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are also clues in Sanskrit and Avestan which point to a deeper structural parallel of Indian and Persian ritual. Paradise is considered a place of light and knowledge in both religions. Indeed, it appears as if many surrounding cultures thought that Ahura Mazda was the sun because in Assyrian inscriptions, Ahura Mazda appears, identified with the sun.24 It appears, therefore, that the original reason the Persians layed out their dead on dakhmas (an open air walled enclosure) was to expose the corpses to the purificatory powers of the sun, in the same way as fire purifies the corpses in Indian thought. Furthermore, one wonders whether the very obvious and visible rending of the body did not itself stimulate a notion of bodily resurrection in Zoroastrianism, as a way of expressing a renewed wholeness in the apocalyptic end of time. In any event, after a year, the Persian texts declare that the body was resurrected.25

The rending of the dead eventually took a more refined form. At first, the Zoroastrians exposed the dead on a stony outcropping. But when they were conquered by Islam, the place of exposure was walled around and called a “tower of silence.”26 This too, Zoroastrians have termed a dakhma-a high enclosure, inside of which corpses are exposed to be dismembered by vultures. Dakhmas were impressive features to all travelers to Persia in Muslim times and continue to attract attention to Parsi communities in Gujurat in modern times. Indian sensibilities, however, are shocked at this practice and the Indian government has been pressuring the Parsis to stop it.27

In some crude way, burial practices themselves parallel the direction that the soul or self takes after death. The Egyptians entombed their mummified dead but the apex of their pyramidal tombs were meant to point the way to the stars. Usually cultures that practice inhumation tend to depict the dead as going underground, as we have seen in the Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Israelite burials. They usually retain an image of the body when they imagine the posthumous self. The cultures that practice cremation seem to prefer the notion that the dead go to the sky. They may or may not retain a notion of the image of the body of the individual. Zoroastrians (and Tibetans), who have a rather unique way of disposing the dead, should be seen as practicing a variation of cremation. Exposure becomes, in effect, a slower form of cremation.28

Particularly revealing in this regard is the Zoroastrian sense that one should keep a corpse from being buried in the ground. We get the following interesting ruling in the Videvdat (Law against the Demons), a compendium of religious ordinance roughly contemporary with and resembling the Talmud:

Let no man alone by himself carry a corpse. If a man alone by himself carry a corpse, the Nasu [corpse-demon] rushes upon him, to defile him, from the nose of the dead, from the eye, from the tongue, from the jaws, from the sexual organ, from the hinder parts. This Druj [falsehood or disorder], this Nasu, falls upon him, stains him even to the end of the nails, and he is unclean, thenceforth, for ever and ever.29

The correct place for the body is not the ground, with its connections to druj, but the air, with its connection with asha. People who bury the dead (who include virtually all the Zoroastrians’ significant enemies) are perpetually cursed with demons.

Later Zoroastrian Texts

LATER ZOROASTRIAN texts give a much more detailed view of the final events of history than the earlier texts do. The Bundahishn text is said to be zend, a Pahlavi gloss and commentary on an earlier text. Some zend commentaries are quite close translations while others are far-reaching commentaries. The Bundahishn bears some relationship to the Bahman Yasht, one of the hymnic texts which, in turn, takes its form from the Avesta. It captured the imagination of the Zoroastrians and continuously needed revision in view of new events. It outlines a terrible apocalyptic end constantly forecasted and constantly being reforecasted based on the latest current events, just