The Making-Wonderful: Frashokereti and the Healing of the World
A standalone piece Most of the ancient world imagined the end as a darkness — the world burned away, the gods withdrawn, judgment falling, an age of gold lost beyond recovery. Zoroastrianism imagined something almost unique among early religions: an end that is a healing . Its name for it is Frashokereti — in the later Persian, frashegird — and it means, almost untranslatably, "the making-wonderful," the making-fresh, the final setting-right of all things.[^1] In this vision, the world is not destroyed at the last.
What this resource contributes
A standalone piece Most of the ancient world imagined the end as a darkness — the world burned away, the gods withdrawn, judgment falling, an age of gold lost beyond recovery. Zoroastrianism imagined something almost unique among early religions: an end that is a healing . Its name for it is Frashokereti — in the later Persian, frashegird — and it means, almost untranslatably, "the making-wonderful," the making-fresh, the final setting-right of all things.[^1] In this vision, the world is not destroyed at the last. It is restored — made whole, made deathless, made at last the perfect thing its Maker intended. It is one of the most hopeful pictures of the end ever conceived, and Zarathustra's people held it some three and a half thousand years ago. A wound, and its healing The Zoroastrian story of the world is the story of a good creation under assault.
Topics and source signals
Primary sources detected
Gathas · Avesta · Yashts · Bundahishn
Scholars detected
Mary Boyce · Prods Oktor Skjærvø