Fereydun

The cow stood in a pasture that had no name yet, and her coat shifted colour the way a peacock’s neck does. For three years she fed a child whose father had already been killed on his account. Her name was Birmaya. A herdsman kept her, and a weeping woman had asked him to be a father to the boy, and he agreed, and the poem is careful to say that he never once breathed a cold breath on him. That is how Fereydun spent his infancy: hidden in grass, drinking the milk of an animal a king would later ride out and butcher himself, in a temper, because it had done him no harm and there was nothing else left to punish.

He reaches the record long before Ferdowsi picks him up, and the older version has no childhood in it at all. In the Avesta he is Θraētaona of the house of Āθβiya, and what he has instead of a boyhood is a request. In the four-cornered land of Varena he lays out a hundred stallions, a thousand oxen and ten thousand lambs, and asks for one thing: that he may overcome Aži Dahāka, the three-mouthed, the three-headed, the six-eyed, a thousand senses in him, the strongest lie Angra Mainyu ever built against the material world, and that he may bring out the two women shut up in that house, Savanghavach and Erenavach, called the fairest of body among women. The hymn grants it. Another says how he came to be able to ask at all. When the divine Glory left Jamshid for the second time and went out of him in the shape of a bird, Thraetaona caught it, and the text calls him the most victorious of victorious men after Zarathushtra.

His name is a claim rather than a description. The Avestan Θraētaona splits into a word for three and a second element from a root meaning to be able, which gives something like “possessing threefold power”. The three turn out to be literal. He fights, he enchants, and he heals.

Ferdowsi supplies the family the hymns leave out, and the family is where the story hurts. Abtin, his father, is picked up by Zahhak’s men and killed, his brains fed to the two black serpents growing from the tyrant’s shoulders. His mother Faranak carries him to the pasture, and then, when word of the extraordinary cow starts to travel, up onto the Alborz, where she gives him to a holy man living alone on the mountain and walks back down. Zahhak has already dreamed the whole thing: three men coming, the youngest cypress-tall, an ox-headed mace descending on his skull. His astrologers are too frightened to speak for three days. When one of them finally does, the proof he offers is not the crown or the throne. It is the cow. You will kill his nurse, he tells the king, and that is why the mace will have an ox’s head on it.

At sixteen the boy comes down off the mountain and asks his mother who his father was. She tells him, then tells him to wait. He does not.

What actually tips the country is not the prince. It is a blacksmith. Kaveh has lost seventeen sons to the serpents and comes to court bellowing about the eighteenth, and when he is handed the loyal address that the nobles have all signed, he reads it, calls them confederates of the Div, tears it and tramples it on the floor of the throne room. Out in the market he lifts the leather apron he wears at the forge, sticks it on a spear point and walks, and the dust comes up behind him, and men follow a piece of hide. When it reached Fereydun he hung it with Roman brocade on a gold ground, set a full moon at the spearhead and draped it in yellow, red and violet, and every Shah afterwards added more jewels and more painted silk. The royal standard of Persia began as a working man’s dirty bib.

He had the smiths make his weapon to a pattern he drew on the ground himself with compasses, and it came out with a buffalo’s head on it. Then he rode for the Arvand, the river the Arabs call the Dijla, and the guard on the far bank refused him boats without a sealed pass. He put his horse into the flood instead. His men went over saddle-deep behind him, heads reeling, the horses’ necks the only part of them above the water, and the whole force came out on the far side soaked and entirely unhurried, and went on to the palace. Zahhak was in India when it fell.

Then the killing does not happen. Fereydun has him on the floor with the helm beaten in when a voice stops the second blow. In the Shahnameh it is Surush, arriving in friendly shape with musk-dark hair to the feet, saying that his time has not yet come. The older Zoroastrian material gives a colder reason. The Denkard has Ohrmazd tell him plainly not to strike, because if that body were opened the earth would fill with xrafstar, the noxious creeping things, and every plague in them would be loose. So he bound the thing instead. He hauled it to Damavand, found a gorge of viewless depth, studded the rock with heavy nails where the head would chafe, and fixed it there by the hands to hang until the end of the world, when it will get free and be killed by somebody else, Garshasp, who is not born yet. The villages under the mountain read their volcano accordingly. The steam is Zahhak breathing, the flames in the vent are his eyes, the dull underground noise is him groaning, and the yellow water running in the streams at the foot of the slope is his urine.

The powers all follow from the Glory he caught in mid-air. He arrests a boulder his own brothers roll down a cliff onto him while he sleeps, and simply goes on with the march without mentioning it. He turns the boatman Paurva into a vulture and keeps him aloft three days and three nights until Anahita brings him down. He drives the Mazanderani demons out of the central land, turns demons to stone, takes dragon form himself when it suits him. And he heals. The Fravardin Yasht praises his spirit specifically against scab, fever, constipation, chills, impotence and the harm done by dragons, which is a very odd list to find attached to a hero. A Middle Persian text calls him purr-bēšaz, full of healing. There are Sasanian charms that invoke him to stop blood, a gem showing a warrior with a bull-headed mace killing a demon that scholars read as an illness, and a chapter of prayers in his name for sore eyes and smallpox and headache, still being printed in Bombay in the nineteenth century.

None of it is any use to him at home. Fifty years into his reign he has three sons, marries them to the three daughters of the king of Yemen, and meets them on the road back in the form of a fire-breathing dragon to see what they are made of. The eldest runs, the middle one charges without thinking, the youngest stands and says whose sons they are. He names them for what they showed him, then splits the world: Rum and the west to Salm, China and Turan to Tur, Iran and the golden throne and the royal seal to Iraj. Envy does the rest. Salm works on Tur, Tur kills the boy, and the head comes back to his father in a box. Fereydun spends the remainder of his five hundred years raising Iraj’s grandson Manuchehr to go and settle it, which Manuchehr eventually does, after which the old man hands over the crown and dies shortly afterwards. The mace was no use at all.

The oldest layer of this is not Persian in any narrow sense. The Fravardin Yasht already blesses the dead of the lands of Airya, Tuirya and Sairima, the three nations whose names produce Iraj, Tur and Salm, and the Ayādgār ī Jāmāspīg has the division of the world between the three brothers without a word of Ferdowsi’s dragon test. Herodotus heard the Scythians tell it about Targitaus and his three sons, Tacitus heard the Germans tell it about Mannus and his, and Georges Dumézil spent a career on why those keep matching. What Ferdowsi added, and what the Avesta does not have, is everything that makes the story readable: the cow, the herdsman, the mother on the mountain road, the apron on the spear. The hymns give a man who binds a dragon. The epic gives a boy who was hidden in a field.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Fereydun in Persian mythology?

Fereydun is the Pishdadian king who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak and ruled for five hundred years. He appears in the Avesta under the older Avestan name Thraetaona, son of Athwya, and reaches his fullest form in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, where he is raised in hiding, avenges his murdered father Abtin, and is later remembered as a physician as well as a warrior.

Did Fereydun kill Zahhak?

No. Fereydun beat Zahhak down with his ox-headed mace but was stopped before the killing blow and bound him instead, chaining him inside a gorge on Mount Damavand. The Denkard explains the restraint: Ohrmazd warned that opening Zahhak’s body would release the noxious creatures inside it and poison the world. Zahhak is to stay chained until the end of time, when the hero Garshasp finally kills him.

What is Fereydun’s weapon?

Fereydun’s weapon is the gorz-e gavsar, the ox-headed mace, which he had smiths cast to a pattern he drew on the ground himself. Zahhak saw it in a prophetic dream before Fereydun was born, and an astrologer told him the head would be an ox’s because Zahhak was fated to kill the cow Birmaya, who nursed the child.

Why did Fereydun divide the world between his three sons?

Fereydun divided the world after testing his sons by appearing to them as a dragon, giving each a realm suited to the character he showed. Salm received Rum and the west, Tur received Turan and China, and Iraj received Iran along with the throne and royal seal. Salm and Tur envied Iraj’s share and murdered him, which began the long wars between Iran and Turan.

Was Fereydun a healer?

Yes. The Fravardin Yasht praises his spirit as a protection against fever, scab, chills and the harm done by dragons, and Middle Persian texts call him purr-besaz, meaning full of healing. Iranians later wore charms and amulets in his name against illness, and a chapter of prayers called the Charms of King Fereydun was still being printed for eye disease, smallpox and headache in the nineteenth century.

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