About 2,200 years ago, brilliant civilizations were flourishing in Asia and in Europe. While ancient Egypt was another very important cultural pole on the edges of the Mediterranean Sea, ancient Greece was rapidly expanding: the time of the great philosophers, Socrates, Plato and his disciple Aristotle was still close, and the Acropolis shone on the whole Mediterranean basin, while Rome and Carthage were at each other’s throat.

Thousand of miles east of the Peloponnese, the great kingdom of Persia dominated immense Eurasia with the Persian civilization fostering cultural links with the no less brilliant Hindu civilization. This was the time of the historical Buddha. Meanwhile, the followers of Lao Tsu were spreading his philosophy of the Tao in a China sheltered from the formidable Mongolian tribes by the recently erected famous Great Wall. Unable to cross this colossal wall noticeable from the moon which will safeguard Chinese civilization from their invasion attempts for centuries, the Turko-Mongol hordes turned away from it to swarm onto Central Asia and the Iranian plateau before reaching Europe around 450 AD, under the banner of the terrible Attila, king of the Huns and "the scourge of God."

Two centuries later, with the Sassanid Empire extending from the borders of present Afghanistan to the banks of Mesopotamia, the invasions from the west by rising Islam’s conquering Arabs chattered Persia’s central power. This, in turn, opened the empire’s northern border to the Tartar barbarians and other Mongolian tribes.

The Arabs, whose numbers were in fact very small by comparison with the Persian Empire’s denizens, had difficulty in conquering this immense country. To overcome the numerous pockets of resistance they encountered, they then literally hired an army of mercenaries from Turkmen tribes of Asian origin. Once they achieved military control of ancient Persia, this Turkish army eventually took the reins of the country’s political power.

The main characteristic of all these Turko-Mongol tribes who successively invaded Persia does not only lay in their common racial origin: one can indeed notice that all these invaders whose numbers and culture are much lesser than their Iranian "hosts’" successively merged and fused with the great Persian civilization. As soon as a conquering tribe would settle down and begin to civilize, another would arrive through the northern plains, only to undergo, after two or three generations, the same fate as the previous one: the military conquerors were culturally conquered and swallowed up by the civilization they were supposed to have subjected. And this story ceaselessly repeated itself throughout Iran’s history, practically till the beginning of the twentieth century!

The history books and the poetry collections were, on the other hand, translated for the main part into Persian, the Indo-European language spoken by Northern Iranians who lived in the Khorasan province, a vast area of the country covering most of Central Asia. Tous was the name of one of its cities.

The more humbled in front of God the hero is, the more he bows to his will and implores his help and support, and the likelier he is to prevail, make decisive advances, and deal fatal blows to his treacherous foes.

Armed by the hand of God, the spiritual knight safeguards civilization and its values from anarchy, injustice, and chaos.

The mystic knights are placed under the protection of a spiritual guide —or "pir" in Persian— portrayed as a white haired young man, young as in the eternal youth of those who have reached immortality and, at the same time, white haired as in the wisdom and knowledge of the very old.

This guide, named Zal, is continually in touch with the Simorgh. Since he holds the Simorgh’s feathers, whenever he is confronted with an insuperable impediment, he places one of them in the fire and the Simorgh responds to Zal’s call by descending into the material world to aid him.

The knights’ spiritual guide Zal also is the father of Rostam, the most famous and bravest knight of the Iranian epic.

Bare eyes may not be able detect it. Yet this wall is no less real: to spot it, one needs a sixth sense latent in all souls. But only mystics have learnt how to develop and use this sense.

Indeed this bulwark has, to this day, effectively insured the survival of an apparently subdued civilization as well as of a Persian culture that preserved its identity for over a thousand years by indefatigably and fully assimilating invading outsiders who literally dissolved into it.

This technique precluded Ferdowsi from exercising any other professional activity for he composed himself the Persian verses of this unimaginable monumental piece. Because of that, he had to sell bit-by-bit all of his belongings in order to keep paying wage to his coworkers and pursue his translation and versification work. The only way of financing his work without drawing from his personal assets would have been to seek subsidies from the state, a common occurrence in those times. Nonetheless, Ferdowsi was well aware that monarchs primarily endow works that flatter and glorify them, and that because of this, he truly was highly unlikely to obtain his king’s support for such a long poem of ancient epics that did not praise the king of Persia in any close or remote fashion.

Now, fate had it that at that precise time, the Shiite dynasty that ruled Persia was brutally overthrown by Turkish invaders.

They were Sunni. And Ferdowsi was notorious as a Shiite who continually mentioned his faith and his love for Ali in his writings…

Ferdowsi’s request for funding came back from the new Turkish headman of Iran, king Mahmoud, with the answer that should he agree to conceal his Shiite views, he would then pay him thirty thousand golden coins —a colossal sum which would allow him to pursue comfortably his translation— whereas if he kept publicly proclaiming the prophet Ali’s glory, he would have him crushed under his elephants’ feet!

But Ferdowsi had the courage of his opinions!

Above all, he wanted to be able to appear with his head high in front of his master Ali upon his permanent arrival in the next world.

As a perfect mystic, he was certain of life’s continuance after physical death, and ceaselessly readied himself for it, contending that: "Our true dwelling is elsewhere."

For he had seen in a dream the important spiritual mission assigned to him. He knew without fail that he would eventually sink into poverty. Nonetheless he had resigned himself to it because the certainty that this mission was his earthly existence’s most important matter inhabited him. He could thus not give it up for any reason.

Far from yielding to the king and complying with his demands, Ferdowsi chose instead to ignore his threats. He even publicly insulted him, before taking at once the path to exile and becoming an itinerant dervish who roamed from city to city for about fifteen years…Indeed Ferdowsi lived over the age of eighty-three.

Likewise, a considerable impulse towards the translation of ancient texts, including that of "Kalileh and Demnah," blossomed in Samanid, the last independent Iranian state where Persian culture and Shiite tradition was flourishing before the Turkish invasion.

The adventures this "Kalileh and Demnah" underwent deserve to be narrated, so that one can fully comprehend how chaotic the fate of an ancestral text can be and how it can undergo many successive translations. Let us open a parenthesis on this subject: The original text of the "Kalileh and Demnah" was written in Sanskrit about five thousand years ago. Brought to Iran during Sassanid times, it was translated into Pahlavi, the common language of the time, by wise men from the royal court. A certain Ibn Moqafa then translated the text into Arabic after the Sassanids fell. Then, as we wrote earlier, the Samanids translated "Kalileh and Demnah" into Persian: the great poet Roudaki put it into verse at that time. This very text by Roudaki was later imported to Europe and translated into Latin where it greatly inspired seventeenth century CE French fable writer La Fontaine for the great majority of his fables, which were in fact nothing but a loose French translation of Roudaki’s poems! Lastly, La Fontaine’s fables influenced in turn in Khadjar times, i.e. in the nineteenth century CE, an Iranian poet by the name of Iradj Mirza, who translated some of them into Persian, in the form of very simple and very popular verses… thus completing the loop!

Iran considered Roudaki, who had translated "Kalileh and Demnah" into Persian poems, as the biggest poet of his time. Born in Samanid times the same year Roudaki died, Ferdowsi who was immersed in this nationalist Shiite culture could not fail to be influenced by his illustrious elder.

It could not escape Ferdowsi’s daily notice that a number of his fellow countrymen knew protracted passages of "Kalileh and Demnah" by heart. He then understood that, because of its ability to live in people’s memory, poetry was his message’s best vehicle. Further, Ferdowsi had, since his early youth, an unquestionable gift for poetry. He versified with great ease, creating for his own pleasure and for art’s sake attractive musical poems, telling histories excerpted from very ancient tales.

Ferdowsi was only forty years old when this murder took place. Unlike other poets of his time, he did not frequent the royal court, preferring instead to live his life away from worldliness, between poetry, his hobby, and the management of his business, for he belonged to a well-to-do social class called "Dehqan" made up of deeply rooted landowners: his family owned vast lands tilled by numerous farmers.

According to some stories, Ferdowsi went the next day to a Sufi master who lived in his city of Tous, to ask him for permission and for the courage to perform this long-term mission. This master was known as Sheik Mahmoud Ma’chouq Toussi.

When he accepted this mission, Ferdowsi was perfectly aware that undertaking this pursuit would bring him no material benefit. On the contrary, he would have to devote most of his wealth to it.

He also realized this was a twenty or thirty years affair, if not more!

Despite all the difficulties this meant for him, he threw himself into this mission because, besides being firmly convinced of the necessity of defending Aryan culture vis-‡-vis Arab occupants, Ferdowsi believed above all in the truthfulness of messages delivered through the channel of dreams.

Ferdowsi even gives a number of technical explanations in regard to dreams, and in particular to the influence of the moon and the travel of celestial bodies and other cosmic bodies as contributing to the creation of the adequate conditions for the supersensible world’s door to open in the human soul. For he who, like Ferdowsi, believes in the truthfulness of dreams, the message of a dream is even more important than an order personally handed down by the king himself: it definitely stands at a higher level since messages delivered in dreams emanate from higher spirits which represent divinity itself…

This is why this mission became a top priority for Ferdowsi. Nothing would be able to make him deviate from the path he had taken: Ferdowsi now took into account the message contained in his dream whose secret he had decoded.

What matters most, indeed, is not the ability to dream, but rather the ability to interpret these dreams. To be able to decipher the symbols that are the most common mode of expression of dreams, it is necessary to know their language. This knowledge is generally recognized as being germane to prophets and clairvoyants.

Ferdowsi goes on to explain that the learning and the mastery of this language have nothing to do either with experience, nor with age, nor with academic transmission. Rather, it is an entirely innate faculty. Some are capable of it, as if their soul knew this language, just as we may know a language other than the one that we usually speak.

That is why stories that he went to a Sufi master to confirm this mission and receive his spiritual support are definitely believable, and even very reasonable.

Ferdowsi very scrupulously honored this request!

When, in the course of his own translation, he gets to the passage previously translated by Daqiqi, he stops translating, quotes very faithfully Daqiqi’s one thousand thirty five lines, not without criticizing afterwards his style which he finds approximate and not much to his taste…

It should also be noted that this last dream is a direct exchange, which by no means calls upon the symbolic language most often encountered in significant dreams.

Many fanciful and unfounded stories on Ferdowsi’s life, contrived by story tellers decades after his death, exist. In this matter as in many others, it is necessary to know how to sort things, and sift seeds from weeds, so as not to lose the thread of what his existence and his deep motives really were.

The surest, in this particular case, is to trust only what Ferdowsi himself reported, and amongst others things, the two above mentioned dreams, which show well to what point Ferdowsi was persuaded of the truthfulness of dreams.

In view of what himself wrote on the subject, it cannot be doubted that Ferdowsi was, throughout his life, led on the spiritual path by way of dreams.

In the eleventh century CE, more exactly in the year 412 of the Hegira, Ferdowsi breathed his last at age eighty-three.

Now, that Ferdowsi was a Shiite was notorious. His poems, which refer ceaselessly to his faith and love for Ali, broadcast it.

For this reason, the imam of the city of Tous where Ferdowsi had lived and just died, refused to bury him religiously in the Muslim cemetery. So, the late poet’s close relatives subsequently took his body to bury him in a small garden located outside of the city’s bulwarks. Just as his body was going through the city gate on its way to its resting place, a messenger of the Sultan was entering the town through exactly the opposite door, carrying the thirty thousand golden coins the Turkish Sultan had eventually agreed to give Ferdowsi to subsidize his work… But it was too late! And the poet’s daughter sent the messenger with all his gold back, refusing categorically, as her father would probably have done, the monarch’s belated reward.

The Sultan decided to use these thirty thousand golden coins to build a dike, which allowed for the irrigation of the city of Tous.

Let us return to Ferdowsi’s burial: it is customary, upon a Muslim’s death, for a cleric to pray over his body. And the imam of Tous had refused to bestow this ultimate honor upon the Shiite poet.

The chroniclers report that Sheik Abol Qassem Coraqani, the Sufi Grand Master of the time who was considered to be the spiritual guide of his time, took himself to Ferdowsi’s burial where he led the prayer. Now, considering the troubled circumstances of the time, when Shiites, and Sufis in particular, had better be as discreet as possible vis-‡-vis the Sunni occupant, this gesture from the Grand Master means a lot. Indeed, he certainly would not have taken the risk to display so openly his Shiite belief by defying the official imam’s religious authority had there been no master to disciple bond between him and the deceased. This heavily symbolic gesture shows with certainty that Ferdowsi was a very close disciple of the mystic Grand Master.

Several historians have claimed in earnest that the Sufi Sheik was not actually present to Ferdowsi’s interment. It would thus have been a very private affair, without the presence of any religious authority. The latter historians say the Sheik went to Ferdowsi’s grave not on the same day but the day after the burial, and it is at this time that he recited the prayer of the dead in honor of his deceased follower.

What is certain, it is that Sheik Abol Qassem Coraqani wrote having seen at this moment a dream showing the state of Ferdowsi’s soul after his physical death. The sheik writes he met in Paradise, in a luxuriant, green and flowery garden, Ferdowsi dressed with a big "abba" or dervish dress, green in color, with a crown on his head in the center of whichshone a magnificent jewel bright green in color too.

For a mystic like the Sheik, all these symbols show without ambiguity the very high spiritual rank occupied by the great poet’s spirit in the mystic heavens of the eighth climate, beyond the seven intermediate worlds inhabited by the vast company of lesser evolved souls.

It is upon awakening that the Sheik allegedly went, after he saw this dream, across the city to recite the prayer of the dead on Ferdowsi’s grave.

This dream by Sheik Abol Qassem Coraqani is, after the two above-mentioned ones, what determined the poet’s vocation as a translator, the third dream of utmost importance in Ferdowsi’s life.

This third dream reveals to us the poet’s spiritual connection to the Sufi Grand Master of his time. For him, dreaming was part of the world of prophecy, and a holy spirit was capable of seeing everything through the mirror of dreams!

Yet, Ferdowsi was not a cleric attached to dogma and literalism but rather, a mystic upholding his spiritual beliefs on his experiences of the invisible world in his master’s pathway.

Indeed his hometown of Tous was at the time the historic center of Sufism: most mystic great masters of Iranian Sufism lived right there, in the heart of the Khorasan province, and at the time of Ferdowsi, around 1,000 CE.

Indeed, when the Arabs invaded Persia through Mesopotamia, the magi of the time collected the most important manuscripts and, to safeguard them from the invaders, sent them to the far North Eastern part of the country, towards the province of Khorasan.

When, following the decisive battle of Qadessieh, the last Sassanid king fled, all the writings recording the ancient Aryan Mazdeans’ science, culture and spirituality had been brought together far away from the major cities of central and Southern Iran, on the outer reaches of central Asia’s mountains. Thus, this region became for the keepers of ancient Zoroastrian mysteries and the ancestral knowledge of Persian tradition a kind of sanctuary where the flame of the magi’s wisdom kept glimmering.

During the Christianizing of Europe between the sixth and the tenth century of the Christian era, the ancient druids’ had endeavored to keep their sacred science, which was not written but exclusively orally transmitted from master to disciple, alive by merging into the new monastic orders. Subsequently, those keepers of the Celts’ esoteric learnedness in the West used the construction of cathedrals to try and pass their science on. Likewise, the magi of ancient Persia used similar stratagems to insure the survival of what constituted the essence and the spiritual foundations of their civilization. Luckily, a good part of this knowledge was written, barely veiled in the form of tales and epic stories.

As the country got progressively Islamized, the erudite translators adapted the Mazdean values to the features of conquering Islam, in particular to the Qur’anic verses having an esoteric value. There indeed are two types of verses in the Qur’an: those that simply have an exoteric value, without hidden meaning, and those that have an esoteric meaning, a deeply spiritual message, conveying universal truths.

It is in this atmosphere of Persian nationalism and active spirituality in the background of an irresistible Islamization that Ferdowsi was born in the year 329 of the Hegira in the city of Tous where he lived, surrounded with the most important spiritual Sufis masters of his time.

Its knights are powerless in front of death and cannot change their fate.

It is a book of wisdom, replete with mystic symbols, and placed under the protection of the wings of the Simorgh, the great mythical bird who inhabits spiritual heavens and intervenes in Persian history under the guise of the winged man of Persepolis’ famous bas-reliefs.

The great knight Rostam is the only one of the epic to have successfully passed the seven tests of spiritual chivalry, and as such, the Simorgh’s shadow is always over his head.

This legend takes place during an invasion. A Turkish army had descended from the northern mountains towards the Iranian plateau where it defeated the Persian army and penetrated all the way to the center of the country. The defeated Iranians asked for a truce bounding new borders. The Turks wanted to further humiliate their defeated opponents.

They then suggested that an Iranian archer, placed at the edge of the territory conquered by the Turkish advance, would cast an arrow northward, in the direction of the former border located thousands of miles from there. The point of impact of the Iranian arrow would bound the new border! The Turks chortled: even cast by an experimented archer and carried over by the wind, an arrow could not reasonably span over a few hundreds yards! There could be no doubt in their minds that they had got hold of the most part of the rich Iranian plains. They knew this would humble the brilliant Persian civilization…

Then an old man by the name of Arach volunteered to cast the arrow.

While he may not have been a man of great physical strength, Arach was a man of a great wisdom, a substantially evolved man. He rose to the top of a mountain and launched his arrow.

But at the very same time, he had his soul leave his physical body and carry the arrow in the airs all the way to the Turkish border, where it pierced the trunk of a tree in the city of Marv, in present Tajikistan. Borne by the old man’s soul, the arrow had journeyed for a whole day, and thus traveled for two or three thousand miles!

Arach had sacrificed himself for Persia’s independence by putting his soul in this arrow.

The message of Arach’s legend is that a spiritually evolved man can, even singlehandedly, perform miracles, and, in this particular case, succeed where an entire army had failed, i.e. in driving the enemy out and in guaranteeing the country’s independence.

This tale is a critical regarding the role of substantially evolved men in a nation’s historical evolution.

Iran’s history is, in particular, strewed with interventions of isolated mystics who likewise influenced the course of historic events in a decisive fashion.