Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world–with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end...
But they ask...–how is it true
That‘we’is not distinguished here from‘you’?
And silently their shining Lord replies:
“I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendor see
Themselves, their own unique reality.”^61
It turns out that the thirty birds–si murghin Persian–inhabit the divine
emanation as soon as the veils of worldliness lift from them. The Simurgh
has always been a red herring, a form–like poetry itself–used to guide the
uninitiated toward the formless. It is yet another misleading image of the
fallen feather reminding of us of the human incapacity to apprehend, and
the impossibility of representing, the divine. While the colorful image of
the Simurgh may remind us of the divine light, the divine, as light itself, can
never have an image.
The association between the sun and divinity has numerous ante-
cedents. Although some modern scholars suggest a pre-Islamic sun
deity in the Arabian Peninsula, the erasure ofjahiliyyafrom Islamic
culture and their distance in time and place render this source
unlikely for Attar. The allusion is also central for Plotinus, who
understands the sun as the crux of divine beauty, at once occluded
from vision and central to it. First, he explains,“All the loveliness of
color and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not
beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty.”^62 Yet
the sun is also the ultimate goal of beauty:
Never did eye see the sun unless it hadfirst become sunlike, and never can the soul
have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.
Therefore,first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God
and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will comefirst to the Intellectual-Principle and
(^61) Attar, 1984 : 218. (^62) Plotinus, 1991 : 46 (1.6.1).
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