2026
Pendant; Persian walnut, jute rope
The Iranian ancestor of the Medusa, Shahmaran is the personification of supreme medical knowledge. The story of Shahmaran as mentioned in the medieval text Jamasp Namag goes like this:
After a cave exploration trip fails, Jamasp’s friends leave him stranded in the cave. He decides to go deeper and finds a passage to what looks like an impossible garden with thousands of off-white colored snakes: it is the Shahmaran’s realm. Shahmaran and Jamasp suddenly fall in love, start living together, and Shahmaran teaches him medical skills. At a certain point Jamasp misses human life and decides to leave. While leaving he promises he will not share Shahmaran’s secret realm’s location. Many years pass.
The king of the nearby town of Tarsus falls ill and the vizier discovers that the treatment of his condition requires Shahmaran’s flesh. In an effort to make easy money, Jamasp, the ultimate snitch, tells the king where Shahmaran lives. To lull the townsfolk into capturing the Shahmaran, Jamasp tells them of a legend where Shahmaran says “cook me in an earthen dish, give my extract to the vizier, and feed my flesh to the sultan.” The townsfolk capture her, and kill her in the town’s public bath. The king eats her flesh and lives, the vizier drinks her extract and dies. Jamasp drinks the water of Shahmaran and becomes a doctor by gaining the Shahmaran’s wisdom.
Even though Shahmaran righteously murders the vizier, she lets Jamasp live and succeed regardless of his betrayal, as a display of her compassion towards him.
“Shahmaran’s Offspring” is a piece that predicts contemporary outcomes of Jamasp’s story. If Shahmaran’s lineage survived, what kind of relationship would they have with humans? Similar to how Shahmaran protected Jamasp out of previous love, can wearers ask for protection citing love despite countless wrongdoings of humans?