The Destiny of the Soul Part 17

In the fragmentary doc.u.ments which have reached us, the whole subject lies in confusion. It is scarcely possible to unravel the tangled mesh. Sometimes it seems to be taught that Ahriman was at first good, an angel of light who, through envy of his great compeer, sank from his primal purity, darkened into hatred, and became the rancorous enemy of truth and love. At other times he appears to be considered as the pure primordial essence of evil.

The various views may have prevailed in different ages or in different schools. Upon the whole, however, we hold the opinion that the real Zoroastrian idea of Ahriman was moral and free, not physical and fatal. The whole basis of the universe was good; evil was an after perversion, a foreign interpolation, a battling mixture. First, the perfect Zeruana was once all in all: Ahriman, as well as Ormuzd, proceeded from him; and the inference that he was pure would seem to belong to the idea of his origin. Secondly, so far as the account of Satan given in the book of Job perhaps the earliest appearance of the Persian notion in Jewish literature warrants any inference or supposition at all, it would lead to the image of one who was originally a prince in heaven, and who must have fallen thence to become the builder and potentate of h.e.l.l. Thirdly, that matter is not an essential core of evil, the utter antagonist of spirit, and that Ahriman is not evil by an intrinsic necessity, will appear from the two conceptions lying at the base and crown of the Persian system: that the creation, as it first came from the hands of Ormuzd, was perfectly good; and that finally the purified material world shall exist again unstained by a breath of evil, Ahriman himself becoming like Ormuzd. He is not, then, aboriginal and indestructible evil in substance. The conflict between Ormuzd and him is the temporary ethical struggle of light and darkness, not the internecine ontological war of spirit and matter. Roth says, "Ahriman was originally good: his fall was a determination of his will, not an inherent necessity of his nature." 8 Whatever other conceptions may be found, whatever inconsistencies or contradictions to this may appear, still, we believe the genuine Zoroastrian view was such as we have now stated. The opposite doctrine arose from the more abstruse lucubrations of a more modern time, and is Manichaan, not Zoroastrian.

8 Zoroastrische Glaubenslehre, ss. 397, 398.

Ormuzd created a resplendent and happy world. Ahriman instantly made deformity, impurity, and gloom, in opposition to it. All beauty, virtue, harmony, truth, blessedness, were the work of the former. All ugliness, vice, discord, falsehood, wretchedness, belonged to the latter. They grappled and mixed in a million hostile shapes. This universal battle is the ground of ethics, the clarion call to marshal out the hostile hosts of good and ill; and all other war is but a result and a symbol of it. The strife thus indicated between a Deity and a Devil, both subordinate to the unmoved ETERNAL, was the Persian solution of the problem of evil, their answer to the staggering question, why pleasure and pain, benevolence and malignity, are so conflictingly mingled in the works of nature and in the soul of man. In the long struggle that ensued, Ormuzd created mult.i.tudes of co operant angels to a.s.sail his foe, stocking the clean empire of Light with celestial allies of his holy banner, who hang from heaven in great numbers, ready at the prayer of the righteous man to hie to his aid and work him a thousandfold good. Ahriman, likewise, created an equal number of a.s.sistant demons, peopling the filthy domain of Darkness with counterbalancing swarms of infernal followers of his pirate flag, who lurk at the summit of h.e.l.l, watching to s.n.a.t.c.h every opportunity to ply their vocation of sin and ruin. There are such hosts of these invisible antagonists sown abroad, and incessantly active, that every star is crowded and all s.p.a.ce teems with them.

Each man has a good and a bad angel, a ferver and a dev, who are endeavoring in every manner to acquire control over his conduct and possession of his soul.

The Persians curiously personified the source of organic life in the world under the emblem of a primeval bull. In this symbolic beast were packed the seeds and germs of all the creatures afterwards to people the earth. Ahriman, to ruin the creation of which this animal was the life medium, sought to kill him. He set upon him two of his devs, who are called "adepts of death." They stung him in the breast, and plagued him until he died of rage.

But, as he was dying, from his right shoulder sprang the androgynal Kaiomorts, who was the stock root of humanity. His body was made from fire, air, water, and earth, to which Ormuzd added an immortal soul, and bathed him with an elixir which rendered him fair and glittering as a youth of fifteen, and would have preserved him so perennially had it not been for the a.s.saults of the Evil One.9 Ahriman, the enemy of all life, determined to slay him, and at last accomplished his object; but, as Kaiomorts fell, from his seed, through the power of Ormuzd, originated Meschia and Meschiane, male and female, the first human pair, from whom all our race have descended. They would never have died,10 but Ahriman, in the guise of a serpent, seduced them, and they sinned and fell. This account is partly drawn from that later treatise, the Bundehesh, whose mythological cosmogony reminds us of the Scandinavian Ymer. But we conceive it to be strictly reliable as a representation of the Zoroastrian faith in its essential doctrines; for the earlier doc.u.ments, the Yasna, the Yeshts, and the Vendidad, contain the same things in obscure and undeveloped expressions. They, too, make repeated mention of the mysterious bull, and of Kaiomorts.11 They invariably represent death as resulting

9 Kleuker, Zend Avesta, band i. anhang 1, s. 263.

10 Ibid. band i. s. 27.

11 Yasna, 24th IIa.

from the hostility of Ahriman. The earliest Avestan account of the earthly condition of men describes them as living in a garden which Yima or Jemschid had enclosed at the command of Ormuzd.12 During the golden age of his reign they were free from heat and cold, sickness and death. "In the garden which Yima made they led a most beautiful life, and they bore none of the marks which Ahriman has since made upon men." But Ahriman's envy and hatred knew no rest until he and his devs had, by their wiles, broken into this paradise, betrayed Yima and his people into falsehood, and so, by introducing corruption into their hearts, put an end to their glorious earthly immortality. This view is set forth in the opening fargards of the Vendidad; and it has been clearly ill.u.s.trated in an elaborate contribution upon the "Old Iranian Mythology" by Professor Westergaard.13 Death, like all other evils, was an after effect, thrust into the purely good creation of Ormuzd by the cunning malice of Ahriman. The Vendidad, at its commencement, recounts the various products of Ormuzd's beneficent power, and adds, after each particular, "Thereupon Ahriman, who is full of death, made an opposition to the same."

According to the Zoroastrian modes of thought, what would have been the fate of man had Ahriman not existed or not interfered?

Plainly, mankind would have lived on forever in innocence and joy.

They would have been blessed with all placid delights, exempt from hate, sickness, pain, and every other ill; and, when the earth was full of them, Ormuzd would have taken his sinless subjects to his own realm of light on high. But when they forsook the true service of Ormuzd, falling into deceit and defilement, they became subjects of Ahriman; and he would inflict on them, as the creatures of his hated rival, all the calamities in his power, dissolve the masterly workmans.h.i.+p of their bodies in death, and then take their souls as prisoners into his own dark abode. "Had Meschia continued to bring meet praises, it would have happened that when the time of man, created pure, had come, his soul, created pure and immortal, would immediately have gone to the seat of bliss."14 "Heaven was destined for man upon condition that he was humble of heart, obedient to the law, and pure in thought, word, and deed." But "by believing the lies of Ahriman they became sinners, and their souls must remain in his nether kingdom until the resurrection of their bodies."15 Ahriman's triumph thus culminates in the death of man and that banishment of the disembodied soul into h.e.l.l which takes the place of its originally intended reception into heaven.

The law of Ormuzd, revealed through Zoroaster, furnishes to all who faithfully observe it in purity of thought, speech, and action, "when body and soul have separated, attainment of paradise in the next world,"16 while the neglecters of it "will pa.s.s into the dwelling of the devs,"17 "after death will have no part in paradise, but will occupy the place of darkness

12 Die Sage von Dschemschid. Von Professor R. Roth. In Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgeulandischen Gesellschaft, band iv. ss. 417-431.

13 Weber, Indische Studien, band iii. 8. 411.

14 Yesht Lx.x.xVII. Kleuker, band ii. sect. 211.

15 Bundehesh, ch. xv.

16 Avesta die Heiligen Schriften der Pa.r.s.en. Von Dr. F. Spiegel, band i. s, 171.

17 Ibid. s. 158.

destined for the wicked."18 The third day after death, the soul advances upon "the way created by Ormuzd for good and bad," to be examined as to its conduct. The pure soul pa.s.ses up from this evanescent world, over the bridge Chinevad, to the world of Ormuzd, and joins the angels. The sinful soul is bound and led over the way made for the G.o.dless, and finds its place at the bottom of gloomy h.e.l.l.19 An Avestan fragment 20 and the Viraf Nameh give the same account, only with more picturesque fulness.

On the soaring bridge the soul meets Rashne rast, the angel of justice, who tries those that present themselves before him. If the merits prevail, a figure of dazzling substance, radiating glory and fragrance, advances and accosts the justified soul, saying, "I am thy good angel: I was pure at the first, but thy good deeds have made me purer;" and the happy one is straightway led to Paradise. But when the vices outweigh the virtues, a dark and frightful image, featured with ugliness and exhaling a noisome smell, meets the condemned soul, and cries, "I am thy evil spirit: bad myself, thy crimes have made me worse." Then the culprit staggers on his uncertain foothold, is hurled from the dizzy causeway, and precipitated into the gulf which yawns horribly below. A sufficient reason for believing these last details no late and foreign interpolation, is that the Vendidad itself contains all that is essential in them, Garotman, the heaven of Ormuzd, open to the pure, Dutsakh, the abode of devs, ready for the wicked, Chinevad, the bridge of ordeal, upon which all must enter.21

Some authors have claimed that the ancient disciples of Zoroaster believed in a purifying, intermediate state for the dead. Pa.s.sages stating such a doctrine are found in the Yeshts, Sades, and in later Pa.r.s.ee works. But whether the translations we now possess of these pa.s.sages are accurate, and whether the pa.s.sages themselves are authoritative to establish the ancient prevalence of such a belief, we have not yet the means for deciding. There was a yearly solemnity, called the "Festival for the Dead," still observed by the Pa.r.s.ees, held at the season when it was thought that that portion of the sinful departed who had ended their penance were raised from Dutsakh to earth, from earth to Garotman. Du Perron says that this took place only during the last five days of the year, when the souls of all the deceased sinners who were undergoing punishment had permission to leave their confinement and visit their relatives; after which, those not yet purified were to return, but those for whom a sufficient atonement had been made were to proceed to Paradise. For proof that this doctrine was held, reference is made to the following pa.s.sage, with others: "During these five days Ormuzd empties h.e.l.l. The imprisoned souls shall be freed from Ahriman's plagues when they pay penance and are ashamed of their sins; and they shall receive a heavenly nature; the meritorious deeds of themselves and of their families cause this liberation: all the rest must return to Dutsakh."22 Rhode thinks this was a part of the old Persian faith, and the source of

18 Ibid. s. 127.

19 Ibid. ss. 248-252. Vendidad, Fargard XIX.

20 Kleuker, band i. ss. x.x.xi. x.x.xv.

21 Spiegel, Vendidad, ss. 207, 229, 233, 250.

22 Kleuker, band ii. s. 173.

the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory.23 But, whether so or not, it is certain that the Zoroastrians regarded the whole residence of the departed souls in h.e.l.l as temporary.

The duration of the present order of the world was fixed at twelve thousand years, divided into four equal epochs. In the first three thousand years, Ormuzd creates and reigns triumphantly over his empire. Through the next cycle, Ahriman is constructing and carrying on his hostile works. The third epoch is occupied with a drawn battle between the upper and lower kings and their adherents. During the fourth period, Ahriman is to be victorious, and a state of things inconceivably dreadful is to prevail. The brightness of all clear things will be shrouded, the happiness of all joyful creatures be destroyed, innocence disappear, religion be scoffed from the world, and crime, horror, and war be rampant.

Famine will spread, pests and plagues stalk over the earth, and showers of black rain fall. But at last Ormuzd will rise in his might and put an end to these awful scenes. He will send on earth a savior. Sosiosch, to deliver mankind, to wind up the final period of time, and to bring the arch enemy to judgment. At the sound of the voice of Sosiosch the dead will come forth. Good, bad, indifferent, all alike will rise, each in his order.

Kaiomorts, the original single ancestor of men, will be the firstling. Next, Meschia and Meschiane, the primal parent pair, will appear. And then the whole mult.i.tudinous family of mankind will throng up. The genii of the elements will render up the sacred materials intrusted to them, and rebuild the decomposed bodies. Each soul will recognise, and hasten to reoccupy, its old tenement of flesh, now renewed, improved, immortalized. Former acquaintances will then know each other. "Behold, my father! my mother! my brother! my wife! they shall exclaim." 24

In this exposition we have following the guidance of Du Perron, Foucher, Kleuker, J. G. Muller, and other early scholars in this field attributed the doctrine of a general and bodily resurrection of the dead to the ancient Zoroastrians. The subsequent researches of Burnouf, Roth, and others, have shown that several, at least, of the pa.s.sages which Anquetil supposed to teach such a doctrine were erroneously translated by him, and do not really contain it.

And recently the ground has been often a.s.sumed that the doctrine of the resurrection does not belong to the Avesta, but is a more modern dogma, derived by the Pa.r.s.ees from the Jews or the Christians, and only forced upon the old text by misinterpretation through the Pehlevi version and the Pa.r.s.ee commentary. A question of so grave importance demands careful examination. In the absence of that reliable translation of the entire original doc.u.ments, and that thorough elaboration of all the extant materials, which we are awaiting from the hands of Professor Spiegel, whose second volume has long been due, and Professor Westergaard, whose second and third volumes are eagerly looked for, we must make the best use of the resources actually available, and then leave the point in such plausible light as existing testimony and fair reasoning can throw upon it. In the first place, it should be observed that, admitting the doctrine to be nowhere mentioned in the Avesta, still, it does not follow that the belief was not prevalent when the

23 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 410.

24 Bundehesh, ch. x.x.xi.

Avesta was written. We know that the Christians of the first two centuries believed a great many things of which there is no statement in the New Testament. Spiegel holds that the doctrine in debate is not in the Avesta, the text of which in its present form he thinks was written after the time of Alexander.25 But he confesses that the resurrection theory was in existence long before that time.26 Now, if the Avesta, committed to writing three hundred years before Christ, at a time when the doctrine of the resurrection is known to have been believed, contains no reference to it, the same relation of facts may just as well have existed if we date the record seven centuries earlier. We possess only a small and broken portion of the original Zoroastrian Scriptures; as Roth says, "songs, invocations, prayers, s.n.a.t.c.hes of traditions, parts of a code, the shattered fragments of a once stately building." If we could recover the complete doc.u.ments in their earliest condition, it might appear that the now lost parts contained the doctrine of the general resurrection fully formed.

We have many explicit references to many ancient Zoroastrian books no longer in existence. For example, the Pa.r.s.ees have a very early account that the Avesta at first consisted of twenty one Nosks. Of these but one has been preserved complete, and small parts of three or four others. The rest are utterly wanting. The fifth Nosk, whereof not any portion remains to us, was called the Do az ah Hamast. It contained thirty two chapters, treating, among other things, "of the upper and nether world, of the resurrection, of the bridge Chinevad, and of the fate after death." 27 If this evidence be true, and we know of no reason for not crediting it, it is perfectly decisive. But, at all events, the absence from the extant parts of the Zend Avesta of the doctrine under examination would be no proof that that doctrine was not received when those doc.u.ments were penned.

Secondly, we have the unequivocal a.s.sertion of Theopompus, in the fourth century before Christ, that the Magi taught the doctrine of a general resurrection.28 "At the appointed epoch Ahriman shall be subdued," and "men shall live again and shall be immortal." And Diogenes adds, "Eudemus of Rhodes affirms the same things."

Aristotle calls Ormuzd Zeus, and Ahriman Haides, the Greek names respectively of the lord of the starry Olympians above, and the monarch of the Stygian ghosts beneath. Another form also in which the early Greek authors betray their acquaintance with the Persian conception of a conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman is in the idea expressed by Xenophon in his Cyropadia, in the dialogue between Araspes and Cyrus of two souls in man, one a brilliant efflux of good, the other a dusky emanation of evil, each bearing the likeness of its parent.29 Since we know from Theopompus that certain conceptions, ill.u.s.trated in the Bundehesh and not contained in the fragmentary Avestan books which have reached us, were actually received Zoroastrian

25 Studien uber das Zend Avesta, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 1855, band ix. s. 192.

26 Spiegel, Avesta, band i. s. 16.

27 Dabistan, vol. i. pp. 272-274.

28 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Introduction, sect. vi. Plutarch, concerning Isis and Osiris.

29 Lib. vi. cap. i. sect. 41.

tenets four centuries before Christ, we are strongly supported in giving credence to the doctrinal statements of that book as affording, in spite of its lateness, a correct epitome of the old Persian theology.

Thirdly, we are still further warranted in admitting the antiquity of the Zoroastrian system as including the resurrection theory, when we consider the internal harmony and organic connection of parts in it; how the doctrines all fit together, and imply each other, and could scarcely have existed apart. Men were the creatures of Ormuzd. They should have lived immortally under his favor and in his realm. But Ahriman, by treachery, obtained possession of a large portion of them. Now, when, at the end of the fourth period into which the world course was divided by the Magian theory, as Theopompus testifies, Ormuzd overcomes this arch adversary, will he not rescue his own unfortunate creatures from the realm of darkness in which they have been imprisoned?

When a king storms an enemy's castle, he delivers from the dungeons his own soldiers who were taken captives in a former defeat. The expectation of a great prophet, Sosiosch, to come and vanquish Ahriman and his swarms, unquestionably appears in the Avesta itself.30 With this notion, in inseparable union, the Pa.r.s.ee tradition, running continuously back, as is claimed, to a very remote time, joins the doctrine of a general resurrection; a doctrine literally stated in the Vendidad,31 and in many other places in the Avesta,32 where it has not yet been shown to be an interpolation, but only supposed so by very questionable constructive inferences. The consent of intrinsic adjustment and of historic evidence would, therefore, lead to the conclusion that this was an old Zoroastrian dogma. In disproof of this conclusion we believe there is no direct positive evidence whatever, and no inferential argument cogent enough to produce conviction.

There are sufficient reasons for the belief that the doctrine of a resurrection was quite early adopted from the Persians by the Jews, not borrowed at a much later time from the Jews by the Pa.r.s.ees. The conception of Ahriman, the evil serpent, bearing death, (die Schlange Angramainyus der voll Tod ist,) is interwrought from the first throughout the Zoroastrian scheme. In the Hebrew records, on the contrary, such an idea appears but incidentally, briefly, rarely, and only in the later books. The account of the introduction of sin and death by the serpent in the garden of Eden dates from a time subsequent to the commencement of the Captivity. Von Bohlen, in his Introduction to the Book of Genesis, says the narrative was drawn from the Zend Avesta.

Rosenmuller, in his commentary on the pa.s.sage, says the narrator had in view the Zoroastrian notions of the serpent Ahriman and his deeds. Dr. Martin Haug an acute and learned writer, whose opinion is ent.i.tled to great weight, as he is the freshest scholar acquainted with this whole field in the light of all that others have done thinks it certain that Zoroaster lived in a remote antiquity, from fifteen hundred to two thousand years before Christ. He says that Judaism after the exile and, through Judaism, Christianity afterwards received an important influence from Zoroastrianism,

30 Spiegel, Avesta, band i. ss. 16, 244.

31 Fargard XVIII, Spiegel's Uebersetzung, s. 236.

32 Kleuker, band ii. ss. 123, 124, 164.