Chapter 11. Ahura Mazda, the Amesha Spentas and Angra Mainyu: Monotheism or Dualism?

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 two uncreated Spirits there from the start. Between them stands Duchesne-Guillemin’s monotheism “tempered by polytheism” and “by dualism”. This chapter sets out the Indo-Iranian inheritance, the Heptad of Ahura Mazda, the twin Spirits of Yasna 30 and the problem of the Holy Spirit. It then compares the main positions and closes with the esoteric readings.

The Indo-Iranian inheritance

Boyce reconstructs an Indo-Iranian belief in a universal principle of order, Avestan asha and Sanskrit rta. In her account it was guarded by “a great triad of ethical divinities, the Lords” (ahura, Sanskrit asura): Ahura Mazda, Varuna and Mithra. Beside them stood Indra, “an amoral being, invoked for strength, courage, and success in battle” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, §1.2.3]. In Rigveda 4.42, which she quotes, Varuna declares “through rta I uphold the sky”, while Indra boasts that “when songs have made me drunk, then both the unbounded regions grow afraid”. She adds that Zarathustra “restricted the use of the ancient title Daeva to Indra and other martial gods” [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, ch. 1].

Duchesne-Guillemin notes that the asuras sank to demons in India, while in Iran the ahuras were exalted and the daevas devalued. He identifies Asha with Vedic Rta, “the ‘true order'”, of which “Varuna is, par excellence, its guardian”. His argument is that in the Gathas “Asa has taken the place of Varuna” and Vohu Manah has replaced Mithra “as lord of cattle” [Duchesne-Guillemin, Religion of Ancient Iran, #38271, §III.A]. Writing earlier, F. C. Cook drew the parallel between “Varuna, in fact, the Asura, as chief of the Adityas, and Ahuramazda, as he stands before us in the old Persian inscriptions, in the Gathas” [Cook, Origins of Religion and Language, #55083, Essay II].

The Wise Lord and the Heptad

Boyce holds that Zarathustra, “in a startling departure from accepted beliefs”, proclaimed Ahura Mazda “the one uncreated God, existing eternally, and Creator of all else that is good”. In her account Ahura Mazda brought six lesser divinities into being through his Holy Spirit, Spenta Mainyu. With him they form a Heptad, and each guards one of the seven creations, so that “the abstract [is] the inner reality of the concrete” [Boyce, #55117, ch. 2; #55116, §1.3.2]. She quotes Yasht 19.16–18, which says the six are “of one mind, one voice, one act”.

Dhalla, a reformist Parsi high priest, notes that Vohu Manah, Asha and Khshathra are “conceived of as masculine beings, though neuter in grammatical gender”, while Haurvatat and Ameretat are treated as masculine though grammatically feminine. In his view the six “are purely the personifications of abstract virtues”, “all of one thought, one word, and one deed” [Dhalla, Zoroastrian Theology, #55113, ch. “Amesha Spentas”]. Haug went further: “in the eyes of the prophet they were no personages”, only “abstract nouns and ideas”, and the notion of a heavenly council was imported by his successors [Haug, Essays, #55015, Essay IV §III.3]. Moulton finds that in the Gathas “Asha seems to lead”, and that “Asha and Vohu Manah are obviously far more important than the others” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011]. For Duchesne-Guillemin each Entity is at once divine and human, and “after Zarathustra, this supple, delicate system was lost”: the Entities “were reduced to mere deities, … separated into male and female” [#38271, §III.A–B].

Yasna 30: the twins and the choice

The central passage is Yasna 30.3–6, which Boyce translates: “Truly there are two primal Spirits, twins, renowned to be in conflict. In thought and word and act they are two, the good and the bad … And when these two Spirits first encountered, they created life and not-life.” The daevas then “chose not rightly, because the Deceiver came upon them as they consulted” [Boyce, #55117, ch. 2]. For Boyce each Spirit’s choice “prefigures the identical choice which every man must make for himself”. Duchesne-Guillemin also reads it as a choice between Asha and the Druj, the Lie, but for him “Ahura Mazda was the father of two twin-spirits” [#38271, §I, §III.A.f]. Lincoln argues that “the demonological components of any religion are no less intelligent, complex, or profound than those of its other constituent parts” [Lincoln, Cēšmag, #60392, §I].

Spenta Mainyu: God’s spirit or a separate being?

Boyce’s Textual Sources calls the Holy Spirit God’s “active agent and yet one with him, indivisible and yet distinct”. She notes that Zarathustra addresses Mazda now as “Thou”, now as “You” (plural) [#55116, §1.3.2]. Dhalla finds that “in a couple of instances Ahura Mazda is depicted as speaking of the Holy Spirit as apart from himself”. Yet he concludes that in the later texts Spenta Mainyu “has no independent existence apart from Ahura Mazda”, much as “the royal title ‘His Majesty'” stands for a king. He cites Jackson’s remark that the relation is “as difficult to define as that between the Holy Ghost and the Father” [Dhalla, #55113].

Duchesne-Guillemin traces how the two Spirits drifted apart. In Yasht 19.46 the two Spirits still contend. In the Vendidad, by contrast, “Ahura Mazda and Anra Mainyu fight each other by creating, respectively, the good and the bad things”. Since Aristotle’s lost Peri Philosophias reports that the Magi taught two principles, Oromasdes and Areimanios, the change dates “at least to the fourth century B.C.”. In a third system Zurvan took the place of Ahura Mazda as father of both [#38271, §I, §III.B]. Haug attributed the Zurvan doctrine to a misreading of Vendidad 19.9 and the full dualism to a sect, the “Zendiks”, while “the Magi seem still to have clung to the prophet’s doctrine of the unity” [Haug, #55015, Essay IV §III.3].

The positions compared

Haug: monotheism in theology, dualism in philosophy. Haug wrote that Zarathustra’s “conception of Ahuramazda as the Supreme Being is perfectly identical with the notion of Elohim … or Jehovah”. He held that the two primeval causes, “the good mind” and “the evil mind”, are “united” and “present everywhere; in Ahuramazda as well as in men”. In his view a separate evil spirit of equal power “is entirely foreign to Zarathushtra’s theology”. [Haug, #55015, Essay IV §III.1–2]. R. Brown agreed: “the twins are the two sides of the divine action, like light and darkness”, and, as Haug says, they are “in Ahuramazda” [Brown, Religion of Zoroaster and Archaic Monotheism, #60417, Part I].

The Parsi explanation reported by Monier-Williams. Monier-Williams passed on the view of the “learned Parsis of Bombay (especially … Mr. K. R. Cama)”. On this view the Twins were “two opposite—but not opposing—principles” inherent in Ahura Mazda, one constructive and one destructive, “merely antagonistic in name”. The only real antagonism came from man’s free choice. In his account Zoroastrianism “ultimately … crystallized into a hard and uncompromising dualism” [Monier-Williams, Remarks on Monism, Pantheism and Dualism, #60440, pp. 9–10].

Boyce: radical dualism. Boyce holds that the prophet “beheld, co-existing with Ahura Mazda, an Adversary, … Angra Mainyu, equally uncreated, but ignorant and wholly malign”. She regards this radical dualism, together with the Heptad, as the basis of Zoroastrian ethics. In her reading it offered “a reasoned explanation” of suffering “not imputing to the will of an all-powerful Creator the sufferings of his creatures” [Boyce, #55117, ch. 2; #55116, §1.3.2.4].

Duchesne-Guillemin: a tempered monotheism. “The Iranian religion has never been as aggressively monotheistic as are, for instance, Judaism and Islam.” It represents, he writes, “an attempt at monotheism”, and is “tempered by polytheism” and “in a more characteristic way, tempered by dualism”. He adds that “a pure, rigorous Dualism, with a God and a Demon equal to each other … has never been known to Iran” [#38271, §I].

Moulton and the inscriptions. Moulton asked why Darius fails “to mention Zarathushtra himself, Angra Mainyu, and the Amesha Spenta”. He concluded that the king need not have held “the whole creed of the Gathas”, and that Herodotus is likewise “silent as to the crucial names”. When the Greek forms appear in the fourth century they derive from Old Persian. By the reign of Artaxerxes II, who invoked “Auramazda, Anahita, and Mithra”, he judged the religion to be “practically the unreformed Iranian polytheism, with the Reformer’s name retained to atone for the absence of his spirit” [Moulton, #55011, Lecture II].

The Parsi dispute over Dhalla. Dhalla’s history traces Zoroastrian doctrine period by period, from the Gathas to the present. It drew an orthodox reply from Ervad P. S. Masani in 1917. Masani records that the Parsi Panchayat trustees, led by Sir Dinsha Davar, refused to sponsor Dhalla’s book because it contained “crude and obnoxious ideas”, including “the advocacy of proselytism”. He argued from the esoteric Ilm-i-Khshnoom [Masani, Zoroastrianism Ancient and Modern, #55152, Preface and Introduction].

Esoteric readings

Rudolf Steiner, lecturing in Berlin on 1 January 1909, gave Ahriman a cosmic history of his own. On his account, Zarathustra’s mission was “to spread … a culture directed towards the world of the senses”. The tempter of the Atlantean initiates was Ahriman, “or Angra Mainyu who, as Zarathustra taught his people, opposes the bright sun god known as the Great Aura, or Ahura Mazda”. Without Zarathustra’s teaching, he claimed, “the descendants of the Atlanteans could still have practised black magic in ancient Persia”. After Golgotha, he said, Christ “laid Ahriman in chains”, and he identified Goethe’s Mephistopheles as “none other than the figure of Ahriman” [Steiner, Disease, Karma and Healing, #69269, Lecture 12]. The Theosophical collection edited by N. F. Bilimoria (1898) internalises the Wise Lord: “Who was ‘Ormazd’ if not the chief Spenta-Mainyus, the monad, our own god-principle in us?” [Bilimoria (ed.), Zoroastrianism in the Light of Theosophy, #55115, “In the Light of Occult Philosophy”].

Key points

• Zarathustra inherited the Indo-Iranian contrast between ethical ahuras guarding asha and the amoral warrior gods. According to Duchesne-Guillemin, Asha replaced Varuna.
• Boyce describes a Heptad: Ahura Mazda, through Spenta Mainyu, with six Amesha Spentas bound to the seven creations.
• Dhalla and Haug read the six as personified virtues. Moulton ranks Asha and Vohu Manah highest.
• Yasna 30’s choice of the twin Spirits is the model for every human choice between Asha and the Druj.
• The sources disagree whether Spenta Mainyu is Ahura Mazda himself. Duchesne-Guillemin dates Ahriman’s rise as an anti-God to the fourth century BC at the latest.
• Haug, Brown and the Bombay Parsis read the Gathas as monotheism, and Boyce as radical dualism. For Duchesne-Guillemin they are a monotheism tempered by polytheism and dualism.
• Moulton notes that the Achaemenid inscriptions and Herodotus are silent about Zarathustra and Ahriman. Masani’s orthodox circle attacked Dhalla’s method.
• Steiner made Ahriman the power behind Atlantean black magic, and the Theosophists read Ormazd as the inner monad.