What Zoroastrianism says about time
Time in this tradition has a shape and a finish. There are three great periods, we are held to be living in the middle one, and it is going somewhere specific. Underneath that runs an ordinary rhythm of daily prayers and seasonal festivals. Ten concepts follow, from before birth to the last day.
The Three Periods
Creation, mixture, separation. We are said to be living in the mixture, the stretch where good and evil are tangled together, and it does not last.
Bundahishn
The Fravashi
Each soul has an eternal aspect said to exist before birth. A life is therefore an episode in something longer rather than the whole of it.
Fravashi Doctrine
The Five Daily Prayers
The day is divided into five watches, each with its own prayer: morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night. The structure is small and constant.
Prayer Tradition
Sacred Time
The calendar marks six seasonal festivals and monthly holy days. The year is deliberately shaped so that it keeps returning attention to the same things.
Calendar
Nowruz - New Year
The year turns at the spring equinox, and the festival is about renewal and the return of light. It is the most widely kept of the observances.
Festival
Daily Renewal
Each dawn is treated as a fresh commitment rather than a continuation. The daily rituals exist to make that restart explicit.
Practice
Frashokereti - The Final Renovation
The end is a renovation: evil destroyed, the dead raised, creation restored to what it was meant to be. It is a repair, not a replacement.
Eschatology
The Saoshyant
A future saviour is expected to lead the final turn of events. Tradition counts three of them, with the last one decisive.
Messianic Teaching
Ameretat - Immortality
Immortality is one of the divine attributes and one of the things creation is meant to end up with. It belongs to the finished state rather than to an escape from the world.
Avesta
Hope
Because the ending is settled, hope is treated as a reasonable position rather than an emotional one. It is what makes present effort worth making.
Philosophy
The interesting effect of a fixed ending is on the present. If the outcome is not in doubt, the daily prayers and the small right choices are not attempts to win anything. They are a way of standing on the side that wins, which is a different kind of motivation altogether.