The Palace of the Lord of the Sevenfold World

Abstract

Chapter 16 offered a portal into a different reality or perceptual plane and, for those privileged, a means to inhabit, at least momentarily, this hyperreality. That is not to say that everyone who beheld such spaces need be convinced or overawed. Indeed, the casual observer or outsider might only see a crowd milling around a large building. Yet if one were allowed- or physically, cognitively and ritually compelled- to enter into the implied realities of the microcosm of the ayvān, you as viewer or ritual participant were afforded, or perhaps confronted with, depending on the degree to which one identified with the regime, a stunning view of the cosmos and the Iranian king’s place within it.