Peri

Sirius climbs over a parched plateau and the sky starts moving. Meteors come down in long scratches of light, and the old hymn to that star names them plainly: not stones, not omens, but witches, knocked out of their stations by the rain-bringer. They had been holding the water back. All season the wells had dropped and the grain had come up thin and the dust had got into everything, and the priests knew exactly who to blame. Tištrya breaks the witch of the bad year and the rain arrives. This is the earliest peri anyone can point to, and she is not lovely and she is not kind.

The Avestan word is pairikā, a feminine noun for a class of demonic females, usually rendered sorceress or witch. It travels a long way. It becomes parīg in Middle Persian and in the Manichaean texts of Turfan, prʾykh in Sogdian, parik in Armenian, pēraī in Pashto, and finally parī in modern Persian, from which English took peri and Turkish took the same word unchanged. Scholars have been arguing about where the word itself came from for well over a century, offering foreign women, the demoness of fullness, a cousin of the Roman Parcae, a relative of the Greek pallakis, and she who surrounds. None of it has stuck. The etymology is a graveyard of confident proposals.

What the Avesta does say is consistent and hostile. Pairikās appear in company, listed alongside demons, wicked men and male sorcerers in the hymns to Mithra and elsewhere. The Vendīdād sets them against Fire, Water, Earth, Ox and Plant, which is a way of saying they are against every good thing that grows or burns. The hymn to the Frawašis asks for protection from bad dreams, bad omens and bad pairikās in the same breath. Mithra is called their nemesis. When Zarathuštra spoke the Ahuna Vairya, the great formula-prayer of the faith, they broke and ran, in the way jinn are later said to scatter at the name of God.

Several are named individually, which makes them more unsettling rather than less. There is the mūš.pairikā, the rat sorceress, invoked against in the Yasna and later described in the Bundahišn as having a tail; one reading of her makes her the thief and destroyer, another the demoness of sensuality, and a third blames her for eclipsing the sun. There is pairikā.dužiiāriia, the witch of the bad year, whom men speaking foolishly call the witch of the good year. And there is Xnąθaitī, counter-created by the Hostile Spirit himself and set on the hero Kərəsāspa in a land the Pahlavi commentators identified with Kabul, called there the city of evil shade. Zarathuštra kills her. The Pahlavi gloss calls her the sorceress of desire and the patron of idol worship, which suggests the compilers understood exactly what kind of temptation she represented.

The strangest of these stories is in the Anthology of Zādspram. A parīg comes at the hero Srīd in the shape of a dog. He cuts her in half, cleanly, and from each half a thousand more pour out, and they pull him apart where he stands. It is the only Iranian demon-fight recorded that the hero loses by winning.

Then something happens that the scholarship calls de-demonization, and the parī changes almost completely. By the Islamic centuries she has shed nearly everything. In Ferdowsi’s Šāh-nāma she turns up in the reign of Jamšīd, in the courtship of Zāl and Rūdāba, and in the story of Bīžan and Manīža, and she is charming throughout. Classical Persian lyric treats parī as a compliment. Persian folklore makes Belqīs, the Queen of Sheba, the daughter of a Chinese emperor and a parī. People began speaking of the parīs obliquely, as az mā behtarān, those who are better than we, which is the same instinct that produced the good people of Irish and English fairy belief. Zoroastrians in Kermān and Yazd still keep a spring ritual called the feast of the daughter of the king of the fairies, laid out on a cloth on green grass.

The bargain survived longest in the mountains. In the Hindu Kush the parīs, or barīs, come in both sexes; their king keeps a golden palace on Tirich Mir and they hold forts on the peaks above Chitral. They own the herds of markhor and ibex, and a hunter who wants one has to ask, out loud, in the cold before dawn, calling the parī mother and requesting a goat as a guest requests bread. They are invisible. They bathe in the high lakes. They raise gales and pull down rain. Cross them and they answer with possession, with epilepsy, with the convulsions that take small children, and the specialist who talks them down is still called a parī-ḵʷān, an invoker of the parī, working the last frayed end of a trance practice that once had its own name.

So her powers were never really abolished, only reassigned. She can withhold water and ruin a harvest, darken the sun, ride into sleep as a nightmare, take the shape of a dog, hide herself entirely from sight, split when cut, and, in her later career, exert a beauty that functions as a weapon whether or not she intends it. Her weaknesses are older than her charm. Fire ruins her, and kindling a Bahrām fire at midnight was held to destroy sorcerers and parīs by the myriad. The right words spoken correctly scatter her. Tištrya beats her in open sky and Mithra hunts her by name. Above all she is bound to the categories that made her: she is defined by what she stands against, so wherever fire is lit, water runs and the ox is fed, she has already lost that ground. Whatever else changed about her over three thousand years, that has not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a peri in Persian mythology?

A peri, Persian parī, is a supernatural female spirit descended from the Avestan pairikā. In Zoroastrian scripture she is a demonic witch blamed for drought, eclipses and nightmares, but by the Islamic period she had been transformed into a beautiful and largely benign fairy of Persian epic and folklore. The same word passed into Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian and the languages of the Hindu Kush.

Were peris originally evil?

Yes. In the Avesta the pairikās are listed among demons and sorcerers, named as opponents of Fire, Water, Earth, Ox and Plant in the Vendīdād, and blamed for drought, bad dreams and eclipse. The shift to a benevolent figure happened gradually across the Middle Persian and Islamic periods, a process scholars call de-demonization.

What do peris look like?

The Avestan texts describe no appearance at all. The winged woman of extraordinary beauty that most people picture comes from later Persian poetry, painting and folktale rather than from the ancient sources. In the Hindu Kush tradition peris are usually invisible and exist in both sexes.

How were peris defeated or driven off?

Fire and correctly spoken sacred words were the main defences. The pairikās fled when Zarathuštra recited the Ahuna Vairya prayer, and Persian Zoroastrian texts hold that kindling a Bahrām fire at midnight annihilates sorcerers and parīs in vast numbers. In the hymns the star Tištrya defeats the witch of the bad year, and Mithra is called the nemesis of the pairikās.

Where do peris live?

Later Persian and Central Asian folklore places them in mountains and remote high country. In the Hindu Kush their king is said to hold a golden palace on Tirich Mir with further strongholds on the peaks above Chitral, and the peris there own the wild herds of markhor and ibex and bathe in the high mountain lakes.

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