ABSTRACT
The text sums up succinctly the whole of Zoroastrian doctrine: it is what every boy and girl of fifteen must know before he or she is invested with the sacred girdle, a ceremony which, coinciding with the age of puberty, may be compared with the Christian rite of Confirmation. It is, in fact, the Zoroastrian’s catechism. Man is, by origin, a spiritual being, and his soul, in the shape of what the Zoroastrians call his Fravashi or Fravahr pre-exists his body. There is no problem of evil because it is a separate principle and substance standing over against the good God and threatening to destroy him. God is eternal, for ‘Ohrmazd and the Space, Religion, and Time of Ohrmazd were and are and evermore shall be.’ Ohrmazd is helped by the six Amahraspands or Bounteous Immortals and by the Yazatan or gods, both of which roughly correspond to what we would call angels.
