Glossary — The Fire and the Veil

¶ Glossary

In one line. The vocabulary the work runs on — Zoroastrian, Second-Temple Jewish, and mystical — defined plainly, each linked to the sourced page that argues it in full. Where a term names a contested borrowing, the entry says so.

¶ The master axis

• Asha — Truth, the right order of things; the single standard the whole project answers to. What does Asha mean?
• Druj — the Lie, disorder; the cosmic opposite of Asha, and the principle that wins whenever the real is overwritten by its impersonation.
• Apokalypsis (unveiling) — the drawing-back of a covering on what is already present; the Greek word behind "Revelation." On a text it is criticism; on the cosmos it is unveiling; on a self it is fire.
• Participation vs. identity — the fork the whole map turns on: the divine present in and through a creature who remains distinct (participation), versus the creature's separateness being unreal (identity). Participation vs. identity mysticism
• The tier system — the honesty convention by which every load-bearing claim wears its weight: bedrock, contested-but-grounded, reconstruction, construction, bracketed. How every claim is weighed
• The four tells of an overwrite — the four places a substitution leaves a fingerprint: grammar, seam, translation, motive. The method
• Descent / influence / convergence — three distinct genealogical relations a careless eye flattens into one: descent is record, influence is contested, convergence is resonance.

¶ The Persian substrate (Zoroastrian)

• Ahura Mazda — the Wise Lord, the good creator of Zoroastrianism. Who is Ahura Mazda?
• Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) — the Destructive Spirit, source of the Lie; in the Gathas a chooser of evil, not God's co-equal. Who is Angra Mainyu?
• Spenta Mainyu — the Bounteous Spirit; Angra Mainyu's true opposite, with Ahura Mazda above the pairing.
• Amesha Spentas — the Bounteous Immortals, the graded divine entourage of the Wise Lord.
• Frashokereti — the "Making-Wonderful," the final renovation and renewal of the world. What is Frashokereti?
• Saoshyant — the future benefactor born of Zarathushtra's line who brings the renovation and the resurrection. What is the Saoshyant?
• The Magi — the Median / Zoroastrian priestly class; the magoi behind the "wise men." Who were the Magi?
• Zarathustra (Zoroaster) — the ancient Iranian prophet whose own hymns, the Gathas, ground the whole tradition; his date a 500-year range, not a fact. Who was Zoroaster?
• Zurvan — "Time"; in the Zurvanite current the prior principle who fathers both Ohrmazd and Ahriman, sliding the religion toward true dualism. What is Zurvanism?
• Chinvat Bridge — the Bridge of the Separator the soul crosses at judgment, met by its own conscience, the daena. What is the Chinvat Bridge?
• The Amesha Spentas — the Bounteous Immortals, the graded entourage of the Wise Lord; an archangel resonance, not a proven borrowing. What are the Amesha Spentas?

¶ The Second-Temple turn (biblical)

• ha-satan — "the accuser," an office in the divine court (Job 1–2), later composited into the Devil. Where did Satan come from? · Is the Devil in the Old Testament?
• The divine council — the heavenly assembly of Psalm 82, Deuteronomy 32:8, and Job 1–2; the bene elohim behind emerging monotheism. What is the divine council? · The sons of God in Genesis 6
• Two Powers in Heaven — a second divine figure beside God, current in Second-Temple Judaism before the rabbis named it heresy. The Two Powers in Heaven · Who is the Son of Man?
• The Memra / Logos — the divine Word as agent (Targumic Memra, Philo's Logos, John 1); at home in Judaism before John. The Logos and the Memra
• The Two Spirits — the Prince of Light and the Angel of Darkness of the Community Rule (1QS); the closest Jewish parallel to Iranian dualism. The Dead Sea Scrolls on good and evil · Did Zoroastrianism influence Judaism?
• The Watchers — the rebel angels of 1 Enoch 6–16; a Second-Temple source of demonology. Who are the Watchers? · What is the Book of Jubilees?
• Resurrection — the bodily-rising hope that emerges in the Second-Temple period (Daniel 12, 2 Maccabees 7). Where did the resurrection idea come from? · Where did the idea of heaven come from?
• Sheol / Hades / Gehenna — three distinct words (the grave; the Greek underworld; the Valley of Hinnom) flattened into one English "hell." Gehenna vs Sheol vs Hades
• aiōnios — the contested Greek adjective at Matthew 25:46, read as "eternal" or "of an age"; the Greek settles it for no one. What does aionios mean?
• Apokatastasis — the universal restoration of all things; the oldest Christian universalism. What is apokatastasis? · Who was Origen?
• The Antichrist — a composite end-time adversary assembled from the man of lawlessness, the beast, and Daniel's little horn. Where did the Antichrist come from?
• The rapture — the pretribulation "catching up" of believers; a modern doctrine (Darby, c.1830; Scofield, 1909), not the ancient church. Where did the rapture come from?

¶ The deeper architecture (mysticism & the fire)

• Gevurah — the Kabbalah's "severity"; disciplined power, the fire that must restore rather than destroy. What is Gevurah?
• Theosis (essence & energies) — deification by participation in God's energies, never the essence. What is theosis?
• Waḥdat al-wujūd — Ibn ʿArabī's "unity of being"; theophany, not crude pantheism. What is wahdat al-wujud?
• Advaita — the non-dual "identity" reading; the fork inside both East and West. Advaita vs. Christianity
• The Integrated Sovereign — the human form of the architecture: mercy and severity as one faculty, turned first on oneself. The Integrated Sovereign
• The Zohar — Kabbalah's masterwork; on Scholem's case, the 13th-century work of Moses de León. What is the Zohar?
• Ein Sof — "the Infinite, Without-End"; God beyond all name, from which the ten Sefirot emanate. What is Ein Sof?

¶ How the church was built (canon & councils)

• The canon — the list of books that made the Bible; settled by no single council, with Marcion as catalyst and Athanasius' 367 letter first listing the 27. How was the canon formed? · What books were left out?
• Nicaea (325) — the council that affirmed the Son as homoousios with the Father; it did not choose the canon or invent the Trinity. What happened at Nicaea?
• Marcion — the 2nd-century teacher whose shortened canon forced the proto-orthodox to define their own. Who was Marcion?
• Gnosticism — a modern category (King) for the demiurge, the divine spark, and gnosis; the thing vs the heresiologist caricature. What is Gnosticism?
• The immortal soul — the Platonic detachable soul, distinguished by Cullmann from the Hebrew nephesh and the resurrection hope. Is the soul Greek, not biblical?
• Purgatory — on Le Goff's account, a place that crystallized in the 12th–13th centuries from older prayer for the dead. Where did Purgatory come from?

Every term here is argued, not asserted — follow the link for the sources and the tier each claim is filed at.

→ Read the book: The Fire and the Veil (free, with a DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20619291). · The method: how every claim is weighed.

Foundation of Asha · CC BY 4.0.