Month: October 2026

Between Alexander’s conquest (331 BC) and the Arab conquest (651), Zoroastrianism went through two very different political settings. Under the Seleucids and the Arsacid (Parthian) kings it was the faith of a loosely held empire made up of regional priesthoods.…

The Achaemenid empire of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes was the first world state whose rulers proclaimed that they ruled “by the favour of Ahuramazda.” Whether these kings were Zoroastrians in the full sense is one of the oldest disputes in…

To outsiders, Zoroastrians became the “fire-worshippers” (Guebres, Gabrs), and the fire temple became their best-known institution. The library’s scholarly sources, led by Mary Boyce, argue that the temple was not original. In their account, prayer before the hearth fire, under…

Zoroastrian ethics has two faces in the library’s sources. One is the moral triad of good thoughts, good words and good deeds, set inside a cosmic war between Truth (asha) and the Lie (druj). The other is a detailed law…

Western scholars and modern Parsis have argued for two centuries over what Zarathustra taught about God and evil. One side reads the Gathas as the first clear monotheism, with dualism a later development. The other finds a radical dualism of…

The Avesta that survives is the remnant of a much larger scripture. Priests passed it down by memory for centuries before it was written, its custodians read it through layers of commentary, and Europe first met it in a translation…

Part 2 starts with a figure whose existence most of the library’s scholars accept but whose date they cannot fix. Zarathushtra, called Zoroaster by the Greeks, is known first from seventeen hymns ascribed to him and then from a tradition…

Chapter 6 described the pressing of haoma/soma as the central Indo-Iranian rite and noted that Zarathushtra seems to have condemned it (see ch. 6). This chapter takes up two questions left open there. The first is what the drink was.…

Chapter 6 reconstructed the shared Indo-Iranian religion from what the Rigveda and the Avesta hold in common. This chapter looks at the Indian branch. The Rigveda is the oldest surviving witness to the gods whom Zarathushtra’s tradition would partly exalt…

The religions this study follows, from the Gathas and Roman Mithraism to the dualist currents that reached Judaism, Christianity, Islam and later esoteric movements, have one of their deepest roots in a religion that left no scripture of its own.…