Myth of the Remembrance and Forgetting in Persian Parables and Allegories

Among the various types of myths is the myth of "Remembrance and Forgetting," numerous examples of which can be found among different peoples, tribes, and civilizations. The Romanian religious scholar Mircea Eliade, in several articles, elucidated this myth and introduced examples of it among the Greeks, Indians, Gnostics, and Manichaeans. The "Hymn of the Pearl," a Gnostic work, is an excellent example of this myth, in which the theme of forgetting and recalling bears striking resemblance to the Indian story of "Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath" and Attar's narrative of "Sheikh San'an and the Christian Maiden."
Given that Hermetic and Gnostic wisdom are among the sources of the symbolic stories of Avicenna and Suhrawardi, examples of this Gnostic myth can also be found in these narratives. The purpose of this article is to explain and compare the myth of Remembrance and Forgetting as a Gnostic myth in Iranian symbolic and allegorical stories. The stories of "Hayy ibn Yaqzan," "Salaman and Absal," "Risalat al-Tayr" (The Epistle of the Birds), and "Qasidah 'Ayniyyah" by Avicenna; "Aql-e Sorkh" (The Red Intellect) and "Qissat al-Ghurbat al-Gharbiyyah" (The Tale of the Western Exile) by Suhrawardi; and the story of "The Prince Bewitched by the Sorceress" in Rumi's Masnavi are the examples examined in this article.