The Zoroastrian conception of human existence is essentially a joyful and life-affirming one that has been adhered to with courage by its believers through times of severe persecution and rejection.
Zoroaster was a prophet of ancient Iran (Persia) who claimed to speak directly with his God.1 His teaching proclaimed a state of eternal struggle between good and evil and he held that human beings are free to choose between right and wrong. It has been maintained that he was the first prophet of monotheism in that he rejected the polytheism of the early Iranian religion and elevated just one of its ahuras, or ‘lords’, to the position of a supreme deity. The claim that Zoroastrianism is monotheistic is a debatable one. It has been the subject of prolonged scholarly controversy and is still a live issue.2 Zoroaster’s doctrine is embodied in seventeen psalms, the gathas, which are thought to have been his own work and which, along with liturgical writings, are part of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian holy book of which only a portion is extant.
Although there is little that can be unequivocally established about Zoroastrianism it is evident that it was an important and influential doctrine. It was the national religion of the Persian empire from the third to the seventh century CE, yielding dominion then to the devastating attack of Muslim invaders, but thereafter staunchly surviving a millennium of persecution, its faithful adherents living in small enclaves in remote or desert settlements. In the tenth century CE many Zoroastrians grouped themselves in India, chiefly around Bombay, and became known as the Parsis (Persians). Zoroastrianism’s basic tenets concerning good and evil, heaven and hell, judgement, resurrection and free will have informed the teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
There is considerable uncertainty about the dating of Zoroaster’s lifetime, but evidence increasingly suggests that he was alive some time between 1500 and 1000 BCE and that he experienced massive migrations of Iranians and Indians, and also the attendant conflicts between those who were peaceful herdsmen and those who were members of roving bands of plunderers. The system of religious belief in which he grew up was based on a creation myth that saw the world as having been generated by gods from inchoate matter passing through seven stages of development. This cosmogony maintained that once order had been achieved and human life established in the centre of the created word, physical and spiritual equilibrium could be maintained by making appropriate sacrifices to the gods. Zoroaster inherited a priesthood in this religion and possessed the genius to reform it in a way that allowed it to develop in a vital and consistent manner.
It is a traditional view that Zoroaster spent most of his adult life in north-eastern Persia, having been forced to travel after the failure of his early missionary efforts in search of a powerful ruler who would accept his faith and protect him. The story relates that he eventually settled in the north-east after converting the ruler, Vishtaspa, by healing his favourite horse when it was deemed to be mortally ill. Some doubt is cast on this placing of Zoroaster in the north-east by the fact that the gathas, the hymns, or psalms, attributed to his authorship, are written in a language that is thought to have belonged to the north- western region of Iran.
It is, again, tradition that informs us that Zoroaster’s birth was signalled by miracles and that a divine protection kept evil forces from harming him. His childhood, it seems, was solitary and in his youth and early manhood he was trained for the priesthood. He received his first vision and prophetic calling at the age of 30 and thereafter began his teaching mission. To prepare himself he spent time alone on a mountain and it is reported that for two weeks, while his spirit communed with God, his body was completely motionless on the mountainside. His first missionary teachings were rejected outright and he was subjected to ridicule and violence. Then his remarkable healing of Vishtaspa’s horse brought about not only the conversion of the ruler but also the official adoption of his beliefs by the whole realm. Legend recounts that he was murdered in old age while praying at the altar and that the event fulfilled forecasts that the prophet would live for exactly seventy-seven years.
As already mentioned, it has been argued that the description of Zoroaster as a prophet of monotheism is not correct and that the error came about largely as the result of the work of Martin Haug, a philologist who translated the gathas in the 1850s and established them as Zoroaster’s own declaration of his faith and doctrine.3 Haug interpreted the gathas as embodying a strict monotheism and also a rejection of ritual sacrifice, a view that ran completely counter to the tradition and practice of the early nineteenth-century Parsis of India who attended Haug’s lectures in order to learn about the history of their religion. According to Mary Boyce, Haug based his understanding entirely on one or two philological points concerning the translation of the gathas without weighing the evidence of the living tradition and the available secondary writings. When, in the 1880s, a quantity of secondary Zoroastrian literature was translated by E.H. West in consultation with Parsi priests and with reference to current practices, a somewhat different conception of Zoroastrianism emerged, one more consistent with its known tradition of a belief in dualism, and which yielded a different understanding of the gathas from that propounded by Haug.4
The central issue in the debate which has ensued arose from the tension between Zoroaster’s assertion of the fundamental dualism of the cosmos and later interpretations of his theology as monotheistic. It brought into prominence a number of difficulties that from time to time had exercised the minds of Zoroastrian theologians. For example, if Zoroastrianism is understood to posit that there are two principles, good and evil, questions then arise as to whether they are entirely distinct from one another, and what the status and source of each is. If it is claimed that both principles are gods and that they are separate, then either monotheism does not obtain or it has to be reinstated by invoking and describing an ultimate deity that somehow overarches both good and evil. If it is claimed that good is supreme, then the presence and power of evil and its relationship with the good have to be satisfactorily elucidated and any outstanding uncertainties about monotheism resolved.
Very few absolutely firm conclusions can be drawn about the exact character of Zoroaster’s own thought, but this is not surprising in view of the incompleteness of sources and the difficulties of translation. The extant portions of his own writing, the gathas, as well as the rest of the Avesta, are capable of being translated in a variety of ways. What remnants we have of the Avesta consist of writings drawn from several centuries, embodying modifications and developments imposed by the priests and believers of many generations. The result is a body of doctrinal and liturgical matter that is largely unsystematic, that sometimes appears to be ambiguous or inconsistent within itself and that always needs to be seen in relation to the history of actual Zoroastrian practice. Any attempt to give an account of Zoroaster’s ideas has to be made in awareness of this complex background.
Zoroaster’s God of goodness, the One True God whom he claimed to have seen in visions, is Ahura Mazda. Opposing Mazda is Angra Mainyu, the personification of evil. Mazda epitomizes everything that is life-affirming and creative, and all activities that foster truth, the benign ordering of life and a pastoral care of the earth and its creatures. In contrast, Angra Mainyu represents destruction, untruth and bloodshed, and the aggressive life-pattern of the pillaging nomad rather than the settled pastoralist. These two beings are derived from the two kinds of gods, the ahuras and the daevas, who were affirmed by the Indo-Iranian polytheism that was largely rejected by Zoroaster. He repudiated the daevas as followers of evil and the Lie, and from among the ahuras took Ahura Mazda as the One True God.
It is at this point in the account that the interpreters of Zoroastrianism begin to diverge in their interpretations. There are passages in the Yasna, the Zoroastrian liturgy, that describe two Spirits, one of which chooses Good and the other Evil. We read that
at the beginning of existence, the Holier spoke to him who is Evil: ‘Neither our thoughts nor our teachings, nor our wills nor our choices, nor our words, nor our deeds, nor our convictions, nor yet our souls agree.’5
What is not clear in this is the relationship in which the two Spirits stand to Mazda. The Good Spirit is sometimes referred to as the son of Mazda and the two Spirits are on one occasion described as twins. But this means that the Spirit of Evil is as much the offspring of Mazda as the Spirit of Good, a conclusion that is not entirely acceptable since it seems to attribute the creation of evil to a God who is entirely good. A resolution of the difficulty, and one that is readily derived from parts of the Yasna, is that Mazda created two Spirits who freely chose their paths. This permits the understanding that the Spirit that chose evil was not created as an Evil Spirit but as one with the freedom to choose. Commentators have pointed out that Zoroaster nowhere attributes evil to God.6
Those who favour a strictly monotheistic understanding of Zoroaster’s teaching cite passages from the Yasna in which Ahura Mazda is described as, for example, ‘the creator of all things by the Holy Spirit’.7 Those who regard the dualism of his thought as central emphasize, without denying the attribution of supremacy to Mazda, the opposition of Good and Evil, of Mazda and Angra Mainyu, that pervades all the Prophet’s teaching. They are mindful of an early catechism of Zoroastrianism which says: ‘I must have no doubt that there are two first principles, one the Creator and the other the Destroyer’, and point out that it was in terms of this opposition that the religious life and practices of Zoroastrianism were conceived. Thus, in an essay published in 1978, Mary Boyce has said that in one sense, that of believing in only one eternal,
uncreated Being who is worthy of worship, Zoroaster was indeed a monotheist, with a concept of God as exalted as that of any Hebrew or Arabian prophet. But he was also a dualist, in that he saw coexisting with Ahura Mazda, another uncreated Being, who was maleficent, not to be worshipped.8
Boyce also points out that Zoroaster’s doctrine does not entirely dethrone the other ahuras who, in Indo-Iranian polytheism, had ranked with Ahura Mazda.
In creating the world Mazda also created the ‘Bounteous Immortals’, six lesser divinities, to assist in the destruction of evil and the perfecting of the world. These beings, although beneath Ahura Mazda, were to be accorded worship and prayer. They personified attributes possessed by Mazda: qualities such as Wisdom, Right, Purpose, Truth, Wholeness and Loyalty. They were also linked with aspects of the physical creation so that the nurture and tending of the world were connected with the virtues and powers they represented. Zoroaster held to the ancient belief in a sevenfold creation in which there was first the enclosing shell of the sky, made of stone, then the world within it, then water in the shell, followed by the earth flat upon it; then a plant, an animal and a man in the centre of the earth. The gods were believed to have crushed and sacrificed these last, thereby causing their multiplication and beginning the cycle of life and death.
In summary, traditional Zoroastrianism teaches that Ahura Mazda is supreme and wholly good, but not omnipotent. Angra Mainyu is an active force of evil that is pitted against the good and that must be opposed with courage and resolution. It has been remarked that this is ‘perhaps the most rational solution of the problem of evil ever devised’.9
There is little doubt that until the midnineteenth century, when Haug’s research appeared and the Parsis of India were experiencing the reforming pressures exerted by monotheistic religions, Zoroastrianism flourished as a sturdily dualistic religion that provided a comprehensive framework for human and humane living. Although many of the details of its original doctrines are now lost, it is clear that the broad philosophical conceptions it embodied are of the kind that spring from and foster some of the noblest aspects of human nature: a love of freedom, the enjoyment of work, a sense of community, valour in the face of evil and an awareness of the mystery of creation and goodness that expresses itself in a sensuous care of the world and its creatures.
In the twentieth century few Parsis remain to uphold Zoroastrianism. There are small groups of two or three thousand in London, Los Angeles and Toronto. The two largest communities, each of around 17,000, are in India (Bombay) and Iran. These communities observe rituals established by Zoroaster: a brief time of prayer five times each day and seven joyous feasts in each year dedicated to Ahura Mazda, the Six Bounteous Immortals and the Seven Creations. The most important of these feasts is No Ruz, or New Year’s Day, held at the vernal equinox. It celebrates the new spring life and the idea of resurrection with flowers, new clothes and painted eggs.
Zoroastrianism’s powerful influence is especially apparent in the Jewish sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls where there is a dualist doctrine concerning the creation of Two Spirits that is almost exactly the same as the Zoroastrian doctrine. The Zoroastrian practice of praying five times each day was adopted by Muslims and the Zoroastrian ethic has been compared with that of the Christian Bible’s Book of Proverbs.
1 Modern practice decrees that the religion derived from Zoroaster’s teaching is called ‘Mazdaism’ since that is how it is referred to by the worshippers of Ahura Mazda, the ‘Wise Lord’ of Zoroaster’s doctrine. Since this essay focuses on theoretical foundations rather than religious practices, ‘Zoroastrianism’ has been used consistently as a generally descriptive term.
2 For a glimpse of the wide-ranging controversy concerning early Zoroastrianism see Julian Baldick, ‘Mazdaism (“Zoroastrianism”)’, in Stewart Sutherland, Leslie Houlden, Peter Clarke and Friedhelm Hardy (eds) The World’s Religions, London, Routledge, 1988, pp. 552– 568.
3 See M. Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis, 3rd edn, London, Trubner, 1884, repr. Amsterdam, Philo Press, 1971.
4 See the essay ‘Zoroastrianism’ by Mary Boyce in John R. Hinnells (ed.), A Handbook of Living Religions, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984, repr. 1991, pp. 171–190.
5 Yasna 45.2.
6 See, for example, R.F. Zaehner (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Living Faiths, 4th edn, London, Hutchinson, 1988, p. 204.
7 Yasna 44.7.
8 See Mary Boyce, ‘Spanning east and west: Zoroastrianism’, in Whitfield Foy (ed.), Man’s Religious Quest, London, Croom Helm and the Open University Press, 1978, p. 608.
9 op. cit., p. 607.
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