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tests.^[1] He swells man's spirit to wrath. He contrives all evil, and he attacks mankind with the sevenfold strength of a fiend,^[2] and man loses his senses when Eshm overpowers him.^[3] He rejoices when man disregards the admonitions of a religious preceptor,^[4] and any man in whom he makes his abode acts like a thief.^[5] Destruction follows where he steps in.^[6] For example, through his seductiveness he made King Kaus discontented with his earthly possessions, and bred in him a burning desire for conquering the heavenly regions,^[7] in which attempt to fly up to the sky he fell to his undoing. He incites Arjasp, the arch-enemy of Zoroastrianism, to invade the territories of Gushtasp, who had embraced Zoroaster's faith,^[8] but Arjasp's ruin followed. Terrible as was the condition of Iran when Afrasiab, and still earlier when the monstrous Zohak ruled over her destinies,^[9] it would have been immeasurably worse had Eshm been the earthly sovereign.^[10] When he fails to spread discord and quarrelling among the righteous, he works among the wicked to the same end, and again if defeat meets him here too, he causes strife among the demons and fiends.^[11] He contests the passage of the soul to the Bridge on the dawn of the fourth day after man's death.^[12] One of the Pahlavi commentators speaks of him as the antagonist of Vohuman,^[13] but his special adversary is Srosh, who will smite him in the end.^[14]

Tishtar's antagonist. The Pahlavi works mainly repeat the account of this demon's encounter with Tishtar, that is, how the angel of rain fled a mile away in terror when he was first assaulted by this demon of drought, but how he later, after having begged more strength from Ormazd and received it, at last over-