Before Heaven and Hell

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue – Before Heaven, Before Hell
2. Chapter One - The Fire and the Word
3. Chapter Two - The Birth of Cosmic Dualism
4. Chapter Three - Judgment, the Afterlife, and the Crossing of Souls
5. Chapter Four - Influencing the Book Religions
6. Chapter Five - Persia’s Priests, Celestial Science, and the Birth of “Magic”
7. Chapter Six - Persepolis Burns
8. Chapter Seven - The Flame That Would Not Die
9. Chapter Eight - Modern Echoes
10. Chapter Nine - The Forgotten Flame

Excerpt

PROLOGUE – BEFORE HEAVEN, BEFORE HELL BEFORE ANGELS SPROUTED wings. Before Satan fell. Before a garden and a serpent, a prophet stepped forward and lit a fire. His name was Zarathustra, or to the Greeks, Zoroaster. He walked the earth sometime around 1200 BCE (maybe earlier), in a land we now call Iran, and he looked at the world. Not with fear, but with vision. He saw a cosmos not ruled by chaos, but by choice. A battle, not between gods and monsters, but between truth and the lie. Light and dark. Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. And he did something no one had ever done: He codified morality as a cosmic law. He made ethics metaphysical. He said: the universe runs on fire and the fire is...