Ahriman: Who Is Zoroastrianism's Destructive Spirit?
The destructive spirit of Zoroastrianism, who burst through the sky from outside and poisoned a perfect creation.
Ahriman, earlier Angra Mainyu, is the "destructive spirit" of Zoroastrianism, the adversary of the wise lord Ahura Mazda. In the Bundahishn he breaks through the sky and poisons a perfect creation.
Angra Mainyu, later Ahriman, means roughly "destructive spirit." In the Gathas, the hymns attributed to Zarathustra himself, the idea appears as a choice between two primal spirits, one good and one evil, who chose their paths at the beginning (Yasna 30.3). In later Zoroastrian texts the evil spirit becomes a personal adversary of the wise lord Ahura Mazda, called Ohrmazd in Middle Persian.
The Bundahishn tells the story as a cosmic war with a timeline. Ohrmazd creates the world in a perfect, motionless state. Ahriman, dwelling in endless darkness, attacks it. He pierces the sky and leaps in, spreads darkness, brings noxious creatures, and kills the first man, Gayomard, and the primeval ox. From their seed, humans and animals are born into a mixed world where good and evil struggle.
History is fixed at twelve thousand years, and at its end the world will be renewed, the dead raised and Ahriman defeated. The Greek writer Plutarch already knew him in the 1st century CE as Areimanius, the dark counterpart of Oromazes. A heterodox school, Zurvanism, made Ohrmazd and Ahriman twin sons of Time.
Historians often point to Zoroastrian dualism as an influence on Jewish and Christian ideas of Satan, angels and demons, the end of days and resurrection, though how much is debated. Readers of invasion stories see in the Bundahishn an intruder breaking in from outside the sky and corrupting a living world.
In the Zurvanite myth, Ahriman tore his way out of the womb first in order to claim the kingship that had been promised to the firstborn.
Scholars caution that the dramatic assault story is recorded in 9th-century Pahlavi books, far later than Zarathustra, and the extent of Zoroastrian influence on Judaism is disputed.
