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THE RENOVATION

will divide the work between them, and each of them will act in one of the seven zones.[1] Every one will miraculously communicate with the other of his six colleagues in the other zones. They will read each other's thoughts from a distance and will thus converse just as two men sitting close together would do.[2] The work of the renovation of the world will last for fifty-seven years, the number already referred to.[3] Full fifty years of this beneficent activity will be devoted to the seventh zone Khvaniras, where Zaratusht himself was the spiritual chief,[4] and where Soshyos himself is working.[5] All evil will perish during these fifty-seven years, and goodness prevail among mankind, and men will embrace righteousness and zealously practise religion before the final raising of the dead.[6] Disease and death, apostasy and vice, depravity and every fiendish influence, will perish during this period.[7] The world will be restored to its primal state.

Resurrection of the dead. The preliminary work of the renovators is to raise again to life all those who have died from the time of Gayomard, the primeval man, down to the last man Soshyos, and then give them their respective bodies.[8] It is natural that the world could not at this period be quite empty of men. Those who happen to be living at the time when the period of renovation approaches near shall abstain from eating, live without food, and live so virtuously that even the offspring that are born unto them at this period will be of spirtual nature. All these, therefore, will be ready to enter the ranks of the dead who will now receive new bodies.[9]

The dead will be made to rise from the place where they had yielded up their lives in the world.[10] Zaratusht questions Ormazd in this connection, according to the Pahlavi texts, regarding the questions of forming again the bodies of the dead, inasmuch as the material frames of the dead have perished and been reduced to dust.[11] Ormazd, thereupon, tells the prophet that even as it was possible for him to have created something from nothing,

  1. ↑ Dd. 36. 4, 5.
  2. ↑ Dd. 36. 6.
  3. ↑ Bd. 30. 7; Dd. 36. 5.
  4. ↑ Bd. 29. 2.
  5. ↑ Dd. 36. 7.
  6. ↑ Dk., vol. 5, p. 277.
  7. ↑ Dk., SBE., vol. 47, bk. 7. 11. 4, 5, p. 117.
  8. ↑ Dk., vol. 5, p. 332.
  9. ↑ Dd. 35. 1–4.
  10. ↑ Bd. 30. 7; SLS. 17. 11–14.
  11. ↑ Bd. 30. 4.
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