Quick Answer
The Zoroastrian account of everything: how the world was made as a trap for evil, how evil broke in and was locked inside, and how, after a fixed span, the dead rise, the wicked are purified in molten metal, and the world is made perfect forever. Compiled by priests in the ninth century from far older material, it is part scripture, part encyclopaedia, and the single best window on the cosmology that shaped Jewish, Christian and Islamic ideas of the end. It is not easy reading. It is essential reading.
Key Takeaways
- Creation as strategy. Ohrmazd makes the world to contain and defeat Ahriman.
- Twelve thousand years in four ages, and the struggle has an end date.
- Resurrection, judgment, renovation: the scheme the West inherited.
- Half of it is natural history, and that half is stranger than the myth.
- Read the Greater Bundahishn in the Agostini and Thrope translation.
17 min read
What This Text Is
The Bundahishn, whose title means Primal Creation or Original Establishment, is a Middle Persian book of thirty-six chapters in its fuller form, setting out the Zoroastrian understanding of the cosmos from its origin to its end.
It is not the Avesta. The Avesta is the Zoroastrian scripture proper, in an older Iranian language, and most of it is lost. The Bundahishn is what the priests of the ninth century put together from what they still had, in the language they then spoke, to preserve a picture of the world that was slipping away under Islamic rule.
It opens with the two spirits in their two infinities. It ends with the resurrection and the renewal of the world. In between it describes the sky, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the first man and woman, the calendar, the mountains and rivers of Iran, and the line of kings down to the Arab conquest.
The result is a text that reads as scripture in one chapter and as a natural history in the next, and that is exactly what it is.
A word on names. The Bundahishn uses Middle Persian forms: Ohrmazd for the Avestan Ahura Mazda, Ahriman for Angra Mainyu, Zardusht for Zarathustra. This review uses the Middle Persian forms when discussing the text and the older ones when discussing the tradition generally. They refer to the same figures.
How It Came to Be Written
The circumstances are the key to the book's character.
The Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century ended the Sasanian empire, in which Zoroastrianism had been the state religion with a large priesthood, a fixed canon and an elaborate commentary literature. Within two centuries the community was a shrinking minority, its priests were losing the ability to read the Avestan language, and its schools were closing.
The Bundahishn was compiled in that emergency, mostly in the ninth century, by priests who understood that if the traditional cosmology was not written down in the language people actually spoke it would be lost. They drew on a lost section of the Avesta called the Damdad Nask, on the Zand or commentary tradition, and on their own learning.
The text names the family of Manushchihr, a high priest of Fars, and the final redactor seems to have worked as late as the eleventh or twelfth century, adding material on the history of the community after the conquest.
Everything in the book, therefore, is preservation. It is what a dying priesthood thought most worth saving.
The Two Recensions
The text exists in two forms and it matters which you read.
The Indian Bundahishn is the shorter version, transmitted among the Parsis of India, and was the first known in the West. It was translated by Edward West in 1880 for the Sacred Books of the East and is what most older references mean by the Bundahishn.
The Iranian or Greater Bundahishn is roughly twice as long, was preserved in Iran, and was recognised in the twentieth century as the fuller and more original text, of which the Indian version is an abridgement. It has the complete cosmology, the complete natural history and the complete eschatology.
Until 2020 there was no complete modern English translation of the Greater Bundahishn. Now there is, and a reader has no reason to use anything else.
The Two Spirits
The first chapter, and the theology in a page.
Ohrmazd was on high in omniscience and goodness, in endless light. Ahriman was in the depths in slowness of knowledge and the desire to destroy, in endless darkness. Between them was the void. Each was limited on one side by the other and unlimited on all other sides.
Ohrmazd, being omniscient, knew that Ahriman existed and would attack. Ahriman, being ignorant, did not know that Ohrmazd existed until he rose from the depths and saw the light. Seeing it, he wanted to destroy it.
The dualism here is as sharp as any in world religion. Evil is not a fallen angel or a privation of good. It is a second principle, co-eternal with the first, with its own nature and its own will. What is not co-eternal is the struggle, which has a beginning and an end.
Creation as a Trap
The idea that makes the Bundahishn's cosmology unlike any other.
Ohrmazd knows that Ahriman cannot be argued out of existence and cannot be destroyed in the infinite. So he creates a finite arena. He makes time limited, twelve thousand years, and within that time he makes a world, first in spirit and then in matter. The world is good, and it is also bait. Ahriman, seeing it, will attack it, and once he is inside a bounded creation he can be fought, worn down, and finally defeated.
Ohrmazd offers Ahriman peace before this begins, on condition that he praise the good creation. Ahriman refuses, thinking the offer a sign of weakness. Ohrmazd then shows him the end of the story, his own defeat, and Ahriman falls back into the darkness stupefied for three thousand years.
Creation, in other words, is a strategy. The world exists so that evil can be caught in it and ended. Everything that follows, including human beings, is part of the plan.
The Twelve Thousand Years
The scheme that organises the whole book and most of later Zoroastrian thought.
Time is limited to twelve thousand years, in four periods of three thousand. In the first, Ohrmazd creates the world in spiritual form and Ahriman lies stupefied. In the second, the material creation exists in perfection, untouched, motionless, without evil. In the third, Ahriman breaks in and the world is the mixture of good and evil it now is. In the fourth, which begins with Zarathustra's revelation, the mixture is progressively resolved through three saviours, each born a thousand years apart, until the final renovation.
The Bundahishn's compilers believed they were living in the last of these periods, somewhere past its midpoint. The scheme gave the community under Islamic rule a way of understanding its situation: the mixture was worsening because the end was approaching, and the end was fixed.
The scheme's most consequential feature is that it makes history finite and directional. Most ancient cosmologies are cyclical: the world is made, destroyed and made again without end. The Bundahishn's world is made once, invaded once, and renewed once, forever. Time runs from a beginning to an end, the end is known, and the meaning of every event is its position on the line. That idea, whatever its origin, is the idea that Judaism, Christianity and Islam built their theologies of history on, and the Bundahishn is the clearest ancient statement of it.
The Assault of Ahriman
The third chapter, and the most vivid.
Ahriman, roused by the demon of lust, bursts into the material world from below. He pierces the sky, which had been a perfect shell, and enters it like a snake. He makes the water brackish. He fills the earth with noxious creatures. He withers the primal plant. He kills the primal bull and the primal man. He falls on the fire and mixes it with smoke.
The sky, the waters and the earth fight back; the sky closes so that Ahriman cannot get out again; and the assault ends with evil locked inside a creation that has been damaged but not destroyed.
The passage explains everything the Zoroastrian thinks wrong with the world, salt sea, disease, death, poisonous animals, the mixing of smoke with fire, as damage done by an invader who is now trapped. Nothing evil is original. Everything evil is a wound.
The Mixed State
The condition the book's compilers, and its readers, live in.
After the assault, the world is gumezishn, mixture. Good and evil are intertwined in every thing. Every creature of Ohrmazd has a counter-creature of Ahriman: the dog against the wolf, the cock against the owl, the beneficial plant against the poisonous weed. Every human is a battleground.
The Bundahishn's ethics follow from this. The human task is to increase the good creation and diminish the evil: to farm, to breed cattle, to have children, to keep the fire, to kill noxious creatures, to tell the truth. The world is a war and every act is a contribution to one side.
That is a very different ethic from renunciation. The Zoroastrian does not withdraw from the world; the world is the front line, and withdrawal is desertion.
The Natural History
The part of the book that surprises first-time readers, and takes up nearly half of it.
Chapters describe the sky and its stations, the sun and moon and the fixed stars, the seven planets as agents of Ahriman, the mountains rising from the earth over eight hundred years, the seas and rivers, the classes of plants, the species of animals in their genera, the nature of fire in its five kinds, the calendar with its months and days, and the properties of the various waters.
Some of this is myth: the mountain Harburz that surrounds the world, the sea Frakhkard, the tree of all seeds. Much of it is observation: the animal classifications are systematic, the rivers of Iran are real rivers with real courses, and the calendar is the actual Zoroastrian calendar.
The compilers did not distinguish. The world was one thing, made by Ohrmazd, and describing its rivers was as much theology as describing its creation.
The First Humans
The Bundahishn's account of human origins, which has no parallel in the Bible.
The primal man, Gayomard, is killed in Ahriman's assault. From his seed, purified by the sun and held in the earth for forty years, a rhubarb plant grows, with two stalks joined. The stalks become Mashya and Mashyana, the first man and woman, so alike that it cannot be told which is which.
Ohrmazd tells them: you are human, the parents of the world, do good with perfect thought. Their first act is to speak, and their first speech is a lie: they say that Ahriman made the water and the earth and the plants. From that lie their souls are damned until the resurrection, and everything since follows.
The passage is strange and dense with meaning. Humanity grows from the earth like a plant, is created as a pair and not a hierarchy, and falls not by disobedience but by a false statement about who made the world. The first sin is a theological error.
The Kings and the Genealogies
The closing chapters trace the line of Iranian kings from the first humans through the legendary dynasties down to the Sasanians and the Arab conquest, with the genealogies of the priestly families and of Zarathustra himself.
This material overlaps with the Shahnameh and is the mythological history that Ferdowsi later versified. It is dry to read and valuable to consult, and it shows the compilers' purpose: to place their own community, its kings and its priests, in the cosmic story from creation to renovation.
The Renovation
The final chapters, on the end of time, and the reason the book has been read outside its tradition.
At the end of the twelve thousand years, the last saviour, Soshyans, born of Zarathustra's seed preserved in a lake, raises the dead. All who have ever lived stand up, bone reassembled and flesh restored, and know one another. There is a great assembly in which each sees their own good and evil deeds. The righteous are separated from the wicked for three days, the righteous in heaven and the wicked in hell.
Then the great renovation, Frashegird, begins. The stars and planets melt, the metals in the mountains flow as a river, and all humanity passes through it. Ahriman and his demons are destroyed, or driven back through the hole by which they entered, and the hole is sealed with the molten metal. The earth is made flat, hell is filled in, and the world is perfect and immortal forever.
The River of Molten Metal
The image that most readers remember, and worth its own section.
Every human being, righteous and wicked, must pass through the river of molten metal. To the righteous it feels like walking through warm milk. To the wicked it is the full agony of burning. But the wicked are not destroyed. The metal purifies them, burns away the evil, and they emerge cleansed to join the righteous in the renewed world.
This is not a last judgment in the Christian sense, which separates forever. It is a universal purification after which no one is damned. The Bundahishn's hell is temporary and its salvation is total. Ahriman's creatures are destroyed; Ahriman's victims are healed.
Readers coming from the Abrahamic traditions often find this the most striking thing in the book, since it is the same imagery, resurrection, judgment, fire, applied to a different end.
What the West Took from It
The question of influence, stated carefully.
The Jews were under Persian rule for two centuries, from Cyrus to Alexander, and the ideas of a bodily resurrection, a final judgment, a cosmic adversary, angels in hierarchies and a renewed earth appear in Jewish writing during and after that period, when they had been absent before. Most scholars accept that Zoroastrian ideas contributed, though the extent and mechanism are debated.
The Bundahishn is a late text and cannot be the direct source. What it preserves is the systematic form of ideas that were current in the Persian period and that reached Judaism, and through Judaism Christianity and Islam, in some form. Reading it is reading the cosmology behind the Apocalypse, at one remove.
The same scheme fed Manichaeism directly and Mithraism in part, and through them ran into the Gnostic and Hermetic currents of late antiquity.
The Bundahishn and the Gathas
A distinction that matters for anyone approaching Zoroastrianism.
The Gathas are seventeen hymns in an archaic Iranian language, attributed to Zarathustra himself and dated by most scholars around 1000 BCE. They are abstract, ethical and difficult, concerned with the choice between truth and the lie, and they contain almost no mythology.
The Bundahishn is two thousand years later and is nothing but mythology. It has the two spirits, but they have become full cosmic persons with histories. It has the choice, but the choice has become a war with a schedule.
A reader who wants Zarathustra should read the Gathas. A reader who wants the religion that grew from him should read the Bundahishn. They are as different as the Sermon on the Mount and a medieval summa, and they belong to one tradition in the same way.
The Translation
Agostini and Thrope's The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation, Oxford University Press, 2020, is the first complete modern English translation of the Greater Bundahishn and it is excellent: clear prose, a full introduction, notes on the difficult passages, and a glossary.
West's 1880 translation of the Indian text is free online and is what most internet quotations come from. It is incomplete, archaic in style and based on the shorter recension, and it should be read only for historical interest.
Editions offered under the bare title Bundahishn on the retail sites are usually reprints of West. Check before buying.
The Difficulties
Three, and they are the text's rather than any translator's.
The form. It is a compilation, not a composition. Chapters repeat, contradict and interrupt one another. There is no narrative voice and no attempt at coherence beyond the broad scheme.
The natural history. Readers coming for the cosmology must get through the classification of animals and the rivers of Iran, and many do not.
The lateness. The text is ninth century and cannot be used directly as evidence for what Zoroastrians believed in the Persian period. Arguments about influence on Judaism must go through it to older sources it only partly preserves.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know where the idea of a last judgment, a resurrection and a renewed earth came from before the Bible had them.
Read it if you study comparative mythology and want a complete cosmology from creation to end in a single text, which is rarer than it sounds.
Read it beside the Babylonian creation epic, which was its neighbour and its opposite.
Read the Agostini and Thrope translation, and read chapters one, three, and the last three first. The middle can wait.
The Bundahishn's most original thought is that the world exists in order to end evil. Not to display glory, not to test souls, not as an overflow of goodness: as a trap, deliberately laid, into which the destroyer would be lured and in which he could finally be worn down. Everything good in the world is bait and weapon at once. Every human act tips the balance. And the outcome is not in doubt, because the maker of the trap saw the end before he built it. That is a bleak and a hopeful cosmology in the same breath, and the mixture it describes is the mixture its readers recognise.
The Zoroastrian account of creation, the cosmic war, and the end of the world.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our recommendation of the Agostini and Thrope translation over the older West version stands regardless of which edition the link leads to.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Bundahishn?
A Middle Persian compilation, whose name means Primal Creation, setting out the Zoroastrian account of the origin of the world, the attack of the evil spirit, the structure of the cosmos, and the final renovation at the end of time.
When was it written?
Compiled in the ninth century CE, after the Arab conquest, from much older Avestan material that had been lost or was being lost. Its final redaction may be as late as the twelfth century.
Who wrote it?
No single author. It is a priestly compilation, associated with the family of the high priest Manushchihr, drawing on the lost Damdad Nask of the Avesta and on other traditional commentaries.
What are the two recensions?
The Indian Bundahishn, shorter and known earlier in the West, and the Iranian or Greater Bundahishn, roughly twice as long, which is the fuller and more original text. Modern translations use the Greater.
What is the creation story?
Ohrmazd, the wise lord, dwells in endless light; Ahriman in endless darkness. Ohrmazd creates the world as a trap for evil. Ahriman attacks, corrupts it, and is locked inside for a limited time, after which he is defeated and the world renewed.
What is the twelve-thousand-year scheme?
Cosmic history divided into four periods of three thousand years: spiritual creation, material creation untouched by evil, the mixed state after Ahriman's attack, and the age from Zarathustra's revelation to the final renovation.
What does it say about the end of the world?
That a saviour born of Zarathustra's seed will raise the dead, that all will pass through a river of molten metal that purifies the wicked and feels like warm milk to the righteous, and that Ahriman will be destroyed and the world made perfect forever.
Why does it matter beyond Zoroastrianism?
Because its scheme of a limited cosmic struggle, a bodily resurrection, a last judgment and a renewed earth is widely thought to have shaped Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology during the Persian period and after.
Is it only about creation?
No. Much of it is a natural history: the classes of animals and plants, the mountains and rivers, the calendar, the nature of fire and water, and the genealogy of the Iranian kings. It is an encyclopaedia as much as a scripture.
Which translation should I read?
Domenico Agostini and Samuel Thrope's 2020 Oxford translation of the Greater Bundahishn is the first complete modern English version and the one to use. West's 1880 translation of the Indian text is free online and outdated.
How does it relate to the Gathas?
The Gathas are Zarathustra's own hymns, abstract and ethical, from around 1000 BCE. The Bundahishn is a systematic cosmology from two thousand years later. They share a dualism of good and evil but differ enormously in form.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in the sources of apocalyptic thought, students of comparative mythology, and anyone who wants to see a complete ancient cosmology from creation to renovation in a single text.
Read the ending first
Most sacred books are read from the beginning. This one rewards being read from the end, because the Bundahishn's beginning only makes sense once you know that the maker saw the end before he made anything. Read the resurrection and the river of metal. Then go back to the two spirits in their two infinities and watch Ohrmazd lay the trap. The whole book is a plan, and a plan is understood from its goal.
Sources & References
- Agostini, Domenico and Samuel Thrope, trans. The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation, Oxford University Press, 2020.
- West, E. W., trans. Pahlavi Texts, Part I: The Bundahis, Sacred Books of the East vol. 5, 1880.
- Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices.
- Zaehner, R. C. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma and The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism.
- Skjærvø, Prods Oktor. The Spirit of Zoroastrianism.
- Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, on the influence on Western eschatology.