Zoroastrian Scripture or Illuminationist Theurgy? On the Sources of the Dasātīr

Few texts in the corpus of Persian literature have aroused as much controversy as the Dasātīr-i Āsmānī (‘The Celestial Laws’), a work of scripture associated with the sixteenth-century Iranian mystic Āẕar Kayvān. When the text was first brought to international attention upon its publication in 1818, it was touted as the ancient scripture of the Iranians. Yet the peculiar ‘celestial’ language in which the text was composed quickly led scholars to dismiss any claim to antiquity that the text might have had. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Dasātīr has largely been dismissed as a forgery, a “contrivance of a bungling impostor.” Little attempt has been made to situate the Dasātīr in the historical context of the Safavid period. If the Dasātīr is not in fact a work of Iranian antiquity, what is it? In this paper, we show that much of the Dasātīr does in fact derive from known sources. Much of the Dasātīr consists of word-to-word translations of unpublished Arabic-language theurgical liturgies attributed to the twelfth-century philosopher al-Suhrawardī, sources which enjoyed a renewed popularity during the early modern period. Other portions of the Dasātīr derive from the 10th-11th-century writings of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā. While much of the Dasātīr therefore firmly derives from the Islamic philosophical and occult milieu, this talk will also present material from unpublished Dasātīr manuscripts which contain additional prayers consisting of liturgical material composed in other languages, including Avestan, Pahlavi, Sanskrit, Hindi, pseudo-Turkic, and Arabic. Ultimately, this talk seeks to answer the question of who the followers of Āẕar Kayvān were, and how the Dasātīr related to their vision of a universalist perennial wisdom.