Life is incomplete without death
When Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu, the two Primeval Spirits of Ahura Mazda, first met together, they created life and non-life. Life and Death are twins. There is lurking death, where there is life upon earth. Life and death are inseparable and indivisive. Death is life's inevitable accompaniment and culmination. Apart from death, life is inconceivable.
Life and death are inveterate foes. Life is ever on the watch against the incessant onslaughts of invincible death to extinguish it. Death hungers for life, feeds upon life and is ever a-hungry for more morsels. Death, the greatest glutton, holds unending festival and knows no satiation. None is ever so busy as death. He knows no holiday and no days of rest.
Life makes history. Death is blank. Life knows the present and the past and the future. Death knows but the present. Death, is death, as darkness is darkness. Death knows no life as darkness knows no light. Death will die, when mortal life will die at the Renovation.
Death conquers, but to be conquered in turn by life spiritual. Life dies in body; it dies not in spirit. Death ends the life of the flesh, when the life of the spirit lives for ever. The soul that animated the body, now wings its way heavenward.
Death confers life's liberty. Death in this world is but the name for the life in the next world. It is the life anew in the other world. Zadomarg, life and death, is the chamber with gates of life and death confronting each other. From one gate man enters and it is life for him; from another he departs and it is death for him. Death's door is but an entrance to another and higher life.
Death is deliverance to the incurably weary and happiness to the hopelessly miserable. Death brings the weary days of the sorrowing and suffering to an end. Death thus heals where life does not and gives peace to the dead which life yielded him not. Death soothes the mourners that they lose one another down upon earth to meet again on high in heaven. The thought that the survivors will one day join the dead consoles and brings respite from grief. Their departed dead rest in the yonder world and they will soon be gathered to them.
If death is to come, death will come and nothing upon earth or in heaven will stay it. Let me then be prepared to meet it. Death can kill my bodily life, it cannot destroy my spiritual life. Let me therefore live for the spirit, the life of the spirit faithfully and dutifully that I can force death to grovel at my feet. Death upon earth provides me with ascension towards thee, to live with thee and in thee, O thou Giver of Life and Death, Ahura Mazda.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, August 01, 2000.