The work “Ahreman’s Ascent and the Direction of His Primordial Aggression”, written by Professor Antonio Panaino, represents the most recent research in the field of Zoroastrian cosmology and has been released by the Institute of the History of Religions at the University of Strasbourg, France. The full English title of the book is “Ahreman’s Ascent and the Direction of His Primordial Aggression with an Excursus about the Cosmic Egg.”

Professor Antonio Panaino, a distinguished scholar of Ancient Iranian Languages at the University of Bologna, has devoted more than three decades to teaching and training Iranologists at this institution. The book addresses the primordial assault of Ahreman upon the realm of Ahura Mazda and his penetration into the celestial spheres. This theme, recorded in the Middle Persian text Bundahišn, constituted one of the fundamental cosmological concerns of ancient Zoroastrians.

One chapter explores the historical transformation of celestial depictions, from simple forms to the fully developed spherical model. Another examines the vertical and horizontal movements of Ahreman and discusses the Rivayat of Dastur Barzo Kamdin, a seventeenth-century Zoroastrian priest, who offered a later model for mapping the heavens from the perspectives of the Avesta and the Bundahišn. The Sasanian Iranians held a cosmological conception of the universe as spherical, comprised of multiple spheres and heavens.

The book concludes with illustrations of the celestial layers, accompanied by their names in Middle Persian (Pahlavi) and New Persian, thereby assisting readers in a deeper understanding of the subject. The volume consists of 114 pages.