The Philosophy of Being in Sohrāb Sepehri’s Poetry: The Myth of Light and Darkness

The mysteriousness of the creation and the emergence of the world always leads human beings to find their answers in the world of myths. Researchers divide the myths of creation into two general groups: The myths of cosmogony that describe the beginning of the world in symbolic terms; and the myths of origins that portray the birth of plants, animals, humans, etc. The myth of light and darkness is one of the most universal cosmogonic myths that are strongly bound with mystical literature. Sohrāb Sepehri is a mystic poet, and his intuition of the story of creation is achieved through his poetry. In mystical intuition of his first poem collections, we encounter both of the two myths of cosmogony and origins, whereas in the later collections we encounter rather with the origin myths. In this article, we examine Sepehri’s Hasht ketāb (eight books) by a descriptive-analytic method. We will study Sepehri’s mystical intuition from the perspective of mythological criticism based on the light and darkness mythology in order to answer some of the questions of humans willing to know the creation.