321 words
Jason Reza Jorjani
Novel Folklore: On Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018
166 pages
Hardcover: $35
Paperback: $20
Kindle E-book: $5.99
Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl is widely considered to be the greatest work of modern Persian literature. Often compared to the classics of Existentialism and Gothic horror, The Blind Owl is widely believed to be cursed, so that anyone who reads it seriously is driven to suicide. This belief is no doubt influenced by Hedayat’s own suicide in Paris in 1951.
In Novel Folklore, Jason Reza Jorjani, whose grandfather was best friends with Hedayat, offers a revolutionary interpretation of The Blind Owl. Jorjani reveals Hedayat’s complex appropriation and adaptation of libertine Gnostic and antinomian Tantric ideas and argues that he aimed to reestablish Iran’s perennial role as the cultural crossroads of the Western world and the Indo-Buddhist East.
On Jorjani’s reading, The Blind Owl is ultimately about the “Imaginal” metamorphosis of humans into higher beings. These beings are addressing us from our own future. We think of them as “aliens” because we are alienated from our own future possibilities. Their business here is to re-write their past by re-engineering the folkloric substratum of human consciousness and identity.
Jason Jorjani’s Novel Folklore is a stunningly original interpretation of The Blind Owl and an original philosophical work in its own right.
Contents
Introduction – 1
Chapter 1. An Untimely Madman’s Angel of Destiny – 14
Chapter 2. Soul Mates & Psychic Shadows – 37
Chapter 3. Poisoned Wine & the Serpent Power – 71
Chapter 4. The Eighth Clime – 91
Chapter 5. Star Blood – 117
Index – 155 (print edition only)
About the Author – 158
About the Author
Jason Reza Jorjani, Ph.D. is a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) and a Senior Advisor to the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees of the Persian (Iranian) Renaissance Foundation. His first book, Prometheus and Atlas, won the 2016 Book Award from the Parapsychological Association (PA). He is also the author of World State of Emergency and Lovers of Sophia. His website is jasonrezajorjani.com.
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6 comments
I had the privilege of editing Jason’s latest work, which is a study of the masterpiece of modern Persian literature, Sadegh Hedayat’s “The Blind Owl.” Jason is the perfect author for this effort, given that, in addition to his Persian background and extensive knowledge of Persian history and philosophy, his grandfather was Hedayat’s best friend. Jason was kind enough to give me a copy of Hedayat’s book long before he knew I would be the one fortunate enough to edit his analysis of it, and while I enjoyed it immensely and was immediately struck by its supernatural tone, I initially took it as a Kafkaesque fable (Hedayat was the translator of Kafka into Farsi). In reading Jason’s book, however, I realized that “The Blind Owl” is in fact thick with references from Persian mythology, history, and philosophy, and this study does a masterful job of showing what is encoded in the text, and also how it fits into the ongoing Weltanschauung regarding our past and future psychic evolution as a species that Jason has been developing since “Prometheus and Atlas.” I highly recommend it, and not only because I worked on it.
Masterpiece of extreme pessimist literature, it was also a major influence on the philosophy and fiction of great Thomas Ligotti.
Great to see that Jorjani is working with Counter-Currents and getting away from the unfortunate elements of the “movement”.
Jorjani is one of major thinkers of anti-christian Right. We really need more people like him, for they upen open up a way of freeing our movement from christian constraints that already did so much damage to the world.
I’m happy to see that Jason, and Counter-Currents, are exploring these kinds of speculative non-Christian myths and possibly developing a new ontology of Indo-Aryanism. The Tradition has always understood the distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric dimensions of great mythological systems. The imaginal, the hyperdimensional and paranormal fields are cognitively closed to most people, but the movement needs to be anchored in something greater than biology and politics. I would hope that the work of Miguel Serrano will also be explored as a source of creative speculation about the nature of reality and our people.
Jorjani is a great contemporary philosopher. Comparing to his True works, all the other works in the same field look like Sharia Law! Hands down…!
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