med breeze, and its good
thoughts and words and deeds took shape before it "under the guise of a
young maiden, radiant and strong, with well-developed bust, noble mien,
and glorious face, about fifteen years of age, and as beautiful as the
most beautiful;" the unrighteous soul, on the contrary, directed its
course towards the north, through a tainted land, amid the squalls of a
pestilential hurricane, and there encountered its past ill deeds, under
the form of an ugly and wicked young woman, the ugliest and most wicked
it had ever seen. The genius Rashnu Razishta, the essentially truthful,
weighed its virtues or vices in an unerring balance, and acquitted or
Condemned it on the impartial testimony of its past life. On issuing
from the judgment-hall, the soul arrived at the approach to the bridge
Cinvaut, which, thrown across the abyss of hell, led to paradise. The
soul, if impious, was unable to cross this bridge, but was hurled down
into the abyss, where it became the slave of Angro-mainyus. If pure, it
crossed the bridge without difficulty by the help of the angel Sraosha,
and was welcomed by Vohu-mano, who conducted it before the throne of
Ahura-mazda, in the same way as he had led Zoroaster, and assigned to it
the post which it should occupy until the day of the resurrection of the
body.*

* All this picture of the fate of the soul is taken from the
_Vendidad_, where the fate of the just is described, and in
the _Yasht_, where the condition of faithful and impious
souls respectively is set forth on parallel lines. The
classical authors teach us nothing on this subject, and the
little they actually say only proves that the Persians
believed in the immortality of the soul. The main outlines
of the picture here set forth go back to the times of the
Achaemenids and the Medes, except the abstract conception of
the goddess who leads the soul of the dead as an incarnation
of his good or evil deeds.

The religious observances enjoined on the members of the priestly caste
were innumerable and minute. Ahura-mazda and his colleagues had not,
as was the fashion among the Assyrians and Egyptians, either temples or
tabernacles, and though they were represented sometimes under human or
animal forms, and even in some cases on bas-reliefs, yet no one ever
ventured to set up in their sanctuaries those so-called animated or
prophetic statues to which the majority of the nations