Episode 125: The Zoroastrian Bundahisn

The Zoroastrian Bundahisn

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 125: The Zoroastrian Bundahisn. This episode is on the Bundahisn, a ninth-century Persian account of how the world was created, and how the deities of good and evil, Ohrmazd and Ahriman, have been at war with one another ever since. Ancient Eurasian religious allegories are full of tales of brothers – Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, and more. And we can imagine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam themselves as brother religions, descended from a common ancestor, the adyan ibrahimiyya, as they’re called in Arabic, sharing the same scriptural traditions. But the Abrahamic religions have another brother – a half-brother from further to the east. This half-brother is very possibly older than all of them. And this half-brother lived closely alongside all of them for a long time, although we in the English-speaking world hardly ever hear of it. As the Achaemenid empire, and then Hellenistic empires, and then conquests of the Parthian empire, and the conquests of Rome washed back and forth over what is today Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, the flood tides of east and west dampened this region of the supercontinent with new layers of people and culture every time. One of those layers, from the 500s BCE onward, was Zoroastrianism.

We learned, a number of episodes ago, about the basics of Zoroastrianism. With a historical epicenter in present-day Iran, Zoroastrianism is an ethical monotheism rooted in a great contest between the forces of good and the forces of evil – a contest that takes place in both the material world around us, as well as the unseen world of spirits. Zoroastrians believe that the omniscient God Ahura Mazda, later known as Ohrmazd, is currently in a great contest with Angra Mainyu, later known as Ahriman. Each Zoroastrian believer is a node in this comic struggle, and through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, each Zoroastrian believer can tip the scales a little further in the direction of good, and secure a happy afterlife, as well.

Zoroastrianism is very ancient. The religion’s earliest scriptures are often dated by scholars today to a period earlier than 1,000 BCE.¹ As we learned in earlier programs, Zoroastrianism’s dualism was immensely influential in Second Temple Judaism, and through it, Christianity. The War Scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls foresees, “the day of calamity, [when] the sons of light shall battle with the company of darkness amid the shouts of a mighty multitude and the clamour of gods and men.”² What is described here sounds like Armageddon in Revelation – the final battle between good and evil. It’s just that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not written by Christians. The Tanakh had no cosmic evil force, other than a minor figure named “the adversary,” or ha-satan, in the Book of Job, not to be confused with the Christian Satan. What we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in apocryphal Second Temple period scriptures like first Enoch, is Jewish theology, over the 200s and 100s BCE, absorbing Zoroastrian ideas about a great cosmic evil opposed to an otherwise omnipotent God, an eventual battle between the two, and a bipartite afterlife in which the good will be saved and the guilty punished. These ideas, again, are not in the Tanakh. They are Zoroastrian ideas, having at some point been absorbed into Judaism. During the first century CE, Christian eschatology likely developed in part due to the commingling of Jewish and Zoroastrian ideas about judgment day during the final few hundred years BCE.

We are, in our podcast, however, no longer in the period before the common era. We are in a far later epoch of history – the 700s and 800s, in fact. And in the previous few episodes, although we haven’t talked about Zoroastrianism much, we have talked a lot about the Sasanian empire. We learned that the Rashidun caliphate conquered this empire between the 630s and 650s. And in the previous program, we learned a bit more about what the Rashidun caliphate conquered when they took over Persia – less of a centralized, homogeneous mega-state, and more of a patchwork of powerful fiefdoms capable of greater and greater regional independence the further east you went. Though conquered by the caliphates, the proud old houses of the Iranian east were able to assert themselves more and more in the second half of the 700s, until, during the Abbasid period, independent Iranian kingdoms, specifically the Saffarid empire, the Samanid empire, and the shorter-lived Sajid dynasty in present-day Azerbaijan, replaced the Abbasid black flag with banners of their own.

Newcomers to early Islamic history might imagine that in the Abbasid empire, the eastern kingdoms that flourished in present-day Iran after the year 800 were Muslim. And of course this is true. The great bequest of the Islamic conquests during the century after Muhammad’s death was Islam itself. Caliphs came and went, and colonizing classes came and went, but the religion stuck around. However, neither Judaism, nor Christianity, nor, certainly, Zoroastrianism suddenly disappeared. The Persian east, already inclined to go its own way since time immemorial, was a vast place, and as Turkic populations washed into what is today Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and eastern Iran, and the eastern portion of the Islamic golden age flowered to life, Zoroastrianism enjoyed a textual renaissance that’s been part of the religion ever since. One of the products of this textual renaissance is the main subject of today’s show, again the Bundahisn, the Zoroastrian creation story. Let’s talk about Zoroastrianism’s books for a moment.

Zoroastrianism’s textual history is very ancient, and quite complex. Its earliest scriptures, written in a unique language called Old Avestan, are frequently dated to before 1,000 BCE.³ Young Avestan scriptures followed in the next millennium, and then Old and Middle Persian inscriptions and texts from the long era of the Achaemenid and Parthian empires. There is, to be clear, a lot of very ancient Zoroastrian sacred literature – the Gathas, the Vendidad, the Visperad, the Yashts, the Arda Wiraz Namag, all of them having long periods of oral transmission before they were set down in writing. Ages later, though, in the 800s CE, during what some scholars call the Iranian Intermezzo, or the Persian Renaissance, a lot of later Zoroastrian literature was set down and preserved for posterity. The Menog-i Xrad was set down during this period, a wisdom book written as a dialogue between a sage, and the spirit of knowledge, like Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. The Shkand Gumanig Wizar, a book of Zoroastrian apologetics, engaged critically with Abrahamic religions, emphasizing that none of them dealt with the problem of evil as intelligibly as Zoroastrianism had. The Zoroastrian Denkard was also likely set down during this later period, an encyclopedia of the religion’s customs and beliefs. In short, during the Abbasid period, devout Zoroastrian writers set down a large quantity and variety of sacred texts, two centuries after the Islamic conquests, recording oral traditions that had been part of Zoroastrian religion for a long time prior.

There are several reasons for a show like ours to explore later, Islamic period Zoroastrian texts like the Bundahisn. First and foremost, Zoroastrianism in general remains a surprisingly obscure topic in the English-speaking world, and thus, reading some of its actual canonical texts should help spread knowledge about the stepbrother of the Abrahamic religions. Second, and as we emphasized last time, Persian civilization had a profound impact on the Arab-Islamic regime that conquered and colonized it, and Zoroastrianism was, for 1,200 years, the theological heart of all three Persian empires. And third, interestingly, just as the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism lies behind some later Christian and Islamic ideas, the influence was ultimately not a one-way street. Late Sasanian Zoroastrianism, such as we see in the Bundahisn, likely has ideas borrowed from Islam. Religions are, in spite of the best efforts of their dogmatists, dynamic things, especially over long periods of time, and that Zoroastrian texts written during the 800s would evince some Islamic doctrines is thus no surprise.

Zoroastrianism, then, the silent partner of the Abrahamic religions, was a major force in west Eurasian theology from 1,000 BCE onward. And yet while it’s easy for us today to see Zoroastrianism as a close cousin to the Abrahamic family, in the 800s, Zoroastrians in present-day Iran were living in a world that was difficult to make sense of. Notwithstanding the robustness of the old Iranian social order in the Abbasid east, and notwithstanding the fact that Zoroastrians were still tolerated as a religious minority, the central supercontinent was tending towards Islam. The ambitious Persian politicos who went west to Baghdad weren’t bringing their Zoroastrian ceremonial garments with them, because the ruling hegemony was Muslim. If you were an ambitious Persian guy who wanted to get in good with Muslim emirs, sultans, and caliphs and climb the social ladder of the new world, being a devout Zoroastrian wouldn’t do you any favors. Zoroastrians, then, during the apex of the Abbasid caliphate, occupied a paradoxical position. They were the heirs of a religion at least a thousand years older than Islam. They knew full well of their religion’s ancient vintage, and that Zoroastrian fires had burned in Iran since time immemorial. And yet they found their congregations diminishing and their prestige dwindling under the ruthless pressure of modernity. Unlike their Christian counterparts over in the old Byzantine provinces, who could look to Constantinople and Europe as continued strongholds of their religion, Zoroastrians in the Islamic empire were on their own. No one was coming. As scholar C.E. Bosworth writes, “with no hopes of outside military support and a dramatic reversal of fortune. . .the masses of [the] Persian population embraced Islam with what seems to have been frequently a genuine enthusiasm.”⁴ The masses did, but not everyone. In the growing twilight of Zoroastrianism’s ascendancy in Iran, the Bundahisn was one of an energetic handful of new books written to preserve the religion’s old traditions. So, before we take a look at the Bundahisn, let’s learn some fundamentals about what it is and how it works. [music]

The Basics of the Bundahisn

The Bundahisn is, at the simplest level, a book. It’s about 200 pages in length in the modern Oxford University Press translation. It was originally written in a language called Middle Persian, which was the dominant language spoken in and around modern-day Iran from the 200s up until the 800s CE. The Bundahisn is often described as the Zoroastrian creation story – the word Bundahisn means “creation.” It begins by describing the universe prior to the creation of the material world. Then, the Bundahisn offers a long inventory of all of the elements of the created world. Finally, the Bundahisn talks about the end times and judgment day.

Reviewing a couple of key Zoroastrian concepts upfront will be helpful for understanding the Bundahisn in the remainder of this program. If there is a single phrase that sums up what makes Zoroastrianism distinct among all of the west Eurasian religions, that phrase is “good versus evil.” From the Iron Age onward, Zoroastrianism’s two warring deities, good Ahura Mazda, later Ohrmazd, and evil Angra Mainu, later Ahriman, made the religion distinct. In Greek and Roman paganism, the gods feud variously and irresolutely. In Christianity and Islam, Satan, or ash-Shaytan, are divine subordinates who rebel against their omnipotent master, imperiling humanity but not particularly troubling God. In Zoroastrianism, however, evil Ahriman is as eternal as good Ohrmazd, the struggle between the two is what creates the physical world, and the struggle between the two is riven thoroughly through all of created reality. So, that’s the first Zoroastrian concept we need to review – good against evil.

The second is dualism in Zoroastrianism. There are two dualisms in Zoroastrianism. The first is a vertical dualism. As we just learned, all the way up and down every tier of reality, from the material world to the spirit world, good and evil are fighting it out. There is also, as in the Abrahamic religions and in Platonism, a horizontal dualism, where the spiritual realm is separated from the material realm. One of the things that makes Zoroastrianism unique is that the spiritual realm is not emphasized as exclusively good, and the material world is certainly not emphasized as exclusively evil. Rather, there are good and evil forces at work in both the spiritual world as well as the material world, and the material world is rather poetically called the Mixture, with a capital “M,” to indicate that materiality was where conflict between good and evil would play out in the temporal dimension.

Those Zoroastrian basics should be enough to get us started in the Bundahisn, but let me tell you a bit more about today’s book before we open it up. The Bundahisn is, again, a creation story, or a cosmogony. That’s easy enough to understand. But it’s also a work of exegesis, and an encyclopedia. Let me talk a bit about those two other features of the Bundahisn, starting with exegesis.

Exegesis is the interpretation of a text, particularly of a sacred scripture. And the Bundahisn quotes earlier Zoroastrian scriptures all the time. Frequently, the book announces, “It states in the [Avesta]” and then quotes a passage – sometimes quite a long passage. Of course, when religions have sacred scriptures, it’s very ordinary for theologians to quote those scriptures in order to make a point. What’s fascinating about the Bundahisn’s quotations from earlier Zoroastrian scriptures is that when the Bundahisn quotes the Avesta, we have an instance of Abbasid period theologians quoting scriptures from more than a thousand years prior, indicating that many Zoroastrian doctrines were very stable for a very long time.

In addition to being a work of exegesis, as I mentioned a moment ago, the Bundahisn is also an encyclopedia. The book tells us that there are precisely 2,244 mountains, 282 types of animals, and 130,000 species of plants, diving into discussions of the flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam of the material world, and frequently with a great deal of granularity. The Bundahisn offers catalogs of the continents, of rivers, of the body parts of humanity, of types of liquid, of archangels and their subordinates, and of archdemons and their subordinates. The purpose of the Bundahisn’s frequently encyclopedic nature is generally to demonstrate that the Mixture of the material world is thoroughly subdivided up into materials, lands, animals, and plants that serve the forces of good, and those that serve the forces of evil. Hardly anything happens in the Bundahisn, it seems, that doesn’t somehow reveal traces of the great conflict between Ohrmazd and Ahriman.

The results of the Bundahisn’s attempts to moralize all of created reality are often weird, and sometimes unintentionally funny. Hedgehogs, the book tells us, are good, and ants are evil, and each time a hedgehog pees on an ant nest, it kills precisely 1,000 ants (124). Birds, the Bundahisn says, eat nails – but they only eat unenchanted nails, because in doing so, birds keep evil demons and sorcerers from charming nails, and turning this crucial construction material to the forces of evil (123). Pigs, the Bundahisn assures us, are good, and “When pigs grunt, they strike down pain” (124). [sound effect] Down with evil. So a lot of the Bundahisn, with its tireless effort to sift the material world into a great T-chart of holy and unholy, is really odd to modern ears, and when the book isn’t being bizarre or inadvertently funny, it is rather rambling and digressive. The star Sirius is responsible for bringing rain, the book tells us, and also, a certain archangel, and also, a certain mountainous three-legged donkey with testicles on its head. You heard that correctly, by the way, and we’ll get to that donkey soon. To be fair and respectful to the Bundahisn, by the way, here at the outset we should remember that this is an early medieval work with encyclopedic tendencies, housing a combination lofty narratives together with ancient Iranian folklore. In Islamic tradition today, roosters are sometimes said to crow when they see an angel, and donkeys bray when they see a devil. English speakers are familiar with superstitions involving black cats crossing paths and broken mirrors and walking beneath ladders causing bad luck. The Bundahisn is a big compendium that contains the great cosmic story of good clashing with evil, as well as folksy traditions that probably have roots in the myths and superstitions of ancient Iran.

So, in the remainder of this episode, we’re going to go through the Bundahisn in detail. As we do so, we’ll review more of the basic elements of Zoroastrianism. But we’ll also learn how Zoroastrianism had evolved across the Sasanian and early Islamic period. Zoroastrianism, as we’ve learned over the course of many shows, was a close cousin of the Abrahamic religions from the very beginning, and its continued practice kept energizing indigenous Persian culture, deep into the Islamic period. Unless otherwise noted, quotes in this episode will come from the Agostini and Thrope translation, published by Oxford University Press in 2020 – one of the few modern scholarly translations of later Zoroastrian texts available to those of us who want to read them. [music]

The Bundahisn’s Opening

The Bundahisn, or Zoroastrian creation story, begins with praises to the deity Ohrmazd, the Middle Persian name of Ahura Mazda. The book opens with the words, “Praise to the Creator Ohrmazd! Majestic, glorious, omniscient, wise, mighty, the greatest in good thoughts, words, and deeds in thinking, speech and action.”⁵ The opening should remind us of the nature of God in Zoroastrianism – Ohrmazd, like the Abrahamic deity, is beneficent, sagely, and he rules over all. You’re going to be hearing the name Ohrmazd a lot in this show, by the way, so for the many of us who are new to Zoroastrianism, the name for God in Zoroastrianism in the Bundahisn is Ohrmazd, Ohrmazd, Ohrmazd, the Middle Persian name of the main Zoroastrian deity, Ahura Mazda. Ohrmazd, incidentally, is where the name Hormuz comes from, as in “Strait of Hormuz.” Moving on through the opening verses of the Bundahisn, as august and magnificent as Ohrmazd is, the worship of Ohrmazd, the text says, has faltered. As the third paragraph of the Bundahisn states,

Since the coming of the Arabs to Iran, and their promulgation of an evil [religious view] and evil will, they have turned away from the good [religious view] of the [ancient Iranians] and from respect for the upholders of [righteous religion], and from the god-given secrets of the deep and wonderful [Zoroastrian scriptures], and the proper logic of things, right thinking, proper action, and meaningful discourses have passed from the memory and knowledge of the common people.⁶

This is an arresting moment in the Bundahisn. Expecting, perhaps, a timeless creation story, we find something very much anchored in the early Islamic period. The book, in its opening moments, uses a very familiar west-Eurasian formula. People used to be good and pious. They’re not so good and pious anymore.

Stalwart Iranian Zoroastrians, the first page of the Bundahisn says, were getting hard to come by. Even the old Persian nobility had sopped up Arab and Islamic customs, and for expedience and social climbing, Iranian Zoroastrians had begun to give up on the religion. Those who sought knowledge about the religion, the book’s opening grumbles, had found that knowledge difficult to find. And thus, the Zoroastrian creation story begins with an outright lament about the present, and tacitly, with hope that the pages to come will help offer knowledge to Zoroastrian believers who seek it. Those pages begin with a story eons in the past, prior to the creation of the material world. [music]

The Awakening of Evil Ahriman in the Bundahisn

Once, the Bundahisn tells us, there was neither time nor space, but only a realm of spirit. The high Zoroastrian god Ohrmazd dwelt on a throne and in a place made of eternal light. Beneath him there was a void, and below that void there lived a being called Ahriman. Also eternal and uncreated, Ahriman lurked in a spiritual realm of never-ending darkness. This was the state of things before creation. There was a realm of eternal spirit, made of two opposite subdivisions with a void in between them, such that they never touched.

The deity of light, Ohrmazd, was omniscient from the beginning, and he knew about his counterpart in the dark half of the realm of spirit. But Ahriman was initially unaware of Ohrmazd’s dominion in the light. They dwelt this way for a long time in the inchoate world of spirit, Ohrmazd aware of all, and Ahriman only knowing about his gloomy domain, until after a measureless quantity of time, Ahriman came up from the gloomy depths of the inchoate world of spirit. Ahriman came to the edge of the great void, and he glimpsed, for the first time, the light on the other side.

The dark god Ahriman, seeing the celestial brightness of Ohrmazd, was filled with fury and jealousy. He attacked, and then, hurrying back into his region of shadows, he created an army of demons, mustering them to the void that separated the light from the darkness. Ohrmazd, looking across the gulf, saw Ahriman’s demons impassively. But evil Ahriman, in spite of himself, looked into celestial realm of Ohrmazd and could only revere what he saw.

The light god Ohrmazd did not want war. Ohrmazd told his nemesis Ahriman to praise the world of light, and said that if Ahriman did this, Ahriman would become eternal. But Ahriman was unconvinced. The wrathful dark spirit roared that he would never praise the realm of light, nor its bright creatures, and that he would make the creatures of light hate their creator Ohrmazd, and instead love him. Ohrmazd then proposed something central to Zoroastrian ideology. Ohrmazd announced that if Ahriman wanted a conflict, then a conflict would be fought. It would be fought, Ohrmazd proclaimed, for precisely 9,000 years, and Zoroastrian time began at just that moment.

When Ohrmazd issued this proclamation, he knew that he would win the war for the first 3,000 years. Ohrmazd also knew that the next 3,000 years of the conflict would be characterized by a commingling of darkness and light, during which Ahriman would gain ground and confuse the many beings in the universe that would soon come to be. Eventually, though, after the murky commingling of darkness and light in both the spiritual and as-of-yet uncreated material world, Ohrmazd knew that he would triumph, and that the evil of Ahriman would be purged from the universe.

The beneficent god Ohrmazd then recited a prayer called the Ahunawar prayer, or Ahuna Vairya prayer, considered to encapsulate the Zoroastrian religion in just 21 Middle Persian words. The prayer, in modern English translation, would have been as follows, though the Bundahisn doesn’t quote it, and remember that Ahura Mazda is an older name for the deity of light and goodness, Ohrmazd:

Just as is the will of the lord God[,] so too is that of the spiritual leader[,] owing to his righteousness.
The gifts of good mind are for those who work in this world and wield in accord with the will of Ahura Mazda.
The kingdom of Ahura’s heaven is for him. . .who [gives] succor to the poor.⁷

A lot is lost in translation here, and the famous prayer, which is from much older Zoroastrian scriptures, gets translated very differently. But to stick with our present text, the gist of the prayer was that Ohrmazd’s righteous representatives on earth would carry out his justice, and that those representatives, who help the poor and help God’s will on earth, would receive heavenly rewards.

Ohrmazd recited this important prayer, and incredibly, as he voiced the words, his enemy Ahriman cowered, then fell to the ground, debilitated. Ahriman, in fact, lay debilitated for three thousand years. [music]

The Creation of the Earth in the Bundahisn

This first confrontation between light and dark in the Bundahisn is told in a dramatic third person narrative. And it sets the stage for the Bundahisn’s explanation of what creation was, and why creation took place. So far in the story, Ohrmazd and Ahriman have dwelt in an embryonic and endless spirit world, Ohrmazd in the upper, luminous part, and Ahriman in the lower, gloomy part. Zoroastrian cosmic history is essentially the conflict between these two opposing spirits, and so when Ahriman first confronted Ohrmazd and challenged him, time and creation as Zoroastrians understand it began.

In the Bundahisn, the beneficent god Ohrmazd created time and the material world for the following reason. Without the continuums of time and space, Ohrmazd knew that Ahriman’s disturbance of the breadth of the spirit would be unending. After all, before the creation of time and space, everything was in stasis, and what was could indefinitely continue to be. However, with the creation of time and space, Ohrmazd knew, the conflict between light and dark would be finite, and it would come to an end, and that was why, after Ahriman challenged him, Ohrmazd fashioned time and materiality.

While Ahriman lay stunned for three thousand years, Ohrmazd busied himself with the creation of the world. Ohrmazd created the sky, first. The sky was formed of bright metal, a masculine thing connected at its summit to the unending light of the spiritual realm. The sky, symmetrical in proportions, was designed as a fortress or bastion for the light, and it would prevent the dark deity Ahriman from escaping if Ahriman tried to do so. To brighten the sky, Ohrmazd created joyfulness, and joyfulness would always be a part of creation, even though the material world would soon be a conflicted, troubled place due to the battle that would be fought there.

Then, Ohrmazd created the water from the sky, and wind and rain came into being along with snow in all of its various forms. He made the earth out of iron, copper, and other materials, and the earth was laced through with reservoirs of water. He created plants, themselves a commingling of water and generative fire down at their roots. And Ohrmazd made the first animal. It was a cow, shining white and brought into being along a river, and the cow relished the plants that Ohrmazd had already devised. Ohrmazd then created the first human – man named Gayōmard, and he created sleep, so that Gayōmard and his descendants would be able to rest. Finally, from the luminous sky, Ohrmazd made sperm, and from the sperm of the first cow and the first man, all humans and all animals would come to be.

The Bundahisn, after describing the central created elements of the material world, spends number of verses explaining how many days were expended on the creation of each aforementioned part. For instance, it took Ohrmazd 40 days to make the sky, and 55 days to create the water, and the Bundahisn explains which things were created during specific months of the Zoroastrian calendar. Thus, the six principal creations, the sky, water, the earth, plants, and the first cow and the first man took place during six subdivisions, and in total, Ohrmazd fashioned these things in 335 days.

Yet the sky, as ancient Persians certainly knew, was not the limit of creation. Ohrmazd, with the firmament and living creatures set in motion, began creating the span of outer space. The great god of light fashioned the twelve constellations that make up the Zodiac, and then dozens of other stars and constellations that the Bundahisn names. Astronomy, by the 800s CE in present-day Iran, was a very old science which dated at least all the way back to Babylon. By Abbasid times, devoted stargazers had at their disposal centuries of ancient astrological texts, as well as more modern Arabic and Persian ones.

In addition to the major and minor constellations named in the Bundahisn, Ohrmazd created precisely 6,480,000 smaller stars, and the celestial bodies all had a purpose within Ohrmazd’s creation. The moon was made to hold the generative force of cattle, and the sun soared over everything. And over all of it was the lofty realm of Ohrmazd himself. The largest stars, the Bundahisn says, were the size of houses, and the smallest, the size of the heads of cows. The moon was the size of a large racecourse.

The created world and the heavenly bodies, at this early point, did not move. The stars held still, and earth shone brightly beneath an unending noontime. But this early period of creation was only possible due to the long sleep of Ahriman. And when Ahriman woke up, following the first 3,000 years of the 9,000 during which the great clash between good and evil would be fought, Ahriman wasted no time. The dark god could also generate things, and seeing the radiant world that Ohrmazd had built, Ahriman attacked. [music]

Ahriman Attacks Creation in the Bundahisn

Ahriman’s awakening took time. In the gloomy region of the spirit world, Ahriman’s demons fretted over their master’s millennia-long slumber. The dark creatures knew that a bounteous and sunny material world had been fashioned, where the sun always shined. They knew that they didn’t have forever to act. And yet it was not until a female demon called Jeh promised to bring great destruction to the world and kissed Ahriman on the head that the evil god awakened. At just this moment, menstruation came into being, first on the demoness Jeh. Upon awakening, Ahriman began his offensive on Ohrmazd’s world.

Ahriman tore into the noontime sky, and the earth knew night for the first time. He polluted the fresh waters of the world, and scattered snakes, scorpions, and dragons everywhere. He poisoned the plant life of the planet. And then Ahriman set his sights on the first man, Gayōmard, and the first cow, whose name was Gōšurwan. They had been pure beings, these first animals, created from fire, but into them, Ahriman planned to instill agony, sickness, laziness, desire, and greed. Ahriman’s attack struck the first cow. But when Ahriman attacked the first man Gayōmard, Ohrmazd made Gayōmard fall asleep, sparing him from all of these ailments.

The first man Gayōmard awakened later, and he saw that the beautiful world had become streaked with darkness. The stars were moving, the earth was turning, and the sounds of screaming demons were everywhere. Gayōmard resolved that humanity would come from him, and just as he had proved resilient against the initial assault of evil, every person who descended from him would also campaign against the forces of darkness.

The world would need all the help it could get. Ahriman’s first assault was ferocious, his demons attacking the stars and planets and sky, just as smoke spreads in a murk around fire. But the forces of Ohrmazd stood fast against this initial onslaught, and afterward, the sky and everything above it proved to be the fortress of light and justice. The demons, having been unable to conquer the heavens, punctured the earth and made a home for themselves in its middle.

Now, if you’ll remember from a moment ago, one of the casualties of this first great clash between good and evil was the first cow Gōšurwan. The poor creature had died of pain and sickness when struck by Ahriman. In due time, after the first cow Gōšurwan died, the first man Gayōmard passed away, too. The death of the first man Gayōmard troubled the spirit of the first cow Gōšurwan, and in the bovine afterlife, the cow asked Ohrmazd about Ohrmazd’s plans. Ohrmazd, said the cow, had promised that humanity would watch over cattle, but the cow had met a bad end and now the first man was gone. Ohrmazd listened compassionately to the cow’s anxious complaint, and said that he had a plan. Ohrmazd said that from a fiery shard of heaven there would soon be a man named Zoroaster. Zoroaster would come to earth and teach all of humanity, and Zoroaster would see to the stewardship and protection of cattle. Hearing this, the first cow Gōšurwan was pleased, and she said she would furnish creation with nutriment.

The initial clash between good and evil, then, was over. The time that Ohrmazd had created was called the Time of Long Dominion, and it saw many more creations of both good and evil. Within the Time of Long Dominion, Ohrmazd created the righteous desire to follow goodness. Ahriman, countering Ohrmazd, created other, more pernicious things. Ohrmazd created wisdom just as Ahriman created ignorance. Ohrmazd created reverence just as Ahriman created self-love. Ohrmazd’s created creatures were bright, fiery, and clear. Ahriman’s created creatures were shadowy and wicked. Ahriman’s created creatures, corrupt and filled with the gloom of their maker, created lies, whereas Ohrmazd’s creatures gave forth honest speech.

The result of all of this genesis, following the crisis of the initial confrontation, was a mottled world of light and dark – a world that is in Zoroastrianism called the Gumēzišn, or the “Mixture” with a capital M. The Mixture – again, created material reality, typified the struggle between Ohrmazd and Ahriman which began after Ahriman awakened and attacked. The unending high noon of Ohrmazd’s ascendancy gave way to the succession of bright days and dark nights, with the sun fighting the darkness for 365 days every year. The Mixture thus became a confluence of two creations, as light and dark clashed in a microcosm the strife between their creators.

The vastness of created reality, where good and evil would fight it out for thousands of years, required more than just two deities for its oversight. Both Ohrmazd, as well as Ahriman created deputies. Each divine being created six deputies, called Amahraspands in Middle Persian, or Spentas in the older Avestan language. Thus, the material world, as it continued to unspool, would be a conflict between Ohrmazd and his six proxies, and Ahriman and his six proxies. Ancient theologians, as we have observed before, loved numerical symmetry, and lists of things, and the Bundahisn contains oodles of these lists. Most centrally, six good deputies of Ohrmazd superintended cattle, fire, metals, earth, water, and plants, whereas Ohrmazd himself focused on humanity.

Humanity, in the Bundahisn, is a coalescence of a number of different components. First, we are made of material bodies. Second, we are animated by breath. Third, our souls have perception, knowledge, memory, and identity. And then, there is something else. In Zoroastrianism, each of us has something called a frawahr, or Faravahar. The Faravahar is the signature symbol of Zoroastrianism today – you can see them on modern Zoroastrian places of worship just as you can in the Achaemenid capital of Persepolis – a pair of outstretched wings and tailfeathers crowned with a bearded figure shown in profile. The Farvahar, as described by scholars Domenico Agostini and Samuel Thrope, “encompasses at once a vast host of ancestor or warrior spirits[,] and the divine, preexisting component of each man and woman.”⁸ Inside of each of us, then, in the Bundahisn, is a divine spark, perhaps with a tinge of reincarnated being, most often in Zoroastrianism called the Farvahar, and the Bundahisn emphasizes that when humans die in the long struggle with evil, this inextinguishable spark within us goes up to join Ohrmazd in the realm of spirits. [music]

The Clash Between Ohrmazd and Ahriman Begins on Earth

As the long conflict between good and evil on Earth opened, all things bifurcated into oppositional pairs. The Bundahisn contains a long inventory of these pairs. To offer an example in the Oxford Agostini and Thrope translation, “Vengeance against peace. . .Miserliness against generosity. . .Night against day. . .Sin against rectitude. . .Death and sickness against health” (35-6). Some of these pairs are familiar enough for those of us schooled in the Abrahamic religions. Others are oddly specific to medieval Zoroastrianism – for instance, the Bundahisn counts frogs as evil, and fish as good, and the book’s author calls winter evil in comparison to summer, and cold as malevolent, in contrast to heat. These were surely old parts of Zoroastrian tradition, but for those of us who don’t mind winter, and those of us who find frogs adorable, the Bundahisn’s desire to split all of reality into good and evil occasionally makes for some odd verses. In fact, the Bundahisn’s desire to subdivide everything into light and dark encompasses celestial, as well as earthly bodies. Jupiter is bad, but Ursa Major is good. Saturn is evil, but the star Sirius is benevolent. Of course, the notion of benevolent and wicked astronomical bodies was a very ancient one by the 800s CE.

And speaking of old traditions, astrology was popular in the ancient Persian world, just as it was everywhere else at the dawn of the Middle Ages. The Bundahisn explains how astrological signs figured into the great pugilism between good and evil. Ahriman, the book tells us, was able to burrow through the sky because of an evil alignment of astrological signs. When he punctured his way into the bright material world, evil Ahriman initially tried to turn back. But the powerful spirit of the sky locked closed, and Ahriman was stuck in the material world, and this initial conflict between Ahriman and the sky itself was the first clash between good and evil that formed many of the contours of the world as we know it today.

The next clash between good and evil involved the star Sirius. Once the sky had trapped Ahriman in the world, the star Sirius soared in the west. Water rose up to the clouds until they were full of rain. Then Sirius changed into three different forms. For ten days and nights, he was a man, and then for ten more days and nights, a horse, and then a cow, flying through the light and clouds and causing the rain to fall for thirty days. The unending rain caused a flood over all of the earth, such that water covered the planet up to the height of a man, and many small creatures perished. Then, the wind rumbled to life and pushed the rainwater to the verges of the planet, leaving a wasteland of drowned creatures on the damp land.

A demon confronted the rain-bringing star Sirius, and Sirius sought strength from Ohrmazd. Ohrmazd helped his lieutenant, and then, filled with divine power, the star Sirius fought off his assailant and brought rain once more to the earth. With great droplets the size of the heads of cows and men, a huge storm began, and the various deputies of the light and dark fought one another in the typhoon. The drowned creatures from the first flood were swept up in the new water, and their rot and decomposition caused some of the water on the earth to be salty and undrinkable. When the storm calmed, three seas, twenty lakes, and two great rivers all became stable bodies of water, and then more rivers sprang out of these first two.

But these great storms and floods were only one of the clashes between good and evil that took place when the dark deity Ahriman first invaded the material world. The sky fought the forces of evil. So, too, did the earth itself. Ahriman’s invasion of the planet caused an earthquake, and mountain ranges began to rise. The Bundahisn’s description of the process is that the mountains “came up from the earth like trees whose branches stretch above and whose roots reach down below, and their roots crossed each other and made a web. Afterward the earth could no longer tremble. . .The mountains are the great bond of the earth” (47).⁹ The mountains, the Bundahisn says, hold the sources of water in their roots, and their ascendancy marked the first clash between the earth and the evil forces of Ahriman.

So the sky had fought Ahriman. The rain-bringing star Sirius had fought Ahriman. The earth had fought Ahriman. And so, too did the other principal creations of Ohrmazd. First, the plants did their part. Wicked Ahriman had flung pestilence and poison all over the planet, but the plants, proliferating from the first plant ever created, suddenly multiplied by ten thousand to cover the face of the earth and combat the diseases that had come from Ahriman. Soon, there were 130,000 species of plants, and out in the sea, a tree arose that grew from the seeds of all of them.

While plants had done their part in the first earthly clash between good and evil, it was time for the first created cow to do its part. Though the cow had passed away, when it died, dozens of new species of grains and plants arose from its remains, and there also appeared a male and female pair of cattle, and then male and female pairs of 282 additional species, from which all additional animals would henceforth descend. What happened with the first ever cow also happened with the first ever human. When Gayōmard passed away, his essence passed into the earth, and forty years later, the first mated pair of humans would arise to populate the planet.

All of the creations of Ohrmazd, then, met the onslaught of the dark deity Ahriman, and more still. Fire roared in conflict with the forces of shadow, and stars fought the planets, and the great struggle billowed upward to the highest celestial bodies.

So this takes us about a third of the way through the Zoroastrian creation epic, the Bundahisn. We still have a ways to go, but before we move forward, it’s worth pausing for just a moment here to ponder the uniqueness of this creation story alongside others we’ve explored in Literature and History. Most significantly, we might say that what we’ve heard so far in the Bundahisn is a sort of cosmogonical prequel. The Abrahamic scriptures do not spend any time describing what God was up to prior to the creation of the earth. In Genesis, God creates the earth right away, in the very first verse of all Bibles. The Bundahisn, however, offers a backstory – the tale of a primordial reality before time and space, and of the moment when time itself was created. Earth, in Zoroastrianism, subsequently, is not actually the work of a beneficent creator deity. Earth, in Zoroastrianism, is a battleground from the outset, in which two supreme uncreated spirits are each vying for dominance. The victory of Ohrmazd is a foregone conclusion from the outset. And yet the Bundahisn still emphasizes that all of creation, from floor to ceiling, quakes with the strife between good and evil.

The Bunadhisn is third-person narrative explaining how the world and everything in it came to be. But the Bundahisn also seeks to be a scientifically explanatory text. Theology, prior to the modern period, was never cordoned off from science, and much of what we are about to read in the Bundahisn will constitute an effort not only to explain the creation of the world, but also to explain how manifold places and things on Earth came to be. [music]

The Bundahisn Explains Geography, Geology, and Hydrology

The ancient Persian world, from Achaemenid Persian times in the 500s BCE forward, was always a vast place that spanned many different lands. In a passage explaining how the rhythm of the seasons came to be, the Bundahisn states that the sun sets in different lands at different times of the year. The text describes how day in one continent is night in another continent, and the other way around, with a mountain that divides the world in half being the barrier between two different sectors of continents. These continents formed during the floods you heard about earlier. The tumult of the great first clash between good and evil caused mountains to rise up, and water to collect in great masses variously around the world. When it was over, there were seven continents. The largest and most central of these continents in the Bundahisn is called Xwanirah, and it is the land of the Iranians. As the Bundahisn announces, “It is not possible to go from continent to continent except by the guidance and power of the deities” (57).

Great barriers divided the continents, including seas, dense forests, and tall mountains. And just as the continents were climatologically diverse from one another, they were also morally different from one another. In the Iranian land of Xwanirah, the spirit of Ohrmazd was strong. But interestingly, in Xwanirah, the spirit of Ahriman was strong, too, because the central continent was the place where the battle between good and evil was playing out most tempestuously. Following the Bundahisn’s overview of the continents is a long inventory of mountains. There was first a great mountain called Harburz, and it took 800 years to grow into its present form, and after Harburz arose, exactly 2,244 mountains grew in 18 years. Mentioning territories within the former Sasanian empire, as well as faraway Rome and China, the Bundahisn’s inventory of mountains is as expansive as it is geologically dubious.

Following the book’s description of how droves of mountains arose in the first years of creation, the Bundahisn goes on to explain the origins of lakes and seas. Some Middle Persian names for bodies of water in the Bundahisn have been linked to real lakes and oceans. The book mentions the Persian Gulf, for instance, and the Caspian Sea and Black Sea, explaining that the Persian Gulf exhales and inhales through the Gulf of Oman, which causes the tides to come and go. The Black Sea, the Bundahisn proclaims, is in Rome. The book names several lakes that scholarship has been able to link to modern ones, including the Aral Sea, Lake Urmia in what’s today northwestern Iran, and the Godzareh depression in southwestern Afghanistan.

Just as the Bundahisn offers an origin story for mountains, seas, and lakes, it does the same for rivers. The book names two principal rivers, which join 18 additional rivers, which themselves join many, many more rivers. A recurring theme in the Bundahisn is that there was an eternal noontime of stillness prior to the evil Ahriman’s attack on earth. Rivers that flow now, the book tells us, will one day, after good triumphs over wickedness, be still once more.

If you are reading the Bundahisn for yourself, Chapters 12 and 13 are the point at which you come to the end, for a little while, of the narrative portion of the book, and you reach the more encyclopedic part of the creation story. Ages ago, when we covered the Book of Leviticus, I quoted a fairly long section of the text having to do with animal sacrifice, just to give you a sense of how much of that part of the Bible is concerned with butchering and meat cutting. I want to do the same, now, with a little swath of the Bundahisn. The passage that you’re about to hear concerns different kinds of fluids, and first of all, it’s ancient pseudoscience, so it’s a little silly. But what I want you to pay attention to is the desire to catalog, and to think of everything. Here’s a nice excerpt of medieval Zoroastrian writing on all of the types of fluids [sound effect] – the kind of thing that you will only ever hear on the Literature and History podcast:

There are seventeen kinds of water:
first, the moisture that sits on the plants;
second, the mountain streams, that is, rivers;
third, rain;
fourth, water from wells and swamps, and others that are not well known;
fifth, the semen of animals and men;
sixth, the urine of animals and men;
seventh, the saliva of animals and men;
eighth, the water in the skin of animals and men;
ninth, the moisture and tears of animals and men;
tenth, the blood of animals and men;
eleventh, the oil of animals and men, which is the desire of the two existences;
twelfth, the water in the copulation of animals and men;
thirteenth, the sweat of animals and men. (65-6)

That was the Agostini and Thrope translation, published by Oxford in 2020. Now, obviously, we’re not going to learn anything scientifically substantive from this energetic enumeration of different sorts of liquids. There are, however, still valuable takeaways from this little grotto of the book. During the 800s and 900s, in present-day Iran as well as the rest of the world, the universal human desire to catalog and understand the world took form within various religious cultures. Contemporary Islamic science, while the Bundahisn was being written, was also cobbling together great big lists of things, and punctuating those lists with remarks about the Qur’an and other works of Islamic theology so as to make the natural world comprehensible and congruent with Islamic teachings. Isidore of Seville had done the same thing two centuries before with his Etymologies during the life of Muhammad, and so to put it simply, the medieval encyclopedia was a hip intercontinental trend. One of the great purposes that religion serves is that it explains what in the hell is going on around us all the time, and although passages like the Bundahisn’s weird inventory of sweat and saliva and semen can make us raise an eyebrow, such passages still demonstrate a scientific desire to understand and tally, a desire that thoroughly permeated the Middle Ages, in spite of stereotypes otherwise.

What comes next in the Bundahisn is many more pseudoscientific inventories – in fact, a hundred pages divided into various sections on different kinds of animals, people, plants, fire, sleep, songs, weather, vermin, wolves, and other subjects – dense chunk of text with hundreds of obscure Middle Persian nouns that must have been absolutely brutal for our translators Domenico Agostini and Samuel Thrope. For your sanity and the purposes of audience retention, I will summarize the next hundred pages of the Bundahisn quite quickly, dutifully calling attention to anything that is memorable, educationally valuable, funny, or some combination of the three – we’ll slow down again when we get to the final quarter of the book. [music]

The Central Botanical and Zoological Sections of the Bundahisn

Plants, the Bundahisn says, sprung up from the remains of the first cow when it passed away. Grape vines came from cow blood, which is why wine has such a strong effect on our blood when we drink it. As in Hinduism, and almost certainly under the influence of Sanskrit writings, in the Bundahisn, cattle are counted as especially sacred. The Bundahisn attests that cattle were created twice – once with the first cow, and then later when a cow and bull were together created later. The creation of animals thus began with grazing creatures, and then animals that fly and dwell in the mountains, and then aquatic and earth-dwelling animals. As the zoological section of the Bundahisn proceeds, it is, on the whole, a perfectly respectable effort to catalog earth’s species into different divisions and genera, although it has a few giggle-inducing parts, too, as when it claims hedgehogs and squirrels are types of dogs, and that dogs are one third human.

Speaking of humans, in the long central section of the Bundahisn, we learn about how the many types of humans came to be. When the first, prototypical man Gayōmard died, the Bundahisn says, he ejaculated, and his semen was purified by sunlight. Forty years later, the initial man and woman, Mašyā and Mašyāne, sprung up from the earth. Though they would later be a boy and a girl, at the time of their creation, they appeared identical. The beneficent deity Ohrmazd gave them a speech that included the pith of Zoroastrian teachings – he told them to work, follow the rules, “think good thoughts, speak good words, perform good [deeds], and do not worship the demons” (77). And off the first man and woman Mašyā and Mašyāne went – their initial act was to take a walk and to contemplate.

The Creation of Men and Women in the Bundahisn

It wasn’t long before demons assailed the first human pair Mašyā and Mašyāne. And then, things got a bit strange. Poor Mašyā and Mašyāne pretty quickly succumbed to the demonic teachings, saying that wicked Ahriman had created the world and everything in it, and not Ohrmazd. These were the first false words ever spoken by humans. The first human pair began dressing only in grass, and they discovered a white goat in the wilderness – a creature of Ohrmazd. They nursed from the goat, and although the goat’s nourishment should have brought them back to goodness and light, upon drinking from the goat’s udders, the first woman Mašyāne said, “The peace I felt before drinking [the] semen-milk [of this goodly goat] was greater than it is now that, having drunk it, there is something bad in my body” (77). What should have purified the first pair of humans, then, only made them feel worse, and thus the forces of darkness gained an even greater hold over Mašyā and Mašyāne.

Worse and worse signs of Mašyā and Mašyāne’s apostasy began showing themselves as the pair became confused and benighted, and as the demons’ power grew and grew, the first man and woman argued and argued, doing so for fifty years. But then, something changed. The Bundahisn offers us an account of the first erotic encounter in all of human history, which is as follows:

At the end of fifty years, the desire for a son occurred in their minds. First to Mašyā and then to Mašyāne. Mašyā said to Mašyāne:
“When I see your belly, mine becomes big and rises up.”
Then Mašyāne said:
“Brother Mašyā! When I see your penis, my belly trembles.”
Desire overwhelmed them both. And as they were fulfilling their desire, they thought:
“For fifty years we should have been doing this!”
After nine months, twins were born, a girl and a boy. Because the children were so sweet, the mother devoured one and the father the other. (78)

It’s a pretty strange sequence of verses, but, excepting the cannibalism bit, it’s pretty sweet, too. The forces of evil don’t awaken lust and desire in humanity. It’s the opposite. The forces of wickedness suppress human passion, right up until one day, the first man and woman start looking at one another in a certain way, and suddenly, horniness triumphs over evil. Sex, then, in the Bundahisn, is part of the beneficent order of Ohrmazd.

Speaking of Ohrmazd, after Mašyā and Mašyāne ate their first two children, the wise lord of creation made it such that the man and the woman no longer wanted to eat their own babies, and it wasn’t long before they had six pairs of twins. Before long, the twins were having pairs of twins, and the descendants of the first pair scattered into the lands familiar to medieval Persia, including Arabia, Rome, China, Pakistan, and other places, still. The Bundahisn describes how the races of humanity included men with bat wings, one-legged men, men with eyes and ears on their chests, giants, little people, and underwater people. Africans, the Bundahisn tells us, were a mixture of aquatic people with earth-dwelling people, and they sprang from a young man having sex with a witch and a young woman having sex with a demon.

The Bundahisn has a bit more to say about Africans. The book laments that “with the overrunning of the Arabs, [Africans] have again mixed in Iran” (80). Just to offer you a bit of history behind this quote, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, following the great conquests of Islam’s first century, were no longer acquiring as many slaves from military conquests. During and after the 700s, Muslim entrepreneurs purchased African slaves from traders in Ethiopia, and as various Islamic sultanates appeared in central and east Africa, a preponderance of slaves were coming from pagan African populations. Islam itself is racially egalitarian, and the biographical literature about the Prophet depicts Muhammad and his companions as indifferent to race. However, when several generations of Umayyad, and then Abbasid Muslims began associating slavery with Africans, racial prejudice billowed throughout the early Islamic empires, surely in part to excuse slaveowners and others complicit in the institution from the quotidian crimes against humanity being perpetrated throughout the caliphates.

To return to the book, following this section on Africans, and how various races were created, the Bundahisn offers us an account of how the beneficent god Ohrmazd felt about the creation of women in general. Ohrmazd was, it seems, displeased with the fact that women had been brought into existence. Ohrmazd told women, just after creation,

You, too, are my creation, you who belong to the Adversary’s race of whores. I have created a mouth near your anus so that sex seems to you like the sweetest taste of food in your mouth. You are my helper since man is born from you, but you are also my tormentor; I am Ohrmazd. If I had found a vessel in which I could make man, I would never have created you, you who belong to the Adversary’s race of whores. (79)

These passages on the evil nature of Africans and women are, needless to say, lamentable and depressing by modern standards. The misogyny, as ugly as it is tiresome and predictable, is par for the course in ancient and medieval theology written by male clerics of various religions. The derogatory rhetoric against Africans demonstrates the increasing prejudice toward, particularly, Sub-Saharans as the Islamic slave trade flared to life during the early Medieval period. [music]

The Bundahisn’s Scientific Inventories

Following its account of how humanity was created and disseminated across the world, the Bundahisn discusses how various animals come to be. Birds, for instance, the text tells us, first spend “forty days as semen, thirty days in a mixed state, fifteen days in the egg, and ten days until their wings grow” (84). Fish, the book says, are all female, and they become pregnant when they rub themselves together and their sweat mingles. Nothing like sweaty lesbian fish to fill the seas with plenty. Following the book’s overview of the generation of animals, there is a chapter on plants. The Bundahisn’s chapter on plants contains other scientifically dubious claims – for instance, that plants had no bark or thorns before the coming of evil Ahriman to earth. At the same time, the variety of plants mentioned in the Bundahisn shows the vastness of the Abbasid empire, as the vegetation catalogued in the book came from all over Europe and Asia.

Just as the Bundahisn sees Ohrmazd and Ahriman ruling over the light and darkness, respectively, the book also proclaims that every species and genus has a master. Zoroaster, for instance, is the master of humanity, and the book describes which cows, horses, dogs, and fish are the masters of their groupings within the animal kingdom. And powering all of the animated things in the world, the Bundahisn says, is fire. Different kinds of fire fuel different kinds of processes and organisms. Plants are said to burn with a certain kind of fire, as well as clouds. The sense of an essence or rhythm permeating created materiality appears elsewhere in the central section of the Bundahisn, too. A chapter on songs emphasizes that when Zoroastrians sing their scriptures, that’s one kind of song. The same chapter says that a millstone grinding grain also makes a song, and that, “When water flows forth in a stream, descends from the clouds, crashes together, or when people and animals pass through it, that is the water song” (103). And speaking of water, the middle part of the Bundahisn explains how rain and storms come to be. The star Sirius is the central agent of meteorological events, the book explains, and demons try to stop the rain by freezing it, but Sirius, with the aid of fire, is able to prevail.

Zigzagging to a new topic, the Bundahisn comes to the subject of evil animals. These animals, according to the book, are “snakes, scorpions, lizards, ants, flies, locusts, and many other similar sorts” (113). Particularly pernicious, according the book, are frogs, dragons with many heads, and winged snakes. Among these menaces to creation mentioned by the Bundahisn are turtles and honeybees, and the book warns that ants can steal grains and heat them by using sorcery. Killing any of these creatures, the book claims, is an act of righteousness, and the discussion of evil creatures continues on into a chapter on wolves and other predators. Something called a garzag in Middle Persian sounds a bit like a werewolf, as it is a type of wolf that, when it bites someone, makes another garzag come out of them.

Returning to the subject of how frogs are evil for a moment, the Bundahisn then offers an account of how a three-legged donkey that dwells in the Persian Gulf is responsible for much of the world’s rain. Now, we’ve already heard some strange things in this medieval Zoroastrian creation story, but the description of this three-legged donkey in Chapter 24, in my opinion, is up there in terms of being one of the weirdest passages from the Middle Ages. To our translators Domenico Agostini and Samuel Thrope and the folks at Oxford University Press, thank you, from all of us who don’t read Middle Persian for offering us the following three verses:

[The three-legged donkey] stands in the middle of the [Persian Gulf], and has three legs, six eyes, nine testicles, two ears, one horn, a dark blue head, a white body, spiritual food, and is righteous. Two of its six eyes are in its eye-sockets, two on top of its head, and two on its withers. With its six eyes it strikes down and overcomes the worst and most troubling dangers. Three of its nine testicles are on its head, three on its withers, and three on the inner part of its ribs. Each testicle is as big as a house, and the donkey is as big as [a mountain]. When it urinates in the sea, it purifies the water in the seven continents of the earth. This is why, when donkeys see water, they urinate in it. (122)

And that, I think, is magnificent. This narrative about an ass with balls on its head is, again, intended to partly explain how the rain gets stirred up from the Persian Gulf. But I think it’s perfect as a standalone narrative. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and – no I’m just messing with you – let’s keep it together and press through the rest of this encyclopedic central section of the Bundahisn.

The unusual donkey we just heard described is only one of the mythological creatures inventoried at the heart of the Bundahisn. There was also a giant bird called the Čamrūš bird, which helped protect the borders of Iran, and another bird that recites Zoroastrian scriptures. The mythological and real creatures of the earth, like great Ohrmazd and Ahriman, are locked in conflict with one another, with many creatures of light, just by virtue of being what they are, canceling out the nefarious deeds of the creatures of the dark.

From top to bottom, the Bundahisn emphasizes, good and evil are fighting it out. And after a number of the book’s sections on how animals and plants aligned as holy or wicked vie against one another, the Bundahisn moves its focus upward to the realm of the divine. The book describes, in extensive detail, the domains and responsibilities of the six spentas, or archangels, of the deity Ohrmazd, along with the agents of these six archangels. The longest of these sections is devoted to a female archangel named Spandarmad, but each of the archangels are described fairly extensively. Angelology was a popular genre in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and after a long central chapter of the Bundahisn that tells us about the six spentas of Ohrmazd, the book then offers a correspondent chapter on demonology.

As we come to the end of the Bundahisn’s long, encyclopedia middle, it’s important to understand that the same theme generally undergirds the whole thing. This theme is the conflict of light against dark and the alignment of nearly everything in creation with one of these two poles. The geography, zoology, botany, anatomy, theorization on reproduction, meteorology, and other topics in the book’s middle have varying tinges of contemporary Greek and Islamic intellectual history. But they’re all brought to bear to illustrate that within the great mixture of the created cosmos, some stuff serves Ohrmazd, and other stuff serves Ahriman. [music]

The Bundahisn and Zoroastrian Doctrines on Salvation Judgment Day

With the encyclopedic core of the Bundahisn behind us now, the next subject that the book covers has to do with endings – how individuals die, how the afterlife works, and how judgment day will come about. Let’s take a look at what Zoroastrians were writing in the 800s CE on the subject of posthumous judgment and the end of days, beginning with posthumous judgment.

Zoroastrian theology emphasizes that when believers die, their souls remain near their bodies for three days in a state of anguish. Souls wait by expired bodies, in the vain expectation that they will be able to return to the places from whence they’ve come. And the Bundahisn states that during this crucial period, Zoroastrians keep fires burning next to the bodies of the recently departed. When the three-day period of strife after death comes to an end, one of two things happen.

If the soul has been that of a good believer, who has worked on behalf of Ohrmazd, she feels a fragrant, heartening, joyous wind. Then, the pious soul is visited by a plump cow, swollen with milk. Then, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl visits the devout believer, heartening her further, followed by a beautiful garden, profuse with ripe fruit and running water. If, on the other hand, the soul has been that of a servant of the dark, a noxious, awful wind strikes her three days after her death, and she sees a gaunt, ugly cow, a hideous, frightening girl, and a garden with neither trees nor water. Following this initial binary outcome after death, good and wicked souls alike are taken up the slopes of a giant mountain, where they look out across a chasm.

Across the chasm in front of them, they see a way across. This way across is one of Zoroastrianism’s most famous elements, known as the Činwad bridge in Middle Persian, but more generally, the Chinvat bridge. The Bundahisn initially describes this bridge as “an edge as sharp as a sword that is as high, long, and wide as nine lances. . .A spiritual dog is at the end of the bridge, and hell is underneath it” (159). When good souls look out over the Chinvat bridge, it widens from a knife’s edge into a broad thoroughfare, and bright fire lights the way across to the heights of heaven. As good souls cross, their souls are purified.

As for evil souls, though, the Chinvat bridge does not widen for them. Instead, it remains a knife’s edge, and sinners are only able to take three steps out onto the span – one for their evil thoughts, one for their evil deeds, and one for their evil words – and after these three steps, sinners tumble off of the bridge and down into hell. The Bundahisn itself doesn’t say anything else about hell, nor does it say much about a third destination called hammistagān. Hammistagān, the Bundahisn explains, is the place where we go if our good deeds are equal to our evil deeds, and “It is a place just like the material world” (161). This is an interesting little part of the Bundahisn, this third destination for the departed, and the only added detail about the hammistagān is that there, each person is sorted in some way or another according to their actions on earth.

And while the Bundahisn describes how each individual will fare after death, the book also goes on to describe what will happen at the end of times. As we learned in an earlier episode, another of Zoroastrianism’s signature theological features was the Frashokereti, or final battle between good and evil, and its notion of the Saoshyant, or a savior figure who will arise at the end of days. Both the Zoroastrian Frashokereti, or, Armageddon, and the Zoroastrian savior appear in the Bundahisn. Here’s what the book says about how Earth will come to an end.

The end of the world, the Bundahisn indicates, will begin to be perceptible through a waning of human appetites. People will begin eating less, having just one meal every three days, and, leaving off eating meat, people will for a time subsist only on vegetables and sheep’s milk, until they eventually only drink water. Once ten years have passed during which humanity has ceased eating, the Saoshyant will appear to raise the dead. The earliest humans will rise first, and then on down the line, with each person rising from the place where he or she died. The process will take 57 years, and at its end, people will begin to recognize one another. Then a great assembly will take place, during which people will be confronted with their good deeds and bad deeds, and then each half of humanity will go back to heaven and hell for three days, severed painfully after their brief terrestrial reunion. The pious will, during these three days, cry for the wicked, and the wicked will cry for themselves.

At the end of the three days, the mountains of the earth will be melted, and humanity will be brought back to pass through the molten metal of the heated mountains. For the good, the passage through the molten metal will feel pleasant, while for the wicked, it will be an awful torture. Having explained this famous Zoroastrian doctrine, the Bundahisn goes on to describe how heaven will work. Interestingly, the searing punishment of the molten metal seems to have been understood as a purification process for evil people, because, as the Bundahisn says, the savior, or Saoshyant, will give the elixir of immortality “to all people, and all people will be immortal forever and ever” (181). Ohrmazd, in the Bundahisn, at least, is more forgiving than the deities of the Abrahamic scriptures. In the Bundahisn, those who died young will be resurrected in heaven at the age of 15, and everyone else, at the age of 40. Men and women will continue to have sex in heaven, but no children will be born to them there.

Just as humanity is exalted and purified, the Bundahisn says, so, too, will Earth be exalted and purified. The great lake of hot metal will burn down into the cavity where Ahriman had made hell and his earthly domain, and once it cools and solidifies, hell will be gone. The earth, with its mountains melted, will return to the flatness and stasis with which it had once been created. As for the final fate of Ahriman, the Bundahisn states that Ahriman will skitter back up through the hole that he bored through the sky, presumably going back to the dark half of the spirit realm, subdued for all eternity. [music]

The Bundahisn and Ancient Iranian Mythology

There’s just one more section of the Bundahisn, which, assuming that you’ve been paying attention, you may find somewhat curious, as we’ve already come to the end of the world. That final subject is what we might simply call ancient Iranian mythology. By the 800s, Iran had been the seat of a single, evolving culture for two thousand years. And just as ancient Greece had its Heracles and Perseus, medieval Iran had its own folk heroes. Many of these heroes were part of a mighty dynasty called the Kayanian dynasty. A number of Kayanian kings are mentioned in some of the early Zoroastrian scriptures. They are, generally, the good guys in Zoroastrian tales of times of heroes, and the Bundahisn brings them up a number of times in the book’s later chapters.

They are listed as the masters of continents at one point in the Bundahisn, and before too long, the Bundahisn narrows its focus to a place called Ērānšahr, which can be translated as “the territory of the Iranians.” Ērānšahr, or Iran, was the best of all places that Ohrmazd fashioned. The second-best place was Mesopotamia. The third was Merv, in the southern part of modern-day Turkmenistan above the border of Iran and Afghanistan. The Bundahisn names other territories once within the Sasanian empire or sphere of influence, ranking them from the very best to the sixteenth best, and explaining the benevolent and malevolent aspects of each. And within these sixteen lands, the Bundahisn lists great Kayanian palaces, and those who built them.

The Bundahisn includes what we might call a “begats” chapter on the subject of the heroic Kayanian dynasty, hundreds of names in length, and then a more comprehensible chapter on the birth of Zoroaster, and his six sons and three daughters. Zoroaster’s ancestor, twelve generations back, was a man named Manuščihr, and the Bundahisn says that all of the nobility of Iran trace their lineage to this same patriarch of the prophet. While this factoid may seem like a back corner of a medieval religious tome, it’s actually a fascinating clue about one of the appeals of Shiism in Persian culture during the 700s and 800s. Ancient Iranian families had been tracing their lineage to the family of the Prophet Zoroaster during Sasanian times. Later, as Shia Islam placed stock in descent from the Ahl al-Bayt, or People of the House of the Prophet Muhammad, the titles Sayyid and Sharif came to indicate descent from Muhammad or the Hashemite clan, and millions of Iranians today trace their lineage to the region’s dominant prophet, just as they did before Islam came to be, maintaining nasabs, or genealogical records, of their families’ descent from the Prophet’s son-in-law, the first Imam Ali. To stick with ancient Iranian history, the author of the Bundahisn describes himself as a man named Farrōbag and a descendant of the prophet Zoroaster. This claim of descent occurs in a passage about mowbeds, or Zoroastrian priests, who are descended from Zoroaster himself.

We will meet some of these legendary figures in more detail in future episodes on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and its background. As Zoroastrian became an increasingly marginalized religion in the Islamic world, Persians could still revere the folk heroes of Iran, and romanticize the heroic past of the region even as they lived in an Islamic present.

Zoroastrianism in the Late Sasanian Empire

So that takes us through the end of the Bundahisn, a Zoroastrian cosmogonical encyclopedia written at a time when Zoroastrianism was rapidly losing ground in its ancestral homeland of Iran. The Bundahisn is a meandering, often miscellaneous text that’s probably not ideal material for a podcast episode, but I still hope this show has offered you a sense of what Zoroastrians were writing several centuries into the Islamic period. What I’d like to do now is to tie things up a little bit by turning to the subject of history, and explore what we can take from this late Zoroastrian text as we move forward.

The Bundahisn is interested in the subject of time. In a beautifully poetic passage it quotes from older Zoroastrian scriptures, book states that:

Time is the measure of all things. Time is the most covetous of those who covet. Time is the most questioning of those who question. . .Our time was laid down limited; in time, what is built up falls down. No mortal man escapes it, not if he flies upward, not if he digs down a deep well and sits in it, nor even if he goes down under the spring of the cold waters. (9)

This truism, for obvious reasons, must have had a powerful resonance in the ninth and tenth centuries. Persians had lost control of Persia. Ohrmazd’s fires had dwindled in Iran. For the proud old Zoroastrian clergy schooled in the Avestan language and the interpretation of archaic scriptures, the walls were closing in. As the Bundahisn states in a passage we heard earlier, “Since the coming of the Arabs to Iran, and their promulgation of an evil [religious view] and evil will, they have turned away from the good [religious view] of the [ancient Iranians]” (1). That lamentation is on the very first page of the Bundahisn. The book, then, has a tension that runs all the way through it. On the one hand, the book promises the ultimate triumph of Ohrmazd and his believers in an age-old schema of light against dark, guaranteeing that time itself had been created to enable the triumph of the light. On the other hand, the Bundahisn depicts time as something that’s gone off the rails. Always the thief of human life, the book states, time appeared to have failed to accomplish the purpose for which it had been created.

It is possible, and reasonable, to read the Bundahisn as the testament of a troubled Zoroastrian clergy – one still resilient in its faith about the future, but at the same time uneasy about the present. Other ninth-century Zoroastrian books also reflect the religion’s embattled status during this difficult period. And although it’s possible to see the Bundahisn as the simultaneously hopeful and crestfallen testament to the passing of an age, as we bring this show to a close, I’d like to connect the Bundahisn to what we learned in the previous show about the late Sasanian period.

The Sasanian empire endured from about 224-661 CE. It was the third of the three great Persian empires from antiquity, and the third of them to have Zoroastrianism as a majority religion. As we learned in the previous episode about the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, the Sasanian empire was as much a coalition of fiefdoms as it was a centralized state. Medieval before being medieval was cool, so to speak, the late Sasanian empire has often been mistaken as a monolithic kingdom due to inscriptions and other propaganda that has survived from Sasanian kings. But even though the Shapurs, Hormuzds, and Khosrows of the Sasanian empire wanted to be perceived as unchallenged and indomitable by posterity, and even though they were powerful imperial leaders, the later Persian empire was so vast and populous and full of moving parts that a unitary monarchy quite simply couldn’t manage the whole thing. You could, if you were a Sasanian king, flex your biceps in Ctesiphon and trumpet your grandeur over the distant east, but up in present-day Armenia, and along the Caspian shore, and especially out in Khurasan to the far northeast, there were major semiautonomous baronies, ruled by ancient noble houses, that kept the machinery of the empire running. Sasanian emperors, in summation, were extremely powerful. But they were leaders in a changing Late Antique world, where constant population migrations were making giant empires unfeasible, and where kings of kings, as the name perhaps unintentionally emphasizes, depended on subordinate monarchies to largely manage themselves.

We learned about the patchy and unstable nature of the late Sasanian empire last time, and perhaps the biggest takeaway from our long program on the so-called “Last Great War of Antiquity” was that the Rashidun Caliphate was able to trounce the Sasanian empire because there was no Sasanian empire. Khosrow II was a relentless and formidable leader who nearly clobbered the Byzantines, but when the tides of war turned against him, the Persian noble houses from which his power came did away with him pretty quickly, just as they had propped him up in the first place. When Rashidun armies started marching up the Tigris and Euphrates, they attacked a feudal world at war with itself, rather than a unified empire.

Let’s connect what we learned in the previous episode with what we’ve learned in this program. We tend, when we study history, to want to categorize things. The Umayyad caliphate, we say, was an Islamic caliphate – never mind the fact that 90% of people living under Umayyad rule were not Muslims. The Roman empire, we say, became Christian in the 300s, never mind the fact that paganism marched onward and that Christianity was dozens of different things. We tend, in other words, to take imperial leadership at face value when edicts are issued and garrison towns are built, even though real religious and cultural changes in populations are sluggish, asymmetrical, and always subject to resurgences and the revitalizations of old creeds. And just as historians have often overestimated the political unity of the Sasanian empire, historians have also overestimated the religious unity of the Sasanian empire.

The founder of the Sasanian Empire was King Ardashir I. And in a document written long after Ardashir I’s reign, the founding father is said to have stated “Know that kingship and religion are twins; one cannot exist without the other, for religion is the foundation of royalty and the king is the defender of religion.”¹⁰ A generation after King Ardashir, one of the most famous Zoroastrian priests in history came to power. His name was Kirdir, and he partnered with several Sasanian kings between 240 and 290. Kirdir, according to recorded inscriptions he painstakingly left behind, was a zealot. He trumpeted his efforts to persecute Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Christians, and Manichaeans, and eventually saw to the imprisonment and death of the prophet Mani himself. Thus, important evidence from the 200s suggests that a muscular partnership between church and state existed from the outset of the Sasanian empire, and that between 224 and 651, non-Zoroastrians were second-class citizens there, if they were even permitted in the first place.

This model of church-state partnership is easy enough to understand. However, a higher preponderance of historical evidence suggests that far from being religiously unitary, the Sasanian empire practiced a range of Zoroastrianisms, and that religious tolerance, and religious indifference were generally more prevalent than persecution. As scholar Parvaneh Pourshariati puts it, the image of Sasanian kings of kings partnering with Zoroastrian priests of priests “reflects more the propagandistic endeavors of the clergy and the monarchy, articulated late in the Sasanian and early in the post-conquest period, than the reality of the religious landscape in Iran during the Sasanian period.”¹¹ In other words, in the twilight of Persian dominance of Iran, pious Persian historians and theologians wrote revisionist history, saying that Late Antique Iran had been Zoroastrian through and through. In actuality, though, Late Antique Iran, like Late Antique Everywhere Else, was a religiously heterogeneous place.

There is a massive amount of evidence that, to quote the same historian again, “political expediency and not adherence to any particular religious dogma dictated the Sasanian monarchs’ relationship vis-à-vis other faiths through most of their history.”¹² That is to say, most Sasanian kings, who ruled an empire four time zones wide, had more pressing things to worry about than enforcing religious orthodoxy. Mani, the prophet of Manichaeism, may have eventually bit the dust under the persecution of the zealous high priest Kirdir, but Mani also spent 30 years promoting a brand-new religion, with the benediction of the Sasanian King Shapur I. A few Sasanian kings are recorded as being more jingoistic Zoroastrians than others, while a few seem especially pluralistic in their outlooks, with the Sasanian emperor Yazdegerd I marrying a Jew, and Hormuzd IV a Christian. Kings of kings, then, were more or less devout in their Zoroastrian beliefs, depending on their personal dispositions and the influences of those around them.

Generally speaking, then, the Sasanian empire, like the Parthian empire before it, was a Zoroastrian-majority polity with numerous minority religions, in which official policy toward religion was overall tolerant enough to facilitate the flourishing of numerous large religious minority populations. It is a humbling fact to remember that in the Sasanian empire’s cosmopolitan centers, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Christians, and pagans of every stripe likely had a better understanding of the world’s extant major religions than many of us do today. And while the central Eurasian empire was naturally a repository of many different religious ideologies, within the Sasanian empire, Zoroastrianism itself had numerous varieties depending on region and timeframe.

We call Zoroastrianism a monotheistic religion, and ultimately, Ahura Mazda, later Ohrmazd, is in charge and his victory is a foregone conclusion. However, as in many religions with numerous divine beings, Zoroastrianism had other figures than Ohrmazd who were revered by worshippers in different gradients over time. A female archangel named Anahita was one of these. Much more famously, Mihr, also known as Mithra, an ancient Indo-Iranian deity, was worshipped so ardently at different junctures of Sasanian history that Mihr worship became a sectarian movement tied to region, ethnicity, and noble pedigree. Various other sectarian movements within Zoroastrianism, movements called Zurvanism, and Mazdakism, grew during Sasanian times with different theological emphases on which Zoroastrian deities were highest of all, and how devout believers might best conduct themselves.

And one further element of Sasanian Zoroastrianism deserves our consideration for a moment. Just as Catholics safeguarded the Vulgate for centuries, many Zoroastrian clerics formed ranks around the Avesta, again the oldest and most revered set of Zoroastrian scriptures, not wanting the masses to read and misinterpret the religion’s core texts. As a result, and as is the case in many religious cultures, the clergy and the commoners essentially practiced two different religions. The learned magi, or Zoroastrian priests, recited the Avesta and drew their orthodoxy from the rarefied world of the religion’s ancient scriptures. But ordinary folks took what they heard from their priests and revered angels that appealed to them, or sometimes made homespun, commonsensical connections about the religion that were out of step with the more labyrinthine reasoning of professional theologians. In Sasanian Zoroastrianism, there was frock religion, and folk religion, and the two didn’t ever line up very squarely.

To sum up, just as the Sasanian empire was not especially unified during the Rashidun invasion, Sasanian religion, during the 600s, was made up of a lot of different pieces. The Bundahisn occasionally seems like it’s in search of lost time, but the lost time that it mourns was an epoch of religious pluralism as much as it was an epoch of Sasanian religious unity.

So, let’s draw some general conclusions. When we read the Bundahisn, there is a keen sense in the text that a period of unified piety is giving way to apostasy. With the book’s gloomy remarks about time, the Bundahisn is a piercing reminder that Zoroastrians in and around modern-day Iran, during Islam’s first two centuries, were absolutely devastated to find themselves a colonized underclass. At the same time, though, the Bundahisn marks a resurgence. The Persian Samanid Dynasty ruled the old Sasanian far east of Khurasan from 819-999, and in it, Sunnis, Shias, and Zoroastrians were all part of a greater movement called the Shu’ubiyya, generally a cultural pushback against Arabization. This pushback was not a rejection of Islam, but instead a reassertion of Persian cultural identity within the new Islamic world, including the traditional Sasanian social order and religious landscape.

The traditional Sasanian social order and religious landscape, as we just learned, was a thing built from many parts. The Persian empire had been the nucleus of Eurasia for more than a thousand years, and though occasional emperors sought advantageous partnerships with the Zoroastrian clergy and attempted to impose orthodoxy on the populace, Persia was too vast, and Zoroastrianism itself was too rich and manifold, for a monarchical dynasty to control. As a result, Sasanian Persia was a religiously diverse empire whose majority faith was itself diverse – a religion with regional variants, in which lavishly educated clerics often weren’t on the same wavelength as their parishioners. Sprawling as it was, it worked. The Bundahisn’s nostalgia for the old days of Zoroastrian hegemony is a eulogy for a more Persian Persia. And as we begin the literature of the Islamic Golden Age in the next few programs, it will be helpful to remember that some of this golden age’s luster came from Persian fire, and the worship of a very ancient deity of light and goodness called Ohrmazd. [music]

Moving on to Kalilah and Dimnah

Over these last few shows, we’ve turned our focus toward the Persian side of early Islamic history. We’ve learned about the late Sasanian empire’s history and politics, and what the term “king of kings” actually meant. We’ve learned about Zoroastrianism in Iran during this later period, and how although it was a majority religion with occasional ties to monarchical power, it was a religion of variants practiced alongside numerous other ideologies still widespread in the world today. We learned that the Abbasid revolution of the late 740s came from the east. A generation after it ended, that celebrated Persian bureaucratic dynasty called the Barmakids attached itself to Abbasid leadership in Baghdad and helped keep the empire running. These past three programs on the Abbasid Caliphate, and then the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, and just now the Zoroastrian Bundahisn have given us an idea of the high-level history of how old Sasanian Persian culture met, and melded with new Arab-Islamic culture in the 600s and afterward.

With the stage now set – with our brief Persian excursion now complete, and the main historical groups introduced, it’s time to move back into literature, in order to get a more personal view of what life was like on the ground in present-day Iraq and Iran in the 700s and 800s. Our first author from the period of classical Arabic poetry will be the Persian-born writer and translator Ibn al-Muqaffa, the author of one of the most popular books of the entire medieval period, Kalilah and Dimnah, which he wrote around 750 CE. Ibn al-Muqaffa, born in the southwest of what is today Iran, spent most of his career in Basra, the navel of Mesopotamia and cultural heart of the Muslim world for a couple of generations during the 700s. Ibn al-Muqaffa learned Arabic and converted to Islam, serving Arab governors in first Iran and then Iraq, and producing a sheaf of translations and original works. Ibn al-Muqaffa is an early figure from classical Arabic literature, and his contributions to it reflected his background and historical moment. While he wrote original works, he’s most famous for rendering Middle Persian books into the contemporary Arabic of the mid-700s. The most famous of these books is the one we’ll look at in our next show.

Kalilah and Dimnah is, in a word, a collection of allegorical beast fables. The version that Ibn al-Muqaffa knew was in Middle Persian, and hailed from the rich Sasanian world we’ve spent the past few hours studying in our podcast. But originally, Kalilah and Dimnah was a far older work called the Panchatantra, written in Sanskrit in India some time between about 200 BCE and 100 CE. Whatever we call it, the beast fable collection that became known as Kalilah and Dimnah in Ibn al-Muqaffa’s translation, for 2,000 years, has been one of humanity’s most popular books, and Ibn al-Muqaffa created the most popular translation of it. Within it, there are 67 stories, some of them quick parables, and some long and drawn out, that, through a series of allegories, explore the complexities of life in human society, paying especially close attention to the power that princes and kings wield over their subjects. Timeless, charming, and profound, Kalilah and Dimnah is a work that everyone on earth ought to go through at least once, in our next program, and climbing out of the thicket of Late Antique Persian history to read a major classic of world literature, we will do just that.

Thanks for listening to Literature and History. There’s a quiz on this program in the notes section of your podcast app if you’d like to review what you’ve learned. If you want to hear a song, I have one coming up. Otherwise, see you next time for a show on one of the most popular fable collections in history.

Still here? So, I got to thinking about – well, nothing less than humanity. You know it always puzzles me how fascinated we are with the creation of the universe and the end of the world. I have probably read more creation stories and revelations than is good for anyone’s sanity, and over the course of doing so, I always wonder, “Why does my species always have to go for the gold and try and puzzle out the beginning and end of the universe? Why can’t we just be a bit more curious about the world around us?” I got to thinking about that, and imagined what it would be like if a space alien met a typical human who was philosophizing about very human questions. What if an alien, I wondered, schooled in chemistry and physics, met a human who preferred to understand the universe through creation and apocalypse stories? Pondering such thoughts, I wrote the song you’re about to hear. This one’s called “Alien Meets Human.” I hope you like it, and Ibn al-Muqaffa and I will see you next time.



References

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