When Belonging Finds You: Ancestral Memory and the Body
by Faranak Mirjalili
It had been a couple of weeks that I felt a palpable feminine presence with and around me. She would be there when I was in meditation or prayer, or just before sleeping or upon waking up. I didn’t know who or what she was. She did feel familiar, as if she could’ve been family or maybe even the feminine being of Persia itself as I felt the vastness of my ancestral soil enveloping me one day during meditation. My mother had passed away about five months before, and I was deeply mourning the loss of the most important woman in my life. Then one night it happened. She finally revealed herself in the most unexpected of ways.
On this night I was toiling in bed, I was falling in and out of sleep as if something was keeping me on the edge of waking and sleep, sweating heavily all night feeling quite uncomfortable. In one of these liminal states, what is called a hypnagogic sleep state—where you are between sleeping and waking—I heard my heart talk to me as if it were being, with an actual voice. I don’t remember all of the conversations, as can be the case when we are in altered states of consciousness. All I remember is that I was very surprised that my heart could speak; that it had a voice and autonomy of its own and that I can apparently dialogue with it as if I would converse with a human being. I also noticed that this presence in my heart was feminine and recognised her as the feminine presence that was with me over the past weeks. So I asked her the initiatory question, which we can find ourselves asking when we encounter these figures in dreams or fairytales; I asked her “who are you?” The voice answered “Anahita”. That’s a female Persian name, I thought in my half conscious state. Then she went on to teach me and show me different images. She conveyed to me that there was a time when my vocal cords were made of gold and showed me an image of two golden rings, intertwined into each other. She went on to show me what had happened: a horrendous image of a male figure attacking me from behind ripping my neck open and grabbing the vocal cords with his bare hands. I screamed in the dream with an agony I did not know existed for having lost what was most precious to me so brutally and violently. I awoke shaking with the trembling terror of this experience. When I caught my breath and was finally calm I quickly picked up my phone and looked up Anahita. To my surprise I immediately found out that she was an ancient Persian Moon goddess of fertility and that she was venerated before and during the Zoroastrian era of ancient Persia.
It was perhaps one of my most important moments of experiencing the inner worlds. Not because of its intensity, I’ve had far more intense dreams and experiences after this one. It was more the stamp of a moment in time that marked a turning point, after which my life would completely change in every way possible. Once we are claimed by something larger than life, we come to know we can actually be claimed by life itself. It is here where the roles reverse; we are no longer living our little life but are being lived by life. And goodness…that is terrifying! It is often said that people are not afraid of death, but of life and I think in many ways this is true. For if life were to really come alive in us; out goes control, will, predictability, comfort and the safe contours of ‘the known’. In comes surrender, the unknown, mystery, unpredictability and the joy of being. There is a joy in this belonging that belongs to both sorrow and happiness. This joy is like a nectar that flows from the flexible, fluid centre of the psyche, the Self—the only place from where we can hold, and live with, the many paradoxes of being human.
When Anahita first came to me, I had been an analysis for a couple of months and I had just started to give energy and focus to the images from my own inner well. Not anyone else’s or any guru or teaching outside of me, but images that intimately belonged to my psyche and culture. I had for a while felt a pull toward Sufism, and since my mother’s deathbed had adopted some of the Sufi practices of the heart, which started to open many doors within me. But I was unfamiliar with the feminine spiritual tradition of ancient Persia, which was held in the being of Anahita.
I have always felt the Persian culture and Iranian women to be incredibly feminine, even though my home country has been suppressed by an authoritarian regime and political structures. I often felt Persian women to be gifted with a specific feminine aura that I couldn’t recognise in many other cultures, certainly not in the lowlands of The Netherlands, where I grew up most my life. This feminine presence can also be found in Persian men who can ooze out a refined form of femininity, especially when they are reciting poetry or sway with their shoulders and arms on the dance floor of the always-over-crowded Persian weddings.
Femininity mesmerised me and as a child I was obsessed with the images of the feminine. I had the holy insight that I absolutely needed breasts at age 6 while admiring my sexy, Aphrodite-like aunt with her tiny waist, the most voluptuous set of breasts, high heels, red lipstick and glorious, thick, shining black hair. She was my idol and my goddess. My search for femininity has been a red thread that was woven throughout my whole life and it took on many different forms. But what I didn’t know is that there was an archaic memory in my own body and psyche that held a feminine being, powerful and glorious beyond imagination.
Taq-e-Bostan, rock reliefs of Anahita in an ancient initiatory cave, Iran
And on that specific night, five months after losing my mother, was She. From the ashes of my heart rose this Great Mother figure of ancient Persia. And She could speak, show me images, guide, touch and heal me. She could rid me of the grip of my own negative inner patriarch so I was able to start to build an exciting, thrilling, terrifying and exuberant relationship with Her. I felt for the first time that I was claimed and it wasn’t long after this dream that I began to receive Anahita in my heart very physically through lucid experiences where the physical heart would open into a vibrational field that presented itself as Anahita. Back then I didn’t know what was happening to me and the forces were too powerful for me to resist or question. I could only surrender and allow this relationship to swamp me with its immense currents and alter the very fabric of my being, body and life. Sometimes we do not have a choice, sometimes we are taken. If the ego is strong enough or if the Soul has enough memory of what it means to surrender, we can allow ourselves to be taken into this vast, mysterious, terrifying place of complete metamorphosis. I was re-assured by the unconscious, dream after dream, that my Soul knew this place of surrender well, so I could let go one breath at a time into the terrifying and mysterious depths of Anahita’s currents.
Now, five years later I have come to know that she is not just a historical figure or an archetype to have encountered in a fleeting moment, She is a living presence that is incredibly invested in my life and destiny but also of those around me as well as the world and troubled modern civilisation that we now live in. And here is perhaps where we find the crucial difference between a transcendent, distant, masculine God and an immanent, immediate, caring feminine Goddess. This doesn‘t make her into a fairy godmother that grants wishes from a bucketlist, far from that. It makes her into a fiercely loving mother and companion who can be confronting and shocking at times; generous, full of humor and magic at others. The exciting part about this, as I learned over the years, is that there is no opposition between these states, one flows effortlessly into the other when we learn to listen to Her song.
Ruins of Kangavar Temple to Anahita, Iran
I have done a good amount of research to try to find pre-Zoroastrian literature about Anahita and Her mythology. But unfortunately everything has been wiped out, or perhaps barely recorded as is the case with oral traditions. All that is left are the remaining footsteps in the Zoroastrian scriptures, where this ancient Goddess wasn’t exiled but incorporated into the Zoroastrian cosmology and angelology. She is known as an angelic being, a yazata, a being ‘worthy of worship’. She was even known to have given Zoroaster his powers and the prophetic light (Farnah, Xvarnah) that guided him into his prophetic destiny. It was also Anahita that gave the Zoroastrian priests their authority and powers. We find that this monotheistic religion—which was the world’s first in the history of religion—didn’t completely exile and destroy the images of the goddess but gave her an important position in the hierarchy of the divine. (1)
When the time came for me to tell Anahita’s story, I almost backed out. What was I to relate when I had no myth to read, engage with and research? There were so many different readings, translations and versions of Persephone, Inanna, Isis & Osiris, all stories I had been working with. They are relatively easy to study and research. But how are you going to tell a story that is wiped out, almost non-existent according to the books? How could I do her justice with the paltry information I had about her? I thought it was impossible and so after an evening of toiling with it, I had decided that I wouldn’t tell the story and I would go for another story instead. That night, I was moving a Mary statue I had upstairs and the statue fell on the floor and broke her neck. A couple of minutes later I slipped down the stairs and almost broke mine. I was on my own at home and I was howling from pain lying immovably on the floor. When I eventually could get myself up again I realised that I had just slightly passed a potentially horrendous accident. That’s when I knew never to reject a great ancestor or goddess that has claimed their presence in your life, and your body.
It took me 3 years until I could tell her story in a way that I felt was starting to do this great Angel-Goddess justice. I started out with the bones of what I could find in Zoroastrian scriptures, then images that had emerged from my own dreams. I wove stories, part fact, part imagination into a single thread that would give a felt sense of this feminine mystery to my audience. As I was working with this, dreams emerged, not only my own dreams but also from my clients, as well as family members or friends who did not even know about my inner explorations. It was as if I were holding a magic magnet that was pulling the images and symbols of Anahita to my awareness. One dream or synchronicity would lead to the next and it brought with it an exploration of different folk stories, fairytales or creation myths where I would find traces of Anahita. Sometimes it would come through another cultural heritage, like when I decided to co-tell the story with my colleague Gauri Raje, where we combined the river sisters Anahita & the Indian Saraswati. This was the moment where she really came alive in the telling in her more magnificent form. It was as if an ancient Indo-Iranian river that connected the two cultures was flowing again.
No matter how small or big, it would be as if She were re-creating Her own story through the little crumbs that I gathered. It is very difficult to explain the way this evolved, it would be like trying to ask a bee what flowers it had pollinated after a day of buzzing around with intense focus in a blossoming field. Instead of telling stories and myths directly about Her, I was telling stories around Her. It is as if one is circling around the house of God, or the Ka’ba, never entering the full glory of but strengthening Her image and presence by the circumambulation.
Perhaps this is a way of honouring a goddess that will forever be veiled. Now and then, we have a glimpse of her beautiful ankle, mesmerising kohl lined eyes, or the shining waves of her black hair… This seductive play is what keeps a mystery alive, magnetic and completely dynamic. It is what keeps the heart of the human devotee flamed with a desire to come a little bit closer while knowing that Her full essence will always remain a mystery, even to Herself.
Footnotes
1) For my academic publication on Anahita and a textual analysis of the Zoroastrian scriptures see: Mirjalili, Faranak. 2021. "Goddess of the Orient: Exploring the Relationship between the Persian Goddess Anahita and the Sufi Journey to Mount Qaf" Religions 12, no. 9: 704.
