Paradise, Light, and Beauty: Fundamental Metaphors in Abhar al-Asheqeen

Abhar-ol-Asheghin, as a volume that uses complex, metaphor-based language, is thought-provoking and obscure. Despite the fact that previous studies have been conducted on the book, its linguistic and intellectual features are not yet fully known. Due to the linguistic features of Abhar-ol-Asheghin and the capacity of conceptual metaphor theory for simultaneous analysis of language and thought, the current study investigates the conceptual metaphors in Abhar-ol-Asheghin by relying on the structural relations between them. This study does not consider the metaphors to be of the same value; instead, it deals with the structure arising from the relations between conceptual metaphors by considering ‘the expansion of the mappings of a conceptual domain’ in the process of ‘entailment’. ‘Paradise’, ‘light’, and ‘beauty’ are the most significant conceptual domains in the text and have been used for the metaphoric understanding of the fundamental concepts in Rouzbehan’s mystical thinking. Other conceptual domains in the text are activated through the expansion or re-examination of these domains. It can be said that the structure arising from the relations between conceptual metaphors in Abhar-ol-Asheghin has three layers: first, Paradise, light, and beauty; second, the expansion of the conceptual domains in the first layer; and third, the re-examination of the conceptual domain in the first layer with the aid of a few other conceptual domains.