THE ZOROASTKIAN CONCEPTION OF A FUTURE LIFE. 237 



bination is fused into one word, Auramazda, the Ormazcl of later 

 days and Oromazdes of the Greeks. The " Wise Lord " was for 

 Zarathushtra Creator of all things, beneficent, all-knowing. The 

 massy heavens are His robe, and infinite space His dwelling. 

 In the beginning we read, 



" The two primeval Spirits, who revealed themselves in vision 

 as Twins, are the Better and the Bad in thought and word 

 and action. And between these two the wise once chose 

 aright, the foolish not so."* 



The two spirits are expressly called Twins, but the term is 

 not developed : it was later Mazdeism that found a parent in 

 " Endless Time." Nor are we told what was the relation of 

 the " Better Spirit " to Ahura Mazdah. Strict logic should 

 equate them ; but whatever the later writings of Parseeism may 

 do, the Gathas never suggest any such equality between Ahura 

 Mazdah and the Evil Spirit as the name Twins suggests. Are 

 we to say that the whole verse is a detached philosopheme 

 about Good and Evil and how they are differentiated, the one the 

 simple negation of the other, a yes and a no that are linked like 

 twins ? This would release us from the necessity of bringing 

 Mazdah into express relation with the statement which quite 

 impersonally sets forth the genesis of evil. Such a considera- 

 tion gains weight from the generally unobserved fact that 

 Zarathushtra never names the Evil Spirit. A casual epithet, 

 " enemy," is once applied to him, and this is taken up and 

 turned into a proper name in the Later Avesta, where Angra 

 Mainyv, Enemy Spirit," crystallises into one word, like 

 Auramazda, and gives us the ultimate Ahriman, the Greek 

 Areimanios. But as far as the Gathas go his name might have 

 been Aka Mainyu, " Bad Spirit," for that does occur twice ! In 

 the Gathas Evil is far more often called Druj, " Falsehood " ; 

 but there is less personification than we find in John Bunyan's 

 thumbnail sketches of a virtue or a vice. Abstraction was of 

 the essence of Zarathushtra's processes of thought. 



In this paper I am not concerned with delineating Good and 

 Evil in themselves, but with describing their present relation 

 and future destiny. Parseeism is generally credited with being 

 " dualistic." If we confine the epithet to the system of the 

 Magi, with its mechanically balanced antitheses of white and 

 black, I have no objection. But in the Gathas I can see no 



* Yas/ia 30 3 . (I quote the Gathas from my own version in my 

 Hibbert Lectures.) 



