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were believed to go. This is the first time we have seen the ultimate destination of the righteous and sinful dead differ. Along the way, Arda Viraf saw terrible punishments waiting for sinners and unimaginable bliss awaiting the righteous. He saw horrors of hell in detail, raising the possibility that his readers just liked to hear about the terrible punishments awaiting sinners. Thus, the trip to heaven to visit the gods to find wisdom and truth is the same journey undertaken by the dead at the end of life. According to Viraf, when living people do it, they are practicing for the final flight after death and, at the same time, confirming that the world assumed by their religion was real and actual. It was travel narrative used as a proof-text for the cosmos.

In form the Arda Viraf Namah is quite a bit like the parts of Jewish hekhaloth literature and the Christian apocalypses, also containing heavenly journeys which function in the same way to confirm the religious universe of the participant. The hekhaloth texts also contain instructions on how to meditate (rather than rely on a drug) and how to make certain rituals magically operant (theurgy). Like the Persian document, the Jewish material also begins with a crisis, usually the famous martyrdom of ten prominent Jewish rabbis, called “The Ten Martyrs,” a Midrashic tradition based on an historical tragedy perpetrated by the Romans at the end of the Second revolt or Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE). The story always raises the issue of theodicy: Why whould God require martyrdom? But it does not face the possible destruction of the whole people and thus lacks the fearful emphasis on the specific and terrible punishments of hell that Arda Viraf Namah has. In content, the Arda Viraf Namah resembles Dante’s descriptions of hell in The Divine Comedy and is likely one of the remote sources of Dante’s work.

Besides the final disposition of the sinners and the righteous, Arda Viraf tells us that there are a whole class of people who are neither good nor bad but equally balanced in their good and evil deeds. These people will remain in a kind of limbo called the Hammistagan (place of the Motionless Ones) until the moment that they get their future body (tan i pasen):

I came to a place and saw the souls of a number of people who were in Hammistagan. And I asked the victorious, just Srosh and Adar Yazad, “Who are these and why are they here?” Just Srosh and Adar Yazad said: “This is called Hammistagan, “The Place of the Motionless Ones;” and until the future body these souls will remain in this place. They are the souls of those people whose goodness and evildoing were equal. Say to the people of the world: “Do not consider the most trifling good act to be ‘trouble’ or ‘vexation,’ for everyone whose good acts outweigh his bad ones goes to heaven, and everyone whose bad ones weigh more, to hell, even if the difference is only three tiny acts of wrongdoing; and those in whom both are equal remain until the future body in this hammistagan. Their punishment is cold or heat from changes in the atmosphere. And they have no other affliction.” (Boyce, 86)

The Soul’s Journey, the Whole Story, in Later Zoroastrianism

AFTER GIVING some of the early traditions, it is appropriate to acknowledge that the full story comes only from a much later source. The complete story of the soul’s journey from death to the afterlife is most easily seen in the Middle Persian, or Pahlavi text, Dâstân-i Mēnōk-i Krat, probably datable to the ninth century, which contains the most complete narrative of the soul’s journey to the afterlife but also contains a great many traditions that we have seen as early as the Gathas.38

While there was considerable development in Zoroastrian thinking, unfortunately this development is not yet entirely datable in any easy or convincing way. Any time we assert Persian influence we must understand that we have few agreed-upon ways of distinguishing the most sophisticated, medieval traditions from the earlier traditions which are more important for our purposes. The core of the tradition,