Chapter 169. The Awaited One: Saoshyant, Messiah, Christ, Mahdi, Maitreya, Kalki and Mitra Compared

Nearly every tradition in this study that counts time toward an end also expects a person who will close it. Chapter 166 covered the scenarios of the end. This chapter is about the figure: his birth, his forerunners, his enemy, his task, and the political order his coming is supposed to create. The comparison runs from the Zoroastrian Saoshyant to the Jewish Messiah, the returning Christ, the Mahdi and the Islamic Isa, the Buddhist Maitreya and the Hindu Kalki. It ends with the modern syntheses that fold them all into one figure, and with two contemporary redefinitions, Keshe’s and Heisman’s, that take the saviour out of human form altogether. Along the way it sets the awaited figures beside the older god-kings and dying gods of Part 1 (ch. 3–8). Those figures were not awaited at the end of time, but they supplied much of the language of kingship and of victory over death that the later saviours carry.

1. The Saoshyant: a saviour from preserved seed

Moulton finds the root in the Gathic hope of a “Consummation” that “involves a ‘Renovation of the World,’ a divine event towards which the whole creation is moving”. In the Yashts the royal succession “passes on immediately to Saoshyant (who in the Yashts is a purely supernatural figure), to appear in the future at the Frashokereti” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011]. Carter gives the later Pahlavi account of his birth. “Zaratust went near unto his wife Hvov three times, and each time the seed went to the ground; the angel Neryosang received the brilliance and strength of that seed, delivered it with care to the angel Anahid”. “The seed is preserved in Lake Kasava, till at the end of the earthly cycle, the maid Eredat-fedhri, bathing in the lake will conceive by that seed and bring forth the Saviour, Saoshyant. His two fore-runners, Ukhshyat-ereta and Ukhshyat-Nemah, will be born in the same way of Srutat-fedhri and Vanghu-fedhri” [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114]. The Yasht text he quotes states the task: “We sacrifice unto the kingly glory, that will cleave unto the victorious Saoshyant and his helpers, when he shall restore the world, which will thenceforth never grow old and never die” [Carter, #55114; cf. ch. 17]. The ERE adds that the time before “the coming of the three restorers of faith will be marked by misery and impiety” [ERE, “Ages of the World (Zoroastrian)”, #60381].

The “kingly glory” that will cleave to the Saoshyant is the khvarenah of ch. 8: “a mystical radiant force emanating from men chosen by God that confers upon them both divine right of kings and the cosmic capacity to do so justly”. A king keeps it while he rules by asha and loses it when druj enters his heart, and Yasht 19 names the “fortune of the kavis” [Wikipedia: Khvarenah]. The saviour of the end therefore inherits the legitimating force of the earliest Iranian kings. The oldest of those kings is Yima. Boyce reconstructs him as “the first king to reign on earth and the first man to die”, who rules “the underworld kingdom of the dead” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, “1.2.5”]. In this pairing the first king opens the age of death and the last saviour closes it.

2. The prototype question

Carter argues that the idea runs from Iran to Israel. “Are we to suppose that any of these conceptions were borrowed from Judaism? In the earliest Iranian literature there is expressed the hope of a coming Saviour. The idea is certainly Zoroastrian. The worshipping Magi that centuries later came from the East to honor the Babe of Bethlehem were familiar with the conception” [Carter, #55114]. He also ranks the two hopes. The Jews, “feeling themselves to be without any present, … threw themselves on the future. In contrast with this, the Zoroastrian conception of a Messiah, Saoshyant, who will give immortality and blessedness to all the righteous, is a lofty and spiritual hope. With the Jews, a spiritual interpretation of the Messianic hope was confined to the prophets and a few devout children of Yahveh” [Carter, #55114].

Sundermann frames the question more cautiously. He sets out to “substantiate the fact of Zoroastrian influence on other religions or at least of a Zoroastrian anticipation of certain religious ideas in a common ambiance”. His alternative, a common environment rather than direct borrowing, concedes the doubters’ point [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067]. His test case is the demon Asmodaios. There he records Isidor Scheftelowitz’s philological objection that an Iranian aēšma daēva “hätte »yšmdyw werden müssen”, and he notes that “Scheftelowitz was not the only one to doubt” Iranian derivations [Sundermann, #55067]. If borrowing is hard to prove even for a single name, then a saviour-figure, which can arise independently from the hopes of any oppressed people, is harder still (see also chs. 17, 31).

The prototype question also reaches back behind Zarathushtra, to kings who were themselves divine or stood next to the gods. In Egypt the pharaoh was “Son of Ra” and “acted as judge like the sun-god Ra-Harakhty” [The Egyptians: An Introduction, #363364]. The myth of Osiris joined that kingship to victory over death. Mercatante writes that because Osiris “conquered death… the Egyptians believed his followers would also conquer death”, and that in every funerary inscription “what happened to Osiris was also done for the deceased” [Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology, #72968, “Osiris”]. Horus wins the throne by a lawsuit against Set, not by single combat [Mercatante, #72968, “Horus”]. This is a dynastic succession, not an expected return (ch. 4). Mesopotamia gave the reverse model. In early Assyria the title “king” belonged to the god Ashur, the Neo-Assyrian king was “not a god” but “the chief servant of the chief god”, and Hammurabi claimed rule “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi]. The exception was Naram-Sin, whose people “built a temple for him and he was named god of the city” [Collins, The Sumerians, #64812] (ch. 3, ch. 8). Read against these two models, the Davidic Messiah resembles the Mesopotamian servant-king, and the returning Christ resembles a divine king who has passed through death.

The figure of the god who dies and returns is the most disputed precedent. In the Baal Cycle, Mot swallows Baal and takes him to the underworld, drought follows, and after Anat destroys Mot, Baal returns to bring rain [Wikipedia: Canaanite religion]. Day notes that Baal “was considered to be dead in the underworld for half the year” [Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, #86469, ch. 1]. The Dictionary of Deities and Demons holds that the later Adonis cult “probably” continued “the worship of a Phoenician Baal, conceived as a dying and rising god” [DDD, #66939]. Hiram I’s “awakening (egersis) of Heracles”, that is of Melqart, is read as possible evidence of the same pattern [Wikipedia: Melqart] (ch. 5). The general category is older and weaker than these cases. It comes from Frazer, and the reference shelf records that his “myth and ritual” theory “is disputed” [Wikipedia: Sacred king]. Juliette Wood calls the modern Goddess a “Frazer’s Dying God, resuscitated once again and cross-dressed”, which shows how far the dying god is a construct of comparative scholarship [Wood, “The concept of the Goddess”, #50933, ch. 1] (ch. 1–2). In the sources these gods return within the year’s cycle. None of them comes at the end of time, which is where the Saoshyant, the Messiah and the Mahdi all stand.

3. Three Abrahamic saviours in parallel

Negru sets out the Abrahamic figures as a structural series: “The messianic emperor precedes Jesus Christ, the Mahdi precedes Isa; the Messiah is a Jew, the messianic emperor is a Christian, the Mahdi is a Muslim; the Messiah protects Judaism”, and so on. Each forerunner protects his own religion. The series also has a polemical overlap: “Christian tradition says that the Antichrist will disguise himself as the Messiah expected by the Jews” [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, Part I]. Joseph, writing in Romanian, gives the shared geography: Christian, Islamic and Jewish doctrine “agree that the Messiah will one day come to Earth, in physical form, and that his first stop will be on the Temple Mount. The three religions no longer share the same opinion, of course, when it comes to the identity of the Messiah and what he will do once he comes” [Joseph, Sfârșitul e aproape, #16863, “Viitor (I) Mesia”; trans.]. He also reports twentieth-century rabbinic expectations: Rabbi Kaduri waited “almost a century” to see the Mashiach, and Rabbi Menachem Schneerson of Brooklyn made similar predictions [Joseph, #16863].

Negru gives the Islamic sequence in detail. “The Mahdi will come out in a year divisible by 2; he will announce his presence in the city of Mecca between the corner from Ka’ba and the place of Abraham and will urge the people to show him loyalty. Then he will go to Kufa”. Against him gather “al-Dajjal and Sufyani (one of the oppressors who works for al-Dajjal; the correspondent of the ‘False Prophet’ from Revelation 13:11-14)”. Isa “will join the forces of the Mahdi and he will kill al-Dajjal. Isa will preach the Islamic teachings and all the people of the book (Christians and Jews) will believe in him” [Negru, #62383]. His overall judgement is that “Islam eschatology copies to a great extent Christian eschatology, but the key difference between the two consists in the importance of the events”. Since Christ in Islam “was only an important prophet, his return has a secondary importance” [Negru, #62383].

4. Saviours as political programmes

In every tradition the awaited figure has been claimed by real people, and each claim carried a political form. In Judaism the line runs from the Second Temple sects to Bar Kokhba’s revolt, and then to Sabbatai Zevi’s apostasy and Jacob Frank’s antinomian sect (chs. 33–34, 36). In Shi’ism, Twelver doctrine places the Hidden Imam in occultation (ch. 74). Mahdism then produced the Sudanese Mahdi state, the Bab’s claim and the Babi uprisings (ch. 81), and the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca on behalf of Juhayman’s Mahdi claimant (ch. 80). The Islamic Republic’s velayat-e faqih is explicitly government in the Imam’s absence (ch. 144). Negru’s observation that Cyrus “turned into a messianic model for the Jews” and Constantine was idolised by Christians in the same way points to a constant pattern: rulers are taken as the saviour’s precursors [Negru, #62383, Part II].

The Christian West produced the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster (ch. 65), Sun Myung Moon’s “Lord of the Second Advent” (ch. 131) and David Koresh as “the Lamb” (ch. 133). In China, Christian and Buddhist expectations met. Hong Xiuquan presented himself as Jesus’ younger brother and founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and Maitreya was the banner of the White Lotus and Red Turban risings that ended with the foundation of the Ming (ch. 102). Hidden Religion lists the White Lotus Society alongside the Templars as a secret society with a religious purpose [Issitt & Main, Hidden Religion, #66220]. India’s saviour is cyclical rather than final. Negru writes that “Kalki will come to put an end to the present era of darkness and destruction dominated by the male demon Kali”, but that “Kalki is also perceived as a metaphor for the eternity of time, while the end of the world is seen as a depletion of an era and the start of a new one, in an endlessly repeating cycle” [Negru, #62383; ch. 90].

5. Esoteric merger: one Messiah under many names

The esoteric literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries treats all the expected figures as one person. Dushkova states that “the present Great King of Shambhala is the Messiah promised by all world religions: Christ of Christianity, Maitreya of Buddhism, Mahdi of Islam, Kalki of Hinduism”, along with the other names in her list, including the Saoshyant. Under his reign as “Kalki Rudra Chakrin (Sanskrit, ‘Forceful Wheel Holder’)”, she writes, “the Great Battle of Armageddon was to be fought between the forces of Good — the Warriors of Shambhala — and the forces of evil” [Dushkova, The Book of Secret Wisdom, #63276]. She dates his approach: “the Great Period of 1998–1999 was marked by the further descent of Maitreya into Shambhala, from the Fiery World into the Subtle World of the Earth”, with “the Sacrament of the descent of the Spirit of the Messiah into the aura of His Mother” in the Tower of Chung in 1998 [Dushkova, #63276]. Pike’s Masonry instead reduces the Christ to the first rank among teachers. It sees in “Moses … Confucius and Zoroaster … Jesus of Nazareth, and … the Arabian Iconoclast, Great Teachers of Morality, and Eminent Reformers, if no more”, and leaves each brother free to assign a “higher and even Divine Character” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717].

6. Keshe and Heisman: the saviour without a person

Keshe reads the messianic expectations of his own time politically and turns them against the religious leaders. The summary of KSW 636 reads “Moslems – Methi; New war to accept Messiah; Religious war – timed to match scriptures”. In the transcript he says: “This war with Iran is done by religious leaders, paving the path for coming of their Methi, according to their script … But whose Methi is the real one?” [Keshe, KSW 636, #378348]. Earlier, on 9 April 2020, he opened KSW 323 with “Birthday of Mahdi, Messiah”, called the day “the 9th day of the 12 day celebration, is a holy day”, and declared: “Today is the birth of Mahdi and he has manifested himself in all dimensions to save humanity in every condition for his soul. From now on the physicality is irrelevant” [Keshe, KSW 323, #378035]. In the same workshop he says that “we will handle all of this with the Iranian security in time” [Keshe, #378035]. By KSW 569 (19 December 2024), which is headed “2025 Year of Messiah”, the saviour has become a kind of knowledge: “Knowledge of Creation is Messiah – not man”. The Winter Solstice is “the Birth of Mitra”, and listeners should “understand the process of the virgin birth … Then understand the process of resurrection”. He argues that Christianity “changed … from Sun to Son” [Keshe, KSW 569, #378281]. The same session introduces three new “Twinity” products, explained as “you need two to tango” [Keshe, #378281]. For his earlier statements on Mitra’s “birth” see ch. 153. The oldest Mitra in the library’s sources is neither born nor a saviour. In the Rigveda he is the “benevolent, friendly, reassuring” half of a sovereign pair with Varuna, keeping ṛta, the order of the cosmos [Ries, Il culto di Mithra, #38276]. His name meant “friendship” in Sanskrit and “compact” in Avestan [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II] (ch. 6–7). Moulton reports Cumont’s view that Mithra’s solar identity came from a later Chaldaean assimilation “to Shamash the god of the Sun”, so that in Rome “Mithra was commonly called Sol invictus, though he was really distinct from the Sun” [#55011, Lecture II]. Keshe’s solstice “Birth of Mitra” therefore rests on the late solar Mithra, not on the Vedic god of contract.

Heisman also removes the human saviour, replacing him with a machine. “The Singularity is the intelligent transcendence of biological nature taken to its historical extreme: the advent of a greater-than-human artificial intelligence”. He adds that “all of these monotheistic traditions were ultimately human-ruled. The potential of the Singularity is the potential to transcend each and every high point of human history — including all previous religions” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252; ch. 165].

Key points

• Carter gives the Pahlavi birth legend of the Saoshyant and his two forerunners from Zarathustra’s seed kept in Lake Kasava, and calls the coming-Saviour idea “certainly Zoroastrian” [#55114].
• The Saoshyant’s “kingly glory” is the old Iranian khvarenah of rightful kings. Yima, the first king and first to die, stands at the other end of the same line (ch. 6, 8).
• The god-king of Egypt, whose Osiris “conquered death”, and the servant-king of Mesopotamia, deified only in cases such as Naram-Sin, are precedents for the saviour-king but not awaited figures [#72968; #363364; #64812].
• Baal’s yearly return from Mot and Melqart’s “awakening” are the sources’ cases of a dying-and-rising god. Frazer’s general category “is disputed”, and Wood treats it as a construct of comparative scholarship [#86469; #66939; #50933].
• The Vedic Mitra is a friendly sovereign of contract and ṛta. His solar identity, on which Keshe’s “Birth of Mitra” depends, comes from a later assimilation to Shamash, as Moulton reports Cumont [#38276; #55011].
• Sundermann’s caution about proving influence, with Scheftelowitz’s objection and the “common ambiance” alternative, leaves the prototype thesis open [#55067].
• Negru sets the Messiah, messianic emperor and Mahdi in parallel, each protecting his religion, and judges that Islamic eschatology “copies to a great extent” the Christian [#62383].
• Joseph notes that all three Abrahamic traditions expect the Messiah’s first stop on the Temple Mount but disagree on his identity [#16863].
• Real claimants turned saviour-belief into politics: Bar Kokhba, Sabbatai Zevi, Münster, the Taiping, the Sudanese Mahdi, the 1979 Mecca siege and velayat-e faqih (chs. 33–36, 65, 74, 80–81, 102, 144).
• Negru reports that Kalki can be read as a metaphor for cyclical renewal rather than a final end [#62383].
• Dushkova merges Christ, Maitreya, Mahdi, Kalki and the other expected figures into one King of Shambhala [#63276].
• Keshe accuses religious leaders of staging war to bring their “Methi” and declares “Knowledge of Creation is Messiah – not man”. Heisman’s Singularity replaces every human saviour [#378348; #378281; #38252].