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After death, each urvan (“soul” or “person,” later also identified with fravashi or fravarti), goes heavenward. It stays around the corpse for three days and then travels on to its reward.21 It meets the daena, who is a comely maid for a righteous person, and who leads him over the Chinvat Bridge. The daena is explicitly the personification of a person’s moral qualities, hence a representation of the person as well. The sinner, on the other hand, is led away by the Demon Vizaresha. In later tradition (but perhaps Zarathushtra himself suggested it), the soul (urvan) must stand on trial. The tribunal will be composed of Mithra, flanked by the two gods Sraosha and Rashnu.22 Thus, these originally independent pre-Zoroastrian divinities are integrated into the pantheon of good gods supporting Ahura Mazda. The just “soul” is led before Vohu Mana on his golden throne and from there to an audience with Ahura Mazda and the Amesha Spentas, who also have their own golden thrones. A great many of these images recur in Jewish apocalypticism, and it is hard not to conclude that they are related. This story must have offered a very powerful tug on the imagination of the Zoroastrians. As time went by, the story became more and more elaborate. The next step came in the Hadhokht Nask, an Avestan liturgical piece, that, unfortunately, survives only in fragmentary form.

Some early texts discuss an ordeal at death and others at the end of time. But eventually, the story becomes completely symmetrical with both the good and the bad meeting their daena. The good pass on to paradise over the wide bridge with the daena as their guide or “psychopomp” (soul leader). But the sinners find that the bridge gets as thin as a knife blade and they fall into the abyss of hell, being grabbed by their daena, who has become a wraith. The Persians concentrated on the story of the soul’s travels to its heavenly home. The Jews tell a similar story, though they invent their own details, so the influence will be limited to fairly small details.

The Disposition of the Body

THE EVENTS affecting the soul according to the Persians begin with the disposition of the body. In early Persian texts, there is a significant reference to the quite famous Zoroastrian practice of having a corpse rent by birds of prey and other scavengers as the preferred mode of disposition of the dead. Originally the Persian tribes appear to have practiced cremation, as the Indians did, but after the rise of Zoroastrianism, with its strict rules about keeping fire pure, the custom changed to exposure of the dead (usually for a week to a month), sometimes by gathering the large bones of the leg and skull afterwards, which were often put in special ossuaries, called dakhma and preferrably placing them high in the mountains.23

Exposure of the dead is a relatively rare practice in world religion, the most obvious analogy being Tibetan Buddhism, where the explanation is not hard to find. Since many Tibetans live in a treeless, permafrosted land, where neither cremation nor inhumation is easy, having bodies eaten by birds of prey seems the most efficient way to dispose of the deceased. No similar, simple cause suggests itself as a parallel explanation of Persian customs.

However there is another explanation. The parallel comes again from looking at Hindu practice. The reason the Zoroastrians expose their dead seems quite close to the ancient Indian practice of purifying the bodies of the dead on funeral pyres. Fire and light are both agents of purification and compare quite closely as formal operations. It seems as if the Hindus and the Iranians used two different technologies of burial to accomplish the same religious end, the purification of the final remains of the dead. Zoroastrian views of the purity of fire contribute to their abandonment of cremation. Perhaps also the lack of trees on the high Iranian plateau contributed to the Persian practice, but the explicit reason was to avoid polluting the fire or earth with a corpse.

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