novel folklore on sadegh hedayat's the blind owl jason jorjani

In the course of an extensive literary comparison of Hedayat's novel to Whitley Strieber's Communion, Jorjani suggests that the visitors from our future are here to re-write their past by re-engineering the folkloric substratum of human consciousness and identity. We think of them as 'aliens' because we are alienated from what it is within ourselves that holds these posthuman possibilities open to us. These beings are addressing us from our own future. On Jorjani's reading, The Blind Owl is ultimately about the 'Imaginal' metamorphosis of humans into higher beings. He argues that Hedayat aimed to reestablish Iran's perennial role as the cultural crossroads of the Western world and the Indo-Buddhist East. Jorjani reveals Hedayat's complex appropriation and adaptation of libertine Gnostic and antinomian Tantric ideas. In Novel Folklore, Jason Reza Jorjani, whose grandfather was best friends with Hedayat, offers a revolutionary interpretation of The Blind Owl. This belief is no doubt influenced by Hedayat's own suicide in Paris in 1951. Often compared to the classics of Existentialism and Gothic Horror, The Blind Owl is widely believed to be cursed, so that anyone who reads it seriously is driven to suicide. He is a brilliant scholar who has now been unfairly disgraced and is forced to fight a legal battle, while continuing his research and writing, without any regular employment.Sadegh Hedayat's novel The Blind Owl is considered by many to be the greatest work of modern Persian literature. Many viewers will know that Jason Reza Jorjani has suffered from libel and persecution as a result of his, generally misunderstood, political views. Jorjani speculates that Constantine made Christianity the Roman state religion as a response to the threat he saw posed by Mithraism. At one time, Mithraism was the dominant religion of the Roman army.

The god, Mithra, is typically symbolized slaying a bull - and is considered to embody a consciousness beyond the restrictions of time and fate. Over time, each of these traditions have incorporated the other, while also standing opposed to key principles in the other.

Here he describes the complex relationship between Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Jason Reza Jorjani, PhD, is a philosopher and author of Prometheus and Atlas, World State of Emergency, Lovers of Sophia, Novel Folklore: The Blind Owl of Sadegh Hedayat, and Iranian Leviathan: A Monumental History of Mithra's Abode.

Novel folklore on sadegh hedayat's the blind owl jason jorjani