Saoshyant

Also Known As: Avestan saoš́yant-, “one who will bring benefit”; personal name Astvat-ereta, “He who embodies righteousness”; Middle Persian Sōšāns; sometimes anglicised Soshyant or Soshyans
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Persian Mythology, Zoroastrian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He carries the inherited weapon of Iran’s great monster-killers and a gaze that turns everything it falls on immortal.
Role in Mythos: He is the last of three saviours born from Zoroaster’s preserved seed, and the man who will raise the dead and finish the world’s long war against the Lie.
Relation to Humans: Every human being who has ever lived will be resurrected by him and passed through a river of molten metal to be sorted and cleaned. He is not a god arriving from outside the species but a man from it, and the oldest use of his title was as something ordinary worshippers hoped to become.

Somewhere under the shallow water of a lake in Sistan, where the Helmand river spends itself in salt flats and the wind moves grit across the surface all day long, three lamps are supposed to burn. The Bundahishn says they can still be seen down there, glowing, warming nothing. What they light is seed. Zoroaster went to his third wife Hvov three times and three times the seed fell to the ground, and the yazata Neryosang took its brilliance and its strength and handed it to Anahita, keeper of the waters, to hold at the bottom of Lake Kayansih. Ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine guardian spirits were posted around it so that no demon could get near. One day a girl will wade in to bathe and come out pregnant, and the world will begin to end.

Before he was a person he was a job description. In the oldest Zoroastrian poetry the word saoshyant is a common noun, built on a future stem of a root meaning to swell, to strengthen, to be of use, and it turns up mostly in the plural. Zoroaster applies it to himself. He applies it to his own followers, to the ones who will come after, to anyone who thinks with the Good Mind and stands against Wrath. One liturgical passage has the congregation pray outright, in the first person plural, that they might be saoshyants and might be victorious. The most famous saviour figure in Iranian religion started life as a word you could volunteer for.

The hardening came later. In the younger layers of the Avesta the plural narrows to one man, the Victorious Saoshyant, and he acquires a proper name: Astvat-ereta, lifted almost verbatim from a line of Zoroaster’s own asking that righteousness be embodied. His mother is named too, twice over. She is Eredat-fedhri, She Who Brings Fulfilment To The Father, and Vispa-taurvairi, She Who Conquers All, and the Avesta explains the second name flatly enough that no one can miss the point: she is all-conquering because she will bear the one who overcomes every hostility of demons and of men. Despite all this the son stays human. He is born of two human parents, he is thirty years old when he acts, and nothing in the texts lets him off being a man.

The Zamyad Yasht, which is really a hymn to the kingly Glory rather than to any person, saves him for its last verses. Astvat-ereta rises out of Lake Kasava, friend of Ahura Mazda, son of Vispa-taurvairi, knowing the victorious knowledge, and in his hand is a weapon with a provenance. It is the weapon Thraetaona held when Azhi Dahaka was killed, the weapon Kavi Husravah held when the Turanian Frangrasyan was killed, the weapon Vishtaspa held when he beat back the enemy host. One of the four men on that list of previous owners is Frangrasyan himself, who spent three attempts of the same Yasht stripping naked and diving into the sea trying to steal the Glory, and failed all three times. The weapon has passed through better and worse hands. It ends in the last pair.

Then the Yasht does something odd and rather beautiful with it. Having armed him, it never shows him strike. He looks with the eye of intelligence over the whole of creation, he looks with the eye of plenty over the entire corporeal world, and his look delivers the living to immortality. The killing in that final battle is done by others, and mostly by abstractions given bodies: Aeshma of the wounding spear bows and runs, Aka Manah is struck down by Vohu Manah, the word of falsehood is struck down by the word of truth, and Haurvatat and Ameretat between them put an end to hunger and thirst. Angra Mainyu bends, flees, and becomes powerless. There is no duel. Evil simply stops being able to.

The Pahlavi books, written under the Sasanians and after, took this single figure and made a system out of it. Zoroaster’s preserved seed now produces three sons across three millennia. Ushedar comes first, conceived in the world-year 9970, winning a great victory at thirty; Ushedarmah follows a thousand years later; and each time the world improves for a while and then rots again. Astvat-ereta is conceived last, in 11,943, and the final battle runs twenty-seven years, three nines, before Frashokereti arrives at the round twelve thousand. Mary Boyce called these arrangements artificial and thought they were built to fit a millennial chronology the western Iranian priesthood had picked up under Babylonian influence. The tidiness gives it away. The Avesta knows one saviour, not three, and the two elder brothers have names and virgin mothers modelled so obviously on Astvat-ereta’s that the imitation is visible in the Avestan.

The Bundahishn is where the end times get their texture. Appetite thins out first. In the millennium of Ushedarmah one taste of consecrated food will keep a person full for three days and nights; then people give up meat, then milk, then bread, and for the last ten years before the saviour comes they eat nothing at all and do not die. The bones of Gayomart are raised first, then those of the first human couple, then everyone else, and the whole resurrection takes fifty-seven years. In the assembly that follows, a wicked man stands out among the righteous like a white sheep in a black flock. The hills are melted down and run over the earth as a river of metal, and every human being walks into it. To the righteous it feels like warm milk.

At the end of it Saoshyant does something a priest does. With his helpers he performs a yasna, and the ox Hadhayosh is offered in it, and from the fat of that ox and the white Haoma they mix the drink called Hush and hand it out, and after that nobody dies. The dead come back at the age of forty, or at fifteen if they died as children. Everyone is given their spouse and shown their children. Life goes on exactly as before except that no more children are born, because the world is full and finished.

His limits are the interesting part. He cannot come early. He is bound to a calendar, he needs fifteen men and fifteen women to help him, and he has no power at all until the appointed year, which means that every generation waiting for him is waiting on arithmetic. He has not come. Zoroastrian communities in Iran calculated that the tenth millennium would close in the early seventeenth century, and their letters to the Parsis in India say they hope to look on Hushedar’s face; the year 1630 passed and he did not appear, and no firm date has been attached to him since. The priests now teach that it is Ushedar who is due, which buys another thousand years. And underneath the schedule the old plural meaning is still sitting there in the Gathas, where being a saoshyant was not something you waited for but something you did.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Saoshyant in Zoroastrianism?

Saoshyant is the future saviour of the world in Zoroastrian belief, whose Avestan personal name is Astvat-ereta, “He who embodies righteousness.” He will be born from the seed of Zoroaster, miraculously preserved at the bottom of a lake, and will raise the dead, defeat evil finally, and bring about Frashokereti, the renovation of the world. Despite his miraculous conception he remains fully human.

How is Saoshyant born?

Zoroaster’s seed fell to the ground three times, and it was gathered by the yazata Neryosang and entrusted to Anahita, who keeps it at the bottom of Lake Kayansih in Sistan, guarded by 99,999 spirits of the righteous. When the end approaches, a virgin bathing in the lake will conceive by it. His mother is called Eredat-fedhri and also Vispa-taurvairi, “She who conquers all.”

How many Saoshyants are there?

The Avesta speaks of one Victorious Saoshyant, but the later Pahlavi books describe three brothers born from Zoroaster’s preserved seed across three millennia: Ushedar, Ushedarmah, and finally Astvat-ereta himself. Mary Boyce regarded this three-saviour scheme as an artificial priestly system built to fit a millennial chronology adopted under Babylonian influence. In the Gathas the word is a plural common noun applied to ordinary faithful people, not a proper name at all.

What does Saoshyant do at the end of the world?

He raises every human being who has ever lived, a process the Bundahishn says takes fifty-seven years, and then presides over a judgement in which all humanity passes through a river of molten metal. He then performs a final sacrifice of the ox Hadhayosh, and from its fat mixed with the white Haoma a drink is prepared that makes everyone immortal. In the Zamyad Yasht his gaze alone is enough to deliver the living to immortality.

Has Saoshyant come yet?

No. Zoroastrian communities in Iran calculated that the millennium of Hushedar should arrive in the early seventeenth century and wrote to their Parsi co-religionists in India expressing that hope, but the year 1630 passed without him. Since then no definite calendar date has been attached to his coming, and priests teach that Ushedar, the first of the three saviours, is the one still awaited.