All of these references to death and the underworld (sheol), except perhaps xiv. 32, refer to the living death, moral and spiritual, which is of such vast and fundamental significance in Zoroastrian religion. In this religion the evil power is "all death." The universe is divided by and into "the living and the not living." [17] "When these two Spirits came together they made first Life and Death,"--words sometimes used as synonymous with the "Good and the Evil Mind." Ahura Mazda representing all the forces that work for health and life, Angromainyu (Ahriman) all that work for disease and destruction, have ranged with them all animals and plants, on one side or the other, in this great conflict. The life of an Ahrimanian creature is "incarnate death." (Darmesteter's Introduction to the Vendîdâd, v. 11.) His destructiveness is equally against virtue, wisdom, peace, health, happiness, life, and all of these, not merely physical dissolution, are included in his Avestan title, "The Fiend who is all death." He is the Abaddon of Revelation ix. 11, also he "that had the power of death" in Hebrews ii. 14, and probably came into both of these from Proverbs xxvii. 20: Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, And the eyes of man are never satisfied. Dr. Inman (Ancient Faiths, i., p. 180) connects Abaddon with "Abadan (cuneiform), the lost one, the sun in winter, or darkness," which conforms with the Avestan Ahriman, who is emphatically a winter-demon, his hell being in the north (cf. Jeremiah i. 14 and elsewhere), and is the natural adversary of the Fire-worshipper. Among the Zoroastrians there were not only Towers of Silence (Dakhma) for the literally dead, but also for the confinement of those tainted by carrying corpses, or by any contact with the death-fiend's empire, such as being struck with temporary death. "The unclean," says Darmesteter, "are confined in a particular place, apart from all clean persons and objects, the Armêst-gâh, which may be described, therefore, as the Dakhma for the living." Here then are the dead-alive guests of Dame Folly (Proverbs ix. 15), who opposes Wisdom, as Ahriman created Akem-Mano (evil thought) to oppose Vohu-Mano (good thought), and here is the assembly that might give the Solomonic proverb its metaphor: The man who wandereth from the way of instruction Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms (or shades, Rephaim). The Zoroastrian books from which I have been quoting contain passages of very unequal date, but it is the opinion of Avestan scholars that most of them are from very ancient sources, pre-Solomonic, and there is no chronological difficulty in supposing that such institutions as the Armêst-gâh, for the separation of the unclean, should not have been well known in ancient Jerusalem before the corresponding levitical laws concerning the unclean and the leprous existed.