Vertical Schema (Descending/Ascending) in Attar’s Mantegh-o Teir (The Conference of Birds)

Cognitive Linguistics through examination of relationships between mind and language strives to discover meaning. It also achieves novel understanding of the subjects through examination of pictorial schemas and discovery of assumptions between mental and real fields. Kinesthetic schemas are those pictorial schemas in which human, stimulated by his/her movement experiences and other mobile phenomena, creates mobile conceptual and perceptual structures for mental phenomena. Mantegh-o Teir</em>, thanks to its didactic-mystical characteristics in narrating journey of birds and its symbolic language, could lend itself to being examined in terms of kinesthetic schemas. This schema implies Attar’s determined efforts on returning to the origin. The questions of the article are what the indications and objectives of ascending and descending movements in Mantegh-o Teir</em> are and what mystical issues Attar is trying to explain by illustrating the journey of birds. The principle of the fall of man is a positive one to Attar which is the result of integration of body and spirit. In other words, he assumes man as the “wonder of mysteries”. His purpose in this descending schema is to delineate the obstacles and the necessity of passing through them. In ascending schema, Attar aims to explain the essence and significance of returning to the origin. The most important requirement for the ascending movement is “self-detachment” and the worst kind of descending movement is decline in human attributes or qualities; corollary to which is loss of power of perception. The requirement for the ascending journey is disregarding this world and the other world and setting one’s heart just on The Right (Hagh); which becomes possible by means of “love” and eventually culminates in unity. Each of these schemas can be elucidated by qualitative and quantitative movements.