Chapter 6. The Indo-Iranian Inheritance: Steppe Religion Before Zarathushtra

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. This is the shared faith of the Indo-Iranians, the people whose descendants composed both the Sanskrit Rigveda and the Avestan hymns. It survives only through comparison: what the Vedic and Avestan traditions hold in common is taken to be older than either. This chapter sets out what the library’s sources reconstruct of that religion, how they reconstruct it, and where they disagree. It covers the homeland and social order of the Indo-Iranians, their gods and cosmic law, their ritual and their beliefs about death, and the split by which the “gods” of one branch became the “demons” of the other.

Method: reconstructing a religion without a book

Mary Boyce, in her introduction to Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, argues that Zarathushtra was a “reformer” only in the sense that every founder is one: “he evidently accepted much of the faith into which he was born, but transformed it through a new teaching.” In her account the Old Iranian faith “can be reconstructed partly from comparison with closely related Vedic texts, and the Brahmanic tradition of India, partly through what clearly seem to be pre-Zoroastrian elements surviving in Zarathushtra’s own revelation, or revived subsequently by his followers” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, “1.2.1 The means of reconstructing the Old Iranian religion”].

James Hope Moulton, lecturing at Oxford in 1912, recalls that this comparative method once had to be fought for. One school “insisted on the infallibility of the native Iranian traditional interpretation of the Avesta,” while the comparative school “retaliated with an equally thoroughgoing contempt.” By his day the two had been reconciled, and “a knowledge of the religion of the Veda is acknowledged to be an essential tool of our science just as much as that of the expositions handed down to us by the Parsi guardians of the Avesta” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture I “The Sources”]. The reference shelf’s survey of the field defines the result as “an archaic offshoot of Indo-European religion”. It lists among its reconstructed concepts a universal force (rta/asha), a sacred plant and drink (soma/haoma), and gods of social order such as Mitra/Mithra and Bhaga/Baga [Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-Iranian religion].

Homeland, migration and the “Aryan” name

The sources agree that a single Indo-Iranian people existed. They differ on where it lived and when it divided. Boyce writes that “from perhaps 5000 to about 2000 B.C. they formed a single group, a branch of the Indo-European family,” with a homeland apparently on “the south Russian steppes, east of the Volga,” where they lived as pastoralists “herding their cattle on foot.” The Avestan term for the community, pasu-vira, “cattle-(and)-men,” reflects that life [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.2 The physical and social background”]. Modern reference articles tie the proto-Indo-Iranian period to the Sintashta culture (c. 2050–1900 BCE) and date the split into Indic and Iranian branches to the second millennium BCE [Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-Iranian religion; Wikipedia: Indo-Iranians].

Moulton uses “Aryan” in what he calls “its proper sense, as the name given to themselves by the easternmost branch of the Indo-European family”. He reports Eduard Meyer’s view that their original homeland lay “in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian,” from which they moved through Turan to the Oxus and Jaxartes and divided in Eastern Iran. In a footnote added after the lectures he revises his own dating, suggesting that the migration “was considerably later” than he first thought, and cites Hirt, who places the first migrations “as late as 1600-1800 B.C.” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture I].

The earliest datable trace is not Indian or Iranian at all. It is a Hittite–Mitanni treaty from Boghazköy in Anatolia, which invokes Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya twins. The reference shelf dates it c. 1380 BC, between Suppiluliuma I and Shattiwaza, and reports a present scholarly consensus that the Mitanni vocabulary is specifically Indo-Aryan rather than Iranian [Wikipedia: Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni]. Moulton was already cautious in 1912. He noted that “the names answer only to Indian phonology or that of the undivided Aryans,” quoted A. V. W. Jackson’s warning that the mention “may be merely a direct reference to Indian deities without having any immediate connexion with Iran,” and judged that the Aryan character of the Mitanni names, if accepted, “probably means no more than that the chieftains were Aryan, the people whom they conquered being indigenous” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture I]. Chapter 19 treats the treaty and its Mitra in detail.

Cosmic order and the gods

At the centre of the reconstructed religion stands an abstract principle. In Boyce’s account the open steppe “encouraged the Indo-Iranians to conceive their gods as cosmic, not local, divinities.” They also “apprehended a universal principle of what ought to be, Av. ‘asha’, Skt. ‘rta’, variously translated as ‘order, righteousness, truth’,” which “should govern everything, from the workings of nature to human laws and all human conduct” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.3 The Old Iranian gods”].

Boyce describes a three-tier pantheon that mirrors tribal society. A “great triad of ethical divinities, the Lords, Av. ‘Ahura’, Skt. ‘Asura'” guarded asha. The greatest was “Ahura Mazda, ‘Lord of Wisdom’,” whom Boyce sees as “the divine counterpart of the wise high priest” and who in the Rigveda is “reverenced, it appears, simply as ‘the Asura’.” Below him stood “the lesser Ahuras, Varuna and Mithra (Vedic Mitra), guardians respectively of the oath and covenant,” counterparts of just tribal chieftains. Varuna’s name “was not uttered in the known Iranian tradition, in which he is invoked only by cult epithets.” Apart from these stood Indra, “the divine counterpart of the warrior, an amoral being, invoked for strength, courage, and success in battle.” There were also “nature” and “cult” gods, and evil was attributed “mainly to earth-bound devils, sorcerers and the like” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.3”].

The reference survey frames the same relationships more cautiously. It says only that Varuna “does not directly correspond to Ahura Mazda but shares several traits in common with him,” as king among the gods and as arbiter of law upholding rta as Ahura Mazda upholds asha [Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-Iranian religion]. Boyce’s identification of Ahura Mazda with the Rigveda’s “Asura” is therefore one scholarly position, not a settled equation.

Moulton gives Mithra a split origin. He accepts the philological evidence collected by Antoine Meillet that the common noun mitra-/mithra- meant “friendship” or “friend” in Sanskrit and “compact” in Avestan. Both languages share a compound, Sanskrit mitradruh and Avestan mithro-druj, meaning “breaking a compact.” He also notes Meillet’s point that “there are … no elemental traits in the one Vedic hymn (Rv. iii. 59) addressed to Mitra.” He doubts, however, that the sky-and-light Mithra of the Yashts grew out of the ethical one. He suggests instead “a fusion of two originally independent conceptions,” and floats a “venturesome suggestion” that the god of the firmament owes something to the Assyrian metru, “rain,” which would explain Mithra’s early pairing with the water-goddess Anahita [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II “Before Zarathushtra”]. He reports Franz Cumont’s view that Chaldaean theology later assimilated “Mithra to Shamash the god of the Sun,” which is why “in the Roman Mysteries Mithra was commonly called Sol invictus, though he was really distinct from the Sun” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II, quoting Cumont].

Ritual without temples: fire, haoma and sacrifice

Boyce writes that “as wandering pastoralists the Indo-Iranians had no temples, and worshipped mainly in the open, without altars or images.” The central rite was the pressing of an intoxicant, “Av. haoma, Skt. soma,” which, “when consecrated, was offered to the gods and drunk ritually by the worshippers.” There were also daily offerings to “the hearth fire and sources of pure water” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.4 Worship in the Old Iranian religion”]. Moulton supports the absence of images with Greek testimony. Herodotus said the Persians used “neither images nor shrines nor altars,” and Clement of Alexandria quotes Deinon that they “sacrificed in the open air, accounting fire and water the only images of gods.” According to Moulton, only Artaxerxes II introduced an image of Anahita [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II].

In Moulton’s reconstruction the sacrifice was not burnt. Flesh was laid “on a carpet of tender grass, to which the deity is invited to come down, the messenger being the sacred Fire”. The Iranian fire Atar (compare Latin atrium) belongs with Hestia and Vesta as a hearth-god. He argues that the Indian branch changed this inheritance: in a hot climate fire became Agni, “the consumer of the sacrifice,” while in India the old word for welcome warmth, tapas, came to mean “penance” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II]. On the drink he writes that Vedic soma, once fermented, “produced a drink strongly alcoholic in character”, whereas the Haoma of the later cult, as he describes it, is “a magical, mystical drink which to all appearance is harmless enough”; for the Gathic period he stresses that Zarathushtra “sternly ignores the name of the divine drink.” He reads Yasna 48.10, “When wilt thou smite the pollution of this intoxicant?”, and Yasna 32.14 as the prophet’s condemnation of “orgiastic nocturnal sacrifices, held perhaps in honour of Mithra, Slayer of the Bull.” In his view such rites were “among the grievances of quiet Mazdayasnian agriculturists against the Daevayasnian nomads.” He suggests that a similar connection between Haoma and Mithra “might be recognised” in Ctesias’s report that the Persian king got drunk on the one day of the year when sacrifice was made to Mithra [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II].

Boyce also reconstructs the cosmology that the ritual enacted. The gods made the world in seven stages: a stone sky, water, earth, a single plant, the Uniquely-created Bull, the first Man (Gayo-maretan, “Mortal Life”), and fire. Then the gods “made a triple sacrifice: they crushed the plant, and slew the bull and man,” which set the cycle of life and death in motion. Each daily yasna re-sanctified all seven creations, from the earth of the precinct to “man in the officiating priest” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.6 Cosmogonical and cosmological ideas”].

Death, the bridge and paradise

Boyce reconstructs an inherited belief about the dead in some detail. Ancestor cult involved offerings of food and clothing for the souls (urvan) in “the underworld kingdom of the dead, thought to be ruled over by Yima (Skt. Yama), the first king to reign on earth and the first man to die.” The way there led to the “Chinvat Crossing,” possibly a ford “guarded by supernatural dogs.” The mighty dead were venerated as fravashis. Before the Indo-Iranians separated, she argues, a hope arose that some souls could ascend to “Paradise, the ‘House of Song’.” Linked to it was “the concept of resurrection of the body,” recreated “from the dry bones a year or so after death.” As this hope spread, the Chinvat Crossing became a bridge between earth and heaven, where “a beautiful girl appeared to lead [the soul] upward to the gods” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.5 Ancestor worship and beliefs about the hereafter”]. If Boyce is right, the bridge, the judgment and bodily resurrection, which later chapters trace into Judaism, Christianity and Islam, existed in seed before Zarathushtra.

Daevas and Asuras: the great inversion

The most striking divergence is a mirror-image reversal of divine terms. In the Avesta the daevas, cognate with Sanskrit deva, “god,” are demons. Indra, “the greatest of the devas from Vedic literature, is often listed in Zoroastrian texts as one of the greatest of the evil forces, sometimes second only to Angra Mainyu himself.” The Zoroastrian confession makes rejection of the daevas a defining mark of the faithful. Conversely, the Vedic asuras became malevolent while the Avestan ahuras remained benevolent [Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-Iranian religion].

Boyce links this to social and political change. Around 1700 BC the steppe peoples adopted bronze and the horse-drawn war chariot. A new class of rathaeshtars, “chariot-standers,” abandoned herding and “sought wealth and fame for themselves by fighting and raiding in the service of warrior chiefs.” This “Iranian Heroic Age” brought “bloodshed and lawlessness,” and “the warrior heroes are likely to have directed their worship to the amoral Indra, rather than to the ethical Ahuras.” The priest-poets eventually “made all the great gods chariot riders, and even gave Mithra a mace of bronze” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.7 Social and religious developments before the time of the prophet”]. On Boyce’s reading, religion and power are bound together from the earliest reconstructable stage: the god a group favours follows its place in the social order.

Moulton offers a further explanation for part of the inversion. He judges that some late Avestan lists naming Indra among the demons may represent reimported “anti-Hindu polemic” rather than primitive inheritance [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II, note on Indra and Saurva].

Key points

• In the library’s sources, the pre-Zoroastrian religion is known only by comparing the Rigveda with the Avesta. Moulton (1912) and Boyce (1984) both treat this method as indispensable [#55011; #55116].
• Boyce places the undivided Indo-Iranians on the south Russian steppes c. 5000–2000 BC as cattle-herders. Moulton and Hirt favour a later migration. Modern reference articles link the period to the Sintashta culture.
• The central principle was cosmic order (asha/rta), guarded according to Boyce by three ethical “Lords”: Ahura Mazda, Mithra and Varuna. The reference survey treats the Ahura Mazda–Varuna equation as partial.
• Mithra began as a god of the compact. Moulton suggests his sky-and-light features may come from a separate strand, possibly with Semitic input, and Cumont links his solar identity to Chaldaean assimilation with Shamash.
• Worship had no temples or images. It centred on the hearth fire, water offerings and the intoxicating haoma/soma, which Moulton reads Zarathushtra as condemning.
• Boyce places the Chinvat bridge, the hope of paradise and bodily resurrection in the period before Zarathushtra.
• The daeva/asura inversion made the “gods” of one branch the “demons” of the other. Boyce ties this to the rise of a chariot-warrior class devoted to Indra, an early case of religion following political and social power.
• The Mitanni treaty (c. 1380 BC) is the earliest dated attestation of Mitra and Varuna. Current consensus, as the reference shelf reports it, reads it as Indo-Aryan rather than Iranian, and Moulton was already cautious about it in 1912.