A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Another eschatological idea is added, that of the resurrection of the body. The belief appears to be comparatively old, but it is expressly proclaimed in Yašt 19. 11 and 89 (see also 13. 129), which speaks of the “resurrection of the dead,” in connection with the arrival of the “Living One,” that is, of the Saoshyant announced by Zarathustra. So the Resurrection forms part of the final Renovation, which also implies the universal judgment. Several ideas, some of them comparatively old, now find expression in a grandiose eschatological vision: the radically and completely renewed world in fact represents a new Creation that will no longer be vitiated by the attacks of the demons; the resurrection of the dead—actually the re-creation of bodies—is equivalent to a cosmogony by virtue of the microcosmos-macrocosmos parallel, an archaic conception common to several Indo-European peoples, but which had a considerable development in India and Iran.