bridge Chinvat, made by Ahura-Mazda, whither souls of the dead on their way to give account of their deeds in life must come, the good to pass over, the wicked to fall into the abyss; to this day the Parsi declares in solemn confession of his faith, that he is wholly without doubt in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat.[1] Perhaps it was from this Persian source that the myth found its way into Rabbinical literature,[2] and into the accepted belief of Islam. Over the midst of the Moslem Hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat, finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword. There all souls of the dead must pass along, but while the good reach the other side in safety, the wicked fall off into the abyss.[3]
In Scandinavian mythology, the bridge on the Hell-way, where the pale unsubstantial dead ride over the river Gjöll, is part and parcel of the myth of Baldur in the Prose Edda.[4] But it seems rather from the Oriental group just described, that the ideas of the bridge in Christian Europe had their source. The "Brig of Dread, na brader than a thread," sung of in the grand old Lyke-Wake Dirge of our North Country,[5] was a recognized part of the architecture of Purgatory and Hell, to be seen and even passed over by the ecstatic explorers whose visions of the future state were a staple commodity of pious literature in the middle ages. It is thus described when Owayne Miles, one of King Stephen's Knights, descends into St. Patrick's Purgatory:—
"Over the water a brygge there was,
Forsothe kenere than ony glasse:
Hit was narowe and hit was hyge,
Onethe that other end he syge.
The mydylle was hyg, the ende was lowe,
Hit ferde as hit hadde ben a bent bo we.
The develle sayde, 'Knyghte, here may thu se
Into helle the rygte entré:
Over thys brygge thu meste wende,
Wynde and rayne we shulle the sende:
We shulle the sende wynde full goode,
That shall the caste ynto the floode.'"
- ↑ Avesta, tr. by Spiegel & Bleeck, vol. i. p. 141, vol. ii. p. 14, vol. iiL p. 163; Alger, 'Doctrine of a Future Life;' New York, 1866, p. 136.
- ↑ Eisenmenger, 'Entd. Judenthum;' part ii. p. 258.
- ↑ Lane, Mod. Eg., vol. i. p. 95.
- ↑ Prose Edda: Gylfaginning, 49. Grimm, D. M., p. 794.
- ↑ Brand, Pop. Ant., vol. ii. p. 275.
