Frashokereti

Frashokereti (Avestan; Middle Persian Frashegird, “the Renovation” or “making wonderful”) is the Zoroastrian doctrine of history’s culmination: the moment when Angra Mainyu is finally and permanently defeated, the dead are raised, and the whole of creation is restored to the deathless, painless perfection it possessed before the Destructive Spirit’s assault began. Where much of Zoroastrian practice concerns the daily, renewable choice between Asha and Druj, Frashokereti names the point at which that choice’s cosmic outcome is settled for good.

Zarathushtra’s own question

The Greater Bundahishn’s thirtieth chapter frames the doctrine of resurrection as a direct exchange between the prophet and Ahura Mazda: “Zartosht asked of Ohrmazd thus: ‘Whence does a body form again, which the wind has carried and the water conveyed? and how does the resurrection occur?’” Ohrmazd’s answer reasons from the first creation itself — if the sky and the world could be produced from nothing, then a body once dissolved into its elements can surely be reassembled: “one will demand the bone from the spirit of earth, the blood from the water, the hair from the plants, and the life from fire, since they were delivered to them in the original creation.” Bodily resurrection, in this account, is not a departure from Ohrmazd’s ordinary way of working but its logical extension.

Soshyant and the final ceremony

The Bundahishn names Soshyant (Saoshyant) as the promised figure through whom the renovation is finally accomplished, assisted by “fifteen men and fifteen damsels” among the living righteous. Soshyant “performs a Yazishn ceremony in preparing the dead,” in the course of which the ox Hadhayosh is sacrificed and its fat combined with white Haoma to prepare a substance called Hush, given to all humanity — “and all men become immortal for ever and everlasting.” Every person, the text says, is restored “with an age of forty years,” and afterward Soshyant “gives every man the reward and recompense suitable to his deeds” before conveying the righteous to paradise.

The sealing of evil

The renovation’s final act, in the Bundahishn’s account, is the permanent imprisonment of Ahriman: Ohrmazd “sets the vault into which the evil spirit fled” and reclaims “the land of hell… for the enlargement of the world,” after which “the renovation arises in the universe by his will, and the world is immortal for ever and everlasting.” The earth itself is remade as “an iceless, slopeless plain,” and even the mountain that supports the Chinvat bridge is said to be leveled — the boundary between the living and the dead having no further work to do once death itself has been undone.

Frashokereti and daily practice

Though Frashokereti describes an event at the end of time, the Zoroastrian tradition treats it as continuous with the daily choice between Asha and Druj rather than separate from it. Every act of truth-telling, every refusal of the Lie, every deed done for Mazda is understood as a small enactment of the same renovation the Bundahishn describes on the cosmic scale — the household prayers’ repeated declarations “I choose Asha, I oppose the Lie” are, in this light, participations in the same victory Frashokereti names as final and complete.