Ohrmazd’s Divine Mercy and the End of the World between Apocatastasis and Apocalypse

Abstract

This article focuses on the central importance of the concept of apocatastasis (or apokatastasis)—the full regeneration of the world and the annihilation of hell—within the framework of the Zoroastrian doctrine of the end of the world, as well as its origin and development. This study insists strongly on a necessary distinction between this idea and the more frequently-encountered doctrine of apocalypse, which does not strictly concern the end of the millennial Mazdæan cycle, but marks only an historical phase of crisis. The idea of apocatastasis does not belong to the earliest Iranian tradition, but was the product of a slow process of adaptation of new theological ideas, partly of Christian origin, that emerged during a period of social crisis. The final synthesis represented a transformation of the theological and philosophical perception of the annihilation of hell in a new universally-optimistic cosmological perspective.