The Role of Light and Its Historical Continuity in Iranian Thought

This seminar follows a symbolic and philosophical thread through Iranian intellectual history: light. In Zoroastrian texts, Ahura Mazda is associated with radiance, limitless light, and an order established through truth. Passages from the Gathas and later Pahlavi works are used to show that light is not merely a natural phenomenon; it becomes a language for truth, wisdom, purity, and the exposure of wrongdoing. Light makes things visible, which allows epistemology and ethics to meet within the same image.

From this background the seminar develops the idea of the “luminous human.” In the Denkard and related interpretations, the human being can be understood as embodied light possessing the capacity to recover its source. This return is not accomplished by adding an external substance. It occurs by removing obscurations that prevent the inner radiance from appearing. Human transformation is therefore associated with emptying, purification, and the disclosure of something deeper than the ordinary ego.

Suhrawardi turns this logic into a philosophical cosmology. The Light of Lights is the source of hierarchical degrees of illumination, while the human realm is associated with the “commanding” or ispahbad light. Iranian names such as Bahman reappear within Illuminationist metaphysics, which the seminar regards as evidence of Suhrawardi’s conscious relation to Khosravani wisdom. Genuine knowledge in this system is not argument alone; illumination and existential transformation also matter.

The next movement follows the same motif in post-Islamic Iranian mysticism. Bayazid Bastami, whose family background is described as Zoroastrian, expresses experiences of self-transcendence through the language of light. Attar preserves these stories; Rumi treats love as a light drawing the person toward the source and distinguishes the light of the heart from discursive reason; Hafez finds “the light of God” in the Magian tavern. The seminar interprets these references as survival of a shared imagination linking illumination with knowledge, love, and inward freedom.

The “luminous human” is therefore not a finished superior being or a bearer of inherited privilege. It is an image of becoming. By moving along a path of truth and loosening fixation on the ego, the person can approach what this tradition names as the source of light. The precise historical relationships among the texts require independent research, but the recurring symbolism permits a powerful philosophical reading: truth is not only something to be known; it must become a quality of life that begins to shine through the person.