Paradis D’Orient — Paradis D’Occident
This is my rough, partial translation of A. J. Carnoy’s “Paradis D’Orient — Paradis D’Occident”, published in Le Muséon in 1922. This should be taken as a work in progress.
Paradise of the East — Paradise of the West
(pages 5–6)
The other role of the cherubim — to transport the divinity through the air — was also attributed by the Greeks to the γρυψ. Aeschylus referred to it in his Prometheus Bound (393-397).
Oceanus taking leave of Prometheus said: “my four-footed, winged beast fans with his wings the smooth pathway of the air; and truly he will be glad to rest his knees in his stall at home.” Thus many γρυπεζ carry the Ocean god through the air.
(pages 11–17)
Yezidís represent their god in the shape of a peacock. The choice of this species is particularly significant. The broad tail of the peacock imitates the solar disc. As should not it be astonished as the same solar symbol was found on a coffin copte and that it also meets at Mandaïtes. This peacock (Malak-Táus) is, to Yezidís, the equivalent of the “white pearl” which in the sea of chaos contained the germ from where the world came. It is easy to recognize here the Iranian myth of the white hōm (plant of life) which, in the cosmic sea, (Vourukasha) the germ of any vegetation contains and which, under the name of Gaokerena, shelters the solar bird, Sīmurgh or Vareghna, which were identified with the farnah, the divine aura which crowned Yima.
It is thus noted that among rather various people the marvellous birds have a luminous origin (sun or fire of heaven). This metaphor could certainly occur independently. In addition, a mutual compenetration of so similar data naturally had to occur as it was the case, for example, for glory haloing the divine or divinized beings.
It was said above that at Hittis the sun was represented like a disc surrounded of a halation of rays.
The portraits of the kings of Syria and Egypt were provided with crowns of light.
In hellenistic art, the phoenix was equipped with an aureole. One finds this one in the Semites nimbant the cherubim. The farnah or xvarenah of the Persians presents the same design in a hardly different form. The nimbus which surrounds the face of Zoroastre in the famous sculpture of Takht-i-Bustan is also an aureole.
Mr. Reitzenstein (Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, p. 211) showed that the xvarenah (Pahl. vareno) penetrated at the Manicheans and Mandéens and same in the syncretic complexus of the religious concepts reigning in the Roman empire under the name of δαδημα or δοξα του φωτος. He came there, of the remainder, simply to reinforce the influence of the Syrian and different ideas to which one has just referred and one thus came from there to place the aureole on the head of the emperors who enjoyed the apotheosis and, then, on that of the saints of the Christian church.
While the Iranian farnah infiltrated kind in occident after having constituted itself in Perse of a kind of syncretism between the ideas chaldénnes and imagination fertilizes the Indo-Iranian ones, it took its place in the very symmetrical system of Mazdeans of the Sassanid era. It was allowed there like one of the shapes of crowned fire, center of the worship of Zoroastriens. It same divine, was venerated, Átar Farnbág (or Farnbag), i.e. “the fire of God (Baga)”.
This fire is the direct representative in the land of the divine fire (Átar spenishta) (Ys. 17. 11) which burns in the paradise in presence of Ormazd (Pakl. Ys. 17. 67).
As Dinkart (6. 293) informs us, “this fire Farnbag is reserved for the priests while fire Gúshnasp is for the warriors and that fire Búrzínmitró belongs to the farmers.”
The Indian recension of Bundahishn teaches us that this fire is well that of Yima which was seized by the Vareghna bird when this monarch of the first ages had made himself unworthy from there.
Bahman Yasht says to us that this fire received the epithets of “glorious” Gadmanhómand and Róshano-Kerp “to the luminous form”. M.A.V. Williams Jackson recently has in JAOS 41, p. 80, 399, peremptorily shown thanks to many texts pehlevis and Arabic that terrestrial Farnbág, at the time sassanide was supposed to burn on uses holy mountain of the district of Kár or Kariyán in Farsistan. It is what taught us already, of the remainder, Iranian Bundahishn (17 5-6): “During the régne of Vishtáspa (the king which converts to Zoroastrianism), at the moment of the Revelation, the fire of the brilliant mountain of Kavarvand in the district of Kár or it since then remained”.
The country of Kár is found nowadays in the south of Persia under the name Káriyán, going up with the Pahlavi. Kárikán which is only one completely normal lengthening of Kár by means of the universal suffix -ka.
The ruins of this temple were visited in 1881 by the Englishman Ed. Stack who believes capacity to affirm that one found there formerly a fountain of naphtha. It brings back also the legend, still current in these places, of the obstinate resistance of Sháh Káram “king de Kár” at the time of the invasion of Perse by the Arabs. The Arab historians Mas’ údí, Istakhrí, Yákút, Kazvíní, Albírúní confirm these data. They codified the tradition reporting that in this place, on a mountain, and in an impregnable fort, had been fire more crowned of Persia, that by which the Mazdean priests fed all fires of the other temples.
It is impossible that this mountain of Kár did not persist in impressing upon the imagination of the Orient. It would be natural that the legends concerning divine fires, the paradises on the mountains, and the marvellous birds which kept them or transported them were located on the mountain of Kár or Kár-i-farn (”Kár of the farnah”) as one had to call it. Perhaps this enables us to cast a ray of light on a passage in the Song of Roland that has remained rather obscure up to now. When the 11th Century poet has Charlemagne enumerate the Eastern peoples who will arise against him after the death of Roland (vers. 2920 to 2924) it is expressed as follows:
My nephew’s dead, who won for me such realms!
Against me then the Saxon will rebel,
Hungar, Bulgar, and many hostile men,
Romain, Puillain, all those are in Palerne,
And in Affrike, and those in Califerne;
The land of Califerne never could be identified. One is satisfied to suppose that it is the country’s Caliphe. Admittedly, a certain influence of the word “caliphe” on Califerne is probable, but it does not explain anything about the final -erne. A contamination between caliphe and Kár-i-farn would return, on the contrary, an admirable account of the form. There would not be, moreover, anything more natural than the appearance of this remote country in this occurrence, because it was specifically of those which were to haunt the memory of the medieval storytellers, being given the great profusion of Eastern legends introduced in Europe by Byzantine novels, in particular by those on Alexandre, to say nothing of the Arab sources.
The survival of the tales relating to the ideas referring itself to the marvellous mountain, the bird of the sun, etc, in fact, is proven by many allusions in the texts of the Middle Ages.
There are two principal sources: Arabo-Persian tales, especially “Thousand and One Nights”, on the one hand, novels Alexandre, other.
Arrien (Exp. Alex. 5. 47) speaks about griffon guards of treasures. After him these fantastic animals prennant a place of larger in the chronicles referring to the “wonders” areas than traversed the conqueror while advancing towards the East.
It is in particular thus in the Greek novel which translated into Latin Julius Valerius into the fifth century. In the famous letter of Alexandre to Aristotle, we learn in the XX that “per magna deinde pericula venimus in loca quae erant fortissima in qua erant bestiae quae habebant caputsicut porcus, caudam sicut leo, ungalus duas latas pedibus sex, cum quibus feriebant milites nostros. Mixti erant inter eos grifes qui habebant pizzos sicut aquila, qui com magna velociate feribant in facies nostras. Nos vero cum sagittis et contis defendabamus nos ab eis. Perdidi in eo certamine ducentos octo milites”.
One announces similar allusions in the novels of Alexander as ancient French.
One meets some in the Novel of the Seven Wise ones (history of prince de Carizme) and then in works of famous Herzog Ernst.
In addition, in the Arabic writings, it is a question of an island or a magic mountain and a powerful bird which is able to transport men there. The 1001 Nights, by example, teach us that Mourad arrived at the magic island tells that it had arrived there while clinging at the leg of a rukh which had flown away with him until there.
The third calendar also tells that it wrapped skin of a sheep and that a rukh carried until the top of a high mountain where this animal deposited. It then left and the rukh seeing it flew away. It was not then long in arriving at the castle of the forty virgins.
It is a question of this rukh or rokh in several passages of this immense composition (ed. Burton. Arabians Nights V 122-VI 16. 17-VI, 49).
(pages 21–22)
What must draw our attention in these historiettes, it is that they perpetuate all the essential elements of the famous Iranian myth, about which it was spoken higher: in the sea Vourukaša pushes the Gaokerena tree with the marvellous fruits which the immense Sĭmurgh bird fertilizes by unceasingly shaking its branches. It is in this sea (originally atmospheric) that the farnah or light rests (originally solar) which gives prosperity, glory, power. It is done the famous land of Califerne (Kár-i-farn) whose distant echo is in the Song of Roland.
This land of Califerne, we saw, formed part of the Eastern areas that Charlemagne groans to have to give up to Islam.
It is very curious to see appearing in 15th Century the same name in extremely similar circumstances. It is in the work of Montalvo: La Sergas de Esplandian, presented by this author like the continuation of the famous novel Amadis de Gaula. It is said to us there that Armato, king de Persia, invites all the Eastern princes to conclude an alliance against Constantinople. When they are all joined together, one learns the arrival from strange allied, because “know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very near Terrestrial Paradise because of the great ruggedness of the country and the innumerable wild beasts that lived in it, there were many griffins, such as were found in no other parts of the world “.
The history of griffons and of the paradise on a steep mount is, therefore, definitively contaminated here by that of Amazones and this marvellous land, placed to Persia, received the name of the mysterious mountain of the farnah, being also in the south of Iran and whose mythical origins are so closely dependent on Persian beliefs with the history of the solar bird and the tree of life.
