Sîmorgh
سیمرغ (sî morgh)
Mythical bird-king of Persian mythology, later adopted by ʿAṭṭār as the divine figure the world’s birds set out to find. The word holds a crucial pun: *sî morgh* means “thirty birds.” After crossing the seven valleys, the thirty survivors of the quest discover that the *Sîmorgh* they sought is none other than themselves—the goal had always borne the number of its seekers.
Le Simorg n'est pas distinct de son ombre : soutenir le contraire, ce n'est pas dire la vérité ; l'un et l'autre existent ensemble.
From Persian sî (“thirty”) and morgh (“bird”): the name of the king-bird echoes exactly the flock that seeks him. ʿAṭṭâr does not settle for a mere sound coincidence; he makes it the driving force of the entire poem. The birds cross the desert, love, bewilderment, and at the end, extinction (fanâ)—only to read their own name in that of the Sîmorgh. Seeker and Sought were never two; the distance traveled was the form their unseen unity took, for the duration of the journey.
The image that seals this identity is that of the mirror: the king too dazzling to be faced directly reveals himself in a mirror, and that mirror is the heart. “If you find the shadow lost in the sun, then you will see that you yourself are the sun.” Not that the bird is God in the sense of a claim; but that at the journey’s end, no separate self remains to stand before an Other.
To be distinguished from the ātman of Vedānta, which posits from the outset the identity of the deep self and Brahman: the Sîmorgh, by contrast, is only discovered at the end of a real and costly quest, and at the cost of the seeker’s disappearance. Sîmorgh ≠ ātman: one is an identity to be recognized, the other a union to which one must surrender—and in which one is lost.