Literary Monster

In Shahnameh, Zahhak is an ambitious young prince with an evil disposition, who seizes his father’s throne and becomes the king of Arabs under the guidance of the demon Eblis. Zahhak then conquers Persia and the world is in the command of the evil king for two thousand years, when “the wise concealed themselves and their deeds, and devils achieved their heart’s desire”, until he is finally overthrown by the wise prince Feraydun.[1] The author Firdawsi wrote a vivid passage about how Zahhak gets the snakes: in this passage of Shahnameh, serpents are linked with the devil and the evilness of King Zahhak.

Before kissing King Zahhak’s shoulders, the devil Eblis disguises himself as a cook and makes a lot of luxury dishes for the king, which are listed in parallelism in the poem: on the first day he makes egg yolks, on the second day he “brought in a dish made from partridge and white pheasant meat”, on the third day “the cook made dishes of chicken and lamb kebab”, and on the fourth day “of veal cooked with saffron, rosewater, aged wine, and pure musk”.[2] After King Zahhak eats his dishes, Eblis says to the king hypocritically: “May you live forever your majesty; my heart is filled with love for you, and my soul is nourished only by your glances. I have one request to ask of the victorious king, even though I am quite unworthy of it, and this is that he will command me to kiss his shoulders, and rub my eyes and face there.”[3] King Zahhak gladly accepted the devil’s request, and after Eblis kissed the king’s shoulders, “Two black snakes grew from Zahhak's shoulders. In his distress the king looked everywhere for a solution, and finally he simply cut them off. But they grew again on his shoulders like the limbs of a tree.”[4] In these sentences, the author uses “the limbs of a tree” as a metaphor for the heads of the black snakes, but also for the evilness and greediness of King Zahhak: not only the snakes on Zahhak’s shoulders will grow again, but also King Zahhak’s lust: after becomes king of the Arabs after assassinating his father, Zahhak even tries to conquer Iran and becomes the Shah there. After consulting learned doctors and no one can cure Zahhak, the devil Eblis appears again, in the disguise of a wise doctor this time, and says to King Zahhak: “These growths were fated to appear; leave the snakes where they are, they should not be cut back. You must prepare food for them, and placate them by feeding them; this is the only thing you can do. Give them nothing but human brains to eat, and they should die from such food.”[5] The snakes’ request for food seems to be a lot simpler than Zahhak’s desire for luxury food that Eblis cooked for him before, but the snake’s harm to human beings are really obvious. Thus, the author uses a rhetorical question: “what was the evil demon's purpose in offering such advice, if not to empty the earth of mankind?”[6] According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory”, the monster’s body is a metaphor of a cultural element, and the snakes on Zahhak’s shoulders are visualizations of evil.[7] Because the two black snakes appeared on Zahhak’s body just after the devil Eblis kissed his shoulders, and Zahhak became king under the guidance of the devil through an immoral way- to assassinate his father, a natural link is created between the serpents on Zahhak and evilness, which is practiced by the devil Eblis and his follower, Zahhak the king. In the story of Zahhak, the boundary between human beings and demons is blurred: although at first Zahhak is a person and Eblis is a devil, the King Zahhak turns into a monster after snakes grow from his shoulders, and the evil plans of Eblis to demolish human kinds are employed with the help by the King Zahhak.[8]

In a later passage, two upright noble men, Armayel the Pious and Garmayel the Perceptive, enter King Zahhak’s kitchen as cooks and replace human brain by the brains of sheep, trying to save the people whose brains were chosen to feed the serpents on Zahhak’s shoulders: when two victims were dragged before the cooks, “unable to do more, they saved one of the two from slaughter, substituting the brains of a sheep, which they mixed with the brains of the man they killed, and so they were able to rescue one of each pair;” however, “Zahhak reigned ever more cruelly. If a warrior had a beautiful daughter hidden away in his house, Zahhak would accuse him of consorting with demons and kill him, and have the girl brought to him as his slave. He acted without regard for the customs of kings or the laws of religion.”[9] This passage further proves the evilness of King Zahhak by his ill behaviors and the serpents on his shoulders which cause the death of people ceaselessly: Zahhak has his heart troubled by the thought of shedding his father’s blood before getting the snakes, but he begins to do things more immoral than to let the devil eblis kill his father, after he got the serpents on his shoulders.[10]

Serpents are not rare in Medieval texts. In another Medieval text, the Greek Romance
Kallimachos & Chrysorroi from the Late Byzantine period, the marvelous castle of the dragon who imprisoned and tortured the heroine Chrysorroi, was guarded by fierce serpents: “Live serpents stood in front of the closed gates; huge and terrifying serpents and supernatural animals; who, ever-wakeful and alert, guarded the mighty castle… A man would die from fear alone on seeing them.”[11] Comparing the descriptions of serpents in Kallimachos & Chrysorroi and Shahnameh, it could be found that there is a major similarity of the Medieval snakes: unlike other monsters such as the dragon in Kallimachos & Chrysorroi who has a strong power to demolish the empire of Chrysorroi’s parents and owns a luxury castle, serpents always depend on more powerful figures or monsters.[12] In Shahnameh, the serpents don’t live alone but grow on Zahhak’s shoulders and need to be fed by the king; and in Kallimachos & Chrysorroi, the serpents are the guardians of the dragon, which are inferior to their master.

[1] Firdawsī, Shahnameh: the Persian Book of Kings, trans. Dick Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 9-27.

[2] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 11.

[3] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 11.

[4] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 11-12.

[5] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 12.

[6] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 12.

[7] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.

[8] Laurie Pierce, “Serpents and Sorcery: Humanity, Gender, and the Demonic in Ferdowsi’s ‘Shahnameh,’” Iranian Studies 48, no. 3 (2015): 350–51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24483073.

[9] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 12-13.

[10] Firdawsī, Shahnameh, 9.

[11] Gavin Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 1995), 40.

[12] Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 49-51.