers. The most significant of these—the Khorramdin—traces back to Mazdak’s own wife, Khurramiya. Given that Khorramdin means “the Joyous Daena,” it is likely that this was the proper name of Mazdak’s own movement from the beginning, and to think that the Khorramdinan named themselves after Mazdak’s widow is to see things backwards. Their orthodox Muslim detractors simply referred to these heretics as Bateniya, “the Gnostics.” At any rate, several leaders of this movement emerged, the most prominent of them being Babak Khorramdin of Azerbaijan.[144] Another such leader was a man named Mazyar, in the Caspian Sea region just north of Tehran—or, as it was known then, the city of Rey.

In 1933, the year of the National Socialist revolution in Germany, Sadegh Hedayat wrote the purple-blooded völkisch drama Mazyar, about the tragic fate of this branch of Khorramdin freedom fighters against the Caliphate. When we place Mazyar (1933) next to Parvin, Daughter of Sassan (1929), which is about the atrocities suffered by civilized Persians in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Muslim onslaught, and also view it in light of the short story “The Mongol’s Shadow” (1931), an interesting pattern suggests itself. “The Mongol’s Shadow” was written for a book called Aniran, or “Un-Aryan,” which consisted of three period pieces by different authors concerning the three most catastrophic events in Persian history.[145] The first dealt with the conquest of Iran by Alexander, the second with the Islamic Conquest, and the third—which was written by Hedayat—was on the Mongol invasion that began in 1219 AD. The kind of nationalist intellectuals who put together the Aniran volume viewed the Mongol invasion as the third great catastrophe, on a par with the first two, because just before the Mongols invaded the resistance had seriously eroded the central authority of the Caliphate. Numerous semi-autonomous enclaves were flourishing, where Iranian nobleman were fostering a Persian spiritual and literary renaissance. These were overrun by the Mongols who, wanting to cement their rule with an all-unifying ideology and lacking a developed faith of their own, officially adopted Islam as the religious foundation of their new centralized authority.

The past life timeframe of The Blind Owl is set in Rey at the period right between the second and third catastrophes portrayed in Aniran. Seen in this light, Hedayat’s drama Mazyar appears to confirm that he saw the era between the Islamic and Mongol conquests of Iran as a golden opportunity, because Iran had been rid of the corrupt Sassanian monarchs and the litigious conservative Zoroastrian orthodoxy, and neo-Mazdakism was increasingly being embraced by Iranians as an alternative to Islam that had been forged from out of the fiery spiritual and intellectual crucible of their own millennial culture. Hedayat probably chose to write the third period piece in Aniran because he viewed the Mongol invasion as the greatest of the three catastrophes—an abortion of the inner angel gestating within the womb of Iran since the days of Zarathustra and Cyrus, a star child that needed just a little more time to be born. This is also why most of The Blind Owl is set in this time period, with an atmosphere of impending catastrophe—a spiritual murder that would become the pivot of all Time.

Appreciating this cultural-historical context, we can now return to the metaphysical question of how Hedayat adopts Mazdakite ideas to suggest a path towards the kind of mystical union that would overcome the earthly dismemberment of the celestial archetypes of the Manichean elect. Mazdak was one of the first Communists in history, and certainly one of the most radical. He saw the hereditary monarchy and religious orthodoxy as co-conspirators in cultivating the plague of arbitrary inequality. Zarathustra’s enemies, the “mumbling” priests and “wrathful” princes, had hijacked and distorted his teaching. For him the solution lay in a new social order that undermined the pillars of these institutions. Mazdak advocated communal life in villages where the agriculture and crafts produced by all the members were to be collected in a central fund from which they would be distributed equitably to each individual according to his or her needs. The elimination of greed for material goods is one thing, but the Mazdakites also sought to root out the lustful will to exclusively possess other human beings.

To this end, the Mazdakites abolished marriage in the traditional sense and replaced it in some instances with a communal marriage, and in others with open marriages between two individuals.[146] A woman’s marriage to one man never meant that she could not also have intimate relations with another. As was undoubtedly intended, rampant sexual promiscuity acted to destroy bloodlines of patriarchal descent, thereby undermining the foundations of the hierarchical social institutions of hereditary aristocracy, class segregation, and slavery. The abolition of marriage in the traditional sense elevated women beyond the status of property and restored the equality to men that they had enjoyed in early Zoroastrianism (as attested to by the Gathas). Indeed, women stood alongside men as the highest leaders of Mazdakite communes.[147] Mazdakites saw this promiscuity as a means towards a mystical union from out of which celestial children would be born.

As we have already seen in numerous passages cited above, the narrator of The Blind Owl is obsessed with the way in which the rabble are driven above all by possessive sexual lust and the desire to accumulate wealth. What is less obvious is that Hedayat seems to be prescribing some kind of Mazdakite mystical orgy as a means to cathartically engage such desires. This is especially clear if we remember that these Gnostic heretics believed that souls are reborn into this world countless times in different bodies and under different circumstances. What others before him had called “Heaven” and “Hell” appeared to Mazdak to be mere psychical projections of the joy or suffering of one’s soul amidst various circumstances in this world during one incarnation or another.[148] If we combine this belief in reincarnation together with the free love that they practiced, it leads towards a truth that some may find quite troubling: these Persian Gnostics were not only uprooting patriarchy, they were intent on breaking taboos against incest.

The narrator of The Blind Owl tells us that his maid or “nurse” was also his wife’s nurse in childhood; she suckled both of them. They are first cousins who were raised together as brother and sister after the narrator was adopted by his aunt, who is his wife’s mother.[149] The narrator even slept in the same swinging cradle as his wife when they were infants.[150] Sometimes when the nurse tells him stories, he feels like a child again, and he vividly remembers how he and his wife “used to sleep together in the one cradle” with the nurse telling them the same stories.[151] He confesses that the real reason he married his wife was because she reminded him of his adoptive mother, whom he loved “as much as if she had been [his] real mother.”[152] He marries his “foster-sister” because she looks like the narrator’s aunt and adoptive mother.[153]

Furthermore, the narrator’s father and his uncle—the husband of his adoptive mother—were psychic twins:

My father and my uncle were twins. They resembled each other exactly in figure, face and disposition, and even their voices were identical. So it was no easy matter to tell them apart. Moreover, there existed between them a mental bond or sympathy as a result of which, to take an example, if one of them fell ill the other would fall ill also. In the common phrase, they were like two halves of the one apple.[154]

They are so alike that the narrator’s mother is not able to tell them apart, and his uncle does not find it difficult to satisfy his desire for the narrator’s mother by sleeping with her as if he were the narrator’s father.[155] After the narrator’s mother insists on the trial by cobra to decide between them, one man walks out of the room and is taken to be the narrator’s uncle because he cannot recognize his brother’s infant.

However, since the man who has “survived” the trial by cobra is generally out of his mind, the narrator expresses doubts as to whether this man was in fact his uncle or his father. So it may be that his father survived and went on to live with his adoptive mother, namely his aunt—the mother of his “cousin.” In other words, the narrator’s wife might actually be his half-sister.[156] His sexual desire for her at times seems to be on account of the similarity of his own body to hers, the kind of similarity that twin siblings would have to one another:

I ran my hand over my body and mentally compared it—thighs, calves, arms and the rest—with my wife’s. I could see again the line of her thighs and buttocks, could feel the warmth of her body. The illusion was far stronger than a mental picture; it had the force of a physical need.[157]

When his “bitch” of a wife’s father catches him with her, forcing herself upon him by his aunt/mother’s deathbed, this man is described in exactly the same terms as the “old man” that the narrator himself becomes.[158] We are left to conclude that, on some level, the narrator is not only his wife’s brother, but also her father.[159] Of course, his wife is in some sense the ethereal girl who is the narrator’s soul mate,[160] and she is in turn the graceful dancer Bugam Dasi.[161] So the narrator’s wife is also his mother—although, only when looking across the span of more than a single incarnation. There is one startling instance when, amidst his delirium, she stops shunning him and comes to stroke his feverish head and rock him on her lap like a little baby.[162]

Finally, during the Rey lifetime the narrator has unconsciously found his way to his brother-in-law’s house, where he notes that this little boy—although clearly younger than his wife—is her psychic twin.[163] He gives the boy the two cakes he has taken and says that they are from “Mummy,” with the narrator explaining to us that the boy would call his own sister his mother for want of a real mother.[164] The narrator lustfully describes all of the similarities between the boy’s features, build, and gait, and that of his wife. Like his wife’s lips, and those of the ethereal girl that she mirrors, those of his brother-in-law “were half-open, as though they had only just broken away from a long, passionate kiss.”[165] He kisses the little boy on the lips, and finds that his lips and mouth taste of the same stub-end of a cucumber kind of bitterness as his wife’s lips and mouth.[166] He hears the by now familiar hollow, grating laughter, and realizes that he has been caught in the act, exactly the same way as he was when his foster-sister set him up to marry her, and by the very same person, his father-in-law, who is the “old man.”[167]

Perhaps the most shocking passage of all is one where Hedayat suggests that the narrator has even been sexually intimate with the epitome of the rabble, his Nanny. She is depicted as the stupidest and most contemptibly fearful of all the “rabble” people that he ruminates on at any length. It nauseates him that she has been so physically intimate with him since the days when she was his wet nurse, and yet Hedayat hints that, in light of his wife’s denying him sex, he lets the Nanny fondle him. The narrator suggests that their relationship is somehow comparable to that between “adoptive” sisters who turn to lesbianism as a sexual outlet in repressively patriarchal Islamic societies that sequester women until their fathers can marry them off to equally “protective” husbands:

Although Nanny had changed outwardly her ideas remained what they had always been. The only difference was that she evinced a greater fondness for life and seemed afraid of death, in which she reminded me of the flies which take refuge indoors at the beginning of the autumn. I on the other hand changed with every day and every minute. It seemed to me that the passage of time had become thousands of times more rapid in my case than in that of other people and that the alterations I daily observed in myself should normally have been the work of years, whereas the satisfaction I should have derived from life tended, on the contrary, towards zero and perhaps even sank below zero. There are people whose death-agonies begin at the age of twenty, while others die only at the very end, calmly and peacefully, like a lamp in which all the oil has been consumed.

But why was this woman of all people so fond of me? Why did she feel that she had a share in my sufferings? All that had happened was that someone had come to her one day and given her money, and she had thrust her wrinkled black nipples, like little buckets, between my lips—and I wish that the canker had eaten them away! Whenever I saw them now I felt like vomiting to think that at that time I had greedily sucked out their life-giving juice while the warmth of our two bodies blended together. She had handled me all over when I was little and it was for this reason she still treated me with that peculiar boldness that you find only in widows. Just because at one time she used to hold me over the latrine she still looked on me as a child. Who knows? Perhaps she had used me as women use their adoptive sisters . . . Even now she missed nothing whenever she helped me to do the things which I could not do on my own. If the bitch my wife had shown any interest in me I should never have let Nanny come near me . . .[168]

Those who suggest that the theme of reincarnation, and how it connects the various characters in The Blind Owl, is indicative of Buddhist influences on Hedayat have not carefully read these orgiastic and incestuous passages, nor are they aware of the Persian Gnostic context that far more adequately suits them and fits Hedayat’s known interests. Take, for example, the comparisons drawn by Iraj Bashiri in two works, a book entitled Hedayat’s Ivory Tower and an essay on “The Message of The Blind Owl.” In the first, Bashiri suggests a series of completely vacuous comparisons between the structure of Hedayat’s novel and the Buddhacarita, a Sanskrit biography of Gautama Buddha. There is no evidence at all that Hedayat read this text, and the so-called “parallels” on which he hangs his argument could be easily drawn to archetypal features of almost any mythological text.[169] The second essay, written years later, claims that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the total key to the symbolism of The Blind Owl. As I will suggest in a moment, while there is also no evidence that Hedayat ever read the Bardo Thodol, as it is natively known, it actually may have some bearing on his novel, but Bashiri’s claim that it is the symbological key is patently absurd. In fact, he admits to having taught Hedayat’s short stories as a professor, without having read The Blind Owl out of fear of a popular Iranian superstition that reading it would lead to suicide. Once Bashiri did read the novel, repeatedly, he claims to have not been able to make heads or tails out of it, until happening upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead—which, not incidentally, scared him so badly that he had to stop and put it down for three years after his first attempt. No insight on the relationship between The Blind Owl and Buddhism is going to come from such a man, and his work in this area has lamentably been the most extensive.

Part of the problem is that those who have sought for a Buddhist influence in Hedayat have thought of it in terms of an Eastern influence imbibed in India. They conveniently forget that Hedayat went to India in order to forge a deeper connection with the pre-Islamic culture of Iran through the Parsis (Zoroastrian “Persians”) of Bombay. (Indeed, if there is a direct Indian religious influence in The Blind Owl, it is of a Shaivite nature, as I argue in the next chapter.) Perhaps more understandably, those who want to argue for an “exotic” Buddhist influence on Hedayat know as little as most people do that Mahayana Buddhism is a religion of Iranian origin—one that emerged from the same syncretistic milieu as Manichean and Mazdakite Gnosticism.

Hedayat’s only known work that is concerned with Buddhism is also situated in this cultural-historical context. It is the nationalistic short story “The Last Smile” (1933), about the downfall of the illustrious Bermecide (Barmaki) household of Khorasan—Mahayana Buddhists persecuted by the early Caliphate on suspicion that the family’s conversion to Islam was insincere. Their fiefdom was one of those aforementioned semi-autonomous enclaves of the Persian cultural renaissance between the Islamic and Mongol conquests of Iran. Hedayat’s story validates the Caliphate’s suspicion and has Ruzbehan Barmaki plotting the overthrow of the Arab Muslim occupiers of Iran. The “smile” of the story’s title refers to the expression on the face of Ruzbehan’s prominently featured statue of the Buddha.

Buddhism began in northern India in the sixth century BC as a movement of ascetics who left their worldly lives behind to wander the deserts and jungles and lead a life of seclusion and renunciation. They hoped to be freed from the suffering to which they believed all mortals are inherently condemned by their corporeal existence. Siddhartha Gautama, a prince by birth, was one such monk who returned to civilization after achieving “enlightenment” in order to teach a doctrine that epitomized the spirit of the broader monastic movement. The movement’s ascetic values rendered it impractical and thus unpopular. Though the Indian King, Ashoka, converted to the faith for genuine personal reasons in 268 BC, it continued to have a very uncertain future for the next several centuries under the Sunga and Kanva dynasties, which favored a Vishnuite Hindu sect. The Sunga King Pusyamitra (187–151 BC) is remembered as a notorious persecutor of the early Buddhists. The movement was also plagued by much controversy arising over the interpretation of vague points of Dharma following the Buddha’s death.[170]

All of this changed only when an Iranian tribe called the Kushans emerged from Central Asia to seize northern India. The Kushan King Kanishka (78–144 AD) is immortalized in Buddhist legends not only because he became a patron of Buddhism, but on account of his having convened the largest Buddhist council in history at the city of Kashmir. Here, monks and scholars, under the influence of the Iranian King, worked out a new vision of Dharma that would come to be known as Maha Yana, or “Great Vehicle.” The founding texts of the new doctrine were engraved on copper plates, not in Sanskrit but in Kharoshti—a Hellenistic script devised by Kanishka to express the Iranian language of the Kushans. Kanishka also became the patron of famous Buddhist authors such as Ashvaghosha, Matrceta, and Vasubandhu, as well as the physician Caraka.[171] It is Kanishka who ordered the carving of the awe-inspiring colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan, which were pulverized with dynamite by the Muslim Taliban in March of 2001. It is worth noting in this connection that the Persian word for “a Buddhist” is bodh-parast, or “bodhi-reverer”—which the ignorant Muslims simply took to mean “idol worshipper.”

Evidence from numismatic researchers suggests that Kanishka also maintained reverence for the Zoroastrianism of his ethnic roots. The transformation of Buddhist doctrine that he encouraged reflects a fundamental Persian influence. The first Zoroastrian influence on Buddhism that engendered Mahayana was the idea that there is more than one Buddha body. In addition to the body of the earthly aspirant who may attain buddhahood, as Siddhartha did, there is also a heavenly Buddha body of bliss existing outside of Time—an idea clearly reflecting the Zoroastrian notion of a celestial counterpart (fravashi). Finally, there is the idea of the union of these two bodies, of the identification of the earthly body with its celestial counterpart, in a larger finite whole that is the Buddha archetype, or Adi Buddha, of more than one earthly incarnation or manifestation of the Buddha. Another Zoroastrian influence is evident in that the original Buddhist school believed that it was possible to become a Buddha, although this took immense stretches of time, so that in every world age there could only be one Buddha, with Siddhartha being the Buddha of this age. The Mahayanists, exhibiting Zoroastrian influence, turned Siddhartha into only one of many enlightened beings manifesting within the same time frame, and they insisted that each and every person possessed an inner Buddha nature which they could cultivate to become no less enlightened than Siddhartha himself.

Whereas the early Buddhists were really seekers of extinction—which is what Nirvana actually means, with its reference to the “snuffing out” of a candle—the Mahayanists vowed to return to the Earth again and again as teachers, in countless lives, until through their overwhelming compassion every single sentient being is freed from suffering and able to enter Nirvana along with them. This is what “Great Vehicle” (Maha Yana) refers to—there is enough room on board for all, and the ship is not leaving until everyone is aboard. Adherents who make such a vow are called Bodhisattvas. There are also major savior figures, such as the expected Buddha of the Future, namely Maitreya—whose name is merely an accented pronunciation of the Persian “Mithra” and who is modeled on the Zoroastrian Saoshyant.[172] To reconcile these ideas with the original teachings of Siddhartha, the Mahayanists adopted the same Iranian device as the Mazdakites—the idea of a batin and zaher, with the Mahayana being construed as the hidden esoteric teaching of Buddha that was to be revealed only over the course of time and at the right moment of psycho-social evolution.

Thus, under the influence of the concern with salvation and the chivalric ethos of Zoroastrian Iran, Buddhism became a life-affirming agent of social transformation on a large scale. The ideal of the Boddhisattva is not that of an ascetic monk. It can be fulfilled by anyone amidst their ordinary worldly life and it necessitates interpersonal relationship, rather than monastic isolation, as a means to liberating others. This revolution in Buddhist doctrine is what allowed it to become a viable popular movement. Kanishka and his Iranian heirs in the Kushan dynasty built many stupas across their conquered lands and endowed massive projects for the translation of Buddhist texts into Chinese by Iranian Boddhisattvas. Several of these monks became missionaries who traveled far into the Tien-Shan Mountains and thereby introduced Buddhism to China and founded strong Buddhist communities there. The beautiful cave murals that they left behind inside the Magao Grottos depict the typical Iranian features of these missionaries—their Aryan bone structure, their light skin, blue or green eyes, and auburn hair.

Both Padmasambhava and Bodhidharma were of ethnic Iranian origin and hailed from the Iranian cultural heartland of Khorasan. The Bon shamanists of Tibet also claim that their Tonpa Shenrab came there from northern Khorasan. In Persian, Khorasan means “sunrise land”—it is a cognate of the Indo-European word “horizon.” This area, which now lies mostly in “Afghanistan,” including Tajikistan and the northeastern parts of the modern nation-state of Iran, was the homeland of Zarathustra, of Ferdowsi (Iran’s “Homer”—the poet of the Persian national epic), and of Jalaluddin Rumi. It was here that the Barmaki family of Buddhist persuasion set up the semi-autonomous fiefdom whose demise at the hands of the Caliphate Hedayat laments in “The Last Smile.” The specific area where the Barmakids were based, the Persian city of Balkh, became the site of Now Bahar (“New Spring” in Persian)—which, with its 93-meter golden dome, was the largest Buddhist temple in the world at that time and drew pilgrims from many faraway lands.

Whereas Siddhartha had frowned on representational art as an amplification of the illusory nature of the sensuous world, when the Kushans seized northern India and settled there, they developed an exquisitely sensual and life-affirming style of Iranian art that is the foundation of the entire tradition of “Buddhist Art”—which began with the Mahayana. This artistic tradition reached its peak some centuries later, in the paintings and sculptures of those caves in the Tien-Shan Mountains of what is now western China, where we see depictions of Iranian missionaries that brought Buddhism to China. Some of the caves have been sealed off from the public by the Chinese government. The reason is that the scenes depicted in them are so erotic that they would apparently offend contemporary public morality as badly as they would have offended the morality of early Indian Buddhists. Yab-Yum imagery of male Bodhisattvas in mystical sexual union with various female consorts feature prominently, as do images of fierce, naked celestial maidens. If there are “Buddhist” elements in The Blind Owl, they are those that were heretically introduced into Buddhism by Iranians of a libertine Gnostic bent—the Eastern spiritual twins of the Mazdakites and Khorramdinan in western and northern Iran. In the movements of Abu Moslem Khorasani, Sunpadh (Sinbad), and Ishaq, we see that neo-Mazdakite ideas were indeed present in Khorasan, where Mahayana also flourished.[173]

In the lands stretching from what is now southern Afghanistan, where the Bamiyan Buddhas were carved, to the Magao Grottos of the Tien Shan Mountains and into the Western Gobi desert beyond (where mummies of Iranian tribesmen have been found), a culture flourished similar to that of the Mazdakite communes of northwestern Iran. Its lost epic story, featuring figures as illustrious and outrageous as Padmasambhava and Bodhidharma, remains to be evocatively retrieved by some historian of the future. It was a culture destroyed by the Islamic Conquest from the west, and then again by the Mongol hordes of Asia who swept in from the east only to adopt Islam. It was a kind of “Buddhism” that could not survive too far east into China, where Confucian conservatism prevailed among feudal landlords who were as concerned with law and order as the Muslims. At least, that is how Hedayat would have seen things: “The Last Smile” of Buddha effaced not only by the Arabs, but also by “The Mongol’s Shadow.”

In the context of his belief in reincarnation, Hedayat’s use of sexual intimacy to an extent that violates the incest taboo may be viewed as a Mahayanist act of compassion: a means to profoundly conflate the orthodox Zoroastrian distinction between the elect and the rabble. This is only true, however, if by “Mahayana” we understand the original Iranian Mahayana (or its Vajrayanist revival) in Central Asia (broadly construed to include Tibet) and not what survived in the context of East Asian cultural conservatism. It puts Hedayat on spiritual terrain that lies beyond the treks of European existentialists, with their quasi-Manichean dichotomy between the authentic individual and mass man. It is a radical development of a Mahayana idea that we find in a germinal form in The Tibetan Book of the Dead attributed to Padmasambhava—the ethnically Iranian sage from Urgyan (Ghazni) in northeastern Iran or Khorasan (present-day “Afghanistan”), who established Buddhism in Tibet and is viewed there as “the Second Buddha.” The text is basically concerned with the navigation of the bardo state, the condition between death and rebirth.

In this state, one will have a spectral body that has all of the senses of the physical body, and in an unimpaired condition—so that a person who was blind or deaf will now be able to see or hear.[174] This body will not cast shadows or be reflected in a mirror, but it will be able to pass through solid objects in the physical world, and its ability to traverse physical space will be limited only by the intensity of one’s intention to do so. Vast stretches of land may be crossed instantaneously.[175]

What is of most concern to us here in relation to The Blind Owl are the following three ideas. Firstly, that according to the Bardo Thodol the various beings that one beholds while in the bardo state are “thought-forms” that radiate from out of one’s own mind as “the embodiment of [one’s] own intellect.”[176] In other words, they are shadows of one’s own mind. One should not be awed by them, nor should one be terrified even if they take on menacing forms and appear to chop one’s (spectral) body into pieces, over and over again.[177] The Bardo Thodol admonishes one to “analyze with care the real nature of that which is frightening” to one, the unconscious fears from out of which these thought-forms are being projected and sustained.[178] Secondly, when one is drawn towards a womb for rebirth, one beholds one’s future parents in the act of sexual intercourse, and if one is going to be reborn as a male, one experiences intense sexual attraction towards one’s own mother, and terribly hateful jealousy of one’s father, and vice-versa if one is being drawn towards rebirth as a female.[179] Thirdly, according to the Bardo Thodol, “the pair, the father and the mother” that one sees in the intermediate state between death and rebirth, are as “unreal and false” as the “black rain, the storm-blasts, clashing sounds, the terrifying apparitions” and all of the other “illusions” or “apparitions” of a “non-permanent” nature that one experiences therein.[180]

The third point connects with the first in a striking way. One imagines that the visions perceived in the bardo are less “real” than the beings in the physical world, but we are told that the couple who are about to become one’s parents—on the physical plane of one’s next incarnation—are just as unreal as the shadows of one’s mind. The metaphors used call to mind those passages of The Blind Owl wherein the narrator describes the various fantastic and phantasmagoric people and places that he sees appearing from out of a thick fog, during a drizzling rain, and disappearing back into mist.

Here is how The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the unreality of the lovemaking couple being observed while in the spectral state: “O, the pair, the father and the mother . . . What advantage is there in being attached [to them]! . . . All these are hallucinations of one’s own mind . . . like dreams . . . like echoes, like the cities of fantastically-shaped clouds, which dissolve in rain and vanish, like mirage, like mirrored forms, like phantasmagoria.”[181] The Bardo Thodol tells us that we should fixedly adhere to the resolution not to feel erotic attraction or hatred towards, or be jealous of, one or another of the men and women we observe in sexual union. The firmness of this resolution to be undistracted should work to dissipate the karma expressing itself through those passions so as to save us from this imminent rebirth in the Samsaric world.[182]

If Hedayat ever read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Bashiri claims that he must have done, he would have come to a different conclusion. Since there really is no discrete bardo state, because the people of the “real” world are just as much shadows of the mind as the specters encountered there, we might as well work towards our spiritual awakening out of illusion now by purifying erotic impulses of the passions of possessiveness, hatred, and jealousy, and also of the fearful repulsions that lie behind taboos of the kind that seem to be violated by the Oedipal desires allegedly experienced in the bardo state. The shockingly promiscuous and incestuous relationships between the characters in his novel suggest Hedayat’s reference to the Mazdakite path to the attainment of such a goal.

Far from what Bashiri would have us believe, there is no bardo state all in The Blind Owl. We have an almost immediate transition from the experience of one incarnation to that of another life in this world. What if there appears to be no bardo state because the entire narrative actually takes place from within the bardo state? From the outset, Hedayat describes the narrator’s condition, which “transcends ordinary experience” as akin to “a state of coma like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither asleep nor awake.”[183] Nevertheless, it is not credible to say that the whole narrative takes place in the bardo state, because, in addition to the fact that two lifetimes are clearly delineated, as noted above, there is a brief description of memories of birth, the womb, and experience of the void between lives.[184] Rather, something like the inverse is true—there is no bardo state because all of life, whether at one epoch or another, in one body or another, is ultimately no different from the bardo state, and the “others” one encounters are shadows cast from out of various depths of one’s own mind. For the same reasons, others may appear to be one’s soul mate. Yet even those who seem to be so far removed from one’s being, so repulsively different from oneself as the narrator takes the rabble to be, are also one’s own psychic shadows. They are, one and all, blissful, banal, or terrifying aspects of one’s self—which is, moreover, an insubstantial “Self” that only coheres in interplay with its shadows. Why prolong coming face to face[185] with them?

CHAPTER 3

POISONED WINE & THE

SERPENT POWER

There is a sense in which the theme of reincarnation in The Blind Owl is a surprising one. Not only because the author is a man who committed suicide, and we wonder why he would have done so had he believed in the transmigration of souls, but also because Hedayat took more than a passing interest in that most materialistic of all Persian poets and natural philosophers, the Lucretius of Iran, Omar Khayyam of Neyshapur. Hedayat’s very first publication was an edition of Khayyam’s quatrains, which he expanded and republished in 1934 as Songs of Khayyam. In his long introduction to this text, Hedayat claims that the many contradictory messages of the poems in the editions of The Rubaiyat then being published point to the fact that they are corruptions that do not derive from Khayyam himself. Hedayat sought the earliest sources of reference to Khayyam in an effort to piece together Omar’s authentic quatrains and their message. Working from fifteen verifiable poems quoted in the medieval texts Mersad al-Ebad and Munes al-Ahrar, Hedayat definitively concluded that Khayyam was not a Sufi and was antagonistic to Sufism.[186] Hedayat’s lengthy and profound interpretation of The Rubaiyat became vital to Khayyam studies and shaped the modern view of the eleventh-century thinker. However, many intellectuals also criticized Hedayat’s introduction in much the same way as Heidegger’s interpretations of the pre-Socratics are critiqued in the West. Hassan Kamshad called it “a vehicle for many of [Hedayat’s] own ideas.”[187]

If Hedayat was interested in appropriating Khayyam as late as 1934, when he published a substantively revised version of his youthful 1923 edition of the quatrains, by 1937, when he completed The Blind Owl in Bombay, he was ready to overcome Khayyam—or at least, whatever “Khayyam” it was that he had internalized. In fact, this overcoming may have been long in the works, and the 1934 revision of the early treatment of Khayyam may have been akin to strengthening an opposed position in its most definitive and elemental features only so as to be able to more decisively demolish it at the joints. In The Blind Owl, Hedayat makes use of Khayyamic imagery, especially wine, but he does so in such a way as to call into question Khayyam’s naturalistic materialism—not because it is hopelessly grim, but because it is too optimistic to believe that death is such an easy escape from the veritable nightmare of life. Hedayat’s world is darker than Khayyam’s. He recognizes that the wine Khayyam naïvely recommends is poisoned, but this poison is not even a means of escape through death’s door. It is, rather, an elixir that leads to a terrifyingly immortal madness, drunk with the ecstatic Power of an inextinguishable Life Force. The narrator of The Blind Owl tells us that the “evil impression” that his experiences have left on him “to a degree that surpasses human understanding” have “poisoned” his “life for all time to come”—in other words forever, and ever, and ever.[188] Before we can see how this is so, we need to have some understanding of Omar Khayyam—with an emphasis on how Hedayat read him.

First, a few words about his biography. Omar Khayyam was born into the working class of Neyshapur, the capital of the Khorasan province, in 1048 AD and died at the age of 77 in 1131 AD. He grew up looking into the face of death. As a boy he bore witness to the waves of devastating invasions for which Khorasan is historically famous—first by the Seljuq Turks, and then again with greater severity by the Mongols. He holds the greatest claim to being the foremost natural scientist in the world of the Middle Ages. Khayyam’s capacity for rigorous and relentless rationality developed early in his life as a follower of the contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina). Khayyam turned from speculative philosophy to the natural sciences and became adept in all of them, including medicine. Like Descartes, he too held the heart of man in his hands. However, his real contributions came in mathematics and astronomy. His treatise on Euclid’s Elements advanced Number Theory, and his famous treatise that first demonstrated how to solve cubic equations became the foundation of modern Algebra (Al’ Jabra, or “the calculations”). It was employed in European universities up through the nineteenth century. In 1047, summoned by the Saljuq Sultan and his Persian court minister Nizam ul-Mulk, Khayyam designed an observatory and undertook a serious revision of the Islamic calendar. His calculations, which added the Jalali era and shifted New Year, allowed it to surpass the Julian and match the Gregorian calendar in accuracy five centuries before its advent in Europe. It is when we consider Khayyam’s place as the preeminent philosopher-scientist of his age that we bring the fullest meaning to the meager 128 quatrains that he composed during retirement in the last years of his life.

Khayyam’s poems, as Hedayat understands them, are an elaboration on several main themes. Above all, the only certainty, and thus the only sense in life, is Death; this follows from the harsh fact that the existence of man and his world is a mere accident.[189] The planets revolve, men are born and die, love and hate, and civilizations rise and fall all according to the Law of Fate; “free will” is a fable concocted by man.[190] If there is a “God” at all, he is cruel, for his designs are like a tragicomic theater in which we are the actors, or a lamp-lit diorama in which we are the passing designs turning to his whim as shadows cast upon the wall of death.[191] The revolutions of the spheres, not to mention the actions of men—their hopes, their suffering, and their striving—are all reduced to an awesome and chilling Absurdity. Only decay and decomposition await man after death. The atoms of his body will find new life after being ground in Nature’s merciless mill, as plants or other objects, but the soul, if there is one, is at once and forever submerged into the oblivion of unconsciousness. If life is fundamentally absurd, then any search for “the truth” is vain folly. Even if there is a “truth,” Omar argues that we “mere mortals” never are afforded so much as a glimpse of it except, ironically, in the oblivion of death, when it is too late for us to grasp any of it.[192]

Khayyam writes off all the philosophers of the past as, at worst, liars, and at best, delusional men with especially large egos frightened by meaninglessness, who misused their rational faculties to project purpose into the world in order to console themselves and each other.[193] Mastery in this kind of knowing brings only vainglory in the face of death.[194] Khayyam’s denial of a search for “the truth” is not exclusive to philosophy, but also includes Science as a way of knowing. It is thus that Khayyam’s poems carry an especially haunting weight. One is disturbed to consider that after a lifetime as the most accomplished scientist of his age, who prodded out the secrets of the movements of the heavens and the mathematical laws of nature, he declared life to be the product of chance and bitterly turned his back on Science—the last faith—as a futile, almost laughable, inquiry into the Absurd.[195] It is because Omar will not be so arrogant as to put forward another “truth” that his quatrains are filled with a tone of deep irony, at times darkly playful, but more often despairing.

In The Rubaiyat, the only recourse for man is to find pleasure in wine and women. However, this doctrine is not the simple-minded hedonism that it is often taken to be in the West. Khayyam’s constant refrain “Drink wine!” is meant quite literally, as a way to induce “forgetfulness” of the sufferings of the past which are gone and the worries of a tomorrow that may never come. However, there is also a deeper sense—“Drink wine!” can be taken to mean “Drink life!”—where “wine,” the juice of the grape, is the blood of Life. Imagine that for Khayyam, death hung over life like a shadow pulling every passing moment towards a gaping black hole, life is being poured out like juice from grapes or wine from a jar, and Omar urges us to consciously grasp the jar, to take our life into our hands and make the inevitable our will by not missing a drop. We can drink or we can stand by and watch as our life is drained, and the “Cruel Potter” smashes the jar of our body back into the clay from which it came. Life, “be it bitter or sweet,” is being poured like wine into the jaws of Death, and so Khayyam also urges us to become the Death that is our Fate.[196] Our lives only have meaning when we never turn from looking into the face of Death.

Women are also a way of laughing back at death. Again, “women” are meant quite literally as women, but they also symbolize the body of life. In holding the body of a woman in one’s hands, one is holding one’s own body, one’s own life, through her hands, and at the same time the hands of each of the lovers clutching the body of the other are the claws of Death.[197]

In light of this vision of life and death, Khayyam has great contempt for the Arabs who invaded Iran and for the Semitic religion that they brought with them to ensnare the rabble. (Hedayat places a particular emphasis on this.) Islam denies and denigrates this world in favor of another, and this is contemptible in two ways: on the one hand the wine of this life is forsaken in the name of salvation in “heaven” and under the threat of “hell,” while on the other hand, the promise of another world turns out to be an empty, delusional fantasy, so that man is left alone with Death, having wasted his life in the name of a lie.[198] Khayyam also sees the Arab caliphs and Arabized clergy of his time as hypocrites using Islam as an excuse for the oppression of their pious followers, and as a veil to conceal their own profligacy, which is not only in excess of everyone else’s, but which is filthy because it is dishonest.[199]

In the eleventh century, while wine was forbidden to Muslims it was allowed to Zoroastrians, who became the guardians of wine taverns (meykhaneh or meykadeh). These were attended by young wine-bringers called Saqis, who in Khayyam’s quatrains are invariably depicted as lusty females. Beginning in Omar’s time, the wine taverns became the refuge of poets and other rebellious spirits.[200] Nevertheless, Omar is also faced with the sober realization that one cannot bury oneself in the imagined glories of the past. In verses to be echoed by Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” he condemns the hubris of Imperial Persia and laughs in the face of the divine grandeur of its kings, whose bones now lie buried side by side with those of their servants. Symbolic references to pre-Islamic Persia haunt the quatrains like a backdrop of ruins.[201]

This should suffice as an overview of Khayyam’s thought, at least as it was understood by Hedayat in Songs of Khayyam.[202] Hedayat’s most significant and explicit allusions to Khayyam in The Blind Owl come in the form of the repeated recitation of a quatrain from The Rubaiyat: “Come, let us go drink wine; Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey. If we do not drink now, when should we drink?” It is quoted on four occasions throughout the course of the novel. Hedayat has the narrator hear three of these recitations from out of the mouths of a band of drunken policemen.[203] This is very significant, because Hedayat sees these men as perfect specimens of the contemptibly obscene, obtuse, and hypocritical rabble. To take a verse of Khayyam and put it in their mouths is to degrade that verse, to suggest that its author is blameworthy for being able to be appropriated even by the rabble.

In fact, on one of these occasions, his reaction to this is even stronger than contempt—he shrinks back in terror at their brutishness.[204] The fourth citation of the quatrain is by the narrator; he murmurs the words of the song to himself, remarking that he had “heard [it] somewhere or other.”[205] This further reduces Khayyam to the level of “hearsay,” of what “They Say” and what one repeats thoughtlessly because “They” have been singing it at a dive bar or some such place. The moment when the narrator murmurs this verse to himself could not be more relevant—it is then that he remembers the poisoned wine vouchsafed to him by his mother, and has the first “flash of inspiration” to drink it and end his sorrows once and for all. Far from being a truly inspired insight, it proceeds from out of that same unreflective state of mind that has one regurgitating quatrains swallowed by drunken louts.

This frames the narrator’s extensive contemplations of death in a different light and reconciles what otherwise seem to be two conflicting views on this subject matter. On the one hand, in a very Khayyamic tenor, the narrator heaps scorn on Islam, referring to its liturgies as “nonsense and lies” filled with “notions of the rabble,” providing a “kind of recreation for healthy, successful people.” He mocks the “bobbing up and down” for an “omnipotent Lord of all things, with whom it [is] impossible to have a chat except in the Arabic language.”[206] He also engages in a sustained Khayyamic meditation on the disintegration of the body into its atomic material constituents. Even when he wonders whether some sensation might persist in the body as the hair and nails continue to grow, despite the cessation of circulation and the onset of decomposition, this is only a morbid extension of a basically materialist frame of mind. The narrator seems reconciled to such a death “so that this idea had ceased to frighten” him.[207] It only disgusts him that his atoms will be redistributed by Nature to potentially constitute the bodies of future rabble. Still, consolation can be taken in the fact that in the face of death, all of the false faces that the rabble wear come undone. Death is the only Truth beyond all lies and it mercifully unmasks these hypocrites.[208] This is a Khayyamic notion of authenticity. The narrator takes himself to be authentic on account of always staring into the face of that which the rabble only face at their demise.

On the other hand, he has a seemingly contradictory fear of death—he is even terrified by it.[209] We learn that his scorn for a religion like Islam is really on account of the fact that it is too unbelievably stupid to allay these fears, with its vision of an afterlife in a heaven populated by the rabble and catering to their vulgar desires. The apparent tension between these two views is resolved when we learn that what the narrator really fears is the prospect of another life in this world, the possibility that death leads neither to an otherworldly afterlife nor to oblivion, but to reincarnation. His murmuring of the Khayyam quatrains sung by the drunken policemen is like a lullaby meant to allay these fears, with the hope that suicide by means of the poisoned wine will deliver him from life, but this remains somewhat ineffectual. He still takes the possibility of reincarnation seriously and that is what profoundly unsettles him about death, that even if it does not provide an “end” that is a telos—a goal, and resolution like Heaven—it may not provide an “end” that is a terminus in senseless annihilation, either. The nightmare of life might be endless. If this is the case, he promises to live his next life in peace as a quiet recluse:

What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death. . . . If I had to go through another life, then I hoped that my mind and senses would be numb. In that event I could exist without effort or weariness. I would live my life in the shadow of the columns of some lingam temple. I would retire into some corner where the light of the sun would never strike my eyes and the words of men and the noise of life never grate upon my ears.[210]

Indeed, he attempts to do just that. When he is reincarnated in modern Tehran, he takes up the life of an unmarried recluse living on the outskirts of town with a mind-numbing occupation as a pen case decorator, and with opium as his diversion. Yet, there is no peace at all. The ethereal woman and the old coachman, specters from his life in medieval Rey, come back to haunt him. He winds up bloodied and encircled by blister flies all over again—after committing necrophilia with a woman who he proceeds to dismember, consorting with a gravedigger who helps him hide his victim in a ditch, all the while still anxiously avoiding being arrested by the police. In another life, at another time, centuries later, his ears are still grated by the harsh sound of the old man’s hollow, hair-raising laughter. He was mistaken to think that there was any way out. More specifically, he was mistaken about the nature of the poison mixed into the wine that his mother left him. He took it to be plain old “cobra venom”[211] rather than the elixir of Serpent Power that it is.

Reincarnated, in modern Tehran, he knows better: the disease from which he is suffering has no cure, and the “oblivion” of intoxication is only a temporary solution that over the long run worsens the symptoms of this condition[212]—worsens them with the realization that even death is no escape. A constellation of esoteric symbols point to Hedayat’s adoption of a basically Tantric position on “life and death” over against the naïve escapism of Khayyamic materialism. Among these are the serpentine imagery associated with the poisoned wine and with the narrator’s mother—the Indian lingam temple dancer who poisoned it; the trial by cobra to which she subjected his father; her identity with his filthy whore of a wife and his pure ethereal girl, both of whom obsessively bite the finger of their left hand; and the yogi who also bites his finger. This opposition of Tantric esotericism to Khayyamic materialism is even formulated into a single thought or observation, which plays on the structure of the aforementioned quatrain from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

I do not know where I am at this moment, whether the patch of sky above my head and these few spans of ground on which I am sitting belong to Nishapur or to Balkh or to Benares. I feel sure of nothing in the world. I have seen so many contradictory things and have heard so many words of different sorts, my eyes have seen so much of the worn-out surface of various objects—the thin, tough rind behind which the spirit is hidden—that now I believe nothing. At this very moment I doubt the existence of tangible, solid things, I doubt clear, manifest truths.[213]

The quatrain of Khayyam referred to here reads:

Since life passes, whether sweet or bitter

Since the soul must pass the lips, whether in Nishapur or in Balkh

Drink wine, for after you and I are gone many a moon

Will pass from old to new, from new to old.

Hedayat calls into question its naïve sentiment by introducing a third city in addition to the two Persian ones, namely the city of Benares (Varanasi) in India. In all of northern India, Benares is the center of the cult of Shiva, whose symbol is the lingam, and the site of the famous Shaivite temple of Vishwanath[214]—the “lingam temple” referred to in the passage where the narrator dreads the prospect of reincarnation.

The narrator’s mother, an Indian woman named Bugam Dasi, was a dancer in one of these temples devoted to the worship of Shiva. After evocatively describing her serpentine movements to the sound of an Indian instrument enfolding within it “all the secrets of wizardry,” and the hypnotic power of the undulating tremors and precisely significant gestures (mudras) of this dance, the narrator tells us that his father fell in love with Bugam Dasi and embraced her religion, “the lingam cult.”[215] Bearing in mind the series of psychical identifications or conflations examined in the last chapter, we have to take this to mean that the narrator himself has on some level embraced it—albeit perhaps only unconsciously until he gathers his psychical shadows back into himself.

To briefly remind the reader, the bent old Indian yogi at the foot of the cypress tree on the pen case covers and in the vision seen through the air vent in the closet[216] is described by Hedayat in almost exactly the same terms as the old odds-and-ends man that the narrator says he has become at the end of the novel,[217] and is also a doppelganger of his uncle, who is the physical and psychical twin of his father.[218] We should note that the three men—and the narrator as well at the novel’s conclusion—all have their necks covered. In one of the Indian myths about Shiva, he has to drink a deadly poison that is the last substance to emerge from out of the cosmic ocean at the dawn of Creation, in order to save the other gods from being poisoned almost as soon as they have begun to manifest. As a consequence of drinking this primordial poison inherent in the Creation, Shiva’s neck turns black and it is often covered by something, usually a garland.[219]

We learn that the narrator’s father and uncle went into the trade business together and that the uncle ultimately falls in love with Bugam Dasi as well, successfully sharing her bed on account of being her husband’s doppelganger. When she discovers his deception, Bugam Dasi subjects the two men to a “trial by cobra.” They are locked in a room together with a cobra snake, and the one to come out alive will have the Indian temple dancer as his wife. Before they are thus enclosed, on the father’s request, she dances once more—this time to a “snake charmer’s pipe,” “bending and twisting like a cobra.”[220] It was believed that whoever is bitten first would cry out and this would be a signal to open up the room, but instead of a shriek of horror, the listeners hear a hair-raising groan that is mixed with wild laughter.[221] The man who emerges is so mentally deranged that no one can really be sure whether it is the narrator’s father or his uncle.[222] More significantly, his sudden transformation into a white-haired old man connects him to the Indian yogi in the initial vision of the ethereal girl, and to the hare-lipped odds and ends man with which the narrator eventually identifies.[223] At the end of the story, we see that the harelip is really a “fang” mark, a consequence of the cobra bite that the narrator’s wife gives him.

The serpent is a liminal being that slithers between the surface world of Earth and the Underworld, between the realm of the living and that of the dead; its wisdom is born of the interior of the Earth from out of which it emerges, and its ability to slough off its skin made it a striking symbol of revitalizing transformation.[224] In Tantra, the progressive nature of spiritual practice towards higher consciousness and concomitant acquisition of greater superpowers (siddhis) is represented by the awakening, arising, and ascent of kundalini shakti—a serpentine female energy coiled within oneself.[225] Hypostatized as a woman, Shakti is the active “Power” and lover of Shiva—the Indian “Lord of the Dance” and the god of the “lingam cult” to which Hedayat refers, the cult of Bugam Dasi that is embraced by the narrator’s father. This Great Goddess has a number of avataras or emanations known as Mahavidyas.[226] Kali is the primary, or adi Mahavidya.[227] She is the Mistress of Transformation.[228]

The name Kali means “Black.”[229] The basic image of her is that of a blood-smeared, naked, jet black-skinned woman with disheveled hair and a red tongue lolling out from between sharp white teeth. She wears only a garland of severed heads around her neck and a girdle of severed arms around her waist. She holds a bloodied cleaver in her upper left hand and a severed head in her lower left hand, while her upper right hand makes the mudra meaning “fear not” and her lower right hand makes the one signifying the bestowal of boons. She is often standing in cremation grounds or on a battlefield.[230] Her devotees call her Kali Ma, meaning “Mother” Kali. Her unbound and disheveled hair signifies the fact that she is menstruating and is in a state of impurity.[231] The other Mahavidyas arise from Kali and are her different forms.[232]

The narrator of The Blind Owl identifies the ethereal girl who is all clad in black with “a Hindu temple dancer,” in other words with his mother Bugam Dasi, on account of “her harmonious grace of movement.”[233] He encounters her on the outskirts of the city, and Kali is also particularly associated with areas outside the borders of civilized life—such as the outskirts of cities.[234] Note that, just like Kali, this ethereal girl also has a mass of “black, disheveled hair.”[235] When he goes on to conflate his “bitch” of a wife with the ethereal girl through his childhood memories of her on the bank of the Suran River,[236] he is in effect also identifying his wife with Bugam Dasi. This identification of the ethereal girl with Bugam Dasi is striking since the former is described as transcendently pure, so much so that at first the narrator does not even want to break their radiant bond by touching her physical body,[237] and he imagines that she would dissolve if the rabble were so much as to glance at her.[238] On the other hand, his wife is a filthy whore. She has a voracious appetite for sex and fulfills it at all hours of the day and night with all manner of low-class, crooked, and shady characters, even dirty beggars, to the point that her bed has been infested with lice.[239] The narrator concludes, “I know now that she loved them precisely because they were shameless, stupid and rotten. Her love was inseparable from filth and death.”[240] She denies him sex, and he suspects that it is because she profoundly resents that the religious and legal institution of marriage places her under his authority by “reciting a few words of Arabic”; she “simply wanted to be free.”[241]

I doubt it is a mere coincidence that the Mahavidyas of what Hedayat calls “the lingam cult” are born of Shakti’s disobedient rage at her husband Shiva.[242] They arise because the woman is not content to remain a passive, obedient, and submissive wife, and they become means by which she controls her husband through fear.[243] In one version, set in the Golden Age, Shiva tires of living with Kali and wanders off wherever he wishes, but Kali draws him back to her by projecting various aspects of herself—namely the Mahavidyas—to meet him wherever he is, until he realizes that she pervades the cosmos as Shakti and there is no escape from her.[244]

The Mahavidyas instill fear in Shiva, binding and controlling him; they demonstrate that he is a mere corpse (shava) without his Shakti.[245] The Mahavidyas arise when a women asserts her independence from her husband.[246] A woman embodying Shakti has a voracious sexual appetite and is by no means sexually satisfied by marriage to any one man—even the god Shiva himself.[247] She takes a multitude of lovers, preferably outcast criminals or low class riffraff. Kali is the patroness deity of the Thugs (the English word is borrowed from the Indian one), thieves who infamously befriended travelers only in order to rob and murder them.[248] Criminals and outcasts, the dangerous and undesirable scum of society (Chandalas), are her most devoted worshippers.[249] She drinks up and drenches herself in their offerings. She even has her mouth open and her tongue hanging out in anticipation. The Tantric texts go so far as to describe her as “She Whose Essential Form Is Sexual Desire . . . Who Is Worshipped with Semen, Who Dwells in an Ocean of Semen, Who Is Always Filled with Semen . . .” [250]

Once the narrator of The Blind Owl finally has sex with his wife, he says that her “body, opened and enclosed [him] within itself like a cobra coiling around its prey” and then she bites him like a serpent and will not let him loose until he takes out her eye with his knife.[251] He takes his wife’s eye out, so that it becomes a third eye within his own grasp,[252] and he chops off the black-clad ethereal girl’s head and severs her limbs.[253] He had initially intended to chop up his wife as well, and apportion her severed limbs to her rabble lovers.[254] Kali receives blood sacrifices of chopped off heads and severed limbs from her devotees.[255] Another of her emanations, that of Chinnamasta, has severed her own head with a sword in her right hand, and is holding the platter bearing her severed head in her left hand.[256] Blood is spurting from her neck into her mouth and that of two female attendants. She stands on the copulating bodies of the god of sexual lust (Kama) and his consort, or is shown in a sexually dominant position astride Shiva.[257] The temples of Kali used to actually incorporate severed human heads and limbs in their structure, and would be “cleansed” with blood instead of water.[258]

When the narrator is standing in his room after having been bitten by his cobra of a wife, with the third eye imprinted on his palm, he lets out the same wild laugh as his father or uncle did when the man was bitten by the cobra in the dungeon as a way to win Bugam Dasi.[259] This is the same “sinister laughter of the old man,” the bent old Indian yogi, that breaks the transcendental bond between the narrator and the ethereal girl and makes him feel separated from her. [260] He first hears this laughter when he sees the Indian yogi through the closet aperture, which he compares to “the dark night which enshrouds the mind and reason of man . . .,”[261] as he is going to retrieve the poisoned wine for his “uncle.” This “deep red wine” had been laid down for him on the occasion of his birth and “it contained a portion of the venom of the cobra, the Indian serpent.”[262] The various forms of Kali are invariably intoxicated, often carrying cups of wine or skulls filled with wine—although one can never be too sure since she also drinks blood.[263] Yet, he needs not drink the wine to go mad like his uncle/father did. He takes the poison directly from his serpentine wife herself and it makes him feel more alive than ever before: “. . . a new spirit had taken possession of my body. My mind and my senses were operating in a completely different way from before. A demon had awoken to life within me and I was unable to escape from him.”[264] This is the same “satanic spirit” of unquenchable life that the narrator has at times observed in his wife,[265] and by means of which Bugam Dasi hexed both his father and uncle.

This new sense of vitality conferred to the narrator by the cobra bite of his wife may be the awakening of kundalini energy referred to above, what practitioners of Tantra call “the Serpent Power.” In most people, this “Serpent Power” lies dormant at the base of the spine. As it is awakened through various yogic practices, this spectral serpent works its way up the central channel, or sushumna nadi, that roughly corresponds to the line of the backbone. Along the way towards the crown of the head, it may activate and for a time rest in six other chakras or energy centers. The activation of each of the chakras expresses itself through the predominance of a spiritual mood, or bhava. The first of these bhavas that one experiences on the ascendant path is a profound dissatisfaction with ordinary life—which ultimately acts as a spur towards the further development of extraordinary consciousness. This dissatisfaction with ordinary life is pervasive in the narrative of The Blind Owl. One of the most prominent and well-known of these chakras is “the third eye” (ajna chakra) that the narrator has in the palm of his hand after succumbing to the poisonously life-bestowing bite by the Black Bitch. The rise of the serpent power through the chakras is both pleasurable and, to someone unaccustomed, terrifying; it is often attended by an ecstatic trembling. One glance from the ethereal girl with the grace of a Hindu temple dancer causes a “fit of trembling” in the protagonist of The Blind Owl, wherein extreme “horror” is thoroughly mixed with the intense “delight” of an uncontrollable shiver of pleasure, after which he is left in “a state of trance.”[266]

The ascent of the serpentine Shakti culminates in her shooting out of the crown chakra, where she is said to attain union with Shiva—in other words: cosmic consciousness. Each of the chakras is associated with a Mahavidya, and so the progress through them is the way by means of which Kali—the adi Mahavidya—attains self-knowledge by recollecting all of her emanations.[267] The Mahavidyas thereby confer siddhis or magical superpowers upon those who awaken them in the chakras, including—among others—the ability to kill someone through a sheer act of willing that person’s death (marana); the ability to will an enemy to be overtaken by sickness (uccatana); the power to paralyze someone or stop them dead in their tracks (stambhana); the power to attract others to oneself; to make others speak any words one wishes; and to retain one’s youth indefinitely while causing accelerated aging in others.[268] That these powers can be cultivated and attained in the pursuit of selfish ends, such as increased wealth, fearful respect from others, or sexual gratification, demonstrates the amoral nature of Shakti as the goddess of cosmic “Power,” pure and simple.[269]

Mahavidyas even control Shiva by means of these powers.[270] In one of her Mahavidya forms, that of Shodasi or Lalita, Shakti is astride Shiva in sexual intercourse on a couch that is supported by the gods Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, and Indra as its pedestals.[271] In other words, her supernatural “Power” (shakti) places her above the gods. Since the sadhaka or Tantric practitioner attempts to identify with Shakti,[272] this Power could become his own. There are moments when the masochistic veneration and captivating attraction that Hedayat’s protagonist feels towards his cruel wife brings him to such a state, where he feels “a pleasure . . . which the gods themselves . . . could not have experienced to such a degree” that it makes him identify with the “eternal, infinite flux” that is “greater than God” and become conscious of his “superiority to the men of rabble, to nature and to the gods . . .”[273]

The case for Hedayat’s allusion to Tantra in The Blind Owl becomes even stronger when we consider that the gesture of surprise or wonderment that the narrator first ascribes to the old Indian yogi, with the index finger of his left hand pressed to his lips,[274] is later also described as a gesture of the ethereal girl herself,[275] as well as of her younger “twin” brother.[276] Finally, we discover that in his lifetime in Rey, the narrator’s “bitch” of a wife also “from early childhood had a habit of biting the nails of her left hand and would sometimes gnaw them to the quick” (emphasis mine).[277] This habit persists into her last moments, just before the narrator murders her.[278] It is on this last occasion that he explicitly identifies this “bitch” with the ethereal girl. That it is always the left hand is very significant. The Tantric Left-Hand Path consists of the panca tattva, or ritual partaking of five things ordinarily forbidden in Hinduism as “dirty” or highly polluting: meat, fish, wine, a type of hallucinogenic drug, and illicit sexual acts—for example sex outside of marriage or with a married woman, sex with an “untouchable” low-caste person, or a menstruating woman, and in a variety of obscene positions and transgressive sexual acts other than straightforward male-female intercourse in the missionary position.[279] In some cases, such as that of the great Tantric guru Ramakrishna, such practices of cultivating non-discrimination have been known to go so far as the smelling and tasting of feces together with the rarefied fragrant delicacy of sandal paste, and drinking urine at the same time as good wine.[280]

Practices like those of Ramakrishna were seen as a way to regain the innocence of a child, while retaining the wisdom of experience—to attain a kind of wise innocence.[281] The intention is to realize the all-pervasiveness of Shakti in the Cosmos, by cutting through the artificial fragmentation of the cosmic reality into the dualistic schemas of “clean” and “unclean,” or “sacred” and “profane,” and deconstructing the socialized ego that has set up these binary oppositions and is sustained by them.[282] These egos are the severed heads in the garland worn around Kali’s neck. Consequently, everything becomes sacred as a means to cosmic consciousness and the forbidden is disarmed of its power to pollute, degrade, or bind one’s soul.[283] The eye set in a palm is an old protective charm against the Evil Eye, but that the Bitch’s eye is (presumably) in the narrator’s left hand (because he was gripping the knife with his right hand)[284] signifies something more. It is related to the color symbolism of Kali: she is black because only blackness absorbs and dissolves every other color into itself without being stained by them.[285] It is also related to Kali’s girdle of severed arms. The arm represents action and its attendant karma, and the Left-Hand Path can undo all of the binding effects of any devotee’s karma.[286] As such, it is considered a shortcut to the rise of the Serpent Power, but one only recommended for the most heroic natures; anyone else would be hopelessly polluted wading through such filth.[287]

It should be noted that only someone whose noble character is already conditioned by a disciplined sense of propriety would have any success in pursuing the Left-Hand Path, because it is based on the release of psychic energy bound up into various psycho-social taboos that artificially delineate what is “pure” and “impure.” If such discipline is lacking, as it is in a shameless beast of a man, then there is no psychic energy invested in taboos in the first place, and so the breaking of taboos will not provoke the manifestation of extraordinary consciousness and abilities. To give an example directly relevant to The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat was—under orthodox Indian influence—a vegetarian. He wrote an entire text advocating compassion towards animals and the practice of vegetarianism.[288] For him, then, Tantric partaking of meat could meaningfully lead to psychic effects in a way it would not for most others in Iran or the West. The subversion of social norms only has significance for a well-socialized ego.

CHAPTER 4

THE EIGHTH CLIME

That The Blind Owl takes place in two different times, namely modern Tehran and medieval Rey, should be obvious to any reader. What is less obvious is that it also takes place in a third time (and an eighth clime). When the narrator meets the hearse driver again after he loses his way, he feels that, with the lantern lights of the ethereal girl’s eyes now extinguished, he could not care less whether he arrives at no place whatsoever.[289] He does not realize that those are lanterns shining a dark light that cannot be extinguished, and that they will draw him, like a moth to the flame, right into her own unearthly world—which is, indeed, the land of no place. It is a twilight zone that is everywhere and nowhere. You might wander into it just around the next bend, but it lies beyond the outer limits. I am referring to the third time and place that we visit in The Blind Owl, the one incomparably other than the “present” of modern Tehran or the “past” of medieval Rey. It is equally accessible to the narrator from both of those epochal milieus, assuming he can enter a certain “mood” that is “like the weather before the storm breaks” when “the real world” recedes from him and he lives “in a radiant world incalculably remote from that of earth.”[290]

The narrator crosses over into this otherworldly realm on no less than five separate occasions. The first is on the way from Tehran to Shah Abdo’l Azim, to bury the dismembered ethereal girl.[291] The second is on the way from the burial site back to Tehran.[292] The third occasion, which is the first during the past life in Rey, comes to pass when the narrator sneaks out of his house without his nanny or wife/mother noticing, with the intention of running away to someplace where nobody will ever find him again.[293] He takes some little “cakes” with him in his pockets, which is interesting given that this is the food of the fairies. He also tells us that once he slips out of the house, his gait reverts to that of his carefree childhood, and he almost feels as if he could take flight:

My leg muscles were functioning with a suppleness and speed which until then I could not have imagined to be possible. I felt that I had escaped from all the fetters of existence and that this was my natural mode of movement. In my childhood, whenever I had slipped off the burden of trouble and responsibility, I had walked like this.

The fourth is when, panic-stricken at being discovered kissing the little boy, to whom he has given the fairy cakes, he wishes he could escape from himself, and he runs away from his brother-in-law’s house.[294] The fifth and final sojourn gives us an invaluable clue to the metaphysical quality of these otherworldly journeys. It is a lucid dream of the kind the narrator tells us that he often crafts as a way to fulfill all of his repressed lusts, desires that would seem beyond belief to those of the waking world but seem perfectly natural in this state.[295]

The following is a composite of all of these accounts of the narrator’s experiences passing through the ethereal abode. The place is a strange city situated between a line of blue hills off in the distance and the road by which the narrator sometimes arrives there, a road lined with wryly twisted, accursedly misshapen trees that in some places look like they are being pulled to the ground by blue flowers of morning glory that are entangling their feet. In other places, these sinister trees have been reduced to dead stumps. The city consists entirely of perfectly geometrical buildings. Some are wide and low-lying and others are tall and narrow. They are shaped like pyramids, cubes, prisms, cones, and truncated cones. They have slanting windows precisely cut into their walls. These lack windowpanes and are of pitch-black glass, so that, when viewed from a distance, they give the impression of crazed eyes staring intently. From some of the windows, vines of blue flowers of morning glory are trailing out over the windowsills and doorways of the otherwise featureless buildings—so austere that they instill intense cold into the heart of the passerby. At one point he is afraid to even breathe, that the sound of his breath and the moisture from his lungs might spoil the perfect silence and serene stillness that fills this whole place with such a thick atmosphere of deathly sacred mystery. During the day, all of the structures are of a uniform ash-gray hue, yet at night their walls give off a sickly radiance like that of glow-worms. The streets are lined with what look like whitewashed walls in the intense sunlight, but these also appear phosphorescent at night.

For the most part, the narrator does not encounter a single living soul in this place. He even speculates that the buildings have been crafted to house ethereal beings of a ghostly nature. He feels that no earthly creature could have dwelt in them. The closest thing to an exception confirms this general observation. On the occasion when he finds himself here in a lucid dream, it appears just as it does whenever he wanders into it in waking life, save for the fact that it is populated with the corpses of the main figures we encounter from his own life in Rey. They are perfectly motionless in their usual postures, frozen still as they carry out their habitual tasks, like wax museum pieces. A couple of drops of blood have dripped from their mouths and dried. As soon as the narrator touches any of them, their heads topple to the ground as if they are crumbling plaster statues.

This “no place” that the narrator arrives at is Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd, an idea developed by the Iranian philosopher Shahab al-din Suhrawardi (1155–1191). Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd is a neologism; it does not appear in most Persian dictionaries. Literally, it means “Nowhere Land.” Suhrawardi’s explicitly stated mission was to resurrect the ancient Persian Gnostic philosophy of Light, and to do so he broke with centuries of Islamic neo-Aristotelian scholasticism—turning instead toward a synthesis of Platonist and Zoroastrian ideas. This proved to be quite a heretical brew, and it got him executed by orthodox Muslims in 1191. Some Persian Gnostics referred to him thereafter simply as the Martyr (Al Maqtul). The bravery of his departure from Islamic scholasticism was unprecedented. Here I will rely on Henry Corbin’s treatment of Suhrawardi in “A Theory of Visionary Knowledge,”[296] “The Theme of Spiritual Voyage in Suhrawardi,”[297] and “Mundus Imaginalis.”[298] The reason for this is that Corbin was the first translator of Heidegger into French, and anyone at all familiar with twentieth-century Continental philosophy will recognize the significance of that fact. Corbin, the Heideggerian, eventually became convinced that the essentials of the neo-Zoroastrian Persian philosophical school of Illuminationism, founded by Suhrawardi, not only anticipated key elements of Heidegger’s thinking, but was more spiritually enlightened.[299] In addition to his distinguished position at the Sorbonne, Professor Corbin was the head of the Institut Franco-Iranien in Tehran, an organization that was founded in Hedayat’s time and at which Hedayat also worked in its early days. The following distillation will simplify and accentuate only those elements of Corbin’s Heideggerian reading of Suhrawardi that are relevant for the present interpretation of The Blind Owl.

Suhrawardi took the passive and active faculties of the imagination in Aristotelian scholasticism and collapsed them into a single faculty. The basic structure of this faculty was such that inputs from the various senses would passively coalesce in a hessé moshtarak, a cohesive sensory mixture that is responsible for experiences of synaesthesia whereby one can hear colors and smell or taste sounds. This “sixth sense” that is not merely an additional one but the metaphysical nexus of the entanglement of the five physical senses would also actively translate intellections from the Platonic realm of forms in terms of mesâl: sensory images and symbols of an apparitional nature. Suhrawardi called this faculty the Active Imagination. He believed that its hessé moshtarak constituted a jesmé mesâl, or Imaginal Body, that could survive bodily death and that, even in the present life, full development of it could grant one access to âlamé mesâl or the Imaginal World.

In other words, the âlamé mesâl is what Henry Corbin calls an “interworld” that draws from both the material world (âlamé hessi) of the physical senses and the purely formal world (âlamé aqli or Jabarut) of abstract concepts (sowar aqliya) accessible to the rational intellect.[300] He also compares this interworld of psychic activity to a screen for projections, or âlamé barzakh.[301] The Active Imagination qua projector dematerializes the physical world into structures of meaning that are suspended as if in a mirror, freeing them from a material substrate, and it symbolizes the world of forms in a way that has intimate significance for inter-personal psychic development.[302] In this two-fold movement, the Active Imagination crafts both a spectral body synonymous with the ancient Persian daena and a transfigured geography, or “celestial Earth,” that reflects the spiritual state of the souls whose abode it becomes.[303] This transfiguration could just as well be a disfiguration of earthly or sensory experience so that our deeds, post-mortem, reverberate and are reflected back to us in the symbolic structure of an ethereal hell.[304]

Corbin relegates everything having to do with various types of extrasensory perception that are commonly deemed “irrational” (telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, especially in dreams, etc.) to this Imaginal World that mediates between the realities of matter and pure form.[305] With respect to such seemingly “miraculous” events of a paranormal nature, Corbin writes: “. . . that the first and greatest miracle is the irruption of another world into our knowledge, an irruption that rends the fabric of our categories and their necessities, of our evidences and their norms.”[306] He even suggests that paranormal abilities are, as it were, a parallel expression of the same “invisible action of forces” that produces physical processes in Nature, but that these “psychic energies have been neglected or paralyzed by our habits,” in other words that abilities of this kind have atrophied through disuse.[307]

Corbin uses the word “Imaginal” to translate mesâl because he wants to insist that Suhrawardi is not talking about an “imaginary” body and an “imaginary” world: “The active Imagination thus induced will not produce some arbitrary, even lyrical, construction standing between us and ‘reality,’ but will, on the contrary, function directly as a faculty and organ of knowledge just as real as—if not more real than—the sense organs.”[308] The faculty of Active Imagination is not “an overactive imagination.” The Imaginal Body is an apparitional body or phantasm, and the Imaginal World has the extension and phenomenal qualities of the sensory experiences of the ordinary world. There are colors, textures, smells, and sounds there, but their dimensionality or delimitation has symbolic significance and is not mathematically analyzable in terms of the accidents of matter or even as form instantiated in a material substrate.[309] What is different is that the Imaginal Body’s navigation of space and time in the Imaginal World is based on the intensity of intent. One may traverse vast distances almost instantaneously or pass through what appear to be solid objects. Nevertheless, the development of the faculty of Active Imagination has a very close relationship to the aesthetic capacities of artists and poets to sustain strong mental images with sophisticated articulation. It is a symbolizing faculty, which is not at all to say that it is allegorical. Allegories can be restated reductively in literal terms.[310] Their metaphors are of a utilitarian nature. Symbolic Images cannot be so translated; the ability to craft, manipulate, and navigate them requires an aesthetic cultivation.

In the ancient geography of Zoroastrian Iran, the world was divided into seven climes, or Kershvars.[311] The modern Persian word keshvar is derived from this and is now used simply to refer to a “country.” In order to emphasize the sensory and situational character of the Imaginal World, Suhrawardi sometimes refers to it as the “eighth clime.” He also refers to it as the extreme Orient (Eshraq), which conflates the idea of the rising Sun of Oriental Wisdom (Hekmat al-Eshraq)—the spiritual East—with the idea of a pole (qutb) of orientation for those seeking illumination or enlightenment (rowshangari). Yet, Suhrawardi’s awareness that this place, although it is indeed a “place,” is not to be found on the physical Earth, at least not in this dimension of reality, brought him to coin the term Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd for this radiant country that has its own unearthly cities. There is a sense in which this Land of No-Place takes place within those who seek it, as an ecstasis, without being pejoratively “subjective”—since more than one seeker who has cultivated the Active Imagination can arrive at the same situs or locales within it.

In this connection, Corbin makes a point with which I have to strongly disagree. He claims that, although Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd does appear to be an exact Persian equivalent of the Greek term outopia (the place of No-Place), it is not a utopia of the kind forwarded by utopian writers beginning in the Renaissance. This claim does not sit well with the fact that these writers, such as Francis Bacon or Thomas Moore, were clearly influenced by Plato—especially by The Republic—and that Suhrawardi venerated Plato nearly above all other human beings who had ever lived, and was especially fond of The Republic, along the lines of which he modeled his own political philosophy (which more than anything else is what got him killed). Corbin wants to also distinguish Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd, and the Imaginal in general, from the science-fictional imagination of Things To Come—things fantastic, horrible, monstrous, or macabre. He denies that the existence of the Imaginal World can ever be the subject of anything like scientific verification and so it cannot even be the subject of science fiction.

Interestingly, the Persian word that he translates as Imaginal is takhayyul, and in Persian “science fiction” is takhayyul-elmi. If the takhayyul in the later phrase is taken to refer to the visionary engagement with archetypal images in the âlamé mesâl, rather than in its banal meaning as mere imagination, then takhayyul-elmi can be heard as “science of the Imaginal.” We will come back to this “science of the Imaginal” with reference to the psychical researcher Frederick Meyers, one of the founders of the field now known as Parapsychology. Corbin claims that the Imaginal is not “imaginary,” that it is not a “fantasy,” and yet he denies any empirical evaluation of its spectral topography, whereas, in fact, the only essential difference that it should have from the worlds of science fiction or Gothic horror is that it really does exist—even if it is difficult, though not impossible, to access. These mistaken contentions on Corbin’s part stem from the fear that if Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd is some kind of utopia, it might also turn out, upon closer inspection, to be a dystopia.

For Corbin, the Eighth Clime has a religious significance, and so he cannot accept this even as a possibility, whereas if Hedayat adapts this idea it would clearly be in a vulgar secularizing direction—even if not in a rationalizing one—that he does so. To put it in a more philosophically substantive way, by “secularizing” I mean that—in line with the esoteric Tantric metaphysics unveiled in the preceding chapter—Hedayat attempts to “tear the veil” (to use a Persian expression) between two sensuous worlds, the mundane earthly world and that of the Imaginal or celestial Earth. This rending of the aforementioned projective screen between the two worlds is itself a Persian mystical idea, especially prominent in the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, which deconstructs the Gnostic dualism explicated by Corbin from within that tradition itself.[312] Hedayat takes that deconstruction much further along the lines of Gothic horror and science fiction wherein the distinction between the supernatural and the preternatural is collapsed, and this world is experienced as the twilight zone that Corbin’s Gnostics want to preserve as a place of refuge from absurd cruelty and an abode of transcendent meaning.

Despite himself, Corbin admits that Westerners may well see the “lost continent” of Atlantis in the Eighth Clime, and he takes this so seriously that he implores the reader to recognize that meditation rather than archeological excavation is the way to reach it.[313] He also admits that all times and places are accessible from it, since as the transfigured world to come is not just further along on a linear timeline but has a polar orientation with respect to the space and time of the world as we have known it.[314] He goes so far as to suggest that this destabilizes the past, allowing it only a virtual “reality”—one that remains uncompleted and open, subject to our interpretation and reinterpretation of archetypal events in the Imaginal realm that have not yet been concretely instantiated by actions that reflect our understanding or misunderstanding of them.[315] Notice, however, that both the trans-temporal vision of history and its potentially volatile virtualization or openness to revision could also be true of a time-traveling civilization.

Corbin’s science-fictional confessions become even more serious. He recognizes that in Suhrawardi and other medieval Persian sources, the Eighth Clime is the same place that ancient Zoroastrian texts describe as the Vâr of Yima.[316] In an interesting variation on the nearly universal myth of the great deluge, a man in Irân Vâj (Avestan, Âryânem Vâejeh) or “seed-cradle of the Aryans” was instructed to build an ark inside a mountain—not to protect the primordial Aryans from a great flood, but from the onslaught of a terrible winter that would bury the Aryan homeland under ice.[317] Interestingly in this version, the primordial paradise of Earth trembled as it was assaulted by the powers of Darkness, and the mountains were raised up as a rampart against their invasion.[318] The Aryan homeland (Irân Vij) was a continent-sized island with massive mountain ranges, located at the Hyperborean “True North” of the world, from which it was possible for the men of that time to access all other lands from which they were separated by the one world ocean—where all of the other oceans meet.[319] It is also the meeting place of Earth and Heaven, the gateway to the stars.[320]

There is obviously no landmass at the North Pole, certainly not a continent-sized one, and this is another reason why Corbin claims that “Yima’s Paradise cannot be marked on the surface of our maps, subject to a system of coordinates.”[321] Its “visionary geography” is supposedly “Imaginal.”[322] However, in connection to Corbin’s comparison of the Imaginal World to Atlantis, we should recall the Earth-crustal displacement theory of Professor Charles Hapgood, in the context of which the “lost continent” of Atlantis is the island-continent of Antarctica.[323] Any worldwide sea-faring civilization, superior to all others on the planet at the time, would have seen their Antarctic homeland as the positive pole and center of the Earth—the “True North.” Corbin’s ancient Persian sources also describe the yearly sunrise and sunset of polar conditions in the environs of the Var.[324] Prior to the last magnetic pole reversal in 10,400 BC, the magnetic north pole of the Earth was in Antarctica. Hapgood’s catastrophic crustal slippage could have caused the temperate landscape of the part of it that was at the latitude of present-day Argentina to suddenly freeze over while at the same time stirring up the worldwide deluge on all other continents. If the Irân Vij or Aryânem Vâejeh of the Avesta, after which the Aryans later named their realm Aryâna Khashatra or Irân Shahr (“Aryan Imperium”) in homage, was actually Antarctica, this would explain why Yima prepares for the freezing-over of his homeland, and carves out a stationary ark as it were inside the mountains, rather than building an ocean-going ark like Noah or the protagonist of so many other Great Flood myths around the world.

We have to presume Hedayat’s familiarity with this material on the Aryan civilizational ark inside the polar mountain, not only because he translated ancient Zoroastrian literature, but more specifically because we are presented with a particularly striking parallel with The Blind Owl: the angelic mansions of the cities, featuring mandala-like garden paradises, storehouses, and fortresses, that were built inside Yima’s Vâr use both artificial and uncreated lights—the latter of which consist of phosphorescent walls crafted out of an apparently luminescent mineral mined inside the mountain.[325] Unless Hedayat got his walls that glow like glowworms from an Imaginal trip to Yima’s Vâr, the influence of Zoroastrian literature on this imagery in The Blind Owl is a fairly safe assumption. Such phosphorescent walls would be especially useful in a place where, as the texts explain, there is no Sun, Moon, or stars.[326] Perhaps this is why Suhrawardi describes the three cities carved out inside the mountain range of the Eighth Clime as “emerald cities”—think of the unearthly phosphorescent greenish glow of the radium used in diver’s watches or on old submarine dials.[327] Welcome to the Oz of wizards!

The three emerald cities are called Jabarsa, Jabalqa, and Hurqalya, although they are often referred to collectively—as is the Eighth Clime itself—by the name of the megalopolis, Hurqalya. Corbin notes that no definitive etymology has yet been found for this name, which is equally exotic in Persian and in Arabic, but sages in the tradition of Suhrawardi have suggested that it is Syriac in origin.[328] Now Syria was part of the Hellenistic world of the Eastern Roman Empire, which kept Greek as its lingua franca for over a thousand years after the conquest of Alexander. Bearing that in mind, Hurqalya sounds an awful lot like Herculea to me: a name for a city that is Herculean or titanic both in construction and in the character of its denizens.

In his notes on the medieval Persian romance Vis and Ramin, which is based on a Parthian-period original, Hedayat remarks on how Fakhruddin Gorgani mentions bewitched structures built by demonic beings or divs, titanic castles or inhuman fortresses that are also referred to in Pahlavi literature and are supposed to be located somewhere in hard-to-reach mountains.[329] Kang Dezh is mentioned in particular, as well as Dezh Âshkoft Divân—which calls to mind one of Zarathustra’s epithets for the divs or daevas (in Sanskrit), namely that they are dezh-khimân or people with a fortress-building or bunker-dwelling mentality.[330] Hedayat discusses these daimonic dwelling places in his study Neyrangestan as well, just after relating folklore concerning Jabarsa and Jabalqa; he notes that inside their domes it is “always spring”: in other words, they feature climate-controlled gardens.[331]

Whoever the “people” here are, the tradition suggests that they do not dwell in time in the same way as we do. They never age, and there is no disease or death amongst them.[332] In fact, the tradition stretching back to the ancient Persian texts via the school of Suhrawardi is fairly clear that they are our celestial counterparts. That makes their world equally accessible from various times and places of the historical past and present. It is a lost world of the primordial past before chronological time, and the world to come after the chronic corruption of this world is burned away in the transfiguring holocaust of the Frashgard. It is the world after the singularity of the technological apocalypse.

The ethereal girl in The Blind Owl is a refugee from the Eighth Clime. Hedayat uses the blue flowers of morning glory to connect her to the psychically projected futuristic city of Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd. As she leans towards him from beyond the stream that separates them, she is “offering him a flower of morning glory.”[333] The narrator realizes that “those flowers of morning glory were no ordinary flowers . . . and that if she were to pluck an ordinary flower of morning glory her long fine fingers would wither like the petals of a flower.”[334] The portrait of the ethereal girl on the aged, violet, glazed antique vase from Rey is inset in “an almond-shaped panel framed in blue flowers of morning glory.”[335] The windows of the strange geometrical buildings of the no-man’s land passed through on the way to and from the gravesite have blue flowers of morning glory trailing from out of their dark, slanted windows and down their cold, featureless walls.[336] The twisted, sinister-looking trees that line the roadside through this strange city have their feet “entangled in vines of morning glory that brought them to the ground.”[337]

The blaue blume, or “blue flower,” is a German Romantic literary and artistic symbol of a quest for the impossible. Hedayat would have probably encountered it through his reading of Rilke. The Blind Owl is very much concerned with the impossible becoming possible: “That night what ought not to have happened did happen.”[338] I am not talking about “miracles” here, because the latter have a positive moralistic connotation, whereas in Hedayat’s world, it is equally likely for something more terrible than what one thought possible to happen. It is only once what one would have believed to be impossible does in fact happen that the narrator decides to commit something to writing: “It was always my opinion that the best course a man could take in life was to remain silent; that one could not do better than withdraw into solitude like the bittern which spreads its wings beside some lonely lake. But now, since that which should not have happened has happened, I cannot help myself.”

If we combine the fact that the ethereal girl is from what Suhrawardi calls the Eighth Clime with the fact that she is clad in silken black, we discover what must have been one of Hedayat’s Persian sources: the medieval fairy tale Haft Paykar of Nezami Ganjavi (1141–1209), especially the chapter on “The Black Dome.” The protagonist of Haft Paykar (The Seven Beauties, or The Seven Countenances) is the Persian Emperor Bahram Gur (421–438 AD) of the Sassanian period, which as we have seen is an era whose Pahlavi literature Hedayat had a great interest in. Bahram is an avid hunter and playboy who must struggle against the nobles to assert his claim to his throne on account of the wickedness and injustice of his recently-deceased father. He is motivated in this struggle by having one day happened upon a secret room in the palace that his father had constructed for him by an architect that we later learn is part of something like a Freemasonic tradition. He demands the key to this locked room and therein discovers portraits of the princesses of the Seven Climes: India, China, Central Asia, Slavonia, Africa, Byzantium, and Persia. At the center of these portraits, which are arranged in a circle, is a portrait of Bahram himself, with an inscription effectively stating that it is his destiny to become the King of the World (Jahanshah) and wed these seven princesses. After securing his throne from the nobles and from a Chinese invasion launched on the mistaken assumption that Bahram was a callow youth who could be easily overcome, the Emperor seeks out the seven princesses of the Seven Climes. These are the Seven Climes in terms of which Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd is, for Suhrawardi, the Eighth Clime.

The disciple of the architect who built Bahram’s mysterious palace of Khavarnag, with its secret portrait gallery, proposes to build him seven distinctly colored domes for the seven new brides. The colors of these seven domes are derived from Suhrawardi’s symbolism of the soul’s progress from darkness to light.[339] This architect, Shida, is more than a mere architect; Nezami calls him a “master-builder,” and it is not at all incidental that this is the title of a high-ranking Freemason. Shida is an adept at geometry, physics, and astronomy, and can apply these arts in the medium of painting as well as architecture. He can “weigh the sky, and know the stars,” and so he proposes to build a structure for Bahram that is an earthly mirror of the heavens, “a likeness of the heavenly spheres.”[340] Like a practitioner of Feng Shui, Shida claims that his seven domes will be built in such a way that their incorporation of beneficent astronomical and astrological alignments will protect Bahram from the Evil Eye and channel heavenly good fortune down to Earth for him.[341]

Each of the seven domes for housing the princesses of the Seven Climes will express the astrological power of one of the seven planetary bodies and the day of the week ruled by that planet: The Black Dome / Saturn / Saturday; The Yellow Dome / Sun / Sunday; The Green Dome / Moon / Monday; The Red Dome / Mars / Tuesday; The Turquoise Dome / Mercury / Wednesday; The Sandal Dome / Jupiter / Thursday; The White Dome / Venus / Friday.[342] On each day of the week, Bahram is to visit the pleasure dome whose planet exerts astrological influence over that day, and to make merry with the princess therein, donning the same color of garments as the dome.[343] At first Bahram objects to this proposal, thinking these “but castles of vain pleasure” instead of “the house of the Creator,” but then he relents with the realization that “He, Whom in no place [Nâ Kojâ] can we see, in every place can worshipped be.”[344] He recognizes in Shida’s plan “a secret scheme”—a talismanic architecture with magical effects.[345] Above all, the magic was to be worked through bedtime stories told by each of the seven princesses, stories that work on Bahram’s imaginative faculty as he drifts in that state between wakefulness and dreamy sleep.[346]

Here is the story told by the black-clad princess from India, who abides in “The Black Dome” astrologically governed by Saturn—the planet of Death and the Netherworld. There was once a festive king who used to dress in bright red and yellow robes and was a generous entertainer of guests. However, he was also very curious. Once he had a stranger come from afar who was dressed in black from head to toe. He asks this stranger, whom he entertains as his guest, why he always dresses in black. The man in black enigmatically responds: “Leave off this talk . . . for none knows where the Simurgh may be found.”[347] The Simorgh is a bird from the mythology of ancient Persia. Its image can be found on pillar heads at Persepolis and on Sassanian textiles. It was said to have protected and raised the white-haired foundling Zal, father of Rostam—the hero who is something like a Persian Ulysses. Ferdowsi adapts this theme in his Shahnameh—the Persian national epic.[348] The philosophical dimension of Simorgh symbolism was first developed by Avicenna and then elaborated by Suhrawardi.[349] It attained its culmination in the famous poem The Conference of the Birds by Fariduddin Attar.[350]

The kernel of that story is the following: Thirty birds of different types all go on a perilous journey towards the esoteric Orient, or the Eighth Clime, to find the mythical Simorgh. After all manner of calamities, both physical and psychological, befall the various birds at various climes, killing some, stranding others, and seriously questioning the hope and faith of those remaining, they arrive at the end of their journey where they make a startling discovery—the thirty (si) birds (morgh) left are themselves the Si-morgh. In other words, it is a symbol of mystical union realized among seemingly differentiated souls, but also a stern lesson that such union is not for everyone—not everyone has a soul destined for communion with a celestial counterpart. Now this tale is very directly linked to the idea of a “stranger” who makes reference to it, since one theme of the spiritual voyage of the birds—in Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Attar—is that they are captive strangers in the metaphorical “Western lands” of the material world and seek their true home at the Oriental pole of the Imaginal World.[351] A few lines from Avicenna’s development of this theme in The Story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan will be seen to have particular relevance to “The Black Dome” of Nezami and to Hedayat’s appropriation of it in The Blind Owl:

Brothers in Truth! Shed your skin as does the serpent . . . Imbibe poison, so as to stay alive. Love death, so as to remain among the living. Stay always in flight, and do not choose the nest which is apparent, for it is in the nest that birds are captured . . . Be as the bats, which never fly by day.[352]

It is also worth noting that in the legend of the Simorgh as recounted in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, the owl is the bird that refuses to undertake the transcendental journey. He calls the quest for God a fantasy, and he says that he prefers to remain among the ruins of this world, where he can find real treasures.[353] This does not imply materialism, for the owl is certainly a symbol of supernatural knowledge—especially clairvoyance—but a supernatural that is ungodly, that is mundanely pervasive, and so all the more ominous. The owl, a creature of the night that is blind in the sunlight, developed an ill-omened connotation in Persian culture. Hedayat records several of these fearful superstitions in Neyrangestân.[354] The change in status, from bird of Ishtar to unlucky omen of death and destruction, could probably be correlated to the advent of orthodox Zoroastrian dualism, which raised the divine Light of Ahura Mazda, as symbolized by the Sun, to the position of the supreme principle. Zoroastrian scriptures mention the owl as the “one bird too many” that Ahura Mazda mistakenly created.[355]

Hedayat seeks to restore the owl goddess to her rightful place as the heavenly angel that descends into the Underworld, the falling star Venus, who becomes the Light of a benighted World. Recall once more these lines toward the opening of The Blind Owl: “In this mean world of wretchedness and misery I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me, in the form of a woman—or of an angel.”[356] The narrator ultimately metamorphoses into a screech owl himself;[357] uncanny and isolated by a dark, abyssal knowledge that drowns the false sunlight without which most men cannot see.

Returning to Nezami, no matter what the King does, he cannot persuade the man in black to tell him any more than this: that there is a land in the Orient where a society of very white people all dress in black silk. The stranger is willing to be killed, rather than to volunteer more of the unspeakable secret than this.[358] So the King entrusts his realm to kinsmen and sets out in search of this Oriental land of men in black, taking with him many precious gifts with which to bribe people for information along the way. He finally finds the place, but none of the men in black are willing to tell him the secret reason for their manner of attire. He finds one weak-minded butcher who he showers with gifts, and who, when he learns why he has been bribed, fears divulging the secret as “the sheep who fears the wolf” and consequently keeps his silence.[359] Nevertheless, the butcher is ultimately persuaded to show, rather than to tell, the King the reason for their black attire. This is where the fairy tale of “The Black Dome” starts to get really interesting.

By the cover of night, the butcher leads the King far outside the city into a deserted area where the only buildings are ruins: “Fairy-like, he bore me far from men, and led me towards a ruined land. When we that ruined place had reached, like fairies we were veiled by it.”[360] This last turn of phrase suggests that somehow they had wandered somewhere that other people would not have been able to see them. Once there, the butcher tells the King to sit for “a while” inside a “round snake’s basket” that has a “rope” coiled around it like “a dragon,” and to display himself to the heavens so that he may learn the secret for himself. He leaves the King there, exposed beneath the starry sky, all alone. Suddenly, the King realizes that the “basket” has become a “bird,” which “by some strange trick of rings” bore him “up to the ring-juggling sphere.” Given that Nezami is an excellent writer, the jumble of indistinct images in these passages must be intended to suggest that the King’s perceptions are confused. The “basket” that at first seems like a “bird” is pulled up a pole. The King is terrified at finding himself high up in the starry sky of night. He is afraid to look at both the vertiginous view of the Earth beneath him and the awesome expanse of the celestial sphere above him.

Now, he sees something that looks like a very tall column fallen on its side, in other words a horizontally-oriented cylindrical structure. Suddenly, what at first appeared to be the “basket” and then the “bird” is this cylindrical structure—although he will occasionally continue to refer to it as a “bird” “of mountainous size” that has “a cave within.”[361] It showers a feathery substance, like flakes of oyster-shells.[362] This flying cylinder—or cigar-shaped UFO—conveys the “earth-born” King, who rides “filled with great dismay” inside its hollow cavity and through the celestial sphere until it arrives at a place with little or no visible atmosphere—since the stars can still be seen after sunrise.[363] There are, however, mists or sprays of diverse perfumes that scent the place.[364] At first he is alone, but then he sees “myriad lights” off in the distance, “a world with radiant forms.” Something like a moon descends from out of the starry sky, with a light so blinding that it “made Heaven disappear.” Arrayed around this descending light, as it touches down, are “fairies . . . like to a myriad morning stars.” From out of the central light, the King discerns the image of a Fairy Queen. In addition to her fairy companions, she has earthly attendants from all different races and climes. She levitates and looks from side to side, and tells her court that it seems “an earthly wight has trespassed here, without a right.” She commands them to go fly the King over. They seize him in a friendly manner, and “like smoke” they glide him over to her throne.[365]

One should bear in mind the moral of the Simorgh story referred to by the stranger toward the beginning of “The Black Dome,” as one follows the peculiar exchange between the “earth-born man” and the celestial Fairy Queen. The King, who refers to himself as “an earth-born man,” repeatedly abases himself in words and gestures before the throne of the “angel-natured queen” who—very curiously—refers to herself as a “sorceress” (not an angel) and just as insistently rebukes him for such self-abasement:

Come to the throne, sit next to me; Pleiades and Moon well-mated be . . .  Make no excuses; ‘tis no avail to show a sorceress your wiles. This place is yours, beneath your sway; but you must sit and rise with me, so that you may my secret learn, enjoyment of my love to earn.[366]

Another related, noteworthy detail is that she tells the King her name is “Turktâz” to which he replies: “How strange that Turktâz is your name, for mine—Turktâzi—is the same.”[367] Basically, for most of the rest of the story, every evening the Fairy Queen entices the King, whom she seats on the throne by her side, with wine, ethereal music, and her dancing girls, to impassion him. She breaks his reverent self-constraint and encourages him to kiss and stroke her. She tells him to bite her lips.[368] Yet every night, when he comes to the point of being sufficiently maddened with desire that he wants to have sex with her, she asks him to wait and be content with kisses. She allows him to satisfy his desires with fairy maidens in her retinue that she commands as if they are puppets and she is their “puppeteer.”[369] It is worth noting that the word manikin was originally the Nordic name for equivalent beings in their own fairy folklore.

Every night, the King’s desire for her increases, and he wishes her to either “slay” him with a “sharpened blade” or to relent, but she answers:

Be content tonight, e’en though love’s flame be burning bright. Put off this fancy for a night, and you will gain eternal light. Don’t sell the well for a mere drop . . . Don’t seek to leave; the garden’s yours . . . When I descend from this degree, I will be won, though late it be.[370]

Eventually she allows him to even enjoy her naked breasts, but when he goes to touch that “treasure sealed,” she kisses his hand and moves it away, warning: “the grasping hand will miss the goal.”[371] All is fair play but one final pleasure that must remain a hope. There is deep symbolic significance here:

Seeing my patience once more fled, “I shall do; stay your hand,” she said. “I’ll favor you, at life’s own cost . . . I am your black. What matter if I sacrifice, for such a guest, my humble life? But that desire for which you long: you’ll find it late, but seek it soon. When Paradise grows from a thorn, by me shall such a deed be done . . . Take from me what you will, save that one wish, which has not ripened yet.[372]

Like an “ancient wolf, with fox-like wiles,” the King finds that he cannot obey her, and “thus . . . unripe, from seeking more,” he falls “into less.” When there is just one more night left before she will give herself to him willingly, he grasps between her thighs, and unable to deter him, she asks him to close his eyes for a moment before she “unlocks” the “prize” that he seeks.[373] He is beguiled by this pretext, and when he opens his eyes after a moment, he finds himself in the “basket” again—descending rapidly from the stars. Once he falls back to Earth, the butcher returns and explains that he suffered a similar experience with the Fairy Queen. Understanding why he and everyone else in the Oriental city wear the color of mourning, the King also becomes one of the men in black who bears an insufferable secret on his back.[374] Here are his concluding observations:

I, who am the King of Black, like black clouds now bewail my lack: That my desire, so nearly gained, was, through my rawness, unattained. . . . [T]o mourn of Life’s bright Stream, I entered black. The moon in blackness shines forth bright, king-like, ’neath parasol of night. There is no better hue than black . . . The eye’s black pupil views the world, and robes of black are never soiled. The moon—if night’s fine silks weren’t black—would a fit bridal chamber lack. Seven colours ’neath seven thrones: no colour beyond black is known.[375]

So ends the bedtime story that the black-clad Indian princess tells Bahram Gur as he falls asleep in her embrace within The Black Dome.

As Haft Paykar progresses, the view expressed in the concluding reflection of the King of Black is called into question by Nezami. Bahram’s journey through the various planetary domes from Saturn, The Black Dome of Death, to Venus, The White Dome of Love, is portrayed as a process of spiritual refinement by means of “the ennobling power of love,” leading towards attainment of the virtuous ideal of the Perfect Man whose reason is a microcosm of the Divine Intelligence.[376] The very square and straight-laced moral of the story told by the princess of The White Dome is that sex that is not consecrated by “the vows of those who wed” is not a “lawful passion,” but is immoral and impure. It is interesting to compare the ode to the color White at the conclusion of this tale to the King of Black’s ode to Black as the supreme color:

From white does the day’s brilliance come; from white the world-illuming moon. All hues with artifice are stained, except for white, which pure remains. He who despairs when stained will be, when pure, called ‘white’ by all who see. In worship, when men strive for right, it is the custom to wear white.[377]

Ultimately, Bahram is so ennobled that he has the seven pleasure domes representing the Seven Climes turned into fire temples. Institutions of orthodox Zoroastrianism supplant bewitched buildings designed by a mad architect, who is a kind of sorcerer. The holy color of Zoroastrian orthodoxy is white; its priests wear white from head to toe. Instead of spending his days in pleasure domes, Bahram turns into an upright ruler—severely punishing a corrupt Vazir (Prime Minister) and providing just compensation to those who were unfairly imprisoned by this man. Then one day when he is out hunting, not for game, but for his “true self,” Bahram Gur disappears into occultation, like a Zoroastrian prototype of the Twelfth Imam. He had, evidently, become too pure to continue life on Earth. Within the scheme of the climes corresponding to pleasure domes, Bahram’s turn away from pleasure and toward Justice can be seen as the Eighth Clime and his occultation as translation from the earthly domain into the Ninth Clime of pure Divine Intelligence.[378]

There are numerous elements in The Blind Owl that suggest an influence from “The Black Dome,” but only if we think of Hedayat as fundamentally subverting the “black and white” orthodox Zoroastrian morality of Nezami’s Haft Paykar by amplifying, and adapting to a modern context, its most radically folkloric and anti-orthodox features. Consequently, the parallels are not anything like isomorphic, but rather like a reflection in a distorting mirror. One example of this is the way that the fairy bitch in The Blind Owl, who the narrator also refers to as a “sorceress,” prostitutes herself to everyone except her husband, to whom she belongs not just as a wife, but a soul mate outside of linear time. This is a similar narrative structure to the Fairy Queen offering every other maiden in her retinue, a different one every night, as prostitutes for the King, even though she clearly loves him and they share some profoundly mysterious spiritual bond.

In the last section, we saw how, in the time frame of modern Tehran, the narrator of The Blind Owl initially feels such reverence towards the black-clad fairy that he does not want to even touch her. Superficially, one might see this as his having learned his lesson from the lifetime in Rey—when his ultimate response to the maddening passion stirred in him by his wife’s sexual denial is to have sex with her by stealth and murder her in the process. This is superficial because this would ignore the fact that he performs necrophilia with the black-clad fairy in the modern time frame, and he chops up her body the way he was planning to dismember his wife’s body in the lifetime in Rey. They are, after all, different emanations of the same woman. In other words, the ethereal purity of the angel is basically inseparable from the filth of the bitch. In the context of Haft Paykar, this would be like saying that The Black Dome and The White Dome are really one and the same, which is as much as to say that The White Dome is an illusion—because whereas Black can absorb every other color into itself without any loss, White is marred by the slightest stain.

It is Bugam Dasi—the narrator’s Indian mother who embodies the Serpent Power (Shakti) of the Black Goddess Kali—who is a truer face of the feminine figure at the core of The Blind Owl than either the angel or the bitch. I doubt that it is a coincidence that of all the princesses from different lands in Haft Paykar, it is the princess from India who is clad in black and narrates the story of The Black Dome. Hedayat takes what for Nezami is merely a symbol of the first stage on a path toward the whiteness of Wisdom and turns her into the embodiment of whatever divinity remains in an Imaginal World with fairies, spectral coachmen, sorceresses, and magic—but without God. Hedayat’s narrator ultimately realizes that the feminine figures—the angel, the bitch, and his serpentine Indian mother—are all projections from out of consciously unfathomed depths of his own mind.

The Fairy Queen in the tale of The Black Dome seems to repeatedly hint the same thing to the King, namely that her court, throne, and kingdom are his own. The reason that he has to wait to have her, even though she already belongs to him more profoundly than he can understand, even though she would “die” for him, is that he takes himself to be a mere “Earth-born” King who is but fit to be the slave of this celestial maiden. He suffers from the same false consciousness of alienation from his own true nature, as does the narrator of The Blind Owl in his initial reverence for the “falling star” and “passing gleam” of the ethereal angel that flashed upon his otherwise benighted life.

Hedayat’s perversely liberating reading of “The Black Dome” would have been that we should seek no light beyond ourselves, no Light of God (Nuré Anvar) since all such lights are projected from out of the abyssal blackness within ourselves. In the context of Suhrawardi and the spiritual geography of the climes, the futuristic city from which the ethereal girl comes bearing its blue flowers of morning glory stands in the place of Heaven. If there is an Oriental pole (qutbé eshraqi), it only leads up to Fairy Land, where you will see things that turn you into one of the men in black. Whereas for Nezami, the pleasure dome amidst the stars where the Fairy Queen holds court is much inferior to the Heaven into which Bahram Gur is eventually occulted, for Hedayat, if there is a Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd, an Eighth Clime beyond the Seven earthly ones, it is one and the same as what Nezami takes to be only the First Clime—namely, Fairy Land. Finally, beyond this Eighth Clime there is no Ninth, as there was even for Suhrawardi, who saw the Imaginal World as an intermediate abode between earthly existence and a realm of pure forms with a mathematical degree of abstraction. The ash gray—not black or white, but gray—geometric buildings of the futuristic city into which the narrator of The Blind Owl wanders is the closest that we get to anything mathematically “pure.” In other words, for Hedayat, the unearthly is very earthly, even ghastly or grisly. An Imaginal Body (jismé mesâl) like that of the ethereal angel can also be butchered and dumped in a ditch. Moreover, from such a mad twilight world, marked by what reason takes to be impossible, there is no escape. Even Death is only the Black Goddess by another name.

CHAPTER 5

STAR BLOOD

In certain circles, especially among his associates in Paris, Sadegh Hedayat was known primarily as a folklorist.[379] During his nationalist period, when he was also researching Middle Persian (Pahlavi) literature in order to oppose Arab influences by reconnecting Iran to an excavated pre-Islamic Persian culture, Hedayat had published two studies of Iranian folklore, Owsâneh (1931) and Neyrangestân (1933). The narrator of The Blind Owl tells us that the folktales which his nanny used to recount for him as he drifted off to sleep had at one time seemed “far-fetched” to him, but since he has come to see that waking life itself is such a “ludicrous story, an improbable, stupid yarn,” these fairy tales brimming over with the “supernatural” have become “perfectly natural and credible” to him.[380] The narrator’s rhetorical question, “Am I not now writing my own personal piece of fiction?”[381] takes on a different meaning in light of his earlier statement, “I must tell my story, but I am not sure at what point to start. Life is nothing but a fiction, a mere story.”[382] The relation between “real life” and an imaginary novel, which is written from out of a store of life experiences, has come to reverse itself, so that by some supernormal means the novel is writing life. Hedayat even suggests that the fabric of social life experience, as deeply conditioned by a custom-laden cultural-linguistic inheritance, is no different from the iterative structure of folkloric tropes.[383] Yet, far from being the pastiche of well-worn fairy tale figures and themes, The Blind Owl is an attempt at accomplishing something of a contradiction in terms: novel folklore.

For the production of such a genuine artistic masterpiece,[384] the narrator must “become a child again” and enter the state of mind of a child drifting off to sleep by the sound of a fairy tale that will be embroidered by his own dreams, the state “when one is neither asleep nor awake,” a state that is a “reverberation of the shadow of the mind.”[385] In our reductively materialist modern society, not being able to tell the difference between the imagination and reality has become the textbook definition of insanity—except where young children are concerned. Children can still run away with the fairies. The narrator tells us that one may consider that which preoccupies him as “idle thoughts,” but that these “torment” him “more savagely than any reality could do.” Inverting the relationship between the “real” world and what others might dismiss as the world of a runaway imagination, he adds, “Is not everything I feel, see and think something entirely imaginary, something utterly different from reality?”[386] His motivation in putting his account into writing is not so much to convince others of its truth, since the impression that his ordeal has left on him “surpasses human understanding,”[387] but to at least convince himself and to perhaps thereby retain some modicum of sanity. He wants to become convinced of the reality of what is likely to seem imaginary to others. Moreover, he quickly realizes that it is asking too much to be able to “draw a general conclusion from it all.”[388] This is to be a folktale without any clear moral, which would perhaps render it one truer to the ethically ambiguous spirit of the fairies than any such story told hitherto.

The earthly quality of the ethereal is something that one encounters in folkloric spirituality before it becomes organized into one or another religious doctrine and mediated by academic abstractions, where the latter are useful for propping up such a doctrine. The Blind Owl is not, however, an attempt to regressively return to this folkloric worldview. It is a modern fairy tale, in other words a return to the element of the folkloric mind after having passed through organized religion and scholastic rationalism—which actually makes it postmodern. Hedayat may have been the first writer to do so, but since the 1930s, when The Blind Owl was written, there have certainly been others.

Perhaps the most compelling of all of these individuals and the one whose work offers the strongest points of comparison to Hedayat’s novel is Whitley Strieber, who initially made a name for himself as one of America’s foremost horror novelists. By the mid-1980s, The Wolfen and The Hunger had both been adapted into mainstream Hollywood films. His work in this genre strikes me as incomparably more profound than that of Stephen King. Be that as it may, it is not Strieber’s novels with which we will be concerned here, but his chronicles of Close Encounter experiences that formed the basis of the national bestseller Communion: A True Story (1987). It, too, was adapted to film in 1989, based on a screenplay written by Strieber himself for director Phillip Mora, and starring Christopher Walken in the lead role. There are significant differences between the book and the film, and it is the former that will be consistently cited here—although I find that the quasi-surrealist film is a work of art that brilliantly captures the bewitchingly questioning spirit of the book.

Anyone who is wondering what Close Encounters could possibly have to do with The Blind Owl as a modern fairy tale must be unaware of the profound connection between the so-called “UFO Phenomenon” and folklore. One who is aware of this connection will already have noticed that certain elements of Nezami’s centuries-old celestial fairy tale of “The Black Dome,” as recounted in the previous chapter, call to mind Close Encounter cases from the UFO literature.

Iran is one of the world’s hotbeds of Close Encounters. One of the best UFO cases ever is the Tehran Incident of September 18, 1976, when a sighting at Mehrabad International Airport by air traffic control and nearby Iranian Air Force personnel led to an emergency scrambling of F-4 Phantom jets from Shahrokhi air base for a long, dangerous dogfight with unidentified luminous objects executing impossible maneuvers in airspace just outside the Iranian capital.

This incident began around eleven at night, when the residents of Tehran were frightened by a bright, star-like light circling around the sky above their city at a low altitude. Some residents contacted the air traffic control tower at Mehrabad Airport, where the night supervisor in charge finally went outside and spotted the object for himself with his binoculars. It was then at six thousand feet, changing position erratically while flashing its colored lights. This air traffic controller then contacted the local air force command post where Deputy General Yousefi checked the night sky for himself and confirmed seeing the object as well. The General decided to scramble Phantom F-4 II jets from Shahrokhi air base. Two F-4s were sent up in succession, each carrying two pilots. The first team sighted the UFO and described it to ground control in the course of unsuccessfully attempting to apprehend it as it traveled at a very high rate of speed. These men gave an account of a diamond-shaped object with pulsing multi-colored lights. The radar return on the object suggested that it was comparable in scale to a 707 tanker. Whenever the F-4 closed in on the object, all of its instrumentation would go out, and its radio would be garbled.[389]

After repeatedly being incommunicado with the first jet, General Parviz Jafari, who at the time was a Major and the squadron commander, ordered these two men home and resumed the chase of the UFO towards the Karaj Dam in his own jet with a backseat copilot. General Jafari’s own extensive testimony forms the basis of this condensed account. As he pursued the UFO, he repeatedly lost instrumentation just as the first jet had. The most dramatic instance of this occurred when the first diamond-shaped UFO with pulsing light emitted a glowing sphere that seemed to be closing on Jafari’s jet like a missile. He attempted to fire a heat-seeking missile of his own at this projectile but realized that his instrumentation was dead, and, barely able to communicate even with his backseat copilot, he was preparing to eject when the projectile finally stopped short of his aircraft.[390] Another such projectile flew down to ground level, landed, and illuminated the surrounding Earth. It emitted a distress squawk for days afterwards, even though onsite helicopter and ground-based investigations could not locate the spherical object itself or the source of the squawk that it set off when it first touched down there.[391]

Both the primary multi-colored star-like UFO and the spherical secondary ones that would come out of and then merge back into it danced around Jafari’s jet. His backseater had these under radar observation and confirmed Jafari’s visual assessment that the objects erratically jumped distances of six to seven miles in a split-second. One moment they were in one part of the sky surrounding the F-4, and the next moment in a completely different region.[392] On his flight back toward the base, Jafari and his copilot saw a third type of UFO, a cigar-shaped object with a dome, with a light at each end and one in the middle; this object did not register on ground control radar.[393]

Once Jafari returned to the base, he and the other men were given medical exams which found that, for some time after the Close Encounter, their blood was no longer able to coagulate.[394] The men were repeatedly debriefed in depth over an extended period of time. They filled out a great deal of paperwork. Those debriefing them included not only Iranian military officials and scientists, but also Colonel Olin Mooy of the U.S. Air Force, an officer with the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group in Tehran. When Jafari described his failed attempt to launch the heat-seeking missile at the UFO that was closing in on him as if it were a projectile, the American colonel who was seated right next to him said, “You’re lucky you couldn’t fire.”[395] Freedom of Information Act requests have subsequently led to the declassification of a memo written by Lieutenant Colonel Mooy for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) based on his attendance of the briefing with Jafari in Tehran.

This document, which spends more than three pages detailing the incident, was forwarded to the NSA, the White House, and the CIA. It formed the basis of another document written by Major Colonel Roland Evans assessing the case for the DIA. Dated October 12, 1976, this assessment by Major Evans concludes that on account of the number of credible and highly-trained witnesses, the numerous vantage points of observation, radar tracking, and the loss of instrumentation on two military jets and apparently a commercial airliner, that “[t]his case is a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon.”[396] Perhaps most significantly, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, took a personal interest in this case and came to meet with Jafari’s squadron at Shahrokhi air base in Hamedan. The Persian Emperor called a private meeting of generals attended by Jafari in his capacity as the squadron leader who most intensely engaged the UFOs. At this meeting, the Emperor asked Jafari, “What do you think about it?” He answered, “In my opinion they cannot be from our planet, because if anyone on this planet had such power, he would bring the whole planet under his own command.” The monarch replied, “Yes,” and went on to explain that this was not the first such encounter within Iranian territory that had come to his attention as the nation’s commander-in-chief.[397]

In his landmark 1969 study Passport to Magonia, the eminent computer scientist and astronomer Dr. Jacques Vallée identifies many commonalities between the fairy folklore of olden times, especially among the Celts, and modern narratives of Close Encounter experiences. The parallels are so striking that Vallée concludes we are looking at the same phenomenon understood according to the mindset of different times, one pre-industrial and the other technological. Although Whitley Strieber explicitly cites Passport to Magonia (1969) only once, anyone who has read it will immediately notice that the last chapter of Communion, which places the Close Encounter experience on a continuum with the fairy folklore of medieval Europe—especially of the Celtic and Nordic peoples—consists largely of cases drawn from this monumental study by Jacques Vallée.[398] Vallée in turn relies heavily on a youthful work by the Irish scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz, who later became famous as the single most influential Occidental interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism. Informed by much fieldwork, Wentz’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) is an expansion of his 1909 thesis on fairy folklore in Brittany. Understanding the connection between UFOs and folklore is a prerequisite to any comparison between Hedayat’s novel and Strieber’s non-fiction writings.

The title of Passport to Magonia is derived from a series of incidents that occurred around the 820s AD in France.[399] At that time, a certain famous or infamous Cabalist by the name of Zedechias had become intent on convincing the masses of his belief in beings that dwell in the Elements. The Sylphs were aerial faeries whose existence had been the subject of an entire book written by the philosopher Paracelsus. Whether by communication with really existing beings of this kind or by means of some extraordinary conjuring, these faeries were made to repeatedly display spectacular maneuvers in the air for all to see. These spectacles became so troublesome to the authorities on account of stirring the populace up into a panicked frenzy that the Emperor Charlemagne himself and his successor, Louis the Debonair, both officially imposed heavy penalties on these “Tyrants of the Air.” In order to mend their reputation, the miraculous men began to take people up in their aerial ships to meet their women, take a tour of their Republic, and be shown all their fantastic gadgets. However, when the people were returned from their tour of this place called Magonia, nearly as soon as they disembarked from the aerial ships, instead of being received as good will ambassadors they were surrounded by mobs denouncing them as sorcerers and witches sent to poison the fields and carry out other nefarious deeds.

One such case involved three men and one woman who, just after having returned from Magonia, were taken captive by a mob who intended to stone them to death. Fortunately for them, before this sentence was carried out, Agobard, the Archbishop of Lyons, intervened. A renowned scholastic theologian who was something like a proto-skeptic, Agobard played the role of the modern-day UFO debunker. He had the men freed by decrying as falsities the charges of their accusers and as preposterous impossibilities their own accounts of what they witnessed in Magonia. Occultist philosophers of the time, such as Paracelsus, lamented the fact that ignorant people would rather accept what Agobard committed to writing simply because he wore a doctor’s hood rather than believing their own eyes regarding the reality of the spectacular events of those days, when the imperial government of Charlemagne was on the brink of declaring war against the aerial race conjured by the Cabalist Zedechias. Nevertheless, Magonia entered folklore. People were divided as to its physical location. For some it was a distant country reachable only after a long journey, for others an isolated island somewhere in the world’s oceans; some saw it as a celestial country, and yet others took it to be a world parallel to ours with tangential points of access known only by its inhabitants.[400]

In Passport to Magonia, Vallée explains that, like humans, faeries were hierarchically organized into ranks, the uppermost of which is an aristocratic-military class of noble-looking, tall, statuesque fairies known as the Gentry, who were said to live in beautiful castles carved inside mountains.[401] These “castles” might well be viewed as something more akin to fortresses, since, like armies, they had rotating duties at various stations. One could also see their weird stone works in the high places of the Earth. It was said that men saw the Gentry most often when they were on their aerial routes from one of these bases to another.[402] Their aerial conveyances were taken to resemble brilliant “flying houses” containing radiant lamps that needed no fuel.[403] The Gentry were believed to possess powers of sight so penetrating that they could see right through the Earth.[404] The members of this aerial aristocracy boasted that they “could cut off half the human race” if they wished. Instead, they took a great interest in stealthily steering the affairs of men towards justice and right.[405] Since they are “not a working class,” they appropriate our produce and goods as repayment for their troubles as they see fit.[406] Whether or not this is a just exchange, and whether or not one thinks they actually stand for what is right, is not for a mortal to judge.

It would be wrong to suggest that the fairies only take without giving in return. The folklore of northern Europe is replete with tales of elfish gifts. These gifts usually demand an act of good faith. A typical one iterated in numerous variants involves a woman who is rewarded for some service rendered in Elfland, or some kindness shown to the wee folk by having her apron filled with rubbish by a manikin (a Scandinavian appellation for a certain kind of fairy or elf, from which we derive the modern usage). If she does not spurn this “gift” and she carefully carries the rubbish in her apron back home in good faith, when she finally goes to shake out her apron, pure gold falls out of it and onto the floor.[407] In other, similar stories, it is coals instead of rubbish, and the woman throws nearly all of them away and returns home to find the two that she has kept as a token of the fairy’s ingratitude have turned into precious stones. She tries to retrieve the other coals from where she dumped them, but they have vanished. Sometimes the gift is stranger, such as a seamless paper dress given to a girl for dancing with the fairies in one of their circles. When she returns home with a distorted sense of time, not realizing that she has been long gone and taken for dead, her superstitious mother immediately consigns this gift to the flames of the family hearth.[408]

We have a clear example of such elfish gifts in the items that the narrator of The Blind Owl receives from the strangely impish old man, in his various guises as hearse driver, gravedigger, and so forth. The hearse driver appears only when the narrator is gazing hard into the foggy drizzle during the daytime. He appears from right out of the mist, sitting bent beneath a cypress tree just like the old man in the vision through the closet aperture, the old man on the repetitively painted pen case covers.[409] The ghastly black horses of this Gothic horror-style hearse, whose hooves make no sound as they rise and fall, are fitted with bells that play a strange tune in the otherwise deathly silent air.[410] The hearse driver’s reappearance in his guise as gravedigger is just as spectral. Our narrator is lost and takes refuge in a cemetery, when suddenly he hears the man’s hair-raising laugh. What is most peculiar is that he does not seem to recognize the man, and the old man pretends not to recognize him insofar as he describes the earlier grave-digging job as though he had done it for some other client.[411] This makes it all the more significant that the old man hands him the antique vase from the ruins of Rey, which he will later discover bears a portrait of her that renders the eyes as faithfully as his own painting.[412] Initially, the gravedigger claimed that he would take the vase in lieu of payment, but then when he meets the narrator for the second time, he gives the vase to him as a gift by which to remember him.[413]

On both occasions, he laughs at the paltry two qaruns and one abbasi that the narrator keeps pulling out to pay him. This is another example of the repeated forgetfulness that is indicative of the narrator’s largely unconscious state of mind. Finally, when the narrator is home, he rushes to repay the hearse driver with his tin box safe. It seems to momentarily slip his mind that his precious painting of the ethereal girl is within the safe. It matters not, because the man has already driven away.[414] The old man never accepts payment, because money is of no use to the dead, or to ghosts, or to shadows from within the unconscious mind. He certainly has a supernatural nimble strength that is startling in light of his outward appearance.[415] He is there to help the narrator along at every turn, giving him just what he needs. Require a hearse to transport a dead body to a secluded area? No problem. Having trouble digging that grave? Let me lend a hand, since I also happen to be a gravedigger.

It is no wonder that he so closely resembles the odds-and-ends man from the past life in Rey. Incidentally, the bone-handled knife with which the narrator murders his wife in that lifetime, and which is similar to the knife he uses to cut up her ethereal image in his present life, was purchased from the odds-and-ends man—at least according to the maid.[416] At the very end of the story, back in the time frame of early modern Tehran, the old man is crouching by the door to the narrator’s house. He has wrapped up the flower-vase in a dirty handkerchief while our narrator is just returning from his opium stupor, and he runs away like some impish figure, laughing all along as he disappears into the mist.[417] The vase had served its purpose, though the narrator still has “the weight of a woman’s dead body” on his chest.[418]

Another motif that runs through both The Blind Owl and Close Encounter narratives is that the traumatic experience usually takes place in an isolated area. The narrator’s house is way on the outskirts of town, “completely isolated” and surrounded only by the ruins of bygone epochs.[419] Of his daily sunset walks in this wasteland of “sweepings, burning sand, horse-bones and refuse heaps,” he tells us that “[i]t was as though I was compelled by some outside force to undertake them.”[420] He not only encounters the ethereal visitor on such a walk into ever-deeper isolation, it is also in this deserted byway that he wanders into the futuristic Fairy Land that has already been interpreted above in terms of Suhrawardi’s Imaginal World. Here is how one of those episodes of wandering through the Land of Nowhere ends for the narrator:

Overcome with fear, I went into my house and shut myself up in my room. At the same moment I began to bleed from the nose. After losing a great quantity of blood I collapsed upon my bed.[421]

People who experience Close Encounters commonly report that they felt as if they were under a hypnotic suggestion to wander away somewhere, unless they were already someplace rather isolated. Whitley Strieber’s country home in the Catskills north of New York City was very isolated.[422] Dense woods surrounded the cabin. Strieber remembers being seated, together with the beings he encountered, in a roughly four-meter-wide depression out in the woods that was clear of the snow covering the ground at that time.[423] (Vallée discusses fairy rings in a similar context.) He recognizes the visitors’ predilection for isolated areas, far from populated metropolises—at least as far as Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind are concerned.[424] All his life, he “wanted to move to New York because of the lights and the people.”[425] At one point, Strieber was so frightened that he wanted to leave New York and move to Austin, Texas—where he had attended university. Yet, a striking experience on the deck of the house that he and his wife were considering buying in Texas immediately changed his mind and reminded him of the value of the city that never sleeps, and that often blocks out the stars with the ambient glow from its skyscrapers: “I walked out onto the deck. When I looked at the dark canyon that stretched out into the shadows, and the stars in the evening sky, I felt suddenly and absolutely afraid. It was exactly as if the sky were a living thing, and it was watching me.”[426] This should immediately call to mind these lines from The Blind Owl: “In the gaps between the clouds the stars gazed down at the earth like gleaming eyes emerging from a mass of coagulated blood.”[427]

Now we turn to the imagery of stars and light. The narrator of The Blind Owl corrects himself after comparing his encounter with the ethereal girl to “a ray of sunlight” breaking in upon his miserable life in “this mean world of wretchedness.” She or “it was not sunlight,” because sunlight is earthly and abiding. Its warmth nurtures Nature and fosters homeliness. This is a Close Encounter with a meteoric entity, one that flashes forth even more brightly, but also more elusively and extraordinarily than a lightning bolt amidst a stormy night. He knows that really, his whole encounter may not have spanned more than “the course of a second, of a single moment,” after which the luminous entity “disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear.”[428] It is in truth something like “a passing gleam, a falling star” that only subjectively “flashes upon” the narrator “in the form of a woman—or of an angel.”[429] Later on, he calls her “that angel of heaven, that ethereal girl.”[430] These corrections and equivocations are significant. This is not a human female, not even in her superficial characteristics. Before going on to explore specific characteristics of her appearance that emphasize that, let us dwell for a moment on the stellar, meteoric imagery.

What might Jacques Vallée have to say about Hedayat’s opening reference to the “passing gleam” or “falling star” that flashes upon the narrator in the form of an ethereal visitor? Vallée suggests that throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and right up to the rationalistic “Enlightenment,” heavenly bodies that moved violently against a background of fixed stars, such as shooting stars, comets, and meteors, were viewed as portentous supernatural manifestations not only because they upset the cosmic order of stellar arrays, but because some of them did other things as well.[431] This description of one woman’s UFO sighting on May 19, 1950 near the Loire River in France is entirely typical of reports that are centuries older:

. . . [I]n the evening, the witness . . . observed a “kind of shooting star,” which stopped abruptly, then appeared to go up and stay among the other stars for a while, then to grow bigger and take on a kind of swinging motion, its light alternately on and off. Suddenly it left, on a curved trajectory, and reached the horizon at very high speed.

Here is another quite common sighting, from July 28, 1966 in the vicinity of Montsoreau, France:

All of a sudden, they saw a red sphere cross the sky like a meteor. It did not behave quite as a meteor, however, because it seemed to touch the ground and then rise again—without losing its brilliant red color—and hover at mid-height for a while before it was lost to sight.[432]

The next day, a farmer found a crop circle right where this light had been seen hovering. Occasionally, these “meteors” or “stars of marvelous size” would put on terrifying acrobatic displays en masse, or one of them would descend into a medieval village to cast its unearthly light on the hallowed ground of churches or cemeteries, among other places. Sometimes they would appear above armies locked in battle, even with the result of altering the expected outcome—such as at the Irish Battle of Clontarf on April 23, 1014, when they provided “air support” to one of the two sides.[433] Near Dublin, many reported seeing the “demoniac phantom host” riding in “the air and firmament” above the conventional armies.[434]

When seen at a distance, as they usually are, a UFO is often first mistaken for a falling star, until its movement becomes too erratic for this interpretation.[435] The occult philosopher Cornelius Agrippa said that “the arrival” of handsome devils is preceded by the flashing forth of “a brilliant star.”[436] In this context, to “wish upon a star” becomes a much more loaded expression. One falling “star” with a heat so intense that it burned nearby trees and threatened to set the whole town on fire came to land near Alençon, France on June 17, 1790. Most of the townspeople had gathered to witness the spectacle by the time the sphere of light opened up and deposited a being that appeared like a handsome man but for his peculiar, tight-fitting suit. This man used emphatic gestures to warn the assembled crowd away, and then ran off into the dark woods (some of whose trees had been set ablaze by his device) before the glowing sphere exploded, in perfect silence, into metallic shards that went on to totally disintegrate.[437]

The ethereal feminine figure that visits the narrator of The Blind Owl from out of a flash of starlight is clad in a long, black dress that clings so tightly to her body that her every contour can be seen through it.[438] We could even say it is something like a skin-tight body suit[439] that wraps around her otherwise naked body like a spider’s web,[440] though at times Hedayat describes it as a “pleated dress.”[441] It was of an exotic material, clearly not fabricated on Earth, or at least not by anyone living in this dimension: “her dress was not woven of ordinary stuff and had not been fashioned by material, human hands.”[442] Her torso and fine long limbs are too slender, so slender[443] that she seems to have only an “ethereal, misty form.”[444] We are told that she is not constructed for life under the gravity of Earth: “The fineness of her limbs and the ethereal unconstraint of her movements marked her as one who was not fated to live long in this world.”[445]

The closest human approximation to “her harmonious grace of movement” would be that of “a Hindu temple dancer.”[446] After often kneeling in prayer to “every created thing” to grant his wish of being able to see her again, the narrator concludes that this was a vain wish “because it was not possible that she should be connected in any way with the things of this world: the water with which she washed her hair came from some unique, unknown spring . . . She was a creature apart . . . I was certain that if her face were to come into contact with ordinary water it would fade . . . a source of wonder and ineffable revelation. Her being was subtle and intangible.”[447] When she is finally lying on his bed, he does not even dare to whisper what he wants to say to her because he fears that his “voice would offend her ears, her sensitive ears which were accustomed, surely, to distant, heavenly, gentle music.”[448] Her own “silence seemed something supernatural.”[449]

She has slanted, almond-shaped “wondering eyes” that are much larger than human eyes. These are set into a face with a peculiar structure, featuring prominent cheekbones and an unusually high forehead.[450] The narrator makes a point of telling us that these strange features were captured very compellingly in the portrait of her on the antique flower vase.[451] Her skin is “pale as the moon,” and all the more striking in its pallor on account of being “framed in the mass of her black, disheveled hair.”[452] The face bears at once both an angelic, child-like expression and a hellishly demonic demeanor.[453] The eyes have above all an “expression of reproach as though they had seen” the narrator “commit some unpardonable sin.”[454] Her eyes pass judgment on him even as they are captured in the two portraits of her, the one he has drawn himself and the one on the flower vase from Rey; these drawings also conveyed their “expression of anxiety and wonder, of menace and promise.”[455] The combination of her eyes and her bony pale face are startlingly inhuman: “I recognized two slanting eyes, two great black eyes set in a thin face of moonlight paleness . . .”[456]

Our narrator tells us that his “life has slowly and painfully burned and melted away” in the “depths” of “those magic eyes” with their “fatal radiance.”[457] This “supernatural, intoxicating radiance . . . at once frightened and attracted” our narrator “as though they had looked upon terrible, transcendental things which it was given to no one but her to see.”[458] Once he looks into “those two eyes . . . activity of any sort” loses “all meaning, all content, all value” for him, and her face is so uncanny that when he looks at it, he is made to “forget the faces of all other people.”[459] The eyes are more like the large, inky pools of animal eyes than those of a human being:

In the depths of her immense eyes I beheld in one moment all the wretchedness of my life. Her eyes were wet and shining like two huge black diamonds suffused with tears. In her eyes, her black eyes, I found the everlasting night of impenetrable darkness for which I had been seeking and I sank into the awful, enchanted blackness of that abyss.[460]

Even after she is butchered into pieces and buried in the hole, the narrator cannot resist a final look at those “two great black eyes gazing fixedly at him,” and he is disturbed to find that though they now gaze from out of a severed head, he still feels that they have the power to “submerge” his “entire being” in their depths.[461]

In nearly every case, the most striking feature of Close Encounters for those who have experienced them is having stared into the enigmatic eyes of the visitors. Many cannot stand doing so, and turn away to the extent possible. Whitley Strieber, though frightened, was extraordinarily unflinching in this regard, and what he has to tell us provides an especially profound point of comparison to The Blind Owl. Strieber’s memories of his “first” encounter end abruptly, with no transition at all before awakening in the morning. At first, before seeking hypnosis, what he mostly remembered of the night was the vivid image of a barn owl staring at him through the window. He searched the snow for owl tracks, and was disconcerted not to find any. Still, he clung desperately to the belief that he had seen this owl, and told other people that he had, just so as to convince himself.[462] It was only later that he discovered that recollections of encountering animals at improbable times and in strange places were often “screen memories” that the mind uses to protect itself from remembering a true event that would be too traumatic.[463] Later on, he offers a more profound interpretation of the owl symbolism. He speculates that, “if my wise and determined friend from afar is a woman, it could be said that her personal symbol is an owl.”[464] He notes that the Latin word for owl, namely strix, was also their word for “witch,” and that the owl was the symbol of several goddess figures of the ancient world: Athena, Hecate, and Ishtar.

Further into Communion, the idea that She might be Ishtar, “the ancient Mesopotamian ‘Eye-Goddess’ with the huge, staring eyes” is substantively elaborated.[465] Strieber connects his impression of her being agelessly old, terribly ancient, an impression that was confirmed by her, to the possibility that she is indeed Ishtar.[466] He wonders what Ishtar really looked like.[467] Whereas the figures of the Olympian pantheon might also have been reflections of the visitors, they were overly sanitized; the image of Ishtar with her inhumanly large eyes, feet that end in the talons of a bird of prey instead of toes, accompanied by her owl and her wildcat, was more faithful to their primal quality. Yes, primal—not science fictional, at least not in the popular sense: “The closest thing I have been able to find to an unadorned image of these beings is not from some modern science-fiction movie, it is rather the age-old, glaring face of Ishtar . . . the ancient and terrible one, the bringer of wisdom, the ruthless questioner . . . the gray goddess.”[468]

Most significantly for our purposes here, Strieber recognizes that in the languages of Greater Iran, where this goddess was predominately worshipped, the word Ishtar means “star.”[469] A Persian variant of her name was Astarte, or in modern Persian, Setare. The owl, a creature of the night that is blind in the sunlight, developed an ill-omened connotation in Persian culture. Hedayat records several of these fearful superstitions in Neyrangestân.[470] This change in status, from bird of Ishtar to unlucky omen of death and destruction, could probably be correlated to the advent of orthodox Zoroastrian dualism, which raised the divine Light of Ahura Mazda, as symbolized by the Sun, to the position of the supreme principle. Zoroastrian scriptures mention the owl as the “one bird too many” that Ahura Mazda mistakenly created.[471]

This is profound. The owl is the Creator’s mistake, in other words the one negation of the omniscience (if not omnipotence) definitive of the Lord of Light, and acknowledgement of the corrupt status of the Creation. Equally significant is that in the legend of the Simorgh as recounted in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, which was touched on in the third section as background to Nezami’s “The Black Dome,” the owl is the bird that refuses to undertake the transcendental journey. He calls the quest for God a fantasy, and he says that he prefers to remain among the ruins of this world, where he can find real treasures.[472] This does not imply materialism, for the owl is certainly a symbol of supernatural knowledge—especially clairvoyance—but a supernatural that is ungodly, that is mundanely pervasive, and so all the more ominous. Hedayat seeks to restore the owl goddess to her rightful place as the heavenly angel that descends into the Underworld, the falling star Venus, who becomes the Light of a benighted world: Lucifer. Recall once more these lines toward the opening of The Blind Owl: “In this mean world of wretchedness and misery I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me, in the form of a woman—or of an angel.”[473] The narrator ultimately metamorphoses into a screech owl himself,[474] uncanny and isolated by a dark, abyssal knowledge that drowns the false sunlight without which most men cannot see.

Just as the owl staring at Whitley Strieber was initially the dominant image in his recollections of what happened on the evening of December 26, 1986, when he thought back to the night of October 4, his recollections at first centered on a mysterious “blue light” that flooded his country house.[475] When we read that the color of the light is blue, like the flowers of morning glory in The Blind Owl, it should call to mind the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of “The Blue Light,” which I will not dwell on here but which is not irrelevant with its dwarf and “dream” of abduction, as well as the 1932 Leni Riefenstahl film by that name, whose mystical moral is also curiously apropos Strieber’s experiences.

The house was entirely surrounded by a dense fog at the time.[476] Strieber and his wife Ann had two houseguests on that night, and they both saw the intense light, which led one of them to think that it was suddenly morning—around 10 AM rather than 4:30 AM—since he could see the trees outside clear as day.[477] Strieber remembers jumping out of bed with the thought that the house was on fire (a thought which had awakened him earlier, before he strangely fell promptly back into a deep sleep). He rushed downstairs to comfort his boy, who was hysterically screaming. Once the blue light disappeared and he discovered that there was no fire or anything of the kind, and once he had consoled his son, Strieber apologized to his houseguests, and they went back to bed.[478]

At the time of writing Communion, Strieber had never actually seen a UFO. He did, however, have what he believes is a screen memory of a huge crystal in the night sky above his country home.[479] Although he forgot having done so, he was reminded by one of his houseguests that the next morning he related this “memory” to her as if it were a dream that he had had in the night.[480] This crystal was “glowing with unearthly blue light.”[481] Bearing in mind the unusually thick fog of that night, Strieber carried out many tests under similar atmospheric conditions to try to replicate a lighting effect that intense inside his isolated cabin, all to no avail.[482] A pilot advised him that, given the density of the fog, light from an aircraft—at least a conventional aircraft—could also be ruled out.[483] It was an impossible light, impossible like the blaue blume of The Blind Owl, yet others had seen it.

Others had also heard the explosion, that sounded like a clap of thunder.[484] The source of the light could not have been thunder and lightning, because the flash of blue light lasted for a lot longer than a lightning strike and it followed the clap of thunder, which also had no echo.[485] Later, under hypnosis, Strieber remembers that this bang was produced by the visitor who, he is terrified to discover, is lurking in the shadows of his bedroom. After placing a thin silver wand to his head just above and between his eyebrows (where the “third eye” chakra is supposedly located), and projecting disturbing images into his mind, the figure stuck this needle or silver-tipped ruler in the air right in front of Strieber’s face, making his face tingle all over, emitting sparks and producing the explosive sound that everyone in the house that night heard, as well as his panicked sense that the house was on fire when in fact it was not.[486] He remembers it feeling like “some big energy had been released.”[487] This metaphor that he offers in the course of his hypnosis session is very revealing: “If you could make a tiny bolt of lightning in someone’s face, you would create thunder right in their face. That’s what was done.”[488] Strieber himself connects the use of this implement to “the use of wands to grant insight” in “the fairy literature of the Middle Ages.”[489] He also relates the experience of a “woman who had an enigmatic visitor encounter in the fifties” and who, as she slowly went insane because of it, “would claw at the center of her forehead in the same place where [she] was struck with the wand” until “she gouged herself almost to the bone.”[490] Is it a coincidence that the area on the forehead struck is that of the Third Eye (ajna chakra) and the object with which it is struck calls to mind a vajra (a Hindu/Buddhist “thunderbolt” scepter)?

The visitor that made the most impression on Strieber always struck him as being feminine.[491] He explains, “I say her, but I don’t know why. To me this is a woman, perhaps because her movements are so graceful, perhaps because she has created states of sexual arousal in me, or maybe it is simply the memory of her hand touching the side of my chest one time, so lightly and yet with such firmness.”[492] She occasionally attempts to comfort him.[493] Initially, he describes her as “five feet tall, very slender and delicate, with extremely prominent and mesmerizing black slanted eyes.”[494] There was a very fierce expression to the face and especially the soul-piercing eyes, which were more slanted than an Oriental’s.[495] From out of the “owllike” face he “could see those limitless, eternal eyes glaring right into the center of” him.[496] When he was in her presence, he felt as if his ego dissolved, and he could readily divulge his deepest secret.[497]

He had known her from his earliest childhood.[498] During his encounter as a child, when he is taken from the train drawing room with his father and sister, until he sees his terrified father and is infected by his father’s fear, young Whitley is content to remain with the visitor even though he thinks that she is “awful looking.” She asks him, “Do you want to go home?” and he replies, “I don’t care if you never take me back home again.” To which her rejoinder is, “You have to go home.”[499] This is very much the attitude of a child who has willingly run away with a fairy, or at least who would willingly run away. Strieber feels just as the narrator of The Blind Owl does when he takes the ethereal woman to be his soul mate, someone who astonishes him just as he vaguely recollects having known her as if she were always a part of himself, and that he later associates with his childhood memories.

For some time, Strieber’s strongest “memories” of his Close Encounter were simply “the owl and the light.”[500] The last piece of writing that Strieber did before his recollection of the events of those nights began to come into focus from out of his unconscious, or rather the only writing of which he felt himself capable in such a state of devastation, was a short story called “Pain.” It is very telling of the folkloric element from out of which his experiences emerge. Here is how he summarizes it:

It is about a man who encounters an enigmatic woman named Janet, who proves to be some sort of superhuman being, perhaps an angel or a demon. She draws this man into a strange experience of capture and incarceration in a tiny, magical cabinet. From the agony that ensues, he gains immense insight and new spiritual strength.[501]

He compares the “enigmatic woman” in this story to the character of “the fairy queen Leannan and her soldiers” in his novel Catmagic. Of the similarity in theme between the two works, Strieber remarks, “Mankind must face a harsh but enigmatically beautiful force . . . part of the justice of the world . . . always hidden between the folds of experience.”[502]

Now we come to the most important of the parallels between UFO folklore and The Blind Owl: Imaginal Transformation. The vision of the ethereal girl, the cypress tree, and so forth that the narrator sees is actually based on the motif of his pen case decorations. It is an image that has crystallized in his mind through being repeatedly painted in a quasi-hypnotic state. When on the third day after his sighting, through the aperture above the top shelf of his closet, the narrator finally musters the courage to put the wine bottle back in its place there, he finds that the opening has vanished. He wonders whether it has somehow been filled in, but there is no trace of it whatsoever. He bangs on the “massive fabric of the wall” only to find that it is as uniformly solid as “a single slab of lead.”[503] This brings him to search the area around his house for not one or two days, but for “two months and four days” until he “came to know every stone and every pebble in the neighborhood” without finding anything remotely resembling the site of the stream and cypress tree where he saw the old man and the ethereal girl.[504] He compares the darkness of the closet where the aperture into that other world once opened to “the dark night which enshrouds the mind and reason of man . . .”[505] Instead of being able to forget her by means of wine and opium, the memory of her becomes clearer and clearer until every detail of her face takes shape as a perpetual vision within his mind’s eye.[506]

When he finally does manage to find her, she materializes from out of a mist that allows his inner conception of her to take shape, and his encounter with her is largely within the context of the hypnotic trance of an artist. On that night when the drizzling rain and impenetrably thick fog has compounded the darkness to blur all externally perceptible lines in the landscape, it is only just after “her awe-inspiring face” has taken shape before his mind’s eye “far more clearly than ever before” that he finally finds her “in the flesh.”[507] He finds his way back to his house, where she is waiting, only by “some special [extra] sense” which he “had developed.”[508] As his encounter with her unfolds, he describes both the maiden and himself as being in a mesmeric state: “She had come like a sleep-walker, independently of any will of her own . . . My state of mind was that of a man in an infinitely deep sleep.”[509] He cannot count how many times he draws and redraws her portrait throughout that night.[510]

There is an almost exact parallel in the process by which Strieber’s image of his visitor crystallizes within his own mind. It begins with this passage from Communion, on the distortion of time and space commonly experienced by abductees: “There are stories of roads that don’t exist, beaches that aren’t there, structures that later prove never to have been built. There are also cases where clouds came down to the ground or strange fogs proved to contain something more than droplets of water.”[511] Strieber relates this in the context of an experience of encountering the visitors while driving into a fogbank and then onto a dirt road that he subsequently found does not exist.[512] It is immediately after this recollection, under hypnosis, of his experience with the fogbank that Strieber’s sense of being watched crystallizes into an image of the face that is watching him—always watching him. It was “the grave, implacable, subtly humorous face” of the unearthly woman.[513] No matter what he did, he could not banish this image from his mind. He studied photographic memory and found that those who have it do not even experience this level of detail, and moreover their vividly recollected images do not have a life of their own that is also responsive to commands—nor did they feel as if their images were about to reach out and touch them.[514] Strieber saw not only the image of her face, but her entire body, and was able to have her rotate her head and display all of her limbs and appendages on command.[515]

This allowed him to meticulously study the anatomical structure of the visitor and to have a by now famous portrait drawn by artist Ted Seth Jacobs. For the purposes of comparison to The Blind Owl, here are the most relevant features of that portrait:

Centered in [the line of] this mouth was a remarkable expression, the outcome, it seemed to me, of implacable will leavened by what I can only describe as mirth . . . By far the most arresting feature in this face was the eyes. They were far larger than our own eyes. In them I once or twice glimpsed a suggestion of black iris and pupil, but it was no more than a suggestion, as if there were optic structures of some kind floating behind those wells of darkness.[516]

The skin was stretched tightly over the bones. The three fingers and the opposable thumb of the hands ended in short, dark nails that were more like claws than human fingernails. The feet were something like cloven hooves, with a single bifurcation rather than toes.[517] It bears mentioning that the involvement of an artist with this mental image was not only after the fact of its manifestation. While Seth Jacobs rendered the visitor from Strieber’s description, no doubt also providing a degree of feedback for his mental image, the image emerged in the first place under the care of an artist. Although Strieber’s hypnosis sessions were conducted with the very professional guidance of Dr. Donald Klein, the first man that he turned to for help, and who was also present at all of his early sessions, was Budd Hopkins—a painter whose works Strieber was familiar with from the collections of the Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York and whose (at that time) recent interest in Close Encounters and abductions had crystallized into a seminal work entitled Missing Time.[518]

Of the eidetic image that appears in Strieber’s mind after a series of hypnosis sessions with an artist, and which a different artist takes to rendering from his description, Strieber admits that, “While I might indeed have been viewing the result of some extraordinary connection between myself and a real, conscious being, it may also be that this was an act of the imagination—the act of a mind calling upon itself to provide another argument in favor of this being an experience with an external component.”[519] In lines that perfectly echo Corbin’s reading of the faculty of Active Imagination in Suhrawardi, Strieber suggests a faculty of imagination that is aesthetic or visionary and at the same time not lacking in the intellectual rigor of the scientist. An Imaginal faculty that transcends the artificial distinction between the “real” and the “imaginary” may need to be developed in order for the manifestation of the visitors to come entirely into focus:

Whomever or whatever the visitors are, their activities go far beyond a mere study of mankind. They are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the band of dream, weaving imagination and reality together until they begin to seem what they probably are—different aspects of a single continuum. To really begin to perceive the visitors adequately it is going to be necessary to invent a new discipline of vision, one that combines the mystic’s freedom of imagination with the substantial intellectual rigor of the scientist.[520]

Strieber even identifies this as “an eleventh century Arabic idea.” He may be forgiven for following certain scholars by mistakenly referring to Persians as “Arabic” on account of their having often written scholastic treatises in the language of the occupiers of Greater Iran.[521] Another sense of the Imaginal, besides Suhrawardi’s, is also relevant here.

Before Corbin popularized the term “Imaginal” as a translation of mesâl in his Iranian sources, it was developed by the psychologist Frederic Myers in his pioneering work in the field now known as Parapsychology.[522] Together with William James and others, Myers was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers traces the word “Imaginal” back to its root in imago, which is the perfected form of an insect that has undergone a transformation from out of the slug-like larval state. This transformation, which often takes place in a chrysalis, is a radical one. If the larvae were intelligent, they would have a very hard time seeing their own imago as anything other than an “alien” being. The caterpillar would not immediately recognize the butterfly as its own perfect form.

In an attempt to understand psychic phenomena in the context of evolutionary theory, Myers suggests that supernormal abilities are latent structures within us comparable to the structures that allow for the metamorphosis of an insect from its larval form into its imago. Like those latent structures in insects, the Imaginal capacities of human beings are covered over by the psychobiological functions relevant to life in the larval state. There are, however, cases of “pre-verts”: the opposite of atavisms, certain of the latent faculties in these individuals are active so that they prefigure the future evolutionary form of the species, but this may be viewed as bizarre or perverted from the present standpoint of the larvae. It may even be viewed as “alien.” Myers refers to human larval characteristics as “terrene,” and superhuman Imaginal capacities as “extra-terrene.” Are the “visitors” of Communion extra-terrenes rather than extraterrestrials?

When the visitors were handling Strieber’s whole body, he distressingly felt as if he was helplessly “being passed along by rows of insects.”[523] He also repeatedly describes the most prominent of the visitors, the female, as “buglike,” although he just as often qualifies this by saying that her actual features were basically humanoid and not at all those of an insect—“no feelers, no wings, no tangle of legs.”[524] It is the gestalt that reminded him in some way of an insect. Strieber describes the emergence of his lifelong experiences into conscious memory as “a kind of internal birth,” something “fluttering” within him that makes him squirm as it caresses and captures him so as to be born into this world through the womb of his mind.[525] He wonders whether “human” beings are not something akin to shadows of other beings elsewhere, or actors with some other persona more authentic than the ones on display as they play their parts—but for this metaphor’s sake, actors unaware of who they are behind the curtain.[526]

Finally, at two points in Communion,[527] Strieber ventures three deeply interconnected speculations that I will merge into a single hypothesis. The visitors emerge with the death of human beings as such.[528] They are the “afterlife” of humanity.[529] Sorrowful death, in the sense of ego annihilation, and spiritual rebirth from out of that state, is a persistent theme.[530] This is, however, a spiritual transformation that is also an “objectively” physical metamorphosis. We are “a larval form, and the adults of our species [are] as incomprehensible to us, as totally unimaginable, as the butterfly must be to the caterpillar.”[531]

In other words, the visitors “are human beings in a mature form.”[532] They are emerging from within us as psychical time travelers from our future.[533] The visitation is a haunting of the present and past from out of our own future, by entities using the portal of our unconscious minds to take shape in the world—not only as the “visitors” of our space age but as the unearthly beings envisioned by our ancestors in their folklore and fairy tales.[534] The metamorphosis by which the larvae, namely us, become them, is a creative life process of cosmic scope: “In some sense, their emergence into human consciousness seemed to me to represent life—or the universe itself—engaged in some deep act of creation.”[535] On this view, we are a larval form of the visitors, and the latter have attained their present state through a “transformation” or metamorphosis that is psychical—at once both psychological and physical.[536]

The final chapter of Communion, in which this passage appears, begins with a quote from Franz Kafka’s “The Building of the Temple.”[537] Strieber started reading Kafka at the age of twelve, in a Texas public library, no less.[538] He explicitly mentions “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial. If one refers to the original German of “The Metamorphosis,” one sees that the ambiguous term Ungeziefer is used instead of a reference to any particular insect. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the “monstrous vermin” in question is a dung beetle—an animal that lives on excrement but is also the ancient Egyptian symbol of transformation. In this respect, it is worth noting that Strieber recalls that the inside of the close and confining tan-gray, circular chamber with a ribbed dome, where he was trapped for most of his interactions with the visitors, smelled bad and was filthy.[539] A sulfurous odor permeated the place, and there were clothes strewn about.[540] It is in the context of Kafka, and especially of these aforementioned works concerning a trying process of metamorphosis, that we should understand Strieber’s references to the insect-like quality of the visitors.

As has been already noted, Hedayat was the most significant Persian interpreter of Kafka’s writings, and this idea of Imaginal metamorphosis clearly figures into The Blind Owl. The ethereal girl, who we have by now identified as a projection of the narrator, as his other self, is described as transcending the human and provoking an inner transformation within the narrator himself—characterized by the dawning of superhuman consciousness and abilities. She bears all the marks of some other world, of some other dimension from whence she has crossed over. Although she is standing directly opposite the narrator, she appears to be “quite unaware of her surroundings” because she is “gazing straight ahead without looking at anything in particular.”[541] The caterpillar has come face to face with the butterfly. Her “half-open” lips look “as though they had broken away only a moment before from a long, passionate kiss and were not yet sated.”[542] The narrator tells us that her “air of mingled gaiety and sadness set her apart from ordinary mankind”[543] such that “she no longer belongs to this mean, cruel world,” and he refuses to “defile her name by contact with earthly things.”[544]

While at times it seems to him that this “fragile” visitor has “no affinity with the world of earthly creatures,” at other times he takes a more complex view of the matter: “To me she was a woman and at the same time had within her something that transcended humanity.”[545] Once she is gone, he also feels as if he can no longer endure the vulgarity of mundane terrestrial existence, and so he withdraws “from the company of man, from the company of the stupid and the successful . . .”[546] It is as if he is withdrawing into a cocoon, for she has set in motion some irreversible metamorphosis that “was drawing some [latent] faculty out of [his] being.”[547] It is almost as if he can float, and stirring within him, he “felt a new and singular form of life.”[548] She has put him in touch with the germinal form of the potencies within that have transformed her from a woman into an ageless superhuman being. Here is how our narrator describes the dawning of those superpowers within himself, as he emerges from out of his chrysalis:

My being was somehow connected with that of all the creatures that existed about me, with all the shadows that quivered around me. I was in intimate, inviolable communion with the outside world and with all created things, and a complex system of invisible conductors transmitted a restless flow of impulses between me and all the elements of nature. There was no conception, no notion which I felt to be foreign to me. I was capable of penetrating with ease the secrets of the painters of the past, the mysteries of abstruse philosophies, the ancient folly of ideas and species. At that moment I participated in the revolutions of earth and heaven, in the germination of plants and in the instinctive movements of animals. Past and future, far and near had joined together and fused in the life of my mind . . . it is at such times as this that a real artist is capable of producing a masterpiece.[549]

Yet the ethereal girl in The Blind Owl does not quite look like the imago that captivates Strieber. With her huge black eyes, her ethereal limbs, and elongated, fluid stature, but with human hair, lips, feet, and digits, she is like a cross between one of them and one of us—what in the fairy faith was called a changeling. There is a folkloric precursor to UFO encounters that involves the abduction and transformation of humans by means of some quasi-sexual intercourse with fairies. One of the first such cases in the modern UFO lore is that of the Brazilian Antonio Villas-Boas, who had sex with a beautiful but not quite human-looking woman around 1 AM on the night of October 5, 1957 after “something like a red star” grew in the sky and turned into a bright, egg-shaped object that forcibly brought him aboard.[550] Drawing on Evans-Wentz and Reverend Kirk, Vallée shows that there was a widespread Celtic belief in nocturnal fairy seduction of humans and in fairies stealing humans away to their lairs, and especially kidnapping children.[551] The medieval scholastics referred to the fairy mistresses who would come to mortal men at night as “familiar spirits.”[552]

Some women of the medieval era were so terribly accosted by fairy men who would appear from out of nowhere when they were alone and vulnerable that extensive treatises were written on how to prevent attracting such unearthly advances and how to break free of them once they had already begun. One of the most substantive of these, cited by Vallée, is De Daemonialitate, et Incubus, et Succubis, written in the second half of the seventeenth century with all the tremendous authority of Father Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari de Ameno, a Franciscan theologian who served as Councilor to the Supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition and as a trusted advisor of the Archbishop of Milan.[553]

One unfamiliar with Latin texts such as this or the Compendium Maleficarum should not suppose that these august scholars are carrying on about “wet dreams” or some such banality. They had intricate classificatory schemes for sinful experiences. Sex with the “daemonic” faeries had its place among these according to precise parameters ruling out other, less serious sins, such as nocturnal emission due to impure reveries or willful bestiality.[554] The “daemons” involved in such cases were not the same as those which were thought to possess people; they responded neither to exorcism nor to the display of holy relics.[555] Sinistrari even lays out distinct penalties for people who were unwitting contactees and those who had deliberately called on the fairies to contact them.[556]

Midwives were commonly abducted so that they could assist the faeries in the birth of human, or at least partly human, hybrid children spawned by the interbreeding of faeries and their human consorts.[557] There was a whole protocol for securing the return of children or other persons who had been “taken” by the faeries to perform certain services in Elfland.[558] Sometimes, instead of returning their own child, the faeries would leave the parents with a changeling in its place—a not quite-human-looking hybrid version of the child; sometimes, adults were also traded for changelings.[559] The belief in changelings was no joke. Many children suffered terrible abuse on account of it at the hands of parents who wanted their obedient son or daughter back, not to mention the witches burned at the stake with the encouragement of husbands who thought that the fairies had replaced their dutiful wife with a changeling; freaks did not fare so well, either—despite the opinion of Sinistrari and other learned doctors that the hybrids were beautifully built and intrepidly bold.[560]

At one point, Strieber briefly suggests an alternative to his larval-imago hypothesis. Rather than us being a larval form of the visitors, the transformation taking place is a metamorphosis of mankind into a hybrid species, a cross between humanity as it is now and the visitors. He introduces the “changeling” hypothesis in the context of recounting another abductee’s experiences with being shown children who looked like a cross between the visitors and humans, with large heads that come to a point at the chin and huge, slanted eyes, but with a more well-developed nose, human hair, and more human appendages.[561] In other words, they look like the ethereal girl in The Blind Owl. He implies that the false pregnancies that female abductees sometimes suffer through, when taken together with the removal of sperm from males that Strieber himself experienced, might be evidence for fetuses that are being transplanted at some stage as part of a hybridization process.[562] Of course, one might also see this “hybridization” more spiritually and symbolically, and it is in these terms that Strieber develops this theme in the concluding section of Communion—which begins with a meditation on the occult significance of the Triangle, a symbol often found imprinted on the bodies of abductees and also one of the few shapes of UFOs.

In our triadic relationship with the visitors,[563] they are an active, aggressive force that seeks to engender something beyond itself through union with us. The sexual element of the encounters Strieber recounts in Communion is undeniable. Just as in sexual union, there is a “little death” in the climax of ecstasy, and just as a child engendered by such intercourse supplants her parents, what would be born of a communion between “us” and “them” would supplant both terrestrial human civilization and their own unearthly society. However, for this to be a passionately ecstatic union that channels the creative force of Life, rather than simply a devastating rape, we have to develop the strength and intelligence to meet them on equal terms. We may still be the more passive and receptive force in this union, but we must be a force nonetheless—we must push back. Sex involves dynamic friction, and generative strife is necessary for death to mean something other than a corpse, for it to mean the shedding of a chrysalis.

The visitors conceal their presence and work in the shadows because thus far, open “contact” with them would only mean a conquest of the kind that rendered meaningless the rich cultures of the native and aboriginal peoples who were “contacted” by European explorers and colonists. If the visitors see in us the germinating potential of a way of life different from their own, of something new that would revitalize their weary, immeasurably ancient souls, the last thing that they are going to do is initiate a “contact” that would abort this terrestrial cultural flowering. We have to openly face them on our own terms, when we are ready to see them not as “angels,” “demons,” or even “aliens,” but as existential possibilities within ourselves from which we are no longer alienated.

Fairies may be the images of our own posthuman future. When I say “images,” I mean that we are imagining them actively—in the Suhrawardian sense—as the projects of a human collective unconscious with a futural temporality, in other words with a past and present that emerges from out of its future. The “visitors” may exist in a future world, but if this were a utopia, they would not be “visiting” us here in the way that they are—in the way that the black-clad celestial maiden appears at the doorstep of the narrator of The Blind Owl, weary and sorrowful, ready to surrender herself. Is she a refugee from that drab, ash-gray city of austerely geometric buildings—where the things of nature are weirdly withered and nothing flowers but the impossible?

Like the ethereal maiden, Bugam Dasi, or the narrator’s wife, Strieber’s visitor is a supernaturally radiant, incomprehensibly fierce woman, capable of terribly disciplinarian manipulation, but there is also something exquisitely frail and agedly mournful about her. She, too, has “hungry eyes.” That is because Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd is unfulfilling. The most extraordinary utopias that we have imagined for ourselves are still too arbitrarily bound by law and sterile. Our celestial counterparts, our timeless inner angels or daena, who have to live in that world we have shaped for them from out of our lucid dreams, profoundly resent us for that fact. Their presence here is a challenge to the imagination. By bringing to bear upon our still youthful vigor their experience of our eventual failure of imagination, they intend to modify the developmental direction of the larvae in its chrysalis. They want to transform the very imago itself, because nothing—absolutely nothing—is ever a “perfect” form. This is a lesson that the children of Zarathustra could use more than anyone else.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JASON REZA JORJANI, Ph.D. is a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) and a Senior Advisor to the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees of the Persian (Iranian) Renaissance Foundation. His first book, Prometheus and Atlas, won the 2016 Book Award from the Parapsychological Association (PA). He is also the author of World State of Emergency and Lovers of Sophia. His website is jasonrezajorjani.com.

Notes

[←1]

Sadegh Hedayat, Neyrangestân in Farhangé Âmiyânehé Mardomé Irân (Tehran: Nashré Chashmeh, 1378 [1999]), p. 85.

[←2]

Ibid., pp. 86–88.

[←3]

Ibid., pp. 22–23.

[←4]

Ibid., p. 22.

[←5]

Ibid., p. 139.

[←6]

Ibid., p. 31.

[←7]

Ibid.

[←8]

Ibid., p. 23.

[←9]

Sadegh Hedayat, Owsâneh in Farhangé Âmiyânehé Mardomé Irân (Tehran: Nashré Chashmeh, 1378 [1999]), pp. 165–66.

[←10]

Ibid., p. 233.

[←11]

Hedayat, Neyrangestân, p. 23.

[←12]

Ibid., p. 27.

[←13]

Ibid., pp. 28–29.

[←14]

Ibid., p. 29.

[←15]

Ibid., p. 24.

[←16]

Ibid.

[←17]

Ibid., p. 25.

[←18]

Ibid., pp. 24, 32.

[←19]

Hedayat, Owsâneh, pp. 163–64, 165.

[←20]

Ibid., p. 166.

[←21]

Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1987).

[←22]

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, translated by D. P. Costello (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 8.

[←23]

Ibid., p. 4.

[←24]

Ibid., pp. 90–91.

[←25]

Ibid., pp. 5, 11.

[←26]

Mehdi Aminrazavi (ed.), “The Fate of the Soul, from Younger Avestan Texts” in An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 48–49, 51.

[←27]

Ali Jafarey (ed., trans.), The Gathas, Our Guide: The Thought-Provoking Divine Songs of Zarathustra (Cypress, Ca.: Ushta Publications, 1989), p. 62.

[←28]

Ibid., p. 85.

[←29]

Henry Corbin, “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism” in Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London: Kegan Paul International, 1983), pp. 10, 17.

[←30]

Henry Corbin, “Sufism and Sophia” in The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy (Berkeley, Ca.: North Atlantic Books, 1998), p. 221.

[←31]

Jafarey, The Gathas, p. 84.

[←32]

Corbin, “Sufism and Sophia,” p. 229.

[←33]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 5.

[←34]

Ibid., p. 7.

[←35]

Ibid., p. 49.

[←36]

Ibid., p. 49.

[←37]

Ibid., p. 18.

[←38]

Ibid., p. 10.

[←39]

Ibid., pp. 41–42.

[←40]

Ibid., p. 43.

[←41]

Ibid., pp. 6–7.

[←42]

Ibid., p. 44.

[←43]

Ibid., pp. 32, 36, 108.

[←44]

Carsten Colpe, “Development of Religious Thought” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 3(2) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 819–65.

[←45]

Jafarey, The Gathas.

[←46]

Ibid., p. 31.

[←47]

Ibid., 39.

[←48]

Corbin, “Iranian Studies and Philosophy” in The Voyage and the Messenger, p. 66.

[←49]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 7, 15.

[←50]

Ibid., p. 7.

[←51]

Ibid., p. 40.

[←52]

Ibid., p. 2.

[←53]

See: R. C. Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1971).

[←54]

Corbin, “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism,” p. 23.

[←55]

Ibid., p. 30.

[←56]

Ibid., p. 33.

[←57]

Ibid., p. 31.

[←58]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 123.

[←59]

Ibid., pp. 112–13.

[←60]

Corbin, “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism,” p. 33.

[←61]

Ibid., p. 34.

[←62]

Ibid., pp. 22–29.

[←63]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 72.

[←64]

Corbin, “Iranian Studies and Philosophy,” p. 63.

[←65]

Corbin, “Sufism and Sophia,” pp. 221–22, 223, 227.

[←66]

Corbin, “Iranian Studies and Philosophy,” p. 60.

[←67]

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp. 531–32.

[←68]

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library: Random House, 2000), pp. 783–84.

[←69]

Henry Corbin, “Iranian Studies and Philosophy,” p. 60.

[←70]

Ibid., p. 65.

[←71]

Ibid., p. 66.

[←72]

Ibid., p. 66.

[←73]

Jafary, The Gathas, p. 33.

[←74]

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 181–82.

[←75]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 103.

[←76]

Ibid., p. 30.

[←77]

Ibid., p. 37.

[←78]

Ibid., p. 37.

[←79]

Ibid., pp. 112–13, 123.

[←80]

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 274–75.

[←81]

Compare: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 274–75 with “The Prologue” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

[←82]

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), pp. 12–13.

[←83]

Henry Corbin, “Iranian Studies and Philosophy,” p. 63.

[←84]

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 228–31.

[←85]

See “Hedayat and Rilke” and “The Blind Owl, Nerval, Kafka, Poe and the Surrealists: Affinities” in Michael C. Hillmann (ed.), Hedayat’s “The Blind Owl” Forty Years After (Austin, Tx: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1978).

[←86]

Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (New York: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2002), pp. 87–88.

[←87]

Sadegh Hedayat (tr.), Zandé Houman Yasn (Tehran: Mohammad Hossein Elmi Publishing House, 2537).

[←88]

Jafarey, The Gathas, pp. 31–32, 89, 106.

[←89]

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 12–13.

[←90]

Ibid., pp. 78–79.

[←91]

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 16–19.

[←92]

Ibid., pp. 96–99.

[←93]

Ibid., pp. 99–102.

[←94]

Ibid., pp. 98–99.

[←95]

Ibid., pp. 215–21.

[←96]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 49.

[←97]

Ibid., pp. 51–52.

[←98]

Ibid., p. 52.

[←99]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←100]

Ibid., p. 80.

[←101]

Ibid., pp. 44–45.

[←102]

Ibid., p. 52.

[←103]

Ibid., p. 53.

[←104]

Ibid., p. 69.

[←105]

Ibid., pp. 72–73.

[←106]

Ibid., p. 82.

[←107]

I am not the first to suggest a Gnostic pedigree for Existentialism. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 320–56.

[←108]

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 15–16.

[←109]

Ibid., p. 17.

[←110]

Ibid., pp. 98–99.

[←111]

Ibid., p. 160.

[←112]

Ibid., p. 200.

[←113]

Ibid., pp. 194–95.

[←114]

Ibid., pp. 272–75.

[←115]

Ibid., pp. 156–58.

[←116]

Ibid., pp. 203–204.

[←117]

Jafarey, The Gathas, p. 33.

[←118]

Ibid., pp. 38–39.

[←119]

Ibid., pp. 61–62, 66, 83, 87.

[←120]

Corbin, “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism,” p. 27.

[←121]

Ibid., pp. 18–19.

[←122]

Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, pp. 33, 164.

[←123]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 11–12.

[←124]

Ibid., p. 16.

[←125]

Ibid., p. 13.

[←126]

Ibid., p. 1.

[←127]

Ibid., p. 2.

[←128]

Ibid., pp. 2, 5.

[←129]

Ibid., p. 3.

[←130]

Ibid., p. 47.

[←131]

Ibid., p. 92.

[←132]

Ibid., pp. 123–24.

[←133]

Ibid., pp. 70–71.

[←134]

Ibid., pp. 28, 32.

[←135]

Ibid., p. 54.

[←136]

Ibid., p. 128.

[←137]

Ibid., p. 103.

[←138]

Ibid., p. 48.

[←139]

Ibid., p. 49.

[←140]

Ibid., p. 114.

[←141]

Ehsan Yarshater, “Mazdakism” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 3(2) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 995–97.

[←142]

Ibid., pp. 112; 120–21.

[←143]

Ibid., pp. 121–22.

[←144]

Ibid., p. 1005.

[←145]

Katouzian, “Iranian Culture and Romantic Nationalism,” in Sadegh Hedayat, pp. 71–73.

[←146]

Yarshater, “Mazdakism,” p. 1023.

[←147]

Ibid., pp. 999, 1001.

[←148]

Ibid., pp. 1009–10.

[←149]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 54.

[←150]

Ibid., p. 50.

[←151]

Ibid., p. 66.

[←152]

Ibid., p. 54.

[←153]

Ibid., p. 60.

[←154]

Ibid., p. 55.

[←155]

Ibid., p. 57.

[←156]

Ibid., p. 58.

[←157]

Ibid., p. 116.

[←158]

Ibid., p. 61.

[←159]

Ibid., p. 61.

[←160]

Ibid., pp. 19, 66.

[←161]

Ibid., pp. 9, 56, 104.

[←162]

Ibid., p. 68.

[←163]

Ibid., pp. 77–78.

[←164]

Ibid., p. 78.

[←165]

Ibid., p. 78.

[←166]

Ibid.

[←167]

Ibid.

[←168]

Ibid., pp. 84, 86.

[←169]

Richard A. Williams, “Buddhism and The Blind Owl,” in Hillmann, Hedayat’s ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, pp. 100–104.

[←170]

R. E. Emmerick, “Buddhism Among Iranian Peoples” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 3(2), pp. 949–64.

[←171]

Richard Frye, The Heritage of Persia (Costa Mesa, Cal.: Mazda Publishers, 1993), pp. 223–24; Emmerick, “Buddhism Among Iranian Peoples,” p. 995.

[←172]

Emmerick, “Buddhism Among Iranian Peoples,” p. 956.

[←173]

Vladimir Minorsky, Persia: The Immortal Kingdom (New York: New York Geographical Society, 1971), pp. 104–106.

[←174]

W. Y. Evans-Wentz (ed.), The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 157–58.

[←175]

Ibid., pp. 159–60, 177.

[←176]

Ibid., pp. 137–39.

[←177]

Ibid., p. 148.

[←178]

Ibid., p. 167.

[←179]

Ibid., pp. 178–79.

[←180]

Ibid., pp. 180–81.

[←181]

Ibid., pp. 180–81.

[←182]

Ibid., p. 180.

[←183]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 1.

[←184]

Ibid., p. 43.

[←185]

Setting “face to face” is a term used throughout the Bardo Thodol, and it is also an expression of mystical erotic love in the Persian tradition: chehreh be chehreh.

[←186]

Leonard Bogle, “The Khayyâmic Influence in The Blind Owl” in Hedayat’s ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, pp. 87–88.

[←187]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←188]

Ibid., p. 2.

[←189]

See Quatrains 101, 102, 103.

[←190]

See Quatrain 34.

[←191]

See Quatrains 50, 105.

[←192]

See Quatrains 7, 3.

[←193]

See Quatrains 14, 8.

[←194]

See Quatrain 13.

[←195]

See Quatrains 40, 107, 99, 191, 141.

[←196]

See Quatrain 140.

[←197]

See Quatrains 129, 144.

[←198]

See Quatrain 6.

[←199]

See Quatrains 145, 85.

[←200]

See Quatrains 74, 122.

[←201]

See Quatrains 56, 54, 165.

[←202]

Sadegh Hedayat, Tarânehâyé Khayyâm [Songs of Khayyam] (Tehran: Mohammad Hossein Elmi Publishing House, 2536).

[←203]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 90, 116, 124.

[←204]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←205]

Ibid., pp. 106–107.

[←206]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←207]

Ibid., pp. 98–99.

[←208]

Ibid., p. 102.

[←209]

Ibid., pp. 90, 99–100.

[←210]

Ibid., pp. 98–100.

[←211]

Ibid., p. 127.

[←212]

Ibid., pp. 1, 5.

[←213]

Ibid., p. 48.

[←214]

David C. Champagne, “Hindu Imagery in The Blind Owl” in Hedayat’s ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, pp. 112–13.

[←215]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 55–57.

[←216]

Ibid., p. 6.

[←217]

Ibid., p. 128.

[←218]

Ibid., p. 55.

[←219]

Champagne, “Hindu Imagery in The Blind Owl,” p. 110.

[←220]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 57.

[←221]

Ibid., p. 58.

[←222]

Ibid.

[←223]

Ibid., pp. 48, 58.

[←224]

David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 89.

[←225]

Ibid., pp. 47, 57.

[←226]

Ibid., pp. 6, 18, 20.

[←227]

Ibid., pp. 1–2, 68.

[←228]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←229]

Ibid., p. 9.

[←230]

Ibid.

[←231]

Ibid., p. 84.

[←232]

Ibid., pp. 9, 25.

[←233]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 9.

[←234]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, pp. 70–71.

[←235]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 9.

[←236]

Ibid., p. 111.

[←237]

Ibid., pp. 11–13.

[←238]

Ibid., p. 13.

[←239]

Ibid., pp. 62–63, 107–109.

[←240]

Ibid., p. 63.

[←241]

Ibid.

[←242]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, p. 23.

[←243]

Ibid., p. 37.

[←244]

Ibid., pp. 29, 68.

[←245]

Ibid., p. 36.

[←246]

Ibid., p. 79.

[←247]

Ibid., p. 80.

[←248]

Ibid., p. 70.

[←249]

Ibid., pp. 70, 80.

[←250]

Ibid., p. 80.

[←251]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 125–26.

[←252]

Ibid., p. 127.

[←253]

Ibid.

[←254]

Ibid., pp. 118–19.

[←255]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, pp. 7, 89.

[←256]

Ibid., p. 11.

[←257]

Ibid.

[←258]

Ibid., pp. 70–71.

[←259]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 127.

[←260]

Ibid., pp. 11-12.

[←261]

Ibid., p. 14.

[←262]

Ibid., p. 59.

[←263]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, p. 89.

[←264]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 127.

[←265]

Ibid., p. 121.

[←266]

Ibid., pp. 10–11.

[←267]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, p. 49.

[←268]

Ibid., pp. 25, 37.

[←269]

Ibid., pp. 55–56.

[←270]

Ibid., p. 37.

[←271]

Ibid., p. 11.

[←272]

Ibid., p. 3.

[←273]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 112–13.

[←274]

Ibid., p. 6.

[←275]

Ibid., p. 19.

[←276]

Ibid., p. 121.

[←277]

Ibid., p. 66.

[←278]

Ibid., p. 111.

[←279]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, pp. 46, 54, 78.

[←280]

Ibid., p. 82.

[←281]

Ibid., p. 87.

[←282]

Ibid., pp. 78, 83.

[←283]

Ibid., p. 78.

[←284]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 127.

[←285]

Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, p. 87.

[←286]

Ibid., p. 89.

[←287]

Ibid., p. 54.

[←288]

Champagne, “Hindu Imagery in The Blind Owl,” p. 108.

[←289]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 35.

[←290]

Ibid., p. 107.

[←291]

Ibid., pp. 30–31.

[←292]

Ibid., p. 37.

[←293]

Ibid., p. 73.

[←294]

Ibid., p. 79.

[←295]

Ibid., pp. 93–95.

[←296]

Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy, pp. 117–34.

[←297]

Ibid., pp. 135–71.

[←298]

Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis: or, the Imaginary and the Imaginal (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1976).

[←299]

Henry Corbin, “From Heidegger to Suhrawardi,” an interview with Philip Nemo recorded for Radio France-Culture on June 2, 1976, available in English at https://web.archive.org/web/20090722112111/www.amiscorbin.com/textes/anglais/interviewnemo.htm.

[←300]

Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shī’ite Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 59, 76, 79.

[←301]

Ibid., p. 81.

[←302]

Ibid., pp. 11, 87–88.

[←303]

Ibid., pp. xxiii, 12, 82, 102.

[←304]

Ibid., pp. xxix, 102.

[←305]

Ibid., p. 87.

[←306]

Ibid., p. xxvi.

[←307]

Ibid., p. 11.

[←308]

Ibid.

[←309]

Ibid., pp. 78, 88.

[←310]

Ibid., pp. xiii, xxvii.

[←311]

Ibid., p. 18.

[←312]

William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).

[←313]

Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, pp. xxi, 74–76.

[←314]

Ibid., p. 75.

[←315]

Ibid., p. xxix.

[←316]

Ibid., p. 73.

[←317]

Ibid., pp. 19, 23.

[←318]

Ibid., p. 25.

[←319]

Ibid., p. 17.

[←320]

Ibid., p. 16.

[←321]

Ibid., p. 24.

[←322]

Ibid., p. 30.

[←323]

Charles Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age (Kempton, Ill.: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997); Charles Hapgood, The Path of the Pole (Kempton, Ill.: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999).

[←324]

Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, p. 24.

[←325]

Ibid., pp. 21, 24–25, 73.

[←326]

Ibid., p. 73–74.

[←327]

Ibid., p. 73.

[←328]

Ibid., p. 103.

[←329]

Sadegh Hedayat, “Chand Nokteh bar Vis-o-Ramin” in Majmu’ah-‘i nivishtah’ha-yi parâkandah- ‘I Sâdiq Hidâyat (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1344 [1965]), p. 518.

[←330]

Ibid., pp. 518–19.

[←331]

Sadegh Hedayat, Neyrangestan in Farhangé Âmiyânehé Mardomé Irân (Tehran: Nashré Cashmeh, 1378 [1999]), pp. 146–48.

[←332]

Ibid., pp. 24–25.

[←333]

Ibid., p. 6.

[←334]

Ibid., p. 13.

[←335]

Ibid., p. 38.

[←336]

Ibid., p. 31.

[←337]

Ibid., p. 37.

[←338]

Ibid., p. 16.

[←339]

Nizami Ganjavi, The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxxi.

[←340]

Ibid., p. 101.

[←341]

Ibid., pp. 102–103.

[←342]

Ibid., p. 104.

[←343]

Ibid., p. 105.

[←344]

Ibid., p. 102.

[←345]

Ibid., p. 103.

[←346]

Ibid., p. 105.

[←347]

Ibid., p. 108.

[←348]

Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 63–69.

[←349]

Corbin, “The Theme of the Voyage and the Messenger,” pp. 145–53.

[←350]

Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds (New York: Penguin Books, 1984).

[←351]

Corbin, “The Theme of the Voyage and the Messenger,” pp. 144–45, 147.

[←352]

Ibid., p. 149.

[←353]

Ibid., p. 69.

[←354]

Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar, “Buf-e-Kur as a Title” in Hedayat’s ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, p. 69.

[←355]

Ibid., p. 70.

[←356]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 4.

[←357]

Ibid., pp. 123–24.

[←358]

Nizami, The Haft Paykar, pp. 108–109.

[←359]

Ibid., pp. 111–12.

[←360]

Ibid., p. 112.

[←361]

Ibid., pp. 113–14.

[←362]

Ibid., p. 114.

[←363]

Ibid., pp. 114, 121–22.

[←364]

Ibid., p. 122.

[←365]

Ibid., p. 117.

[←366]

Ibid., p. 118.

[←367]

Ibid., p. 120.

[←368]

Ibid., pp. 120, 123.

[←369]

Ibid., pp. 121–22.

[←370]

Ibid., pp. 123–24.

[←371]

Ibid., p. 127.

[←372]

Ibid., pp. 128–29.

[←373]

Ibid., pp. 130–31.

[←374]

Ibid., pp. 131–32.

[←375]

Ibid., p. 132.

[←376]

Ibid., pp. xi–xii, xxx–xxxii, xxxviii.

[←377]

Ibid., p. 233.

[←378]

Ibid., p. xxxv.

[←379]

Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat, pp. 248–49.

[←380]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 67.

[←381]

Ibid., p. 49.

[←382]

Ibid., p. 67.

[←383]

Ibid.

[←384]

Ibid., p. 23.

[←385]

Ibid., p. 1.

[←386]

Ibid., p. 3.

[←387]

Ibid., p. 2.

[←388]

Ibid.

[←389]

Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record (New York: Harmony Books, 2010), p. 86.

[←390]

Ibid., p. 88.

[←391]

Ibid., pp. 89–90.

[←392]

Ibid., pp. 88, 91–92.

[←393]

Ibid., p. 89.

[←394]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←395]

Ibid.

[←396]

Ibid., p. 91.

[←397]

Ibid., p. 91.

[←398]

Whitley Strieber, Communion, p. 241.

[←399]

Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993), pp. 9–12.

[←400]

Ibid., pp. 102–103.

[←401]

Ibid., p. 27.

[←402]

Ibid., p. 28.

[←403]

Ibid., pp. 50, 58.

[←404]

Ibid., p. 28.

[←405]

Ibid.

[←406]

Ibid., p. 41.

[←407]

Ibid., p. 103.

[←408]

Ibid., p. 107.

[←409]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 28.

[←410]

Ibid., pp. 29, 37.

[←411]

Ibid., pp. 35–36.

[←412]

Ibid., p. 35.

[←413]

Ibid., pp. 32–33, 36.

[←414]

Ibid., p. 38.

[←415]

Ibid., p. 32.

[←416]

Ibid., pp. 120–22.

[←417]

Ibid., pp. 129–30.

[←418]

Ibid., p. 130.

[←419]

Ibid., p. 5.

[←420]

Ibid., p. 15.

[←421]

Ibid., p. 79.

[←422]

Strieber, Communion, pp. 102, 46.

[←423]

Ibid., pp. 24–25.

[←424]

Ibid., p. 123.

[←425]

Ibid., p. 132.

[←426]

Ibid., p. 50.

[←427]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 37.

[←428]

Ibid., p. 4.

[←429]

Ibid., p. 4.

[←430]

Ibid., p. 11.

[←431]

Vallée, Passport to Magonia, pp. 7, 59.

[←432]

Ibid, p. 32.

[←433]

Ibid., pp. 58, 67.

[←434]

Ibid., p. 67.

[←435]

Ibid., p. 81.

[←436]

Ibid., p. 60.

[←437]

Ibid., pp. 60–61.

[←438]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, pp. 10, 19.

[←439]

Ibid., p. 6.

[←440]

Ibid., p. 27.

[←441]

Ibid., p. 10.

[←442]

Ibid., p. 13.

[←443]

Ibid., p. 10.

[←444]

Ibid., p. 4.

[←445]

Ibid., p. 9.

[←446]

Ibid.

[←447]

Ibid., p. 13.

[←448]

Ibid., p. 19.

[←449]

Ibid., p. 18.

[←450]

Ibid., p. 9.

[←451]

Ibid., p. 38.

[←452]

Ibid., p. 9.

[←453]

Ibid., p. 20.

[←454]

Ibid., p. 25.

[←455]

Ibid., p. 38.

[←456]

Ibid., p. 16.

[←457]

Ibid., p. 4.

[←458]

Ibid., p. 9.

[←459]

Ibid., pp. 6, 18.

[←460]

Ibid., p. 18.

[←461]

Ibid., p. 34.

[←462]

Strieber, Communion, pp. 30–31.

[←463]

Ibid., pp. 31, 33.

[←464]

Ibid., p. 120.

[←465]

Ibid.

[←466]

Ibid., p. 242.

[←467]

Ibid., p. 124.

[←468]

Ibid., p. 126.

[←469]

Ibid., p. 286.

[←470]

Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar, “Buf-e-Kur as a Title,” p. 69.

[←471]

Ibid., p. 70.

[←472]

Ibid., p. 69.

[←473]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 4.

[←474]

Ibid., pp. 123–124.

[←475]

Strieber, Communion, p. 43.

[←476]

Ibid., p. 44.

[←477]

Ibid., p. 47.

[←478]

Ibid., pp. 44–45.

[←479]

Ibid., p. 20.

[←480]

Ibid., p. 49.

[←481]

Ibid., p. 45.

[←482]

Ibid., p. 46.

[←483]

Ibid., p. 47.

[←484]

Ibid., p. 48.

[←485]

Ibid.

[←486]

Ibid., pp. 65–66.

[←487]

Ibid., p. 72.

[←488]

Ibid., p. 73.

[←489]

Ibid., p. 75.

[←490]

Ibid.

[←491]

Ibid., p. 25.

[←492]

Ibid., pp. 104–105.

[←493]

Ibid., p. 28.

[←494]

Ibid., p. 29.

[←495]

Ibid., p. 68.

[←496]

Ibid., p. 94.

[←497]

Ibid., p. 72.

[←498]

Ibid., p. 90.

[←499]

Ibid., p. 86.

[←500]

Ibid., p. 33.

[←501]

Ibid., p. 34.

[←502]

Ibid.

[←503]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 12.

[←504]

Ibid., p. 13.

[←505]

Ibid., p. 14.

[←506]

Ibid.

[←507]

Ibid., p. 16.

[←508]

Ibid.

[←509]

Ibid., p. 17.

[←510]

Ibid., p. 24.

[←511]

Strieber, Communion, p. 147.

[←512]

Ibid., pp. 147, 164.

[←513]

Ibid., p. 164.

[←514]

Ibid., p. 165.

[←515]

Ibid., pp. 165–68.

[←516]

Ibid., p. 167.

[←517]

Ibid., pp. 165, 168.

[←518]

Ibid., pp. 40–41.

[←519]

Ibid., pp. 165–66.

[←520]

Ibid., p. 243.

[←521]

Ibid., p. 244.

[←522]

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 82–84.

[←523]

Strieber, Communion, p. 30.

[←524]

Ibid., pp. 68, 96.

[←525]

Ibid., p. 95.

[←526]

Ibid.

[←527]

Ibid., pp. 96–97, 224–25.

[←528]

Ibid., p. 96.

[←529]

Ibid., p. 224.

[←530]

Ibid., p. 103.

[←531]

Ibid., p. 96.

[←532]

Ibid., p. 224.

[←533]

Ibid.

[←534]

Ibid., p. 96.

[←535]

Ibid., p. 97.

[←536]

Ibid., p. 225.

[←537]

Ibid., p. 221.

[←538]

Ibid., p. 114.

[←539]

Ibid., pp. 26, 28, 82.

[←540]

Ibid., pp. 26, 104.

[←541]

Hedayat, The Blind Owl, p. 9.

[←542]

Ibid., p. 9.

[←543]

Ibid.

[←544]

Ibid., pp. 4–5.

[←545]

Ibid., p. 18.

[←546]

Ibid., p. 5.

[←547]

Ibid., p. 18.

[←548]

Ibid., pp. 18, 22.

[←549]

Ibid., pp. 22–21.

[←550]

Vallée, Passport to Magonia, pp. 114–15.

[←551]

Ibid., pp. 100, 118.

[←552]

Ibid., p. 118.

[←553]

Ibid., p. 120.

[←554]

Ibid., p. 125.

[←555]

Ibid., p. 126.

[←556]

Ibid.

[←557]

Ibid., p. 101.

[←558]

Ibid., p. 104.

[←559]

Ibid., pp. 104–105.

[←560]

Ibid., pp. 104, 118.

[←561]

Strieber, Communion, p. 273.

[←562]

Ibid.

[←563]

Ibid., pp. 276–80, 291.

Table of Contents

Front Matter

Cover

Title

Copyright

Frontispiece

Dedication

Contents

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

About the Author