Saoshyant, assisted by fifteen men and fifteen pure women, who have already lived on earth, and are awaiting their final destiny in a magic slumber, shall offer the final sacrifice, the virtue of which shall bring about the resurrection of the dead. “The sovereign light shall accompany him and his friends, when he shall revivify the world and ransom it from old age and death, from corruption and decay, and shall render it eternally living, eternally growing, and master of itself.” The fatal conflict shall be protracted, but the champions of Saoshyant shall at length obtain the victory. “Before them shall bow Aêshma of the blood-stained lance and of ominous renown, and Saoshyant shall strike down the she-demon of the unholy light, the daughter of darkness. Akem-manô strikes, but Vohu-manô shall strike him in his turn; the lying word shall strike, but the word of truth shall strike him in his turn; Haurvatât and Ameretâfc shall strike down hunger and thirst; Haurvatât and Ameretât shall strike down terrible hunger and terrible thirst.” Angrô-mainyus himself shall be paralysed with terror, and shall be forced to confess the supremacy of good: he shall withdraw into the depths of hell, whence he shall never again issue forth, and all the reanimated beings devoted to the Mazdean law shall live an eternity of peace and contentment.
Man, therefore, incessantly distracted between the two principles, laid wait for by the Baêvas, defended by the Yazatas, must endeavour to act according to law and justice in the condition in which fate has placed him. He has been raised up here on earth to contribute as far as in him lies to the increase of life and of good, and in proportion as he works for this end or against it, is he the ashavan, the pure, the faithful one on earth and the blessed one in heaven, or the anashavan, the lawless miscreant who counteracts purity. The highest grade in the hierarchy of men belongs of right to the Mage or the âthravan, to the priest whose voice inspires the demons with fear, or the soldier whose club despatches the impious, but a place of honour at their side is assigned to the peasant, who reclaims from the power of Angrô-mainyus the dry and sterile fields. Among the places where the earth thrives most joyously is reckoned that “where a worshipper of Ahura-mazdâ builds a house, with a chaplain, with cattle, with a wife, with sons, with a fair flock; where man grows the most corn, herbage, and fruit trees; where he spreads water on a soil without water, and drains off water where there is too much of it.” He who sows corn, sows good, and promotes the Mazdean faith; “he nourishes the Mazdean religion as fifty men would do rocking a child in the cradle, five hundred women giving it suck from their breasts.* When the corn was created the Daêvas leaped, when it sprouted the Daêvas lost courage, when the stem set the Daêvas wept, when the ear swelled the Daêvas fled. In the house where corn is mouldering the Daêvas lodge, but when the corn sprouts, one might say that a hot iron is being turned round in their mouths.” And the reason of their horror is easily divined: “Whoso eats not, has no power either to accomplish a valiant work of religion, or to labour with valour, or yet to beget children valiantly; it is by eating that the universe lives, and it dies from not eating.” The faithful follower of Zoroaster owes no obligation towards the impious man or towards a stranger,** but is ever bound to render help to his coreligionist.
* The original text says in a more enigmatical fashion, “he
nourishes the religion of Mazdâ as a hundred feet of men and
a thousand breasts of women might do.”
** Charity is called in Parsee language, ashô-dâd the
gift to a pious man, or the gift of piety, and the pious
man, the ashavan, is by definition the worshipper of
Ahura-mazdâ alone.
He will give a garment to the naked, and by so doing will wound Zemaka, the demon of winter. He will never refuse food to the hungry labourer, under pain of eternal torments, and his charity will extend even to the brute beasts, provided that they belong to the species created by Ahura-mazdâ: he has duties towards them, and their complaints, heard in heaven, shall be fatal to him later on if he has provoked them. Asha-vahista will condemn to hell the cruel man who has ill-treated the ox, or allowed his flocks to suffer; and the killing of a hedgehog is no less severely punished—for does not a hedgehog devour the ants who steal the grain? The dog is in every case an especially sacred animal—the shepherd’s dog, the watchdog, the hunting-dog, even the prowling dog. It is not lawful to give any dog a blow which renders him impotent, or to slit his ears, or to cut his foot, without incurring grave responsibilities in this world and in the next; it is necessary to feed the dog well, and not to throw bones to him which are too hard, nor have his food served hot enough to burn his tongue or his throat. For the rest, the faithful Zoroastrian was bound to believe in his god, to offer to him the orthodox prayers and sacrifices, to be simple in heart, truthful, the slave of his pledged word, loyal in his very smallest acts. If he had once departed from the right way, he could only return to it by repentance and by purification, accompanied by pious deeds: to exterminate noxious animals, the creatures of Angrô-mainyus and the abode of his demons, such as the frog, the scorpion, the serpent or the ant, to clear the sterile tracts, to restore impoverished land, to construct bridges over running water, to distribute implements of husbandry to pions men, or to build them a house, to give a pure and healthy maiden in marriage to a just man,—these were so many means of expiation appointed by the prophet.* Marriage was strictly obligatory,** and seemed more praiseworthy in proportion as the kinship existing between the married pair was the closer: not only was the sister united in marriage to her brother, as in Egypt, but the father to his daughter, and the mother to her son, at least among the Magi.
* A passage in the Vendidad even enumerates how many
noisome beasts must be slain to accomplish one full work of
expiation—“to kill 1000 serpents of those who drag
themselves upon the belly, and 2000 of the other species,
1000 land frogs or 2000 water frogs, 1000 ants who steal the
grain,” and so on.
** The Vendidad says, “And I tell thee, O Spitama
Zarathustra, the man who has a wife is above him who lives
in continency;” and, as we have seen in the text, one of
these forms of expiation consisted in “marrying to a worthy
man a young girl who has never known a man” (Vendidad, 14,
§ 15). Herodotus of old remarked that one of the chief
merits in an Iranian was to have many children: the King of
Persia encouraged fecundity in his realm, and awarded a
prize each year to that one of his subjects who could boast
the most numerous progeny.
Drawn by Boudier,
from Plandin and Coste.
Polygamy was also encouraged and widely practised: the code imposed no limit on the number of wives and concubines, and custom was in favour of a man’s having as many wives as his fortune permitted him to maintain. On the occasion of a death, it was forbidden to burn the corpse, to bury it, or to cast it into a river, as it would have polluted the fire, the earth, or the water—an unpardonable offence. The corpse could be disposed of in different ways. The Persians were accustomed to cover it with a thick layer of wax, and then to bury it in the ground: the wax coating obviated the pollution which direct contact would have brought upon the soil. The Magi, and probably also strict devotees, following their example, exposed the corpse in the open air, abandoning it to the birds or beasts of prey. It was considered a great misfortune if these respected the body, for it was an almost certain indication of the wrath of Ahura-mazdâ, and it was thought that the defunct had led an evil life. When the bones had been sufficiently stripped of flesh, they were collected together, and deposited either in an earthenware urn or in a stone ossuary with a cover, or in a monumental tomb either hollowed out in the heart of the mountain or in the living rock, or raised up above the level of the ground. Meanwhile the soul remained in the neighbourhood for three days, hovering near the head of the corpse, and by the recitation of prayers it experienced, according to its condition of purity or impurity, as much of joy or sadness as the whole world experiences. When the third night was past, the just soul set forth across luminous plains, refreshed by a perfumed breeze, and its good thoughts and words and deeds took shape before it “under the guise of a young maiden, radiant and strong, with well-developed bust, noble mien, and glorious face, about fifteen years of age, and as beautiful as the most beautiful;” the unrighteous soul, on the contrary, directed its course towards the north, through a tainted land, amid the squalls of a pestilential hurricane, and there encountered its past ill deeds, under the form of an ugly and wicked young woman, the ugliest and most wicked it had ever seen. The genius Rashnu Razishta, the essentially truthful, weighed its virtues or vices in an unerring balance, and acquitted or Condemned it on the impartial testimony of its past life. On issuing from the judgment-hall, the soul arrived at the approach to the bridge Cinvaut, which, thrown across the abyss of hell, led to paradise. The soul, if impious, was unable to cross this bridge, but was hurled down into the abyss, where it became the slave of Angrô-mainyus. If pure, it crossed the bridge without difficulty by the help of the angel Sraôsha, and was welcomed by Vohu-manô, who conducted it before the throne of Ahura-mazdâ, in the same way as he had led Zoroaster, and assigned to it the post which it should occupy until the day of the resurrection of the body.*
* All this picture of the fate of the soul is taken from the
Vendidad, where the fate of the just is described, and in
the Yasht, where the condition of faithful and impious
souls respectively is set forth on parallel lines. The
classical authors teach us nothing on this subject, and the
little they actually say only proves that the Persians
believed in the immortality of the soul. The main outlines
of the picture here set forth go back to the times of the
Achæmenids and the Medes, except the abstract conception of
the goddess who leads the soul of the dead as an incarnation
of his good or evil deeds.