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come out unscathed.^[1] King Shapur thereupon declared the work, as thus redacted, to be authoritative, and he commanded that anything outside this canonical collection should not be countenanced. Another source states that still further steps were taken to put the truth of the religion to the test. Several pious mobads were convoked to attend at the temple of the fire Froba, and there to consider the momentous question of deputing one of their number to visit, in a vision, the spiritual world and thus to bring back from the angels themselves a first-hand knowledge of matters spiritual for the complete restoration of the religion. Seven holy men were first elected from the assembly. Out of this number Arda Viraf was selected as the most righteous and saintly. After preliminary ceremonies this holy man entered into a trance for seven days and nights, during which he was transported in spirit to the other world. His soul ascended into the realm of heaven, traversed the spiritual regions, and after beholding paradise visited likewise the inferno. Viraf described the experience of his visions and thus contributed to rehabilitating the faith of the people in their historic religion.

The Pahlavi works are written by many hands in successive periods. Though the canon was declared closed by the edict of Shapur II, the work of rendering the Avestan texts into Pahlavi with exegetic commentaries, and the composition of original works in the court language, continued throughout the Sasanian period, and even long after the downfall of the empire. Few if any of the exegetical works of Zoroastrianism written during the Sasanian period have survived the devastating hands of the conquering hordes of the Arabs, and almost all the important Pahlavi works that we possess to-day were written under the Abbasid Caliphs. The Persians in whose veins flowed the kingly blue blood had helped the Abbasids in overthrowing the Umayyads, thus avenging themselves upon their national foes, the Arabs. This greatly elevated the position of the Zoroastrians at the royal court of Bagdad. During this period it was that the composition of the Pahlavi treatises was undertaken with renewed vigour. To the ninth century we owe much of the Pahlavi literature that has come down to us. Thus the Pahlavi literature covers a period of about seven centuries, beginning