The author of the Persian vision was a pious Mazdean whose whole desire was to revive religious feeling amid growing indifference. He is supposed to have lived not earlier than 500, and not later than 700 A.D. The former is the likelier date. Had the assault of Islam begun, the book must have borne traces of the struggle with invaders who threatened to annihilate the faith. The author states that the work was intended as an antidote in the first place to atheism and in the second to “the religions of many kinds” that were springing up. This probably contains a reference to Christian sects, but it is not the way that allusion would have been made to propagandists with a sword in their hands. Christian sects managed to recover from the first persecution in 344 A.D., after which they were more often than not tolerated, though the Zoroastrian priesthood feared a Church that possessed an organisation so much like their own. They were accused, moreover, as at Rome, of being anti-national: everywhere the sentiment against the Christians took a form closely resembling the anti-Semiticism of our days. Such accusations can hardly fail to create, to some extent, the thing they predicate, and it is no great wonder if in the end the Persian Christians received the Moslem invaders with favour. Though the essence of Mazdeism is peace to men of good-will, it is to be feared that the Zoroastrian priests (like others) were less tolerant than their creed, and that the harassing of the Christians generally originated with them. They are known to have counselled this policy to Homizd IV., who gave them the memorable answer that his royal throne could not stand on its front legs alone, but needed the support of the Christians and other sectaries as well as of the faithful. It was one of the wisest sayings that ever fell from the lips of a king and more Mazdean than all the bigotry of Zoroastrian clericalism.
The author of Ardâ Vîrâf tried the perfectly legitimate means of persuasion in rallying his countrymen to their own religion. He tells the story of how, in an age of doubt, it was agreed that the best thing would be to send some one into the next world to see if Mazdeism were, indeed, the true religion. Lots fell on a very virtuous man named Ardâ Vîrâf, who was commissioned to make the journey in a trance-state produced by the administration of a narcotic. Even now, in India, children and others are given narcotics, sometimes of a dangerous sort, in order to obtain knowledge which is supposed to come to them whilst insensible. To a Mazdean the ordeal would be particularly terrible, because sleep, like death, was created by Ahriman. The calm fortitude with which Ardâ Vîrâf submits, while his family break into loud weeping, almost reminds one of the bearing of Socrates on the eve of a similar departure but one with no return. “It is the custom that I should pray to the departed souls and make a will,” he says; “when I have done that, give me the narcotic.” His body was treated as though dead, being kept at the proper distance from fire and other sacred things, but priests stayed near it night and day, praying and reading the Scriptures, that the powers of ill might not prevail.
At the end of seven days the wandering spirit of Ardâ Vîrâf re-entered his inanimate form, and after he had taken food and water and wine he called for a ready writer, to whom he dictated the tale of what he had seen. Guided by Srosh the Pious and Ataro the Angel (Virgil and Beatrice) the traveller visited heaven and hell. At the outset he saw the meeting of a righteous soul and its Fravashi. This soul crosses the Chinvat bridge in safety, and on the other side passes into an atmosphere laden with an ineffably sweet perfume which emanates from the direction of the presence of God. Here it meets a damsel more wondrously fair than aught it has beheld in the land of the living. Enraptured at the sight, it asks her name and receives the answer: “I am thine own good actions.” Every good deed embellishes the human soul’s archetype, every evil deed mars and stains it with the hideousness of sin. This poetic and beautiful conception was not due to the author of Ardâ Vîrâf: it is taken from the venerable pages of the Avesta itself.
In the abode of Punishment the most impressive penalties are those undergone by the souls which have tortured helpless infants or dumb animals. The mother who feeds another’s child from greed and starves her own, is seen digging into an iron hill with her breasts while the cry of her child for food comes ever from the other side of the hill, “but the infant comes not to the mother nor the mother to the infant.” Here the supreme anguish is mental: it is caused by the awakening of that maternal instinct which the woman stifled on earth. Has the Inferno any thought so luminously subtle as this? The woman-soul will never reach her child “till the renewal of the world.” Till the renewal of the world! Across the hell-fog penetrates the final hope!
The unfaithful wife who destroys the fruit of her illicit love suffers a horrible punishment. It is strange that if we wish to find an analogy to these severe judgments on offences against infancy, we must go to a small tribe of Dravidian mountaineers in the Nilgiri hills, among whose folk-songs is one which describes a vision of heaven and hell. In this a woman is shown who is condemned to see her own child continually die, because she refused help to a stranger’s child, saying: “It is not mine!”
Those who treated their beasts cruelly, who overworked them, overloaded them, gave them insufficient food, continued to work them when they suffered from sores caused by leanness instead of trying to cure the sores, are seen by Ardâ Vîrâf hung up head downwards while a ceaseless rain of stones falls on their backs. Those who wantonly killed animals have a knife driven ceaselessly into their hearts. Those who muzzled the ox which ploughed the furrows are dashed under the feet of cattle. The same punishment falls to those who forget to give water to the oxen in the heat of the day or who worked them when hungry and thirsty. Demons like dogs constantly tear the man who kept back food from shepherds’-dogs and house-dogs or who beat or killed them: he offers bread to the dogs, but they eat it not and only tear the more.
Ardâ Vîrâf tells a story which belongs to the cycle of “Sultan Murad,” immortalised by Victor Hugo. A certain lazy man named Davânôs, who never did any other thing of good during all the years when he governed many provinces, once cast a bundle of grass with his right foot to within the reach of a ploughing-ox. Hence his right foot is exempted from torment while the rest of his body is gnawed by noxious creatures.
It is easy to imagine that the realistic picture of heaven and hell by a poet of no little power produced the deepest effect on the minds of people, who for the most part took it to be literally true. No Oriental work ever became more popular or was more widely read and translated. People still living can remember the time when it was the habit of the Parsis at Bombay to have public readings of Ardâ Vîrâf, on which occasions the audience, especially the feminine part of it, broke into violent sobbing from the excitement caused by the description of the punishment of the wicked. The Parsis have abandoned now the theory that the book is other than a work of imagination, but it may be hoped that they will not cease to regard it as a cherished legacy from their fathers and a precious bequest to their children.