THE GOAL OF THE DEPARTED SPIRIT

Sometimes the destination itself is vaguely named, but mention of the First Man (Ōhrmizd) makes it clear which Paradise is intended:

'Then shall you receive, at the end, a helmet, garland, and diadem from the god Ōhrmizd, the Father, within the Paradise of Light. There shall you rejoice and prosper forever, (and) be happy in gladness.'¹

The Coptic texts contain a good deal of material about the fate of the soul, but not much explicitly concerning the New Paradise. In one of the 'Psalms of the Bema' the soul is promised salvation within 'its kingdom', where

Thy Father, the First Man, will give thee thy life (?) . . . who (?) . . . to give it since thy beginning; the divine envoy of Truth will give thee the diadem of Light; . . . will give thee thy garland of renown.²

The psalm comes to an end almost upon these words, the soul being left in bliss with the First Man. A fuller statement of the doctrine of redemption in the New Paradise is contained in one of the 'Psalms of Heracleides',³ whose subject is the return of the First Man to Paradise after the triumph of the Light. In it the psalmist creates what is evidently a conscious parallel between this return, constituting the ultimate victory of the First Man, and the original re-entry of the First Man into Paradise after his encounter with the powers of Darkness.⁴ On the earlier occasion, the Spiritus Vivens Living Spirit had been sent as Envoy to summon the First Man back to consciousness, and had been asked by him:

How are our fathers, the sons of light, in their city?⁵

and had answered 'They are well'. In the Coptic psalm, an Envoy is sent in the same way to summon the First Man at the end of the world. He knocks at the gates of his dwelling-place and rouses him,

They purify the souls for the Light; they clothe the body of the Father; they rejoice in the New Kingdom forever and ever.

¹ Mir. Man. ii, p. 333⁴⁻⁸.
² Ps. Bk. 22¹⁶⁻¹⁹.
³ Ibid. 197–202.
⁴ The parallel is so closely worked out that Widengren has been deceived into thinking that the psalm refers in fact to the first scene in the battle of redemption, instead of the last. See his Mesopotamian Elements in Manichaeism, pp. 74–76. That this is not the case is shown by the interchanges between the Envoy and the First Man; see, for example, p. 201, ll. 17–18: 'The Light is set over the king of the Darkness: his host is bound, it is fettered. Take the news.'
⁵ See Theodor bar Konai, apud Cumont, Recherches, i, p. 24.