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284 Zoroastrianism
greet him on the bridge in personified form—a
beautiful maiden for a good person; an ugly hag
for a bad person—who either leads the soul to
paradise (“the luminous mansions of the sky”) or
embraces the soul and falls into hell, according to
whether the person has been good or evil.
After the final battle between good and evil,
there will be a general judgment in which everyone
will be put through an ordeal of fire (a river of
molten metal), in which good individuals will
have their dross burned away and evil people will
be consumed. Thus the souls of the damned will
trade their ongoing torment in hell for a painful
annihilation. The souls of the blessed, on the other
hand, will be resurrected in physical bodies, which
Ahura Mazda will make both immortal and eternally
youthful. (In a later modification of tradition,
both good and evil souls have their dross
burned away, so that everyone shares the postresurrection
paradise.)
The concept of resurrection as formulated in
Zoroastrianism represents one of the earliest
efforts to conceive of immortality. It is part of an
optimistic vision of the end of the world, in which
the forces of light overcome darkness and all
humankind rejoices with the renewal of creation.
An entire section of the Avesta explains how the
body is returned to the soul upon the moment of
reunion and resurrection.
The final great transformation, called the
“making wonderful,” is described by scholar
Norman Cohn in the following way:
The earth will be flattened by the fiery flood,
so that its surface will be a single level plain:
the snow-covered mountains of Iran—first
thrown up as a result of Angra Mainyu’s
onslaught—will be no more. In this perfect
environment the surviving human beings will
live in the most perfect harmony with one
another. Husbands and wives and children,
including of course the resurrected dead, will
be re-united and will live together as they do
in this present world—except that there will
be no more begetting of children. All
mankind will form a single community of
devout Zoroastrians, all united in adoration of
Ahura Mazda and the Holy Immortals, and all
at one in thought word and deed. (Cohn
1993, 98–99)
Many of the components of this vision of the
end times—a final battle between good and evil,
judgment of the wicked, resurrection of the dead,
and so on—were adopted by Jewish apocalyptic
thinkers. From texts composed by these apocalypticists,
such notions were adopted into
Christianity and Islam.
See also Ahriman
For Further Reading:
Biedermann, Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism:
Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them.
New York: Meridian, 1994.
Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to
Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
Eliade, Mircea. Encyclopedia of Religion. New York:
Macmillan, 1987.
Pavry, Jal Dastur Cursetji. The Zoroastrian Doctrine
of a Future Life. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1926.
Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993.