Abstract:
Among the various types of myths, the myth of "memory and oblivion" is one for which many examples can be found among different peoples, tribes, and civilizations. Mircea Eliade, the Romanian religious scholar, addressed this myth in several articles and introduced examples of it among the Greeks, Indians, Gnostics, and Manichaeans. The "Hymn of the Pearl," which is a Gnostic work, is an excellent example of this myth, where the theme of forgetting and remembering bears a great resemblance to the Indian story of "Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath" and Attar's narrative of "Sheikh San'an and the Christian Girl." Given that the sources of the symbolic stories of Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi are Hermetic and Gnostic wisdom, examples of this Gnostic myth can also be found in these narratives. The purpose of writing this article is to explain and compare the myth of memory and oblivion as a Gnostic myth in Iranian symbolic and allegorical stories. The stories of "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan," "Salman and Absal," "Risalat al-Tayr," and "Qasida Ayniyya" by Ibn Sina, "The Red Intellect," "Qissat al-Ghurba al-Gharbiyya" by Suhrawardi, and the story of "The Prince Whom the Sorcerer Deceived" in Rumi's Masnavi are the examples examined in this article.
Machine summary:
"The Hymn of the Pearl," which is a Gnostic work, is an excellent example of this myth, where the theme of forgetting and remembering bears a great resemblance to the Indian story of "Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath" and Attar's narrative of "Sheikh San'an and the Christian Girl.
Keywords: Myth of remembrance and oblivion, Gnostic wisdom, symbolic stories, Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Attar, Rumi drhoseini@yahoo.
(Shayganfar, 1387: 112) 'Abulqasem Esmailpour' also, in the book 'The Myth of Creation in Manichaeism' (1381), mentions 'The Hymn of the Pearl' as an example of Gnostic stories from the beginning of the Christian era, written in Syriac, and addresses the point that this story is an allegory of human lostness and wandering in the darkness of the body, which, through affliction by oblivion and then subsequent remembrance, realizes its main goal from the journey Gnostic to the land of Egypt, which is the same as the stealing of the "Pearl" from the clutches of the dragon.
(Corbin, 1387: 15) He considers this oblivion to be the very 'sleeping' of the 'archetype' in the Gnostic realm (as narrated in the Story of the Pearl) and believes that the soul has fallen asleep in sensible objects and natural axioms, and through the perception of higher levels of existence, the levels of the celestial realm, it awakens and becomes aware of the world of angels.
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