Ancient Roots of Creation and Afterlife Beliefs

The interaction of culture, religion, environment, and language shapes a people in any period. To appreciate and respect the diversity of contemporary world religions, it is important to recognize their development from their inception to their present form so that we may better understand the past through drawing parallels and tracing the continuity of institutions and beliefs of specific areas through the centuries. Thus, this book has described the characteristic points of Indo-Iranian religions, which are bound to contribute to a better understanding of the development of the eschatological beliefs in the presently prevailing major religions.

By the end, this study’s goal is to demonstrate both the non-static nature of religion and the organic end result of its dynamism—the global prevalence of belief in an afterlife. While this belief may be called by different names in different eras, each variant arises from the fears and hopes of the people who gave expression to it in their time.

It is noteworthy that one religion’s influence on another requires great sensitivity, and a historical precedent exists for simply refusing the challenge as too delicate, since the evidence we discover is always open to different interpretations. However, it seems arbitrary to abandon the investigation of known religious traditions without examining precursor religions, so, in the interest of research, we accepted that challenge in undertaking this study. Although the suggestion of one religion’s direct influence on another is a delicate issue, there are genetic and historical links in the eschatological beliefs of the so-called eastern and western religions that argue for a comprehensive, collective treatment. This study is intended to generate enthusiasm for further in-depth research into the earliest religion as a system, acknowledging its genetic historical connections with both earlier and subsequent traditions.

In the interest of accessibility, this book emphasizes only the universally-accepted doctrines as found in the scriptures of major religions. We choose to risk oversimplification to facilitate understanding of certain doctrines and avoid exhaustive analyses of metaphysical-philosophical concepts such as God, soul, and death. Nor do we concern ourselves with the problem of the origins of these concepts, a question that our present state of knowledge cannot definitively answer. The intention of this study is to elucidate, in language available to most contemporary people, the cultural and religious views on creation and afterlife held by those who lived in the Near East during the Vedic and Avestan periods. This research uses an interdisciplinary methodology, isolating and identifying artistic, archaeological, cultural, religious, and literary affinities, and examining afterlife beliefs in Near East, Indian, and Iranian traditions and their unique bond with their ancient ancestral cultures—Old European and Indo-European. This process takes two approaches. The general approach looks for universal patterns, and the particular approach identifies what makes the Near Eastern, Vedic, and Avestan cases unique.

The hereafter is central to most religions, both ancient and modern. However, to emphasize its importance is not to refute its ambiguity. Most of the cosmogonic, eschatological, and apocalyptic philosophers of monotheistic faiths hold fast to a literal reading of what they consider to be godly revelations about the end of the world and its accompanying rewards and punishments. These include a forthcoming end to linear time, involving God’s final judgment on evil, and a coming reward for the faithful, both in heaven and on earth. As recent history shows, scholars can no longer ignore the eschatological beliefs of such faiths with their myriad of believers in a literal heaven and hell, reward and punishment. Much of the earlier scholarship devoted to cosmology, eschatology, and apocalypticism concerns the origins of cosmogony and eschatology within Judaism and Christianity. These beliefs have not been adequately examined against the backdrop of the earlier religious notions that existed in the regions where these monotheistic religions originated. Ideas about death and the afterlife, as we know them chiefly through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, were not created in a vacuum. Studying the evolution of these ideas is like reading books for a course in the humanities. Today we need to know the ancient ideologies of East and West, not just the current available scriptures, in order to understand why we envision our afterlife in heaven or on earth as souls or as bodies.

Religion and Myth

Concepts of creation, death, afterlife, and end of time as presented in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have had a profound influence on shaping the ideologies of billions of people in all societal levels, consciously or not. To find out where such expectations originate, we start several millennia ago in the Ancient Near East, where they, too, had concerns and beliefs about death, the afterlife, and the underworld. Culturally and religiously, death has been defined as the total cessation of one’s earthly life, but it has always been obscured by mystery and controversy. How a tradition views death determines the understanding of the notion of soul, the disposal of the corpse, and a belief in the afterlife and the end of the world.

In addition to afterlife beliefs, creation myths are also interpreted and reinforced in a religious socio-political system. Stories describing the creation of everything and the afterlife are categorized as mythical because they are not historically documented or personally experienced, but imagined. Similar to the afterlife myths, the creation stories describe how the world and the cosmos came into existence through a process understood by a given group of people. These stories not only provide explanations and justifications for the process of coming into existence but also for the future events. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the doctrine of creation is exclusively based on the Book of Genesis, and therefore the religious conjectures regarding the creation and the place of humanity in the universe are based on the same myth.

The Near East

In the Near Eastern cosmogonic themes, often the world was created as the progeny of the primordial parents, mother and father, symbolizing the earth and the sky, with reference to an undifferentiated, chaotic existence before the world came into being. The stories also describe the establishment of the world from a dismemberment of the body of a primordial being. The concepts of dualism or opposition and divine twines are also shared in the original creation myths. The historical and literary records of this dualist concept originated in the ancient Iranian Zoroastrian religion with its strong conviction in the original spiritual existence, the presence of two primal spiritual forces, good and evil, and the birth of opposition and dualism. This creative duality is best described in the Zoroastrian Book of Creation, the Bundahishn, also known as Knowledge from the Zand, which survived over centuries through oral tradition until it was committed to writing in the ninth century CE. The text explains that the deliberate formation of the world was as a stage whereupon the two forces could engage in concerted combat for sole kingship over creation up to the cataclysmic end of finite time, followed by renovation and the absolute perfection of existence. Ancient Greater Iranian domains had a diversity of religious traditions, including ancient Indo-Iranian practices, Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism, Manichaeism, Mandaeism, and other localized religions. The Zoroastrian tradition, with its monotheistic and dualistic features, ethical notions of good and evil, the pantheon of demons and angels, doctrines of afterlife judgment, hell and heaven, the final savior, the apocalyptic end of time, and the renewed eternal life, most likely had the greatest impact in the development of other Near Eastern religious thoughts, particularly Judaism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam.