Religions, Cults and Power

Every chapter of this study rests on two decisions: which sources to read, and how to read them. The comparative history of religions has argued over both since the nineteenth century. Its founders compared religions across continents in search of…

The religions studied in this book come with texts, but religion is far older than writing. For tens of thousands of years before the Rigveda or the Gathas, people buried their dead, painted caves, carved figurines and raised monuments of…

Long before the Indo-Iranian tribes reached the plateau (see ch. 6), the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates had a religion of cities, temples and written theology. Its first evidence comes with writing, around 3500 BC. It ended only…

Mesopotamia (ch. 3) gave the ancient world a pessimistic picture of the dead and kings who ruled as servants of the gods. Egypt gave it the reverse: a king who was himself divine, a cosmic order the king had to…

The narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Syrian desert produced the gods with whom the Hebrew Bible argues most bitterly: Baal, Asherah, Molech and the “host of heaven”. For most of the modern era these gods were…

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.…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

Zurvanism taught that Ohrmazd and Ahriman were twin sons of Infinite Time, Zurvan akarana. Few questions in Zoroastrian studies have divided scholars as sharply. There are two reasons. The evidence is contradictory: as Boyce puts it, “foreign sources for the…

Zoroastrian eschatology has two levels. The first is individual: the soul is judged at the Chinvat Bridge on the fourth dawn after death. The second is universal: at the end of a fixed world history, a saviour born of the…

The Arab conquest ended Zoroastrianism’s long run as the religion of Iranian empires, but the faith survived it. It survived as two communities. The Iranis held out in the oases of Yazd and Kerman while their numbers kept falling. The…

The god whom Roman soldiers would later worship in caves first appears in history as a name on a diplomatic document. Before he slew a bull or was hailed as the invincible Sun, Mitra was the power that held two…

Zarathustra’s Gathas never name Mithra, yet in the Younger Avesta Ahura Mazda declares that he made Mithra as worthy of worship as himself. The library’s scholars disagree sharply about how this happened. Some see a prophet hostile to the cult…

In the god Mithra the library’s sources most clearly show religion merging with state power. From the fourth century BC to the first century AD he appears in royal inscriptions and in the throne-names of Pontus, Parthia, Armenia and Commagene,…

The Roman Mithras has to be studied mainly from stones, paintings and graffiti rather than from books. Vermaseren states the problem directly: “Ancient literature gives hardly any information about the meaning of this symbolic act, and what little we know…

This chapter turns from images to people: initiation, the seven ranks, the meal, the exclusion of women, the charges of bloodshed, and who joined. The library’s sources agree that Mithraism was a small, secret, male, hierarchical brotherhood that was especially…

No question in Mithraic studies has been argued over more than this one: was the Roman cult of Mithras a western survival of an Iranian religion, or a new creation of the Roman world that used a Persian name and…

In the third and fourth centuries the worship of the sun moved from the private cave-sanctuaries of Mithras to the centre of the Roman state. Emperors gave the sun a temple, a priesthood, coins and a birthday. The Tetrarchs dedicated…

The relation of Mithraism to early Christianity is the most argued question in the study of the Roman cult. The ancient Christian writers did not deny the likeness of the rites. They explained it as demonic forgery, and in the…

When the last mithraea of the West were destroyed, Mithra did not disappear. In the Iranian world his name passed into a new universal religion, Manichaeism, which carried it from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. His festivals survived the Arab conquest…

Part 4 turns from Iran to the small highland people whose god became the God of three world religions. The scholarly literature in the library agrees on one starting point. Israelite religion did not arrive from outside Canaan as a…