Ahreman’s Ascent and the Direction of His Primordial Aggression. With an Excursus about the Cosmic Egg

The present study analyses the problem of the trajectory taken by Ahreman during his aggression against the Good Creation, and in particular deals with the evolution of the shape of the creation in itself. In the Pahlavi texts, this attack clearly moves in a direction from the bottom of the primordial universe (the realm of darkness) to the top (the lights of Ohrmazd), passing throughout the atmospheric intermediate void, an evidence which implies that the heaven of the stars, pierced by the demonic army, was not spherical at that moment, and certainly did not envelop the earth also in its reversed, inferior, side. According to a Hellenistic homocentric system, the most external sphere would have been the one of the Primum Mobile, where the Paradisiacal House of God was located, but in this case Ahreman, coming from the outer space, would have aggressed directly Ohrmazd. This solution is obviously countered by the description of the attack, so that we must presume that the final homocentric shape was assumed after the aggression, or that the Sasanian theologians mixed an earlier non spherical model with a later one, with a contradictory result. Parallel problems emerge when we try to understand certain narrations concerning Ahreman’s expulsion from the lowest heaven, whose effects, without any other clarification, would have been that of putting the antagonist not out of the universe, but in another heaven or celestial sphere. Ahreman enters only the heaven of the stars, but he cannot ascend to the higher strata of the heavens, because blocked by the sphere of the unmixable stars, so that the fights take place in the first heaven, in the atmospheric stratum, and on the earthly ground. This situation is the one which probably reflects also the Avestan uranographic and cosmological imagine of the battle, with the earth conceived as round or ovoidal in shape (metaphorically covered on the top and the flanks by the wings of an imaginary bird). It was protected by a series of superimposed strata starting from the ground to the highest abode of Ahura Mazdā, within a structure presumably arranged as a sort of cylindric or ovoidal architecture. The evolution of the Zoroastrian cosmology, in particular in later periods, as shown in the Persian Rivāyats, presents us with an additional number of different and contradictory ideas and representations of the facts that reveal the different points of view and the chronological and culturally distinct influences that