THE Z0R0ASTRIAN CONCEPTION OF A FUTURE LIFE. 



245 



fourth day, meets a lovely damsel wafted towards him on a 

 fragrant south wind. 



Then spake to her with question the soul of the righteous man : 

 What maiden art thou, fairest in form of all maidens that 

 ever I saw ? 



Then to him replied she that was his own self : 0 youth of good 

 thoughts, good words, good actions, good self, I am the self 

 of thine own person. 



She tells him that by worship and almsgiving he had made her 

 ever fairer and more adorable. The fragment is imperfect when 

 it comes to describe the passing of the wicked soul : it is, one 

 fears, not probable that literary feeling forbad the author to spoil 

 a gem ! But Pahlavi books come to the rescue and tell us that 

 the wicked soul, as it tied to the cold and demon-ridden North, 

 was met by its own self as a hideous old hag. Every detail is duly 

 reversed in the characteristic Magian way. But in both parts 

 of the picture, if in the mechanically balanced strokes of 

 the brush we recognise a Magian painter, the conception of 

 the Daena or Self as creator of destiny goes back to the genius 

 of Zarathushtra. 



The story of the destiny of the soul must be rounded off with 

 a glimpse of the heaven into which the righteous enters : we 

 began this survey with the hell wherein the wicked abides his 

 punishment. The next stanza in the fragment just described 

 tells us that the soul stepped successively into the Good Thought 

 Paradise, the Good Word, the Good Deed, and finally to the 

 Endless Lights. There Ahura Mazdah bids them bring him 

 " spring butter," the nectar and ambrosia of the Parsee heaven. 

 This is all in the spirit of the Gathas, where heaven is variously 

 called the House of Song, the Best Thought, the House of Good 

 Thought, the Kingdom of Good Thought, the Best Existence, etc. 

 And if only in antithesis to the description of the House of the 

 Lie quoted above, we may picture Zarathushtra's House of Song 

 to be a place " of bliss, of light, of dainty food, and singing of 



joy." 



What then about the body ? It is here that the great gulf 

 fixed between Zarathushtra and the Magi is most apparent. 

 Those who know nothing else about the modern Parsees know 

 how they dispose of their dead. The corpse of a good man is 

 the most unclean thing in the world : it represents the victory 

 of the Death-fiend over a creature of Mazdah. Hence it must 

 never touch the sacred earth or waters, but be devoured by 



