abandoning it to the birds or beasts of prey.  It was considered a great misfortune if these respected the body, for it was an almost certain indication of the wrath of Ahura-mazda, and it was thought that the defunct had led an evil life.  When the bones had been sufficiently stripped of flesh, they were collected together, and deposited either in an earthenware urn or in a stone ossuary with a cover, or in a monumental tomb either hollowed out in the heart of the mountain or in the living rock, or raised up above the level of the ground.  Meanwhile the soul remained in the neighbourhood for three days, hovering near the head of the corpse, and by the recitation of prayers it experienced, according to its condition of purity or impurity, as much of joy or sadness as the whole world experiences.  When the third night was past, the just soul set forth across luminous plains, refreshed by a perfumed breeze, and its good thoughts and words and deeds took shape before it “under the guise of a young maiden, radiant and strong, with well-developed bust, noble mien, and glorious face, about fifteen years of age, and as beautiful as the most beautiful;” the unrighteous soul, on the contrary, directed its course towards the north, through a tainted land, amid the squalls of a pestilential hurricane, and there encountered its past ill deeds, under the form of an ugly and wicked young woman, the ugliest and most wicked it had ever seen.  The genius Rashnu Razishta, the essentially truthful, weighed its virtues or vices in an unerring balance, and acquitted or Condemned it on the impartial testimony of its past life.  On issuing from the judgment-hall, the soul arrived at the approach to the bridge Cinvaut, which, thrown across the abyss of hell, led to paradise.  The soul, if impious, was unable to cross this bridge, but was hurled down into the abyss, where it became the slave of Angro-mainyus.  If pure, it crossed the bridge without difficulty by the help of the angel Sraosha, and was welcomed by Vohu-mano, who conducted it before the throne of Ahura-mazda, in the same way as he had led Zoroaster, and assigned to it the post which it should occupy until the day of the resurrection of the body.*

* All this picture of the fate of the soul is taken from the Vendidad, where the fate of the just is described, and in the Yasht, where the condition of faithful and impious souls respectively is set forth on parallel lines.  The classical authors teach us nothing on this subject, and the little they actually say only proves that the Persians believed in the immortality of the soul.  The main outlines of the picture here set forth go back to the times of the Achaemenids and the Medes, except the abstract conception of the goddess who leads the soul of the dead as an incarnation of his good or evil deeds.

The religious observances enjoined on the members of the priestly caste were innumerable and minute.  Ahura-mazda and his colleagues had not, as was the