Firelight, and the feast of Sada

Ferdowsi tells it this way. Hushang, one of the first kings in the Shahnama, is riding in the mountains with his companions when a huge dark serpent appears. He seizes a stone and hurls it with all his strength. He misses. The stone strikes another rock, the two flash together, and out of the collision comes a spark, then flame. The serpent escapes, but the king has found fire. He gives thanks to God for this gift, and that night he and his people gather around a great blaze and hold a feast. They call it Sada. People in Iran and Zoroastrian communities elsewhere still keep it, more than a thousand years after Ferdowsi wrote the lines.

On this page, painted in Tabriz around 1525 for the young Shah Tahmasp and attributed to Sultan Muhammad, the night has been set in a landscape in full flower. Hushang sits at the centre on a small carpet, in an orange robe under a blue coat, looking out with great calm. Below him, in a ring of green ground, the fire burns orange and red, its flames drawn as tongues and curls. Around it sit his companions: one in green with a tall pointed hat, two young men side by side in red and blue, an older figure in a dark robe holding up something small and red. Gold vessels stand on the grass. Bowls of fruit wait to be passed. At the left, servants come down the slope carrying dishes.

Then look up and out. The rocks are not grey but lilac, rose, sea-blue, piled like silk cushions. A blossoming tree throws pink flowers against a sky of deep lapis. Deer stand on the ridge. In the lower margin, among goats and stags, a man in red trousers moves through a crowd of animals. The painting spills beyond its own ruled border into the gold-flecked page.

The manuscript held more than two hundred and fifty paintings like this, made by the finest painters of the royal workshop. What strikes me in this one is how quickly the danger is forgotten. The serpent has gone. The stone is never shown. What the painter chose to keep was the gathering afterward: a crowd of people seated close, in the light of a thing they did not have yesterday.

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