I was looking up monsters and some chain led to motifs from Middle Eastern art, which led to an article on Zoroastrianism, which led me to get confused about their concept for the soul. I remember once reading some outdated conventional wisdom about the origin of religion, wherein the concept of the soul emerged from the observation that the living breathe and the dead do not – that a soul must be an immaterial thing that is in your body and subsequently leaves. Simple enough, but a lot of supernatural ideas from older religions leave me scratchin templez. More complicated.
If I got this right, the main part of your zoroastrian soul exists outside of the material world. It sends a piece avatar-style when you are born, animating you, and that part returns to the source four days after you die, bringing with it the wisdom of your time spent on Earth. As you spend various lives on Earth, you’re making your main soul more wise and powerful. Juiced-in soul points. Power ups. I presume when you hit your limit break, you can do a special finishing move.
The concept of the soul that most amurrican christians believe is less ornate. Your soul is born when you’re born, it goes to heaven or hell when you die. I think most of the denominations preach something more like you stay in the dark until judgment day when the helling and heavening will actually happen, but that doesn’t stick in the heads of the laity.
Still, these are the conceptions I’m most familiar with, and you gotta admit, they’re more streamlined than that zoroastrian stuff. Why the extra steps, zoroastrians? I have to admit tho, I find their take appealing. While you are alive, you are fighting against evil. When you die, your main soul gets the XP, making you more powerful against evil. We’re all getting better at fighting evil all the time.
Whenever the zoroastrian end of days comes around, we’ll all be 99th level paladins, kickin’ ass on the angra-mainyu-something-whatever. That’s optimistic. That’s some “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice” kind of shit. I can’t believe it, but it’s nice.
This is the part when people raised under the cruel repression of the zoroastrian bible belt come into my comments and explain how it isn’t nice. As you will…
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…your zoroastrian soul … sends a piece avatar-style when you are born, animating you, and that part returns to the source four days after you die, bringing with it the wisdom of your time spent on Earth. As you spend various lives on Earth, you’re making your main soul more wise and powerful.
Actually, as immaterial-soul-beliefs go, that one’s pretty cool. And it goes well with my longstanding belief that, if there’s an all-powerful, all-knowing creator-god, the only reason I can think of as to why they force us to live in this unjust
insane* world is, TO LEARN, and to bring back that acquired wisdom to enhance ourselves.*edited by beeb per my probably outdated and overapplied ableist language policy
One thing that was pointed out to me long ago is that most religions disparage other religions as crude and simplistic. You see this in the constant Christian refrain of many other religions being idol worship. In fact almost no religions are actually that simple. Religions all look at the idols as symbolic connections to the gods/divine/ancestors/etc in the same way that Christians put up statues of religious figures in churches. It’s easier to paint other religions as wrong if your religion is more sophisticated then their crude worship.
thanks for the comments ye comrades. still interested to hear from a zoroastrian tho.
The only Zoroastrian I know of is the deceased Freddie Mercury, and I’ve no idea if he practiced as an adult.
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