Siavash's mourning and its associated rituals is one of the most important stories of mourning in mythology of Iran. The adventure's of Siavash has been mentioned in many classic Iranian texts and also an important part of Shahnameh is dedicated to it. Traces of many ancient rituals can be identified in Siavash's mourning. By investigating the mourning of Siavash and comparing it to the narration of Imam Hossein’s Ta'zieh, this study tries to answer the questions of why and how in Iranian mythological thinking a mundane character has transformed into a heavenly and spiritual one and this transformation is being repeated in mourning rituals. In the absence of sufficient historical resources and archives on Iranian culture and arts, one of the most important ways to review the myths and rituals is using visual resources. For this purpose, in this article, in addition to using Shahnameh and other historical texts, we have also used the images of mourning obtained from Central Asia and have compared them to a painting of the Iranian modern painter Hossein Zendehroodi. The main concern of this research is pursuing the consistency of the myth of Siavash and its ritual signs with the symbols in the mourning ceremonies of Imam Hossein and the reason of this continuity and unity of ritual signs in these two different ceremonies. In order to do so, we try to identify the similarities between the mourning rituals of Imam Hossein and Siavash mourning in a painting of Zendehroodi through comparing it with images obtained from Central Asia. According to the findings, although it seems that Zendehroodi’s work which portrays all scenes of mourning for Imam Hossein, depicts the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, in fact it represents an eternal pattern namely death and martyrdom which itself is the repetition of rituals and their associated ceremonies of ancient history. Moreover, there are many similarities, including black color, black horses, crying over the hero's body, between the visual depictions of these mournings. This has been studied using written and visual resources and prioritizing a kind of visual-iconographic reading. Descriptive-analytic method is used in this study.
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