Archetypal Interpretation of the Myth of Zahhak — Part 2: Zahhak's Rule over Iran

This seminar calls Mehregan a festival of the victory of light, but “light” is not treated as an abstract symbol or as the simple triumph of one army over another. The argument centres on Kaveh the Blacksmith and Zahhak and asks how a society becomes free from a power that seeks to govern not only bodies but also minds—power that requires people to repeat its lie as truth. The first site of resistance is therefore individual judgment and conscience.

Kaveh enters the story when he is asked to certify that Zahhak is a just ruler. After losing his sons, he refuses to sign a statement that contradicts what he has lived and witnessed. The seminar treats this refusal as decisive. Totalizing power is not satisfied with behavioural obedience; it seeks control over the narrative through which reality is understood. Kaveh’s “no” is consequently more than protest against a particular policy. It is the recovery of independent judgment. As long as a person can distinguish what they know from what authority orders them to say, power has not fully colonized the mind.

Kaveh’s craft acquires symbolic importance as well. A blacksmith works with earth, metal, fire, and transformation, creating a new form through heat. The seminar reads this through an alchemical and individuation-oriented vocabulary. Effective resistance is not simply an explosion of anger; the raw material of suffering has to be transformed through consciousness. Kaveh does not overcome grief by forgetting it. He turns personal loss into a form of collective responsibility. His revolt therefore becomes a model for converting wounded experience into action without surrendering judgment.

The argument then connects this theme with Zoroaster and the formula of good thought, good word, and good deed. In the seminar’s interpretation, a major contribution of the Zoroastrian tradition is its emphasis on ethical choice by the person, rather than the passive absorption of tribal or external command. Individuality here is not selfishness. It is the capacity to stand on one’s own ethical judgment. The same motif is traced into strands of Iranian mysticism, where the sacred dignity of the individual can limit the claim of religious or political institutions to monopolize truth.

Fereydun and his cow-headed mace add another layer. The cow Barmayeh is associated in the story with multiple colours, and the seminar treats that multicoloured image as a metaphor for Iranian culture. Cultural continuity is said to depend on the ability to absorb, combine, and sustain difference rather than impose uniformity. The rainbow thus becomes an image of possibility and hope.

By the end, the “victory of light” has three related meanings: freeing the mind from compulsory falsehood, transforming grief into responsible action, and protecting a society whose internal diversity remains alive. Mehregan becomes a reminder that freedom begins at the point where an individual refuses to surrender the truth of lived experience to the command of power.