This paper brings together three types of contemporary concerns within our academic field. The first is the rise in interest in the Indo-Persian or rather the forms of Persian literary expression, cultural and intellectual history, and the longevity of Persian expressions of the self in South Asia, especially in the early modern period. The second is the increasing interest in the occult and in the ways in which language is used – not least poetry – to express both the ideas and the practice of the occult. And the third is the quest for selfhood in non-European and non-modern contexts, not merely as a way to demonstrate different trajectories of modernity but rather to understand one example of the dynamic between the self as a multi-dimensional expression of self-personality as well as the quest for the aspirational self that is a transcendent entity. After an introduction that locates B?dil in the venerable tradition of the Persian poetic school of Ibn ?Arab? (d. 1240), most exemplified in the earlier period by Mu?ammad Sh?r?n Maghrib? (d. 1407), and especially intersecting with the occult reception of Ibn ?Arab? in Sufi circles, I will examine B?dil’s poetic oeuvre in his masnav?s, ?Irf?n and M????-i a??am, on the quest for the elusive aspirational self. The Persian poetical tradition already brings up the notion of the ?Anq? (mughrib) (The Fabulous Gryphon as Elmore famously translated it) as a cipher for the self as the perfect human, as the ultimate presence of the divine and the microcosm, as well as the peacock (??v?s) as the strutting, self-confident and self-satisfied notion of the subject and the person expressing his mastery over the cosmos through the deployment of the arts. One central question will be the role of the practice of the occult arts as a means to grasp the Gryphon whilst avoiding the trap of becoming the peacock. In my final comments, I will consider the reception of B?dil’s expression of these ideas in the oeuvre of the late Indo-Persian poet Gh?lib Dihlav? (d. 1869).