PERSIAN wrote:Nice hit.
Hope to see silence back and rebuilt.
And I very much like your new name Gozar (at least it's new to me lol), although it's off the topic but I'm curious howcome you chose it.
Think this sums it all up...lol
Ahuramazda and Ahriman.
Ahriman's might, too, is very terrible in the eyes of the faithful believer of the Mazdian faith; for he possesses a whole kingdom of evil beings, who are obedient tools in his hands for annihilating the creations of Ahuramazda and for bringing men to violent destruction. Among these evil spirits there are six that are in intimate contact with his person, just as there are six Ameshaspentas that surround Ahuramazda. The number six may be an invention of a later period for the sake of arriving at a counterpart to Ahuramazda's body-guard. But it is certain that Ahriman, too, according to the testimony of the Mazdian religion in its earliest epoch, is surrounded by an army of evil beings like-minded with himself. The whole history of the world is one long-continued struggle between Ahuramazda and Ahriman. The course and outcome of the struggle are, however, settled beforehand. The conflict is to proceed for 12,000 years, divided into four periods of 3,000 years each.
At the close of the last period, the Saoshyat or Sosiosh, the Messiah of the Parsees, will arise and make an end of Ahriman's dominion, not, however, until he has been allowed to exercise his sway to an extent before unknown. Sosiosh will at the same time raise all the dead to life, hold final judgment upon the earth, and inaugurate the regeneration of the present world.
This tenet of the Persian religion has not been without its influence upon the ideas of later Judaism. As late a writer even as the Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. xlv. 7) expresses himself in such a way as to exclude beyond question any dualism in religion, if we are not to interpret his words as being a direct attack on the Parsee doctrine, a god of light and a god of darkness.