Homa

The shadow comes first, and in most of the stories it is the only part of the bird anyone gets. It slides across the dust of a caravan road, over the stones, over the shoulders of men who are thinking about nothing in particular, and then it is past. Look up and the sky is white with glare and there is nothing in it. But if that shadow crossed your head rather than the ground beside you, the rest of your life has just been decided, and you did not feel a thing.

That is the whole of the Homa. It is a bird known by its shade.

The clearest sight of it in Persian literature comes in the assembly of the birds that Farid al-Din Attar convened around 1177, when the hoopoe calls every bird in the world together to seek the Simurgh, their true king, and one by one they invent reasons not to go. The Homa steps up eighth, and Attar introduces it as the Giver of Shade, whose shadow bestows pomp on kings. This, the poem says, is why it is called Humayun, the fortunate. The bird agrees. I am not a bird as you are, it tells the assembly. A high ambition moves me. Kings are lifted up by the influence of my shadow, but beggarly-natured men do not please me. It names Fereydun and Jamshid, the great kings of the old Persian past, as its own work. Beneath my wings everyone seeks shelter. And then the line that damns it: do I need the friendship of the lordly Simurgh, when I have royalty at my disposition?

The hoopoe’s answer is the reason the Homa is worth an entry rather than a footnote. O slave of pride, it says. Spread no more your shadow. Far from conferring power on kings, you are like a dog busy with a bone. And then it goes further, and turns the gift inside out. Suppose your shadow does seat rulers on their thrones. Tomorrow they will meet misfortune and be stripped of their royalty, and had they never seen your shadow at all, they would not have to face so terrible a reckoning on the last day.

Attar then does something worse to the bird. He follows the rebuke with a story about Sultan Mahmud, the most powerful man of his age, appearing to a holy man in a dream and being asked how things stand in the kingdom of eternity. Mahmud does not want to talk about it. Say nothing and depart, he answers, for here one does not speak of royalty. My power was only vanity and self-pride, conceit and error. Call me the afflicted one. Do not call me king. And then he sends a message to his son: may the wings and the feathers wither of that Homa which cast its shadow upon me.

The bird that makes kings is cursed, by name, by a king it made.

A century later Sa’di gives it back some of its dignity, and does it in two lines that are still quoted in Iran. The homa excels all other birds in nobility, he writes in the Gulistan, because it feeds on bones and injures no living thing. The nobility, in other words, is not in the crown-giving at all. It is in the restraint. This is a bird at the top of the sky that lives off what is already dead, kills nothing, competes with nothing, and takes only what no other creature wants. Elsewhere in the same book Sa’di sets it against the owl, the bird of ruins and ill omen, in a couplet with a hard edge to it: no one goes under the shadow of an owl, even if the homa should disappear from the world.

What the Homa actually looked like, nobody says. There is no beak, no plumage, no colour, no size in the passages that matter, and there is something fitting in that, because a shadow has no colour either. The later tradition fills the silence with the image most people now carry: a bird that never touches the earth, that lives its whole life aloft in the high air, that in some tellings has no legs and therefore cannot land even if it wanted to, and that burns and renews itself like a phoenix. Those details are repeated everywhere and traced to almost nothing. The old poets give a shadow, a pair of wings and a mouthful of bones, and leave the rest to the imagination of everyone who came after.

The bones, though, belong to a real animal. There is one bird in the mountains of Iran that lives on bone and nothing much else, carrying the skeletons of dead sheep up into the air and dropping them onto rock to crack them open for the marrow. The bearded vulture, Gypaetus barbatus, haunts the high passes of the Alborz and the Zagros, kills nothing, and does exactly what Sa’di said the homa does. Iranians today call it the homa, and it is the airline’s bird, the emblem’s bird, the bird on the tail fin. Whether the poets meant it is another matter, and the honest answer is that they never said.

The powers follow from the shadow and go no further. The Homa confers sovereignty, and it does so passively, by passing overhead; it shelters those who get beneath its wings; its name became a Persian word for royal good fortune, which is why a Mughal emperor was called Humayun and why a huma sat in gold above the canopy of Tipu Sultan’s throne in Mysore. The limits are just as clear. It cannot be caught. It cannot be summoned, bribed or reasoned with, and it does not care who deserves what. Attar’s hoopoe insists the crown it hands out is a debt that comes due at the reckoning, and Mahmud, who wore one, agrees.

As for the gold bird on Tipu’s throne: when Seringapatam fell in 1799 and Tipu was killed in the breach, the huma was prised off the canopy, presented to George III by the directors of the East India Company, and eventually sent to the royal jeweller to be remounted. It sits in the Royal Collection now, a bird of good fortune in the cabinet of the king who took it from the king it was supposed to protect. Attar would have known exactly what to do with that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Homa bird?

The Homa, also spelled Huma, is a legendary bird of Persian tradition whose shadow is said to confer kingship on whoever it falls upon. It appears in Sufi and courtly poetry rather than in narrative myth, most famously in Farid al-Din Attar’s twelfth-century poem The Conference of the Birds, where it boasts of having made kings of Fereydun and Jamshid.

What happens if the Homa’s shadow falls on you?

You become a king, according to the tradition, without any action on your part. Attar calls the Homa the Giver of Shade, whose shadow bestows pomp on kings, and derives its name from humayun, meaning fortunate. His hoopoe warns that the crown is a trap, and the poem’s Sultan Mahmud, speaking from the afterlife, curses the very Homa whose shadow fell on him.

Is the Homa a real bird?

The Homa of the poets is not, but the name belongs to a real one. Sa’di wrote in 1258 that the homa excels all other birds in nobility because it feeds on bones and injures no living thing, which describes the bearded vulture, Gypaetus barbatus, a bone-eating bird of the high Alborz and Zagros mountains that Iranians call the homa to this day.

Does the Homa ever land?

The tradition says it does not. It is described as living its entire life in the high air, never touching the ground, and in some versions it has no legs at all and so could not land if it tried. These details come from later lore rather than from the earliest sources, which describe the Homa almost entirely through its shadow.

Why does the Homa refuse to join the search for the Simurgh?

In Attar’s poem the Homa declines the journey because it already has royalty at its disposal and sees no reason to seek a king when it makes them. The hoopoe answers that this is pride, compares the bird to a dog gnawing a bone, and tells it that the rulers it crowns will be ruined and will answer for the crown on the day of reckoning.

Related Entries

Simurgh, Hoopoe, Chamrosh, Shahbaz, Anqa, Roc, Peri, Div, Zahhak, Rostam, Phoenix, Fenghuang, Garuda, Bennu, Ziz, Kun and Peng