Table of Contents

  • CORVÉE

    Cross-Reference

    See BĪGĀR.

  • CORVIDAE

    Cross-Reference

    See CROW.

  • COSMETICS

    This article is based on information provided by Žāla Mottaḥedīn and Eqbāl Yaḡmāʾī.

    prepara­tions for personal beautification, in Persian tradition used mainly by women on special occasions.

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY

    Multiple Authors

    theories of the origins and structure of the universe.

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY i. In Zoroastrianism/Mazdaism

    Philip G. Kreyenbroek

    The “orthodox” myth. The extant Avesta contains no systematic exposition of the cosmological beliefs of the people among whom it was composed and who eventually brought Zoroastrianism to western Iran.

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY ii. In Mithraism

    Roger Beck

    That Mithraism had an elaborate cosmology, central to its doctrines, is proven first by the structure of its cult shrines (mithraea), which took the form of caves (real or artificial) because, as Porphyry (6) stated, the cave is an “image of the cosmos.” For this reason mithraea were equipped with “symbols of the cosmic elements and climates set at appropriate intervals.”

    This Article Has Images/Tables.

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY iii. In Manicheism

    Werner Sundermann

    Manicheism, like contemporary Zoroastrianism and various gnostic sects, offered a detailed cosmogonic myth, or cosmology.

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY iv. In the Mazdakite religion

    Werner Sundermann

    The most important source for modern knowledge of Mazdakite cosmogony is the description of the Mazdakite religion in Ketāb al-melal wa’l-neḥal, writ­ten by Abu’l-Fatḥ Moḥammad b. ʿAbd-al-Karīm Šahrestānī, in 624/1227, several hundred years after the period in which the sect flourished. 

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY v. In Twelver Shiʿism

    Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi

    Imami traditions contain a chaotic abundance of material portraying the origin and structure of the universe. Book XIV, “On the heavens and the earth,” of Moḥammad-Bāqer Majlesī’s Beḥār al-anwār, fills ten volumes (LVII-LXVI) in the most recent edition and contains several thousand traditions.

  • COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY vi. In Ismaʿilism

    Wilferd Madelung

    The physical world consists of nine celestial spheres, the highest sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars, the seven spheres of the planets, as well as the sublunar world of generation and corruption.