Zahhak

The palace kitchens opened before first light, because the snakes woke hungry. Two brains a day, taken from two young men, went into a bronze bowl and up through the corridors while the steam was still on them. The cook who carried it had learned to keep his eyes on the floor. When the smell reached the throne the serpents came up off the king’s shoulders, swaying, thick as branches, dark as wet leather, and they fed while the court stood and watched and said nothing worth recording. They had grown out of him at the exact two places where the devil’s mouth had touched.

Ferdowsi tells this story around the year 1000, near the opening of the Shahnameh, and he tells it as a slow seduction rather than a battle. Zahhak begins as the son of Mardas, a god-fearing Arab king of the land Iranians called Tazian. The son is rich, restless, unloved and hungry for consequence. Eblis, the devil, notices. He comes three times, in three faces. First as a wise counsellor, who offers knowledge in exchange for an oath of obedience, and gets it. Then he proposes that the young prince take the throne early, and when Zahhak flinches from killing his own father, Eblis offers to do it himself and asks only for silence. He gets that too. Mardas dies in a pit dug in his own garden, and the silence is the real crime.

Eblis returns a third time in a cook’s apron. In the Shahnameh he is the first to prepare meat, and the young king eats blood and flesh and becomes something with a taste for both. In payment the cook asks a small courtesy, permission to kiss the royal shoulders, and vanishes at the moment his lips leave the skin. The serpents come up out of the wound the kiss made. Physicians are summoned and fail. Then a new physician arrives with a calm and terrible prescription: feed them human brains, and in time they will die. It is the devil’s fourth face and his best joke. The remedy is the disease, and it guarantees that Zahhak will need people the way a furnace needs fuel.

Meanwhile the old king Jamshid loses his farr, the divine glory that legitimises Iranian kingship, and his realm slides into disorder. A delegation rides out to Tazian to offer the crown to the strongest man they can find. They choose Zahhak. Ferdowsi puts that choice in plain sight and does not soften it. The serpent king is not imposed on Iran. He is invited.

For nearly a thousand years the daily quota runs. Two of his cooks, Armayel and Garmayel, work out the only resistance available to them: each day they release one of the two condemned men into the mountains and stir a sheep’s brain into the pot instead. Nobody at the throne can tell the difference. The poem says the descendants of those spared men became the Kurds, though what Ferdowsi meant by the word is argued over, and it may have carried the older sense of mountain nomads rather than the modern people. Either way it is the tenderest thing in the chapter, and it happens in a kitchen.

Behind Ferdowsi’s tyrant stands something older and far less human. The Avesta knows him as Aži Dahāka, a dragon with three mouths, three heads, six eyes, a thousand tricks and enormous strength, a demoniac lie made by Angra Mainyu to spoil the world. He worships Ardvi Sura Anahita in the land of Bawri, which the tradition read as Babylon, and he worships Vayu at a fastness called Kwirinta, and what he asks for is the power to empty the seven climes of every living person. He is refused. Later, in the same texts, Thraetaona prays at the same shrines for the strength to beat him, and is granted it, along with the freeing of Savanghavach and Arenavach, the two most beautiful women in the world, whom Aži Dahāka had taken. The Pahlavi books give him a genealogy running back to the Evil Spirit himself and a mother, Wadag, counted among the seven worst sinners who ever lived.

Armenia took him early, through Parthian, and made him a king. Movsēs Xorenacʿi tells the Shahnameh’s story in an appendix to the first book of his History of Armenia — Fereydun turns up there under a north-western form of the name, Hṙudēn — but he also does something Ferdowsi never does, and identifies Aždahak with Astyages, the historical king of the Medes against whom the Armenian Tigran rebelled. The dragon becomes a neighbouring monarch, and the story becomes a story about foreign rule: what Armenia borrowed was not the monster so much as the shape of the grievance. The habit outlasted him. Pʿawstos Biwzand describes the fourth-century Armenian king Pap, a persecutor of the church, with serpents springing from his breasts, and the carved stone steles still standing in the Armenian highlands are called vishap, dragon, by the Armenians and aždahā by the Kurds who live among them.

The end arrives by way of a nightmare. Zahhak dreams of a young man who will bring him down, and the dream names Fereydun. Fereydun is Thraetaona brought down to human scale: his father Abtin has already been fed to the serpents, and his mother Faranak hides him on a farm and then on Mount Alborz until he is old enough to ask why. What turns the boy’s grievance into a rebellion is a smith. Kaveh has lost seventeen children to the snakes, and when the collectors come for the last one he walks into the throne room, shouts down a king who has ruled for ten centuries, and tears up the loyalty declaration they hand him to sign. Then he goes outside, lashes his scorched leather apron to a spear, and lifts it. That apron becomes the Derafsh Kaviani, the royal banner of Iran, hung afterwards with silk and jewels and carried until the Arab conquest.

Fereydun takes the palace and brings the mace down on Zahhak’s skull, and Zahhak does not die. The Pahlavi Dēnkard is blunt about how badly he does not die: struck on the shoulder, the heart and the head, he lives; cut three times with a sword, he begins to run out of his own wounds as scorpions, lizards and vermin, and Ohrmazd tells Fereydun to stop before the world drowns in creeping things. So the hero binds him instead. They drag him up Mount Damavand, the white cone that stands over the Alborz range, and chain him in a cave in the cold where the wind does not stop, and leave him.

His powers are the powers of an appetite: a thousand wiles, sorcery that filled Babylon with wonders and turned people to idolatry, strength enough to hold a throne for a millennium, and a body that will not accept a killing blow. His weaknesses are all of the same kind. He owns nothing he was not given. Every capability he has came from Eblis, including the snakes, and the one thing he most wants, an emptied world, was refused him by the very powers he prayed to. His allotted thousand years were counted out in advance in the Bundahišn’s calendar of millennia, which means his reign was always a lease. And he cannot be killed, which sounds like an advantage until you notice what it costs him.

He is still there. Zoroastrian tradition holds that at the end of days the fetters will fail, and Aži Dahāka will come down off Damavand and devour a third of all the cattle, the sheep and the people of the world, and strike at the water and the fire and the plants, until the hero Keresaspa is woken from his long sleep to finish what Fereydun was forbidden to. The chain is not a verdict. It is a delay, and the Iranians who told this story knew exactly how long delays last.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zahhak in Persian mythology?

Zahhak is the serpent-shouldered tyrant of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, an Arab prince who murders his father under the devil’s influence, takes the throne of Iran, and rules it for nearly a thousand years. Two snakes grow from his shoulders after the devil kisses him, and they must be fed the brains of two young people every day. He is finally overthrown by Fereydun and chained inside Mount Damavand.

Why does Zahhak have snakes on his shoulders?

The serpents appear after Eblis, the devil, disguises himself as a cook, wins Zahhak’s favour, and asks permission to kiss the king’s shoulders. The devil vanishes at the moment of the kiss, and the snakes rise from the two spots his mouth touched. Eblis then returns disguised as a physician and prescribes the only thing that will quiet them, human brains, which locks Zahhak into killing his own subjects to survive.

How was Zahhak defeated?

Fereydun, whose father was fed to the snakes, took the palace with the help of the blacksmith Kaveh and the crowd Kaveh raised behind his leather apron, and struck Zahhak down with a mace. Zahhak could not be killed. Blows and sword cuts only made vermin pour from his body, so he was chained in a cave inside Mount Damavand instead.

What is Aži Dahāka and how is it related to Zahhak?

Aži Dahāka is the older Avestan form of the same figure, a dragon with three mouths, three heads and six eyes, created by Angra Mainyu to depopulate the world. By the time of the Shahnameh, roughly 1,600 years later, the dragon has been rewritten as a human tyrant whose monstrousness has shrunk to the two snakes on his shoulders.

Does Zahhak ever escape?

Zoroastrian eschatology says he does. At the end of the world his fetters break and he comes down from Damavand to devour a third of all people and livestock and to attack the water, fire and plants, at which point the hero Keresaspa is resurrected to kill him for good.

Related Entries

Kaveh the Blacksmith, Angra Mainyu, Ahura Mazda, Div, Anahita, Rostam, Simurgh, Zoroaster, Aka Manah, Bakhtak, Peri, Shahmaran, Typhon, Tiamat, Apep/Apophis