The “Other” gumēzišn. About the Final “Merger” of Limited Time with Eternity

The Middle Persian verb gumēxtan, gumēz-, despite its Indo-Iranian and Indo-European origins, does not offer attestations in Avestan and Old Persian. This is a very peculiar fact, because in particular a nominal derivative of this verbal stem, gumēzišn, became one of the most sensible technical terms adopted in the framework of the Mazdean osmology and theology. We can briefly recall that the gumēzišn concerns the “state of mixture”, the mélange produced by the irruption of Ahreman in the primordial good creation of Ohrmazd, when he pierced the heavens and entered the world. The mixture of the intermediate stage between the creation (bundahišn) and the final regeneration (frašgird) of the universe corresponds to a period of contradictions, struggles and of an inevitable dialectics between order and disorder. It is only within this mixed dimension that death is possible, although its negative impact is countered and balanced from the fact that immortality in the gētīg dimension would imply also that of the demons. But this inevitable condition is tempered from Ohrmazd’s promise that the good creatures will be re-surrected, forgiven, and finally admitted into the eternal paradise of god. In this respect, if the semantic field of the verb gumēxtan, and of its nominal derivatives is not strictly and absolutely negative, and this because the gumēzišn, within the economy of Zoroastrian theology, constitutes a useful and necessary trap against Ahreman forces and their chief, certainly the implications covered by its meaning do not immediately evoke a most positive image. However, despite the inevitable impression of a negative nuance connected with the image of the “mixture” between good and evil in itself, we must register a very rare, but thrilling, opposite example, which is most important from the theological point of view. A very significant passage concerning the role of time (Zurwān) in the process of liberation of the universe from the evil presence occurs in the first chapter of the Bundahišn (I, 41). This article studies in etails this particular framework,showing that the limited time (Zurwān kanāragōmand) itself will "merge" (gumēzēd) and turn (wardēd) into the infinite.