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This is not the end. Apocalyptic

comfort from ancient Iran |
Psyche Ideas
by Lyndsey Stonebridge

9-11 minutos

At its height, around 620 CE, the Sasanian empire

ruled over a territory stretching from Jerusalem in the
west to Samarkand in the east. The royal court at the
ancient city of Ctesiphon, near present-day Baghdad,
was the political heart of this vast realm, and its official
religion was the ancient Iranian faith, Zoroastrianism. In
royal iconography, the king of the Sasanians was
likened to Ohrmazd, the good creator God: just as
Ohrmazd vanquishes the evil spirit Ahriman, so, too,
does the king triumph over his enemies on the
battlefield. For at least 1,000 years, the Zoroastrian
faith held sway over the empires of Persia.

In 651 CE, the Sasanian empire collapsed. Armies

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commanded by the second and third Islamic caliphs,

Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan, relentlessly
pushed defeated Persian forces eastward from the
imperial heartland in Mesopotamia. Yazdegird III, the
last Sasanian king, was murdered. The remnants of the
royal family fled to China. It was a total defeat,
unprecedented in Iranian history. Faced with today’s
world-changing events, this Iranian experience has
much to teach us. In responding to an event different
from, but in many ways proportionate to, our own,
Zoroastrians, followers of the ancient Iranian religion,
sought comfort in the apocalyptic – a comfort we might
now turn to as well.

For the Zoroastrians, it was a defeat of apocalyptic

proportions. The fact that a rival faith could so
thoroughly destroy the ‘good religion’ – which Ohrmazd
revealed to the prophet Zoroaster thousands of years
before – violated the fundamental laws of the Universe
itself. In the Zoroastrian conception, the progress of
time is fixed and irreversible. When Ahriman first
became aware of Ohrmazd in the uncreated spiritual
realm, the two made a pact to fight for 9,000 years;
Ohrmazd, knowing in his omniscience that the evil spirit
would never be defeated unless a limit was imposed,

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tricked Ahriman into agreeing to the time-bound fight.

This 9,000-year period is divided into three stages.
First, the primal creation of the world by Ohrmazd, a
time of harmony, perfect and unmoving. Next is the
period we live in now, known as the Mixture
(gumezišn), which began with the attack by Ahriman
and the demons on creation, who corrupted the world
with their evil and filth. At last, there will be the defeat
and removal of evil from the world and the final,
purifying judgment of all mankind at the end of days.

The Islamic conquest upset this steady progression of

the Zoroastrian universe. Time itself must have seemed
derailed. The Zoroastrians were forced to rethink their
world. In the wake of the tragedy, they began to write.

Over the course of the 9th and 10th centuries,

Zoroastrian literature in Middle Persian – closely related
to the modern language spoken in Iran today –
flourished. Traditions that had been preserved orally for
generations were set down in writing for the first time,
and new works were composed. Scholars can’t pinpoint
what, exactly, sparked this literary revival. Perhaps it
was renewed interest in the Iranian past under the
Abbasid Caliphs, who moved the capital of the Muslim
world to Baghdad in 762; the rise of small, philo-

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Zoroastrian principalities on the shores of the Caspian

Sea and in present-day Afghanistan; or the fear that
knowledge would be lost as more and more adherents
abandoned the faith. But we have this literature to
thank for much of what we know about ancient Iran,
and the civilisation that so influenced Judaism,
Christianity and Islam.

The movement of the Sun and stars, world

chronologies, the gestations of animals. The constancy
of time is central

Each of these Zoroastrian works is different, ranging

from ritual law to court poetry. But a theme that unites
many – expressed in apocalyptic visions, primordial
myth and scientific taxonomies – is the need to set the
world right.

Perhaps the best example of this type is the Bundahišn,

meaning primal or primeval creation, an encyclopaedic
survey of world history from creation to the final
judgment, written sometime during the 9th century.
Composed in part from earlier materials – including
translations and commentaries on the Zoroastrian
sacred scripture, the Avesta – the book touches on a
diverse host of topics. Its 36 chapters jump between
technical discussions of astronomy and astrology that

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draw on Hellenistic science, to lists of famous palaces,

zoology, rain myths and the origins of man. The
Bundahišn isn’t literature in the sense in which we
generally understand it today: the book lacks a
sustained narrative or an overarching argument, and a
cursory examination leaves the impression of a
hodgepodge collection of scraps.

Looking closer, however, the Bundahišn does follow,

and prescribe, an order. The book progresses forward
in time and inward in space: from creation in the first
chapter, through the three ages of the world, to the final
eschatological visions in the concluding chapters, and
from the outermost spiritual realm to the fates of
individual men and women. Although this framework is
far from rigid, and individual chapters seem out of
place, the overall structure is clear and consistent.

While the Bundahišn aims to encompass and

comprehend the created world in all its diversity, a
consistent theme runs through it; this is the theme of
keeping time. The movement of the Sun and stars,
world chronologies, the genealogies of families, the
gestations of animals, the duration of sleep and, of
course, the divisions of years, months and days:
discussions of measuring, recording and marking time

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echo throughout the book. The constancy and reliability

of time is the book’s central concern.

This is particularly true in the Bundahišn’s culminating

sections on the eschatological events that will unfold at
the end of days. Since its beginnings, thinking about
how time will end has been an essential component of
Zoroastrianism. The Gathas – poems composed by the
prophet Zoroaster that are the religion’s founding texts
– compare time to a chariot race in which it is known,
far in advance, that good will triumph as it rounds the
final turn. The Bundahišn and other later works expand
on these themes to create elaborate apocalyptic visions
of multiple saviours, heroes vanquishing demons and
monsters, and a river of molten metal that burns away
sin and destroys hell.

The greatest calamity is ultimately just one event

among many on the road to the promised end

The Bundahišn’s apocalyptic sections also incorporate

the downfall of the Sasanians into this world-historical
scheme. History is made to fit eschatology. Chapter 33
describes the death of Yazdegird III, and the spread of
Islam in Iran: ‘From the primal creation until today, there
was no evil worse than this.’

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Given its encyclopaedic scope, the Bundahišn reports

the calamities brought on by the conquest – the
destruction of ancient traditions, the abandonment of
the religion’s strict purity laws, the invaders’ evil rule –
in summary form only. However, other Zoroastrian
apocalyptic texts are more explicit. They claim that the
coming of the new faith brought about the disintegration
of the fundamental values of society and of basic family
bonds. Passages describe the forced separation of
parents from children, brothers torn apart by the
conversion of one, and mothers selling their daughters
along with their dowries.

It goes without saying that this depiction of the Iranians’

adoption of Islam is neither objective nor complete.
Many Zoroastrians chose to become Muslims out of
sincere faith, and the first centuries of Islamic rule saw
as much continuity as rupture with the Sasanians who
had come before. All the same, it’s easy to see how
aspects of our current reality, when great fears seem to
be coming to pass, resonate with these Zoroastrian
descriptions.

But this is by no means the end of history. The

Bundahišn goes on to describe further invasions and
devastations of Iran – which are retold in the future

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tense, but likely refer to events far in the past from the
perspective of the book’s authors – until the arrival of a
ruler who will restore Zoroastrianism and launch the
eschatological process. This ruler is described as a
man, though his mission is divine. Apocalyptic
upheavals will bring about a crisis in human connection
– just as we are seeing today.

From the perspective of the Bundahišn’s future vision,

the greatest and most devastating calamity is ultimately
just one event among many on the road to the
promised end. It’s in this sense that the Bundahišn is a
therapeutic text. The book proclaims that time is
constant and uninterrupted and that future promises
continue to hold. The ultimate triumph of good is
contained already in the first moments of creation, an
inevitability that no earthly event or setback, no matter
how large, can undo. For Zoroastrian readers seeking
consolation as the world they knew fell away before
their eyes, we can imagine that the Bundahišn gave a
sense of order and relief.

The stars continue to move in their regular courses, the

seasons come and go as before. And as for the future,
the most important lesson the Bundahišn has for us is
that no event is, itself, the end of history. Even if we’re

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uncertain about the way ahead, we can be reassured

that we have not reached the end of the road.

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