Zoroastrianism: The “Missing Link” of Major World Religions
The Persian prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra or Zardusht) was born somewhere between 1500 and 1700 BCE, probably in Rhages, Media. As always seems to happen, the entrance of the hero into the world is marked as an epoch-making event deserving of mythic commemoration. According to one Nativity tale, in the very moment of Zoroaster’s birth, Durasan, chief priest of Persian paganism, wakes up, beaded with cold sweat and trembling. In an instant he knows that the newborn child will one day do away with magic and idolatry, Durasan’s stock in trade. The same myth pattern produced the scene in the third Omen movie, The Final Conflict (1981), in which Damien Thorn, the Antichrist, wakes up in a cold sweat from a fitful sleep at the exact moment Jesus Christ is (re)born on earth.
To prevent the damage Zoroaster would eventually cause him, Durasan makes repeated attempts to destroy his infant nemesis. He contrives to have the baby placed in the fire on the sacrificial altar, but Zoroaster is as little singed as were Shadrach, Meschach, and Abed-(“Asbestos”)-Nego in the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. When that scheme falls through, Durasan next tries dropping the child off in a day-care run by hungry wolves who, however, rudely ignore him. Finally, Durasan orders that the child be, like Baby Oedipus, dropped off in a bare desert where he must starve to death—only he doesn’t since angels working for Meals on Wheels promptly show up with goodies left over from feeding the Prophet Elijah in similar circumstances (1 Kings 19).
There are also notable parallels with Moses. After his encounter with Jehovah at the burning bush in Midian, Moses is dispatched to Egypt and proves his divine commission to Pharaoh by a number of miraculous feats including causing, then cleansing, leprosy on one arm. Likewise, Zoroaster betakes himself to the court of King Vistashpa and proves his authority by conjuring a ball of fire in one hand. Just as the Egyptian sorcerer-priests of Pharaoh were, up to a point, able to copy Moses’ miracles, we may wonder if, so to speak, Zoroaster has copied them, too—or vice versa!
Like his father, Zoroaster was a priest in the Vedic religion. Legend has it that, one day, having completed a purification rite in a sacred river, he was walking back up onto the riverbank when the Great Archangel Vohu Mana appeared in the sky before him, proffering a cup containing some unearthly liquid. He had, he announced, been sent by the One God, Ahura Mazda, to commission Zoroaster to preach the message that all men should henceforth worship Ahura Mazda and him only. Zoroaster drank from the cup, the contents of which equipped him for his great work. In no time, as he went forth to begin his mission, the evil anti-God Ahriman appeared to him and tried to convince him not to go through with it. He offered him every kind of power and glory in place of the trials and tribulations his divine mission would surely bring. But he had underestimated the new Prophet who spurned the bribe and continued on his way.
It is possible that this old story tells us more than we have usually read in it. The third-century CE Manichaean religion, born in Persia but spreading though Asia to survive for a thousand years, borrowed much from its ancestor Zoroastrianism, e.g., giving prominent importance to the archangel Vohu Mana. Manichaeans, in effect, reinterpreted Zoroastrian mythemes in a decidedly Gnostic doctrine. For them, Vohu Mana was, macrocosmically, the same as the Primal Man Gayomard, and at the same time he was, microcosmically, the divine spark in every human being. He was represented as the axis mundi, a column of light linking earth and heaven, This pillar, upon closer examination, would be seen to be the great mass of these light-souls ascending heavenward after the death of their hosts. On earth, Vohu Mana operated as an evangelizing Apostle, speaking through his mortal host. Zoroaster and Mani, the Manichaean founder, were two such. Therefore it may be that, even from the beginning, Zoroaster was believed to be (and/or believed himself to be) the Great Vohu Mana incarnate.
Right here we can observe a major difficulty in understanding Zoroaster’s gospel. He was the apostle of Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”), spreading the word of monotheism. But then, who was Vohu Mana (“Good Thought”)? Was he a created angel? No, he was supposed to be one of six Amesha Spentas (“Bountiful Immortals”), semi-autonomous hypostases (personifications) of the cardinal aspects of Ahura Mazda. Here is the same sort of strategic equivocation observable in the later Old Testament writings: what was the Word of God, the Name of God, the Shekinah of God, the Spirit of God? Well, not exactly God himself, but not somebody else either. It was a way of keeping God transcendent but without saying he had delegated to subordinates things once predicated of a more anthropomorphic God, like molding Adam from clay (like Geppetto creating Pinocchio) or carving commandments into stone slabs with his fingernail. Did he really take up residence in Solomon’s Temple? Or was it “merely” his Name that he caused to dwell there? Hans-Joachim Schoeps suggested that the “Amesha Spentas may originally have been gods of the Indo-Aryan tribes. Zoroaster, however, recast them in their new roles as personifications of abstract moral ideas and aspects of Ahura Mazda.”
Such a maneuver seems to me characteristic of a subsequent stage of theological development, like the Christian Trinity and the Hindu Trimurti doctrines. I am thinking that, like Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, and the Prophet Muhammad, Zoroaster became a ventriloquist dummy for innumerable conflicting doctrines and traditions he can never have heard of.
There are also prayers, ascribed to Zoroaster, addressed to some of the traditional deities that Zoroaster supposedly rejected in favor of Ahura Mazda. It looks as if such contradictions stemmed from extensive rewriting of the Zoroastrian scriptures (the Avesta, the Yashts, the Vendidad, and the Pahlavi texts) as they were hand-copied and recopied over the centuries. The historian, then, has a difficult job on his hands if he wants to trace the evolution of Zoroastrian theology. Was the Persian prophet a monotheist, a polytheist, or a dualist? At one time or another, Zoroastrians believed in this or that version, but in what sequence? And what factors occasioned the changes?
You will recall how the Vedic religion of the Aryan invaders imagined a two-tiered system of gods. The top tier were the devas (cognate with Latin deus, “divinity,” “god”), while the second were the asuras (from “Assyria,” their place of origin). The two groups of gods carried on intermittent warfare for centuries, but sometimes at least some of them got along harmoniously in the same pantheon. But even here there is a discordant note, which may have wide implications. At first, Varuna, an asura, was the king of the Vedic pantheon. But he was superseded by the mighty thunder-warrior Indra, a deva. To me, this seems to imply a major power shift in the religious establishment, just as the victory of Yahweh over Leviathan (Nehushtan) signals a “Temple Revolution” in which the Yahweh priesthood displaced that of the Divine Serpent. Again, the story (Num. 16:1–50) of the challenge and defeat of the Sons of Korah by the Aaronic priesthood reflects ecclesiastical politics.
The devas, whom the Vedic religionists in India worshipped as gods, were vilified as devils by Zoroaster, while the asuras, the devils or Titans of the Vedics, became the true gods for the Zoroastrians. Specifically, the deposed Varuna became the head of the Zoroastrian pantheon, Ahura Mazda. It is too easy to accept the legend of Zoroaster’s vision of Vohu Mana as a sufficient cause for his prophetic reform crusade. It is, after all, a legend of a miracle, that is to say, a “God of the gaps” stratagem to which one retreats in the absence of a real, humanly motivated cause. So was there a real occasion for Zoroaster to have broken with and demonized the devas, his accustomed objects of worship? I think there was, and that it is fairly obvious: it was the demotion, the forced retirement, of the asura Varuna to make way for the deva Indra. As a committed priest of the asuras, young Zoroaster was not about to brook the blasphemous affront to his divine patrons.
Essentially Zoroaster would have been doing what the authors of the Prometheus and the Eden stories did. It seems clear to me that in the former we see a protest against the replacement of the pantheon of the Titans by that of the Olympians. Zeus is painted as a stupid, peevish tyrant unwilling to share his blessings with fledgling humanity, while Prometheus takes pity on clueless mankind, easily outwitting Zeus into granting the better share of the sacrificial meat to his worshippers and defying him by giving the secret of fire to the shivering hominids. For these philanthropic rescues, Prometheus paid a heavy price—as did the Serpent in Eden when he exposed the empty threats of Jehovah who falsely told Eve she and Adam would drop dead as soon as they ate from the Tree of Knowledge.
Like Zeus, he was begrudging his own advantages (of knowledge and immortality) to his creatures. Who would depict their own gods in such a light? No one. But it might be expected of a disgruntled priest whose preferred gods had been deposed and demoted, and their priests along with them. They could not undo the damage done them, it was too late for that; but they could get their licks in by composing stories depicting their defeated deities as beneficent martyrs and their victorious rivals as dim-witted despots. But Zoroaster took it one step further, leading a secession of his priesthood.
But perhaps he did not inaugurate this “asuras-only” religion. R.C. Zaehner notes that there may already have been such a movement. “Zoroaster’s inherited religion… was an ancient tradition of worship of the asuras and a repudiation of the daevas.” Nor was he necessarily even a monotheist! “Zoroaster… attacked only the worship of the daevas; so far was he from attacking that of the Ahuras he twice speaks [in the Gathas] of the Ahuras in the plural, which shows that, in the early days of his ministry at least, he did not fear to associate other gods with God.”
As Zaehner notes, the later hymn collection, the Yashts, not assigned to Zoroaster, is much like the Rig Veda, addressing prayers to several of the old gods ostensibly rejected by Zoroaster in favor of the unique glory of Ahura Mazda. This Zaehner explains as the result of a later replacement of Zoroastrian theism by traditional Iranian polytheism, as if Lutherans had eventually reconciled with the Pope. But I must admit I wonder if the presence of these deities might represent that hypothesized “proto-Zoroastrianism” which had not yet reduced the pantheon to a single Ahura/Asura. Is it possible that we are mistaken to picture a linear development of a monolithic “Zoroastrianism” as a lone ship traveling from theological port to port, occasionally returning to previous harbors? Perhaps various types of Zoroastrianism had always existed side by side, whether amicably or otherwise. I am envisioning something like Moshe Weinfeld’s suggestion that, instead of Deuteronomy representing an earlier stage in Jewish religion than the Priestly Code, as Wellhausen had held, the two compilations were contemporary, Deuteronomy representing the standpoint of the official scribes, the Priestly Code being the work, obviously, of the priesthood. Both groups carried a lot of clout, so neither’s manifesto could be left out.
Are Two Heads Really Better?
It is remarkable that the doctrine most commonly associated with Zoroastrianism is none of the above, but rather dualism. In its earliest known form, attested in the Gathas (a collection of hymns credited to Zoroaster), we hear that there was an original deity called Ahura Mazda (“Wise Lord”) who produced twin sons. Spenta Mainyu chose the way of righteousness, while Angra Mainyu opted for self-seeking evil. The stage was thus set for conflict on a cosmic scale. Neither’s moral character stemmed from his essence but was the product of free choice. So what, you say? This distinction absolves God from creating evil. It was the bad guy’s free decision to become the bad guy, which is also exactly the point of having Satan created as a noble archangel who subsequently succumbed to pride and presumption, instead of having been designed as Evil Incarnate, which would have implicated God.
Soon after Zoroaster died (at the ripe old age of 77, not exactly immortal but not bad!), somehow Ahura Mazda was merged with/identified as/substituted for Spenta Mainyu, resulting in dualism proper: a polarity between more or less evenly matched deities forever opposed to each other.
I will speak of the two spirits
Of whom the holier said unto the Destroyer at the beginning of existence:
“Neither our thoughts nor our doctrines nor our minds’ forces,
Neither our choices nor our words nor our deeds,
Neither our consciences nor our souls agree.” (Yasna 45)
Further theological speculation (in the fourth century BCE) arrived at the conclusion that, if the two Powers were, as was said, “twins,” then they must have had a father in common. But Spenta Mainyu had dropped out of the picture, so they needed a new third being. And he turned out to be Zurvan, Lord of Eternal Time. This version of Zoroastrian theology became dominant in the Sassanian Empire in the third century BCE. The attendant myth went something like this: Zurvan wanted a righteous son whom he could install as ruler of the world. To this end, he offered daily sacrifices (of what? To whom?). A whole millennium of this passed with no results, and, like Abraham, Zurvan started to doubt. Big mistake! This momentary flicker of faith became embodied in an unanticipated second son, a bad seed. Somehow Zurvan impregnated himself with twins. In the womb, righteous Ahura Mazda (by this time, contracted to “Ohrmuzd”) overheard Zurvan vow that the first infant to see the light of day should receive the rulership. Naively, he informed his fraternal fetus, Angra Mainyu (or “Ahriman”) of this news. Of course, the wily Ahriman shoved past him and, falsely announcing himself as his righteous brother, claimed the prize. Zurvan could not renege on his pledge and promised Ahri-boy that he should indeed rule the world for the lion’s share of the projected twelve thousand years of world history, but in the meantime, there was fighting to be done! He gave each son a mighty weapon: Ahriman received the curse of craving and worldly desire as a tool to win over humanity. Ahura Mazda, on the other hand, received some token of the power to create the world of matter with which to lure his foe into a suicidal attack. And thus began history.
There developed at least three rather different Zurvanite sects. This is all quite colorful, but the most important takeaway is that Zurvanism tended to deny Zoroaster’s original doctrine of free will. This denial was implicit in the myth’s depiction of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman each acting as determined by his substance, or moral essence. Well, Zurvan might have been eternal, but Zurvanism wasn’t. Islam put an end to it. Their new Islamic overlords were willing to recognize some varieties of Zoroastrianism, along with Jews, Christians, and “Sabeans” (whoever they were) as fellow “peoples of the Book,” recipients of genuine revelations from the same God. But most Zoroastrians fled the country and resettled in India, where they are known as “Parsees,” i.e., Persians.
Future Forecast
What follows is a sketch of the historical timeline according to Zoroastrianism. It doesn’t seem like Zoroaster could have come up with any of this because the hymns of the Gathas seem to envision a more or less immediate establishment of the eschatological kingdom of Ahura Mazda. But it’s the same old story: the train never came into the station. So the whole thing got pushed way off into the future. I have to wonder if this accommodation was the invention of Zurvanites since in their myth, Zurvan grants evil Ahriman nine thousand years of hegemony before righteous Ahura Mazda gets his turn. The effect of this is, of course, to defer the advent of the kingdom of Ahura Mazda, and to explain the delay.
Like the apostles of primitive Christianity and early Islam, Zoroaster viewed… the universal catastrophe as… impending. But since it did not come, and since the course of the world was in no way changed by Zoroaster’s conversions, the Persian religion underwent a modification very similar to what took place in Christian theology during the second century: the anticipation of an immediate judgment faded, and the Last Things were postponed to a distant future. (Schoeps)
There is no mistaking the conviction that drove the prophet on: he clearly believed that he had been sent by Ahura Mazda at that particular moment to urge human beings to align themselves with the right side at once, in the short time remaining before the transformation of the world…. But Zoroaster died, his figure began to fade into the past, and still the world was not transformed. The first generations of Zoroastrians must have been as bitterly disappointed as the early Christians were to be, a thousand years later. Subsequent generations consoled themselves in ways that also recall the development of Christian belief. They came to see their prophet as a world-saviour sent by the supreme god—and they also elaborated the notion of a future saviour … who would complete his work. (Cohn)
Anyway, the revised dispensational chart went something like this. All of history advances in a linear direction as a wearying, seemingly endless war between Good and Evil, that is, between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman—and their armies, the righteous and the sinners into which the human race is divided. Whether we realize it or not, we are delivering blows, weak or strong, on behalf of the deity we are serving. Here’s how it came about. All of a sudden one day, Ahriman noticed a distant glimmer of light. Having nothing better to do, he decided to check it out. Lo and behold, and to his utter astonishment, Ahriman had discovered he was not alone! He had seen the beautiful light of Ahura Mazda. He admired it and coveted it. One might suppose the sight would have inspired Ahriman to emulate Ahura Mazda and his bright glory, but that was not in his nature. As scripture says, his nature is to smite.
Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, immediately understood the situation: that war was in the offing. Each camp went into preparation mode, Ahriman creating his demon horde, Ahura Mazda fashioning the Void, a realm set between heaven and earth, something akin to Plato’s Realm of Forms, the ideal prototypes for all material things and creatures. These events filled an initial three thousand years.
All was now in readiness. Not really expecting a positive response, Ahura Mazda made a peace overture to his rival, but Ahriman threw it back in his face. Ahura Mazda then chanted the chief Zoroastrian prayer (which he had at the ready for whenever he got around to creating people to pray it!), and the sheer power of the text flattened Ahriman, sending him crashing to the mat, where he stayed, comatose, for the next three thousand years! His imps tried everything they could think of to wake him up: ideas for dirty tricks, obscene jokes, flattery (“Ooh, you are so big! So absolutely huge! Gosh, everyone down here is really impressed, I can tell you!”), but he kept on snoozing. Finally, the, um, “Whore,” the first woman, abandoned her husband, switched sides, and managed to succeed where the others failed. She woke Ahriman van Winkle by talking dirty to him.
Meanwhile, Ahura Mazda got busy recruiting allies. He summoned the fravashis, spirits combining the aspects of Valkyries, warrior maids who collected the souls of fallen warriors off the battlefield, and guardian angels of the living. Would they consider volunteering to take on mortal bodies and to take up arms (literally or figuratively) in the coming struggle against Ahriman and his demonic stormtroopers? “You can count on us, Chief!” Ahura Mazda also filled the Void with the spiritual and physical creations. The spiritual creation was that of his six archangels, the Amesha Spentas. The physical creations were the living prototypes of humanity, cattle, plants, soil, sky, fire, and water.
As for weaponry, all Ahura Mazda needed was a planet. He created the earth as a shining jewel, a universal paradise. “It was a plum Satan couldn’t resist!” It was a boobytrap, and Ahriman fell for it. This was a singularly inauspicious beginning of the third three-thousand-year dispensation. He was having a great time vandalizing the place until he realized he was trapped. He had smashed his way through the solid firmament-dome, but there was no access to the hole from the inside, so he did the next best thing: he tunneled below the earth-disk and took up habitation, along with his gang of demon thugs amid the stinking, slimy sewer of Hell, or “the House of the Lie.” (“I guess it’s not so bad once you get used to the smell!”)
Perhaps the most strategic of Ahriman’s targets was the rotund Primal Man, Gayomard. He looked more like a parade balloon than a man. He was like a huge beachball with arms, legs, and a (probably goofy-looking) head. He provided an easy target, and Ahriman gutted him in no time. Maybe he figured he was ruining his foe’s plan to mass-produce as many soldiers as needed. But the joke was, again, on Ahriman. He had so thoroughly demolished poor Gayomard that oozing bits of his flesh fell like rain all over the place, and wherever they hit the ground they fertilized it to produce new people, this time males and females who “manufactured” more humans the fun way. Poor stupid jerk! This fatal goof perfectly typified the difference between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. In terms of raw power, they were evenly matched, but Ahura Mazda possessed wisdom and foresight, while Ahriman had neither, being merely a creature of impulse and covetousness. Guess who pretty much had to win in the long run?
And now we have hit upon the profound and distinctive Zoroastrian theodicy: the way they sought to reconcile God’s unimpeachable goodness with the obvious evil and adversity in the world he created. Don’t we always speak of God’s conflict with the devil? Doesn’t such talk imply that Satan, or we, are at least occasionally succeeding in advancing our sinful aims, defeating God’s will? Of course it does, but the inconsistency of that with our belief that God is firmly in control forces us to heave a sigh and relegate the matter to the X files. We’ll just have to wait till we get to heaven to find the answer.
But Zoroastrian dualists refuse to wait. They’ve already got an answer that satisfies them. Is God completely righteous but not all-powerful? Or is he not entirely righteous though fully omnipotent? In other words, is it that he could stop all evil but doesn’t want to? Or that he does want to put a stop to it but can’t? Zoroastrians opt for the second. It’s not ideal, but believing God refrains from doing good that would be possible for him…? That’s a character flaw. It would seem fatal to confidence in God. Better to admit he is engaged in a real struggle, and that he has a better chance to win the victory if you and I lend a hand. As Kris Kringle said to his lawyer Fred Gailey in Miracle on 34th Street, “At least we can go down swinging!”
And how exactly do puny humans assist mighty Ahura Mazda in his ages-long war with Ahriman? Nothing fancy; simply remember to act according to the canonical slogan, “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Every righteous act or utterance is a blow struck on Ahura Mazda’s behalf, while every selfish, wicked deed or word scores one for the opposing team. Simple, yes, but not always easy! Zoroastrianism took root in an agricultural environment and stressed kind treatment of livestock and mutual support among farm families. Good thoughts, words, and deeds were defined in this particular context. Who were Ahriman’s demonic henchmen? They were by no means hard to recognize: the marauding Aryan nomads who might swoop down on one’s farmstead out of nowhere. And there was no commandment to turn any cheeks! You had to fight back, and no one would blame you if you did, least of all Ahura Mazda.
Back to the Future
Where were we? Oh yes, the timeline! Well, Ahriman had launched his initial assault on his opposite number’s earth but found he had been trapped. There was no place to go but down, and so he retreated to the Netherworld, he and his entourage. (This would appear to be the origin of the pseudo-biblical belief that Satan is the ruler of Hell.)
The conflict is what we would call a proxy war, where the actual combatants are the agents of the real authorities sponsoring them. Human beings are dealing and receiving the blows, even though most of them don’t realize they are just pawns. Of course, Zoroaster’s purpose was to explain the real situation and thus to persuade as many as he could to get with the program. Again, we are forced to ask if the outcome is a foregone conclusion, because if Ahura Mazda’s ultimate victory is a fait accompli, whence the urgency of the call to battle? Oh well, maybe we’ll find out once we get to heaven (which Zoroastrians call “the House of Song”).
In any case, history is set to last a neat twelve thousand years, and we are now up to the last three-thousand-year dispensation. It begins with the timely birth of none other than Zoroaster. It is scheduled to conclude with the advent of one called the Sayoshyant (“Benefactor”). Initially, Zoroaster seems to have believed he himself would fill that role in the soon-coming denouement, but things didn’t work out that way. So the doctrine evolved. The revised version expected the Sayoshyant to be a posthumous descendant of the founding prophet. You see, the envisioned scenario had a virgin descendant of Zoroaster bathe one day in a lake which, unknown to her, contained plenty of Zoroaster’s still-living sperm—a thousand years later! She becomes pregnant with the child of promise. Later doctrine posited a series of three Benefactors, one appearing every millennium of the fourth period to assist humanity, but the final one was still the most important, given his unique mission, for he was to raise all the dead (which should take fifty-seven years to accomplish!) to face the Final Judgment. The righteous will be welcomed into the House of Song, while the wicked will be dumped into the House of the Lie, popularly known as Hell. How to determine which was which? Easy: all would undergo a flowing bath of molten lead. To the righteous it would seem like a nice bath in warm milk, but for the wicked, well, it would feel like a bath in molten lead! Eventually Zoroastrian theologians amended the eschatology, reasoning that few sinners were totally bad, and that the magma-bath ordeal would smelt away one’s sinfulness, leaving the rest of you (if there was any!) intact.
This elaborate schema seems to have supplanted an equally picturesque version in which one would wake up in the grave, greeted by either a beautiful maiden or a repulsive hag, depending on one’s moral rap sheet. She would accompany you to the Chinvat Bridge (“the Bridge of the Requiter” or “of the Separator”). This was a gigantic sword spanning a fiery chasm. If you were one of the righteous, you would make your way down the flat of the broad blade to safety and salvation. But otherwise, the sword would flip over ninety degrees, and even an expert tightrope walker would teeter off balance and plunge into the yawning Pit. But aren’t most folks pretty mediocre, neither a saint nor a villain? That’s usually not a problem: if the scales of justice tilt toward damnation by as little as a single sin, down you go!
This essay is excerpted from Houses of the Holy: A Higher-Critical Study of World Religions, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Robert M. Price is the author of numerous books and founder and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism.