Allegorical Reflection of the Carnal Soul in MasnaviManvavi

Jalāl al-Din Rūmi insists on recognizing the carnal soul. The soul is an abstract concept and is far from human understanding, so for depicting it, Rūmi uses allegory in which he relates the human soul to the elements of nature. Among the souls, he focuses more on the carnal soul and tries to express its ugliness by using allegories about animals and the four elements. By this way, he refers to didactic and ethic issues and by an indirect and impressive way warns his readers of the carnal soul. In the present article, the allegories related to the carnal soul have been extracted from first three books of Masnavi Manvavi and have been divided to two groups of allegory: allegories of animals and imaginary beings, allegories of the four elements and inanimate. In order to show the results clearly, the rate of usage of the concept has been presented by diagrams and samples. In the first group, the imaginary beings have the most frequency and in the second group, the most common element of the carnal soul belongs to fire.