Bundahishn: What Does the Zoroastrian Creation Story Say?

The Zoroastrian book of creation: a twelve-thousand-year plan, an invasion from outside the sky, and humans grown from a plant.

The Bundahishn, "Primal Creation," is a Zoroastrian work in Middle Persian, compiled mostly in the 8th and 9th centuries CE. It sets history as twelve thousand years and tells how Ahriman invaded creation.

The Bundahishn, "Primal Creation," is an encyclopedic Zoroastrian work in Middle Persian (Pahlavi), compiled mostly in the 8th and 9th centuries CE from older lost commentaries on the Avesta. It survives in a shorter Indian recension and a longer Iranian one, the Greater Bundahishn. E. W. West translated it for the Sacred Books of the East in 1880.

It lays out history as twelve thousand years in four ages of three thousand. Ohrmazd first creates the world in spiritual form, then in material form. Ahriman attacks from the darkness, breaking through the sky and spreading poison and death. The first man, Gayomard, dies, and the seed he leaves behind lies in the earth for forty years before growing as a rhubarb plant, which becomes the first human couple, Mashya and Mashyana.

The book is also a catalog of the ancient Iranian world: stars and planets, mountains, rivers, animals, plants, and the kinds of demons. It describes the planets as allies of Ahriman who disturb the orderly fixed stars, and it ends with the renovation of the world, when a flood of molten metal will purify everything and the dead will rise.

Scholars value it as a key to older Iranian myth, though it was set down centuries after the Avesta. For readers of this site it adds a fixed cosmic schedule, a breach of the sky, and a humanity grown from the remains of a first man. Its creation account also has close echoes of other myths in which the world is formed from a slain first being.