When Love Came to Town
Some people say romantic love is a European invention. Some facts suggest it isn’t. Let the mud fight begin!
Romantic love is a Western invention that is at best misunderstood in the East, just like democracy and freedom of speech. So the story goes. However, the actual truth might be stranger than the myth itself.
Long time ago in Parthian Iran, there lived a girl named Vis. She was the daughter of the ruler of Media, a region in the western part of the empire. As universal aristocratic principles dictated back in those days, she was little more than exchange currency for her family. Even before Vis was born, her mother promised her hand to the ruler of Merv, a state in the far east of the empire.
Years passed. She subsequently forgot about her promise and married her daughter to her own brother. Fortunately, the young bride had a very erratic menstrual cycle, and because Zoroastrian canon explicitly advised against sex during menstruation, her virginity remained intact even after the marriage.
When the ruler of Merv found out about the whole mess, it was already too late. Seeing no other choice, he decided to go to war and steal what he felt was righteously his. Unlike Paris, who stole Helen of Troy personally, he put his brother Ramin in charge of the whole operation and the logistics of bringing his future wife back to her new home.
At this point, what seems like just another story about kidnapping a girl as a trophy turns into something extraordinary because Vis wasn’t just an ordinary woman ripe for picking. She had superpowers:
And you would say that subtle mischief made;
Her face to plunder hearts as its cruel trade,
Or that this lovely creature had been given,
All the beauty that was owned by heaven.
On the road to Merv, Ramin fell in love with Vis so deeply that he — allegedly — had a seizure and fell from his horse. This was the beginning of a love affair that would endure the test of time despite many dangerous obstacles and would continue even in the afterlife. The poem in its praise was written by the Iranian poet Fakhruddin As’ad Gurgani.
Dick Davis, whom we should thank for the translation of the poem in contemporary English, suggests a connection between Gurgani’s tale and the precursor of all Western romantic stories — the legend of Tristan and Iseult. They share a similar plot line developed around a love triangle between a king, his future wife, and a servant who is in charge of her safety on her way to the royal wedding.
In both stories love is a powerful force that emerges by accident, inspires treachery, and challenges an entire established social order. Out of the ashes of the rejected morality rises a brand new idea: the passion of the human heart as the ultimate human experience. Until that moment, the ecstasy of love was always understood in a religious context, as a triad between two souls and a deity that was the ultimate source of their fascination.
Ancient myths are infested with gods and goddesses claiming authority over the human heart: Aphrodite and her progeny in Ancient Greece, Astarte in the Near East, and Kamadeva in India are among the few examples. In those cultures love was little more than a hangover caused by a capricious deity. Barring several refined myths infused with allegorical meaning, love often led to rape, unwanted pregnancy and/or desperation.
For the Ancient Greeks, The Happy Ever After of two lovers was as easy to imagine as it is for us to picture a movement of a graviton in four-dimensional space. During the Middle Ages things turned up even more sour. What we now know as romantic love was considered the purest and most irresponsible form of adultery and as such was punishable not only by death but by eternal damnation in Hell. Apart from few mystics, everybody in those times believed in a literal hell, so falling in love was an act of ultimate rebellion against everything sacred, a type of nihilism with a fanatic streak unsurpassed even by the highest Taliban doctrines of heavenly virgins and premature ejaculation.
Perhaps we will never find out beyond doubt if there was a direct link between Ramin and Tristan. Both stories are significantly old and their origins are covered by centuries of dust. The European was first written down as a poem in Old French by Thomas of Britain. This happened in the second half of the 12th Century. The Iranian precedes it with a century but much of our knowledge about it is indirect, transmitted to us by a better preserved interpretation made in medieval Georgia called Visramiani.
Medieval Iran was spared from the restraints of the dogmatic Christianity that suffocated Europe at the time. The refined and dynamic Muslim culture that produced poets like Gurgani obviously encouraged the creation and proliferation of works that in hindsight can be described as romantic.
By replacing the divine agent with a mortal king, the Iranian legend of Vis and Ramin reinterprets love as a purely secular concept. What used to be a guiding principle to spiritual enlightenment became an absolute universal power, erasing the strict boundaries between spirit and body, between life and death.
In the Tristan legend the role of a deity that administers the love potion, reserved in ancient times for almighty Aphrodite, is performed by Iseult’s nanny, Brangien. And because she lacks the disarming brashness of the beautiful Greek goddess, her mortal human self is devastated by the fact that the romance between the lovers is a result of her own carelessness:
“The wine possesses you, the draught your mother gave me, the draught the King alone should have drunk with you: but that old Enemy has tricked us, all us three; friend Tristan, Isolde my friend, for that bad ward I kept take here my body and my life, for through me and in that cup you have drunk not love alone, but love and death together.” *
The substitute for a deity embodied by Brangien may have a surprising feat of bitter remorse but what makes the European story absolutely unique is the attitude of the lovers. They are aware of their curse. They know there’s no way out, there can be neither forgiveness, nor salvation. The madness controlling their hearts and minds transcends social order, religious morale, and even reality itself. It is a throbbing middle finger in the face of the entire Universe.
The legend is a fusion between Greek tragedy and Eastern mysticism. Just like a dying star can only produce gold by spilling its guts, love itself has little regard for the life of the people whose hearts it occupies. At the same time, it is not an abstract, impersonal force but a deep fascination with another human being made of flesh and bones. It is worth both living and dying for. With Tristan, Europe, the Cradle of Egoism, achieved what always seemed impossible: the absolute secularization of religious ecstasy.
The East has always frowned upon the earthy delights of the human ego. On the social front, Confucianism and the Indian caste system are permeated with disdain for it. On the religious, Buddhism preaches its total oblivion through the rejection of every possible human emotion. However, only the bravest of Eastern heroes could ever hope to get closer to Nirvana. The sociopathic bliss with its imaginary blossoming lotuses stuck on the surface of a perfectly still pond is nobody’s teenage dream.
Individualistic Europe found an easier way to crush its overblown obsession with individuality. Instead of resisting emotion, people could completely yield to it. The devastating result on the ego was the same but there was a significant bonus at the exit: You died happily ever after.
Its seems that the first push for this discovery didn’t happen in Southern France, the now mythical land of armored troubadours and virgin dominatrices, but in Muslim Iran.
“Fold your arms round me close and strain me so that our hearts may break and our souls go free at last. Take me to that happy place of which you told me long ago. The fields whence none return, but where great singers sing their songs forever.” *
*Quotes taken from Joseph Bédier’s version, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult.
