Mehregan and an Archetypal Interpretation of the Myth of Zahhak — Part 1: Zahhak's Rise to Power

This first Mehregan seminar begins with the festival itself. Alongside Nowruz, Mehregan is presented as one of the great festivals of ancient Iran, situated at the threshold of the darker half of the year and associated with Mehr/Mithra, the victorious sun, and confidence in the eventual victory of light and truth. Yet the seminar avoids turning that symbolism into a simple opposition between a luminous Iran and a dark “other.” Its real question is how light itself can become corrupted within the individual and within power, and how a culture can remain rooted in its past without converting historical pride into collective narcissism.

The story of Jamshid provides the first major case. Jamshid has extraordinary civilizational achievements, but eventually attributes all of them to himself and treats his own “I” as the source of order. In this reading, the loss of his farr or royal glory is not merely the result of an external defeat; it follows the inflation of the self. Priests and figures of knowledge become silent before his grandiosity, so the myth also becomes a warning about societies in which nobody can correct the ruler. The same warning is applied to national identity. Iran’s exceptionally rich cultural inheritance does not establish an inherent superiority over other peoples. When historical pride becomes a conviction that “we are special and therefore better,” it repeats Jamshid’s error and endangers the very culture it claims to defend.

Zahhak then represents another failure: the destruction or burial of one’s roots. His killing of his father Merdas is read symbolically as a severance from origin, while his appetite and ambition represent drives that escape ethical and conscious regulation. The seminar brings in the archetypal image of the chariot and horses, alongside a psychoanalytic analogy in which powerful drives require guidance rather than denial. The Greek myth of Phaethon makes a related point: possession of solar power is useless, and even catastrophic, without the capacity to steer it.

A contrasting model appears in the Egyptian story of Osiris, Seth, and Horus. Horus descends, confronts Seth, loses an eye, and restores his relationship to the father, but Osiris does not simply return to rule the living world. He remains associated with the realm of the dead, judgment, and inherited wisdom. The seminar uses this to formulate a more mature relationship to tradition. The past should be recovered and integrated, not reinstated as the literal political order of the present. The hero returns from the encounter with the past carrying a transformed vision—a new eye.

Mehregan therefore becomes a meditation on cultural continuity through transformation. Forgetting the past can reproduce Zahhak’s severing of roots; freezing and idealizing it can prevent the present from living. The alternative is a critical retrieval of tradition: to inherit it, recognize its shadows, and bring forward values such as truthfulness, justice, humility, and responsibility in forms adequate to a changed world. The victory of light has meaning only when the individual and the culture remain capable of seeing the darkness within themselves and within their own forms of power.