THE ZOROASTRIAN CONCEPTION OF A I ' I TU RE LIFE. 235 



the beaten tracks of ancient civilisation is the best explanation 

 of the practical absence of reliable traces of his teaching till a 

 much later date than sundry theorists have assumed. His 

 1 1 vnms (Gathas) are very scanty in extent and extremely 

 difficult of interpretation, but we must refer every problem of 

 Zoroastrianism proper to their arbitrament. For the bulk of 

 the Avesta, of which the Gathas are much the oldest part, 

 presents us with a most obvious declension from Zarathushtra's 

 teaching in every particular. This deviation comes in two well- 

 marked stages. First, after some short prose pieces in the 

 archaic dialect of the Gathas, comes the mass of the verse 

 Avesta, the Yashts and the later Yasna. Here we have, in 

 metre and in thought and style, what is closer than anything in 

 the Avesta to the kindred hymns of the Eigveda, though the 

 Gathas are in a dialect much nearer to the Sanskrit. The 

 religion presumed here is virtually Vedic. The old polytheism 

 professed by the united people, who (perhaps about the middle 

 of the second millennium) divided into Indian and Iranian, has 

 returned, now that the mighty force of the Prophet's personality 

 has been withdrawn. During the fifth century (as 1 believe) a 

 new force began to work with the coming of the Magi, a sacred 

 tribe in Media, who had made a bold bid for political power 

 during the reign of Cambyses, but were put down by the 

 warrior Aryans under the great Darius. They seem to have set 

 themselves to win spiritual power by way of compensation ; and 

 in a couple of generations, perhaps, they had made themselves 

 the indispensable priests of a religion very different from their 

 own. They adapted to it their peculiar ritual and priestcraft, 

 developed its theology along new lines, and completed the canon 

 of the Avesta by adding prose books containing ritual, cosmo- 

 gony, and other elements which we cannot identify, since so 

 small a part of the original Avesta has come down to us. 



I have thought it necessary to describe in brief the stratifica- 

 tion of Avestan religion and religious documents, because 

 without this basis I cannot discuss the relation of Zoroastrian 

 eschatology to other eschatologies which interest us more closely. 

 I proceed after this preface to take up the specific doctrine 

 mentioned in the title of this paper. 



With one very notable exception, all the characteristic and 

 valuable elements in Zoroastrian eschatology come from 

 Zarathushtra himself, and are to be derived from his own Hymns. 

 There is no doubt that he worked up inherited material, 

 developed into doctrine what had been mere mythology, tacitly 

 ignored what did not fit into his highly abstract and spiritual 



