THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
In the Avesta, Azhi Dahaka is a dragon with three heads, three mouths, and six eyes, master of a thousand wiles, the mightiest druj that Angra Mainyu fashioned to destroy the world of the righteous. The Aban Yasht tells how he sacrificed a hundred horses, a thousand oxen, and ten thousand sheep to the water goddess Anahita, praying to empty the seven regions of the earth of men, and was refused; the hero Thraetaona then sacrificed to the same goddess and won the power to overcome him. The Pahlavi books foretell his end: at the close of time he will break his bonds and devour a third of men and cattle before the revived hero Keresaspa strikes him down.
Ferdowsi's Shahnameh remade the dragon as Zahhak, the most famous tyrant in Persian literature. An Arab prince seduced by the devil Eblis into killing his own father, Zahhak was then served by the disguised fiend as a cook, who asked only to kiss his shoulders in reward — and from each kissed shoulder sprang a black snake that grew back when cut, quieted only by a daily meal of the brains of two young men. Zahhak seized the throne of Jamshid, and for a thousand years his kitchens consumed the youth of Persia two by two. The blacksmith Kaveh, who had lost seventeen of eighteen sons, raised his leather apron on a spear-point in revolt — the Derafsh Kaviani, later the sacred banner of Persian kingship — and the rebels crowned Fereydun, heir of Jamshid's line. Fereydun felled the serpent king with his ox-headed mace and, commanded by a divine messenger not to kill him, nailed and chained him deep in a cave of Mount Damavand; folk tradition hears the volcano's sulfur vents as the dragon's breathing.
