Gnostic experience in Vikrama Urvashi

  Vikramurvaśī is the name of a play with the concept of love by the broad-minded Indian writer, Kālidās. He has been the most popular classic writer of Sanskrit literature and the greatest poet of the famous King, Vikramāditya. It is likely that the inspiration for choosing the name Vikramōrvaśīyam for the mentioned play has come from the name of this king (Kalidas, 1962: 6-5). He has written his plays based on religious/ritual themes. Deities play a central role in his plays. The events in his stories are amazing and exemplum, and the movements of the characters in his plays are vertical; they have one visage on the earth and another one in the heaven; these movements remind us the imaginary travels and inner journeys and associate the mystical experiences. The mystical experience is the epistemic knowledge obtained from a certain reality; it is a fact that cannot be expressed through intellect and intuition, nor by human language, but which is the result of an inner development and a cryptic journey followed by a spiritual intuition that is expressed in an allegorical and symbolic language. Everyone believes that the mystical experience is a kind of immediate awareness of the status of divinity (Faali: 2005: 349). In mystical experiences, the goal is to reach the heavenly pole of one’s being, namely the one’s self, as someone in whom the God has manifested himself at the beginning of creation in the unseen world, and through whom the God has portrayed himself (Corbin, 1995:86). This is an eternal memory which is common in the psyches of all human beings and causes them to be drawn towards the God and the truth that is their very eternal form. "Here we deal with the common psychological layers of all the people who share an ethnicity and civilization, and hence it is called the collective unconscious "(ibid). Jung believes that the collective unconscious is not directly recognizable, but it is represented in the form of an archetype. (Sokhanvar 2000: 29) One of the most important archetypes is Anima serving as the soul or spirit, that is, the early origin of living creatures, and the breath or the magic flame of life "(Moreno, 2007: 60). A representation of Anima is "Sophia. Another representation of Anima is "Daena (Razi, 2003: 298) Daena is the "celestial self” and the “heavenly origin of the soul." (Poornamardian, 1996: 294). In folk tales, Anima is sometimes called "Pari". This research is done through content analysis and its theoretical foundations are explained relying on library sources and tools. At first, we briefly introduce the famous Indian playwright and the work which is investigated here, followed by a summary of the play, Vikramōrvaśīyam, and subsequently an analysis of his mystical representation is presented.

The main theme of the play "Vikramōrvaśīyam" is love and the effects of love. The king is the very same as the wayfarer who is considered as the God’s deputy. The fact that the hero of the play is the king not only associates the kingship of Adam over the world, which has been mentioned in the play by the king himself. (Kalidas, Bita: 170), but also reminds the kingdom of soul over the whole body. Given the fact that the king "Pururavas" is an offspring of the sun and the moon (ibid: 106 footnotes), this demonstrates his luminous background and ancestors; and this definition, strengthens the kingship of the soul. "The soul is luminous, celestial, and heavenly (Bukhari, 1984: 857-856)."A soul that has not forgotten its divine origin. This light and this flame is the dignity. Dignity is the greatness, knowledge, happiness, glory and magnitude granted by the God to those who deserve it (Razi, 2005: 34), so the main character and the hero of the play is a wayfarer who has granted the dignity of divine kingdom because of his glorious and celestial spirit.
The king has a close relationship with the sun. He is in the heaven and comes from the sun worship and meets the fairies at the top of the mountain. The sun has often been depicted in the center of the universe and considered as a sign of the wisdom of the universe. The place of sunrise and its main position is the east. In the mystic world, the word “east” implies the spiritual world and orientemeiur, from which the intellectual sun rises, and the Orientals are those whose inner being accepts this fire inside them. (Corbin, 1990: 44) Now that the wayfarer has been adorned with enlightenment and illumination light, he is ready to join his inner love. "He can face his spiritual companion; the blessed self appears as a woman resembling the spirit of the wayfarer and they marry each other "(Berry, 2006: 192). The king in this play marries Shakuuntala who is a fairy in this tale. The fairy, as mentioned above, is in fact the celestial replica of the self and the transcendental ego from which the soul has fallen apart during its fall to this world. Meeting and joining this celestial ego, and the heavenly witness and beloved, is the ultimate wish of the mystics and the final goal of wayfarers. The experience of such a bonding and meeting which is the presence of ego against self is the realization of another birth as well as the development and expansion of personality beyond the invisible part of the experimental ego and achieving a great source of the non-acquired power, knowledge and wisdom, and a promotion to the angles’ rank. (Pournamdarian, 2001: 129)
Following Urvashi, the king walks in Kumar jungle, a very beautiful and marvelous jungle introduced as the God’s jungle or Indra, and as stated by king Pururavas, this is a forest "which is the home of love" (Kalidas, Bita: 184). We call this land the heart of man. The heart is the essence of the entire universe and the divine house of privacy. (Abedi and Tarachand, 1968: 148) Entering into the heart, the king finds a treasure which is the self and for the Sufis it is the same as divinity" (Barri, 2006:232)
Eventually, a vulture mistakenly steals the gem of union instead of meat, which is then hunted by the king's son. The king's son hunts the death (vulture) and gains immortality (the gem). Certainly, the king’s son is not a person other than the king himself and his inner being and his soul. As stated in "Al-Valad al-Ser Abyeh" (Lahiji 2002:268), the king reaches the level of unity with the superior self. Vikramōrvaśīyam is the name of a celestial fairy with which the play is also. She is the female hero of the play, and a manifestation of love faced with a terrestrial king with ascension capabilities. The king comes from the moon and sun worship who meets the fairies on top of the mountain; the heaven, the sun and the mountains have a sacred side, so at the very beginning of the story, the spiritual and sacred atmosphere of the play is clearly understood; though it should be noted that moving and travelling to the heaven and exploring it cannot be done by every terrestrial human being, but this requires another type of humanity, a person who has turned into a heavenly being. Therefore, the king's journey to heaven is not of a materialistic thing, but rather it is a mystical journey and experience.
The king is not a body, but a he is spirit that has removed its attachments and has freely and lightly flown to the heaven.
The king in this land (the heaven) falls in love with the fairy, who is a representation of divine joy and a reflection of his own being, which has been called Anima by Jung. The fairy or the love, empties the king or mystic from bodily attachments and material desires and removes all of them, and then becomes his guide in reaching the essence of immortality, purity, unity and mortality.
And eventually, she reveals the love, the soul, and the discovered origin of the king (the king's son) to him; with her aid, survival is achieved, and the mission of the fairy comes to an end.

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