Chapter 15. Throne and Altar: Parthian Tolerance and the Sasanian Church-State

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. Under the Sasanians (224-651) it became an imperial orthodoxy, with a single canon, a hierarchy headed by a “high priest of high priests”, and a policy of persecution. The library’s sources disagree about how unified this “church” really was. Mary Boyce describes one created “under the direct and authoritarian control of Persia” [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, “Tansar, a religious propagandist”]. Philip Wood holds that the royal mandate “does not seem to have been monopolized by any ‘Zoroastrian church'” [Wood, text catalogued as Drama of the Divine Economy, #55093]. This chapter sets out both views and the evidence each relies on.

The “accursed” Alexander and the Seleucid interval

Boyce stresses that Alexander’s invasion “had no religious impulse”. Even so, it is Alexander, not his Seleucid successors, “who is execrated in Zoroastrian tradition, in which he is remembered as the ‘accursed’ (guzastag), an epithet which he shares with Ahriman alone”. The charges against him, as she collects them, are these. A Sogdian fragment says he “killed magi”. The Arda Viraz Namag (I.9) says he slew “many teachers, lawyers, herbads and mobads”. The Greater Bundahishn (XXXIII.14) says he “quenched many fires” [Boyce, #55117, ch.6 “Alexander and Iran”]. West’s Denkard gives the fullest legend. There had been “two written copies of the whole Avesta and Zand”. Through “the evil-destined villain Alexander” the copy in “the fortress of documents” “came to be burnt”. The other copy fell to the Greeks, who translated it [West, Pahlavi Texts Part IV, #55048, Denkard]. Boyce herself puts the real loss in the oral tradition: the priests “were the living books of the faith”. The Gathas survived because every working priest knew them by heart [#55117, ch.6].

Under the Seleucids, Boyce argues, the Macedonians took over Persia’s political authority but “could not do so in the religious one”. The priests of each province therefore “pursued, it seems, independent courses, maintaining only fraternal links with one another”. The rise of separate regional scripts derived from Aramaic reflects this [#55117, ch.6 “The Seleucids and Iran”].

Boyce’s account also takes in the borderlands. The Kushans of Bactria struck coins showing fourteen or fifteen yazatas, among them Miiro (Mithra), Orlango (Verethraghna) and Pharro (Khvarenah), before they turned to Mahayana Buddhism. She adds that the Buddhist Maitreya “must owe something to Zoroastrian teaching about the Saoshyant”. Armenia was ruled after AD 62 by the Arsacid Tiridates, whom Roman sources call a magus, and was “a predominantly Zoroastrian land” until it converted to Christianity, “partly, it seems, in defiance of the Sasanians” [#55117, ch.6 “Eastern Iranian borders”, “Western Iranian borders: Armenia”]. Boyce and Grenet’s third volume covers these Macedonian, Roman, Anatolian and Armenian settings in detail [Boyce & Grenet, A History of Zoroastrianism vol. 3, #54984].

The Arsacids: a federation of fires and image shrines

According to Boyce, the Arsacids “ruled as high kings over vassal kings and great nobles”. In the same way the Parthian priests “exercised leadership… but did not seek to impose conformity in all matters” [#55117, ch.6 “The rise of the Parthians”]. Strabo is cited for a royal council of “the lords spiritual and temporal”. Boyce suggests that Parthian prelates bore the title herbad, that a magbad headed a fire temple, and that a bagnapat served a bagin, or image shrine. Vassal kings kept dynastic fires of their own. Statues served both the yazatas and the cult of the dead, and coins showed Ahuramazda, Mithra and Verethraghna in the guise of Zeus, Apollo and Herakles [#55117, ch.6 “Ecclesiastical organization”, “Fire temples and image shrines”]. The tradition that the Avesta was collected begins here:

“Valakhsh the Arsacid commanded that a memorandum be sent to the provinces (instructing them) to preserve… whatever had survived in purity of the Avesta and (its) Zand… scattered by the havoc and disruption of Alexander.” [Denkard, in Boyce, #55117, ch.6 “The Avesta”; cf. West, #55048]

Boyce tentatively dates the compilation of the Vendidad to this effort. Her picture of the period is one of tolerance. The Arsacids “showed forbearance… to unbelievers” and had good relations with the Jews, and “it was out of a Judaism enriched by five centuries of contact with Zoroastrianism that Christianity arose in the Parthian period” [#55117, ch.6 “Unbelievers”].

Ardashir, Tansar and the twin pillars of state and faith

Ardashir I came from the family that guarded the Anahid temple at Istakhr. Boyce says he chose “religious propaganda” as one of his tools [#55117, ch.7]. Duchesne-Guillemin records the Pahlavi view that “Artaxsër, was also the founder of Mazdean orthodoxy”. He also records the maxim attributed to Ardashir: “religion and kingship are brothers, neither of which can do without the other”. He then quotes Zaehner: “the Sassanian kings saw in Zoroastrianism the only answer to the rising dogmatisms of both Christianity and Manichaeanism” [Duchesne-Guillemin, The Religion of Ancient Iran, #38271].

Ardashir’s chief priest was Tansar (Tosar). Geiger and Windischmann call him “the Airpatan Airpat, i.e., the head of the priests” and note that the Denkard authorised him “to collect the sacred texts”. Their summary of his Letter lists among its themes the “superiority of the Persian race” and war against “the Romans, the successors of Alexander” [Windischmann & Geiger, Zarathushtra in the Gathas and in the Greek and Roman Classics, #55095]. For Boyce, the Letter is propaganda addressed to Gushnasp of Tabaristan. Tansar’s case is that the faith had decayed so badly after Alexander that it “must needs be restored by a man of true and upright judgment” [Boyce, #55117, ch.7 “Tansar, a religious propagandist”]. He defends the bloodshed in these words:

“Bloodshed among people of this kind, even if of a prodigality that seems to have no bound, is recognized by us as life and health, like the rain which quickens the earth.” [Tansar Name 40, in Boyce, #55117, ch.7]

Boyce lists the measures Ardashir’s regime carried through:

• a single church and a single canon, for which Tansar “selected one (?) tradition and left the rest out”;
• a calendar reform whose five added days were resented as “stolen”;
• iconoclasm, with cult statues replaced by fires;
• the quenching of the vassal kings’ dynastic fires. Gushnasp protested that “no one has ever before presumed so far against religion”.

[#55117, ch.7 “Calendar changes”, “Iconoclasm and sacred fires”]

On the Naqsh-i Rustam relief, Ardashir’s horse tramples the Arsacid Ardaban V while Ohrmazd’s horse tramples Ahriman, so that Ardaban is “equated thus in his defeat with the powers of evil” [#55117, ch.7].

The dynasty’s founding legend is the Karnamag of Ardashir. The library holds it in Sanjana’s edition [Sanjana (ed.), The Karname-i Artakhshir i Papakan, #54960], but no text has been extracted from that file. The outline therefore comes from Boyce’s account of the Khwaday Namag. Papak, “enlightened by dreams”, gives his daughter to a shepherd, the last of a hidden line of Sasans descended from the last Achaemenid king, and Ardashir is born of the union. Boyce calls this a “faked” genealogy. In her view it blotted out “a whole glorious epoch, lasting half a millennium” of Parthian Zoroastrianism [#55117, ch.8 “Religious literature and royal propaganda”].

The counter-view: a mandate without a monopoly

Wood’s text is catalogued as Drama of the Divine Economy, but the extracted file is his study of the Chronicle of Seert, with a chapter titled “Collaborators and Dissidents”. He accepts that the early Sasanians “underscored their connection to the fire shrine dedicated to Anahita at Istakhr”. He also accepts that Ardashir’s and Shapur I’s rock inscriptions “commemorate their divine mandate, which flowed from their deeds of martial prowess, especially their defeat of the Romans”. But he goes on: “this divine mandate does not seem to have been monopolized by any ‘Zoroastrian church’: the institutional sponsorship of the magi by the shah seems only to have…” The rest of the sentence narrows how far that sponsorship went [Wood, #55093, ch.1].

Dhalla also sees no monolith. He says Zoroastrianism “split up into a number of sects” and that the church “had lost all control over its adherents” [Dhalla, Zoroastrian Theology, #55166, ch.XXIV “Sects”]. Boyce herself concedes that Iran “was too vast a country… for the state religion ever to obliterate all other creeds” [#55117, ch.7].

Kirder, Mani and the smiting of unbelievers

Kirder was the only commoner granted royal-style inscriptions. He rose from herbad under Shapur I to “mobad of Ohrmazd” under Hormizd I, and then to “mobad and judge of the whole empire” under Vahram II [#55117, ch.7 “The rise of Kirder”, “The summit of Kirder’s power”]. His inscriptions boast that “images were destroyed and the lurking places of devs demolished”, and that

“Jews and Buddhists and Brahmans and Mandaeans and Christians… and Manichaeans are being smitten in the land.” [Kirder, SM 29-30, in Boyce, #55117, ch.7]

He also promoted next-of-kin marriage (khvedodah), which the royal house practised. Boyce describes Mani as a Parthian noble who presented his religion “in a Zoroastrian guise” and was protected by Shapur I. Kirder, she writes, then “compassed the death of Mani, prevailing on Vahram to have him tried and executed” [#55117, ch.7 “The prophet Mani”].

Rome, Armenia and the Christians

Boyce writes that once Constantine made Christianity the faith of Rome, “political considerations began to intensify religious animus”. Shapur II taxed Christians at double rates for sharing “the sentiments of Caesar our enemy”. In the Syriac martyr acts the magi complain: “we cannot serve the sun, nor purify the air… because of the Nazarenes” [#55117, ch.8 “Upholding a Zurvanite orthodoxy”].

Dhalla calls Christianity “the most aggressive” of the alien faiths. He cites a bishop who told his congregation that the king’s soul would burn “in hell-fire with Satan”. He also records that “apostasy was made a capital crime by the Zoroastrian Church”. Citing the Shahrestaniha-i Eran, he adds: “Yazdagard I, who favoured the Christian cause, was hailed by the Christians as the blessed king, but was branded by his own co-religionists as the wicked sinner” [Dhalla, #55166, “The active propaganda of the faith”].

Boyce records provocations from the Christian side too, such as a priest who “extinguished a sacred fire and celebrated mass in its place”. She also notes Vahram V’s exhumation of the Christian dead, and Peroz’s relaxation of persecution once Byzantium had rejected the Nestorians [#55117, ch.8].

The Parsi writer Jhabvala explains the policy as rivalry with Constantine’s model. As he puts it, “if Zoroastrianism were to be regenerated in its original purity it must get state aid, just as Constantine had adopted Christianity as State religion”. Yet he concludes that “tolerance was the key-note of Sassanian Zoroastrianism” [Jhabvala, Zoroastrianism in Sassanian Times, #55105].

Mazdak and Khosrow “the Just”

Boyce places Mazdak against a church that had become “a landowner on a large scale, with slaves as well as peasants”. His gentle, Manichaean-coloured creed forbade killing and meat-eating. It sought “to have property held in common, and in this, his detractors say, he included women”. Boyce suggests that this demand may have begun as a wish to free daughters and sisters from the harems of the nobles. Kavad I backed Mazdak, was deposed in 494, and then regained the throne. In 528 Khosrow arranged “what purported to be a banquet in honour of Mazdak, which ended in the slaughter of that prophet and many of his followers” [#55117, ch.8 “The Mazdakite movement”].

Casartelli dates the “Heresy of Mazdak” to 488. He calls Khosrow I’s reign (531-579) “the golden age of the Pehlevi literature”, the age of the Avestan alphabet and of flourishing Greek and Syriac learning [Casartelli, The Philosophy of the Mazdayasnian Religion under the Sassanids, #60415]. Khosrow’s declaration in the Denkard reads: “We have no dispute with those who have other convictions”. The Great Avesta of twenty-one nasks was published in his council [#55117, ch.9 “Khosrow ‘the Just'”, “The written Avesta”].

Van Bladel challenges the “established fact” of “ancient Iranian orality”. He cites Ibn al-Muqaffa’ and the wide range of Middle Persian words for books (madayan, namag, nibeg) as evidence of a culture with written literature [van Bladel, Written Middle Persian Literature under the Sasanids, #55144].

A modern comparison: Keshe on prophets and divisions

In KSW 176, “Blueprint for Peace in the Islamic World” (2017), Mehran Keshe claims that “the name of God has become a passage for killing”. In his view the Sunni-Shia conflict is “a war between the religion within the religion” in which “in fact they are both wrong”, because “who followed doesn’t count, what is written and the message of the prophet counts”. He also speaks of “72 divisions in Christianity” and calls for “100% taxes on religious organizations” [Keshe, KSW 176, #377819]. His thesis is that divisions are made by men and that rulers and priests take over the prophet’s message. Set beside Tansar’s openly stated licence for the king to remake the faith, it offers a modern outside comparison.

Key points

• Tradition calls Alexander guzastag, “accursed”, a title he shares only with Ahriman, for killing priests, quenching fires and burning the Avesta [#55117; #55048].
• Boyce portrays the Arsacids as tolerant overlords of regional priesthoods, image shrines and dynastic fires. The decree of Valakhsh begins the collection of the Avesta [#55117].
• Pahlavi sources name Ardashir founder of orthodoxy and attribute to him the maxim that religion and kingship are brothers, “neither of which can do without the other” [#38271].
• Tansar’s Letter justifies innovation and boundless bloodshed as the restoration of a faith ruined by Alexander [#55095; #55117].
• Kirder boasts of smiting Jews, Buddhists, Brahmans, Mandaeans, Christians and Manichaeans, and he secured Mani’s execution [#55117].
• Wood and Dhalla dispute the idea of a monopolising “Zoroastrian church”. Wood points to a mandate won in battle, Dhalla to a proliferation of sects [#55093; #55166].
• Mazdak’s common ownership of property, and “his detractors say” of women, ended in the massacre of 528. Khosrow I’s reign became the golden age of Pahlavi literature [#55117; #60415].
• Persecution of Christians followed the Roman frontier. Yazdegird I, a friend to Christians, became “the wicked sinner” in Zoroastrian memory [#55166].