Manifestation of Mother Archetype: Iran's National Epic

Mother Archetype is one of the most important archetypes in Carl Gustav Jung's theory manifested in literary works both as the character of a real mother or in the form of symbols that indicate maternal aspect. Epic is a work derived from the male-dominated society in which the heroic functions and masculine power grabs the attentions always more than the women's presence and role. However, since most of the epic poems have a mythic infrastructure, archetypically, they reflect many of the mythological themes and symbols that have emerged unconsciously in the poem. Since human life, before the epic realization and the manifestation of the male heroes, has experienced a female dominated era with female eternal holiness (mothers and women), the human subconsciousness is full of images and symbols indicating the female element of existence and reflects on the epic texts as mother archetypal symbols. According to this perspective, there has been no research on the mother archetype manifestations in the national epic and most of the researchers only referred to the mother characters in these works whose role did not go beyond giving birth and training the epic heroes. What has been emphasized on this research is that although in the Persian epic works (Shahnameh and the following epic poems), the women and mothers do not generally play a decisive role, the vacuum of the presence of women and mothers as an inevitable part of the human's existence has been filled in the epic works unconsciously in the form of archetypal images and symbols, such as water, springs, rain, wind, plants, mountains, caves, fire, etc. and the mother archetype has come into the realm of consciousness in the form of these symbols.