| Combat | ATK 5 DEF 9 SPR 10 SPD 9 INT 10 |
| Element | Light |
| Role | Sovereign |
| Rarity | Legendary |
| Threat | Low |
| LCK | 10 |
| ARC | 10 |
| Epithets | "The Simurgh" (Persian: *Sīmorġ* — "thirty birds"); "Anqa" (the mythical phoenix in Arabic usage); "the King at the End of the Seven Valleys"; "the Mirror of the Soul" |
| Sacred Animals | She IS the sacred bird — composite creature; in Attar she is every bird's destination |
| Sacred Objects | The mirror at Mount Qaf (which shows the thirty surviving birds their own faces as the Simurgh); the seven valleys through which the soul must pass to reach her |
| Sacred Colors | Iridescent — she contains all colors, as she contains all birds; gold and silver in her feathers |
| Sacred Number | 7 (the Seven Valleys of Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Wonder, and Annihilation through which seekers must pass); 30 (*si murgh* — thirty surviving birds who ARE the Simurgh) |
| Tariqa | No specific order — she is the universal goal of ALL tariqas; the Kubrawiyya and Ni'matullahi orders use her imagery most extensively |
| Key Teaching | The seeker IS the sought; the goal of the spiritual path is the discovery that the self and the divine are not two; annihilation of the self reveals what was always present |
| Dargah / Sacred Sites | Mount Qaf — the cosmic mountain at the world's edge; a symbolic, imaginal geography rather than a physical location; invoked in Sufi meditation practices |
| Festivals | No specific festival — her image pervades Nowruz poetry and is invoked in Sufi gatherings throughout the Persian-speaking world |
| Iconography | Vast composite bird on Mount Qaf; the mirror of union; depicted in Timurid and Safavid manuscript art as a golden phoenix-like creature above a mountain of light |
| Period | Pre-Islamic Persian mythology; Sufi allegorical use fully developed in Attar's *Mantiq al-Tayr* (c. 1177 CE); remains a living symbol in Persian poetry |
| Region | Persian literary world — Iran, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent (Mughal poetry); her image universally recognized across the Islamicate world |
| Special | Mirror of the Thirty — Those who reach the Simurgh discover that the journey was the destination and that the King they sought is the polished face of the seeker who survived the seeking. |
| Passive | Mount Qaf — The Simurgh dwells beyond the seven valleys; she cannot be sought directly, only approached by being unmade, and her presence reveals every other goal as a mistranslation. |
In Farid al-Din Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds, c. 1177), the birds of the world gather to seek their king. The hoopoe — herald of Solomon, knower of secrets — tells them their king is the Simurgh, who dwells beyond the seven valleys: the Valleys of Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Wonder, and Annihilation. The journey is brutal. Most birds die or turn back. Thirty (si murgh in Persian) survive the final valley. They look for the king, and there, in a mirror, they see themselves: si murgh — thirty birds — are the Simurgh. The goal of the quest was the quester, polished by the journey into the divine.
This is one of the great mystical allegories of world literature, and the Simurgh is one of its great figures. Older than Attar, the bird appears in Persian myth (the Shahnameh) as a vast, benevolent creature who dwells on Mount Qaf at the world’s edge, who raised the hero Zal in her nest, who is part lion, part dog, part peacock, with the face of a man. In Sufi cosmology she is the divine itself glimpsed as the soul’s deepest self — the Self, the Anima Mundi, the One who is reached only when the seeker has been so emptied that what remains is what was sought.
Biblical Parallels: The Simurgh corresponds to the Wisdom (Sophia) of Proverbs 8 — the divine feminine who plays before God in creation — and to the Holy Spirit descending as a dove (Matthew 3:16). Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme spoke of the Imago Dei — the image of God in the soul — that is uncovered, not constructed, by the spiritual journey. Augustine’s “Thou wert within me, and I outside” (Confessions 10.27) captures the structural insight of Mantiq al-Tayr. The seven valleys parallel John of the Cross’s stages of the spiritual ascent of Mount Carmel.
Cross-Tradition: The Simurgh parallels the Hindu Garuda (mount of Vishnu, divine eagle) and the Vedic Hamsa (the cosmic swan who symbolizes the Atman). In Chinese myth she is the Fenghuang (phoenix), in Egyptian myth the Bennu (the heron whose self-immolation prefigures rebirth), and in Greek myth the Phoenix who rises from her own ashes. Jung saw the type as the Self — the integrating archetype that the ego mistakes for an other and finally recognizes as its own deepest ground.
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