Panaino, Antonio. 2025. Ahreman’s ascent and the direction of his primordial aggression. With an excursus about the cosmic egg (Publications d’Études Indo-Iraniennes 4). Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg.
This study analyses the problem of the trajectory taken by Ahreman during his aggression against the Good Creation. In the Pahlavi texts, this attack moves from the bottom of the universe to the top, passing throughout the intermediate void. This means that the heaven of the stars, pierced by the demonic army in the circumpolar area, was not spherical at that moment, and that the cosmos did not follow a homocentric model, or Ahreman, coming from the outer space, would have aggressed directly Ohrmazd, whose paradisiacal sphere would have been the most external one. Actually, the cosmos assumed a homocentric shape only after the aggression, and this shows that the Sasanian theologians mixed an earlier non spherical model with a later spherical one with contradictory results. Parallel problems emerge with reference to certain narrations concerning Ahreman’s expulsion from the lowest heaven, whose effects would have produced the transfer of the antagonist not out of the universe, but in a superior sphere. The present book discusses this and other uranographic problems in connection with the complex evolution of Zoroastrian cosmology since the Avestan period till the later phases, when the Mazdeans were living within a dominating Islamic cultural framework.
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