Part 2. Zoroastrianism

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…