This study follows a line of descent and contact that runs for more than three thousand years. It starts with the gods the Indo-Iranians shared before they split into Vedic Indians and Avestan Iranians, and it ends with two twenty-first-century systems that claim to explain, and to supersede, everything that came before. Along the way the same questions recur. Is there one god or two principles? What happens at death? Who will come at the end of time? And who has the right to speak, and to rule, in God’s name? This introduction maps the arc Part by Part, so that readers can see where each thread is picked up and where it is compared.
Part 1. Foundations: method, the ancient Near East and the Indo-Iranian world (ch. 1–8)
Part 1 lays the ground the rest of the study stands on. Chapter 1 sets out the method: the comparative tradition from Müller, Tylor and Frazer to Durkheim, Weber and Eliade, the criticisms made of it, and the rules this study follows for insider and outsider sources, for dating and for arguments about influence. Frazer already tied religion to power when he wrote that “magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings” [ch. 1; Frazer, The Golden Bough, #65694]. Chapter 2 turns to religion before writing: burials, painted caves, the female figurines and the Mother Goddess debate, and Göbekli Tepe. There Eliade’s warning that “beliefs and ideas are not fossilisable” is set against the readings of Wood, Harari and Graeber and Wengrow [ch. 2; Eliade, Istoria credințelor și ideilor religioase, #44122, ch. I §2].
Chapters 3 to 5 treat the older civilisations that later traditions met. Chapter 3 covers Mesopotamia: its gods, the temple as the god’s house, Enūma Eliš, the flood, divination and divinely appointed kingship [ch. 3; Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, #70458; Collins, The Sumerians, #64812]. Chapter 4 covers Egypt: the city cosmogonies, Maat and the god-king, the judgment of the dead, the power of Amun’s priests, Akhenaten, and the debate over Moses the Egyptian [ch. 4; Bierbrier, Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, #366518]. Chapter 5 covers Canaan, Ugarit and Phoenicia: the pantheon of El, Asherah and Baal, the Baal Cycle, the high places, the molk dispute, and the Canaanite roots of Israelite religion that Part 4 takes up [ch. 5; Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, #86469; Smith, The Early History of God, #67245].
Chapters 6 to 8 return to the line this study follows most closely. Chapter 6 reconstructs the religion that left no scripture of its own, the shared faith of the peoples whose descendants composed both the Rigveda and the Avestan hymns. It covers the homeland debate and the “Aryan” name, the cosmic order (rta/asha), the Lords (asura/ahura) Mitra and Varuna, the fire and haoma/soma cult, the bridge of the dead, and the great inversion by which the daevas became demons in Iran while the asuras sank in India [ch. 6; Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, §1.2.3; Duchesne-Guillemin, Religion of Ancient Iran, #38271, §III.A]. Chapter 7 looks at the Indian branch: the Rigveda and its date, Mitra and Varuna as guardians of ṛta, Indra and Agni, the asura/deva reversal seen from India, and Dumézil’s tripartite theory and its critics [ch. 7; Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, #54250; Ries, Il culto di Mithra, #38276]. Chapter 8 asks what soma/haoma was, setting Wasson’s fly-agaric against ephedra, Syrian rue and cannabis, and then follows the drink into sacred kingship and the debate over the Sumerian “temple-state” [ch. 8; Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, #74742; Collins, #64812]. The Indo-Iranian material is picked up again in Chapters 19 and 82.
Part 2. Zoroastrianism (ch. 9–18)
Part 2 begins with the problem that frames all Zoroastrian studies: when Zarathustra lived. The dates offered run from the Greek “6,000 years before Xerxes” to the Parsi 660-583 BC and the modern philologists’ Bronze Age steppe [ch. 9; West, Pahlavi Texts V, #60400, Introduction §71; Jackson, Zoroaster, #55100]. It then sets out the scriptures and their transmission (ch. 10) and the central theological controversy over whether the Gathas teach monotheism, dualism or Boyce’s “dualistic monotheism” (ch. 11). Ethics, purity law and ritual follow (ch. 12–13), and the purity material is given in full. The political chapters are the core of the Part. Chapter 14 asks whether the Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrians and how Persian rule shaped post-exilic Judaism. Chapter 15 follows the Sasanian “church-state”, in which, in Shaked’s phrase traced through Ibn al-Muqaffa, “religion and sovereignty are twins” [Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam, #60406, article VI]. Zurvanism (ch. 16), eschatology with the Chinvat Bridge, the Saoshyant and the “making wonderful” (ch. 17), and the afterlife of the faith among Gabrs, Parsis and Iranis down to the Islamic Republic (ch. 18) complete it.
Part 3. Mithra and Mithraism (ch. 19–27)
Part 3 follows one god across nearly two millennia. Mitra appears in the Hittite-Mitanni treaty and the Rigveda as a god of the contract, and becomes the Mithra of the Mihr Yasht (ch. 19). His place inside Zoroastrianism is disputed (ch. 20). He then becomes a god of kings in Achaemenid, Parthian, Armenian, Pontic and Commagene royal cult (ch. 21). The Roman mysteries are treated through their monuments and their initiates (ch. 22–23). Chapter 24 sets out the central scholarly controversy over Cumont’s “Romanized Mazdaism” and its critics; as Vermaseren puts it, “the great gap which exists between the records of the Persian and Roman Mithras makes interpretation all the more difficult” [Vermaseren, Mithras the Secret God, #38300, ch. 8]. Sol Invictus and 25 December (ch. 25), the Mithras-Christ parallels and polemics (ch. 26), and Mani, Mehregan, Yalda and modern claims of a Mithraic root of all religions (ch. 27) carry the god into the Christian era. That last claim is taken up at length in Chapter 153.
Part 4. Israel, Judaism and the Second Temple (ch. 28–37)
Part 4 starts inside the West Semitic world of El, Baal and Asherah, where John Day and Mark S. Smith place the emergence of Yahweh (ch. 28) [Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, #86469]. It sets the biblical founding stories beside the archaeological record (ch. 29) and follows the monarchy and the Deuteronomic revolution of Josiah (ch. 30). Chapter 31 is the main bridge back to Part 2: it presents the case, and the objections, for a Persian imprint on Jewish angelology, demonology, resurrection and judgement [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067]. Hellenism and the Maccabees (ch. 32), the Second Temple sects and Qumran (ch. 33), Rome and the fall of the Temple (ch. 34), the Mishnah and Talmuds and the polemics against them (ch. 35), and Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, Hasidism and modern Judaism (ch. 36) follow. Chapter 37 closes with the identity debates, among them the Khazar thesis and its rebuttals, and the road to political Zionism.
Part 5. The Greco-Roman world (ch. 38–47)
Part 5 describes Greek religion as a civic system that had, in Seltman’s words, “no priestly caste … neither dogma nor missions … no Sacred Book” [Seltman, The Twelve Olympians, #87245] (ch. 38). It then turns to the initiation cults: Eleusis and the entheogen hypothesis (ch. 39), Dionysus and Orpheus (ch. 40), and the Pythagorean-Platonic theology of the soul (ch. 41). Stoics and Epicureans (ch. 42), the eastern cults of Cybele, Isis and Serapis (ch. 43) and the imperial cult (ch. 44) show religion as the binding force of empire. The Hermetica (ch. 45) and Gnosis (ch. 46) introduce the dualist and esoteric currents that resurface in Parts 7, 11 and 12. Neoplatonism, Julian and the end of the old gods close the Part (ch. 47).
Part 6. Early Christianity and the Empire (ch. 48–57)
Part 6 opens with the historical-Jesus debate, from Dunn’s “Jesus remembered” to the mythicists, Atwill, Heisman and Keshe (ch. 48) [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4]. It follows James and the Jerusalem community (ch. 49), Paul (ch. 50), the making of the canon (ch. 51) and the persecutions together with the dispute over their scale (ch. 52). The apologists and their pagan critics come next (ch. 53). The political turning point is Constantine (ch. 54), followed by Nicaea (ch. 55), the Theodosian Christian state and the end of paganism (ch. 56), and the Christological councils that split the Eastern churches (ch. 57).
Part 7. Christianity: schisms, reform and divisions (ch. 58–69)
Part 7 traces the divisions of Christendom: East against West and 1054 (ch. 58), the papal monarchy (ch. 59), the Crusades (ch. 60), and the dualist chain of Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars (ch. 61), which links back to the Gnostic and Manichaean material of Chapters 27 and 46. The Inquisitions and the Templar trial (ch. 62), Wycliffe and Hus (ch. 63), Luther (ch. 64), Zwingli, Calvin and the radicals (ch. 65), and the wars of religion (ch. 66) show reform turning into state policy and armed conflict. The Counter-Reformation and the Jesuits (ch. 67), Orthodoxy from the Third Rome to modern Romania (ch. 68), and the revival, Pentecostal and prosperity currents (ch. 69) bring the story to the present.
Part 8. Islam (ch. 70–81)
Part 8 begins with Arabia between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran (ch. 70) and Muhammad’s union of revelation and rule (ch. 71). The Quran, hadith and the problem of sources follow (ch. 72) [Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, #55061]. The succession disputes, the Kharijites (ch. 73) and Karbala (ch. 74) produce the great divisions of the faith. Chapter 74 also reports the persistent claim of a Zoroastrian or Mithraic substrate in Shi’ism. The caliphate’s Persian inheritance (ch. 75), law and theology (ch. 76), the esoteric Shi’ism of the Ismailis, the Nizari “Assassins”, the Druze and the Alawites (ch. 77), and Sufism and its Western afterlife (ch. 78) follow. The gunpowder empires and the end of the caliphate (ch. 79), Wahhabism, the Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic (ch. 80), and the post-prophetic movements from the Bab to Keshe’s “true Koran” (ch. 81) complete the Part.
Part 9. India (ch. 82–93)
Part 9 returns to the Indo-Iranian root from the Indian side. It opens with the Indus cities and the Aryan question, on which philologists, colonial administrators, Hindu nationalists and Dalit organisations have each built a narrative [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, “Into or Out of India”] (ch. 82). Vedic sacrifice (ch. 83), the Upanishads (ch. 84) and caste and dharma (ch. 85) lay out the Brahmanical order. Jainism (ch. 86), the Buddha (ch. 87) and Ashoka’s Dhamma state (ch. 88) present the renouncer challenge to it and its political uses. Mahayana and Vajrayana (ch. 89), the epics and the Gita (ch. 90), sectarian and Tantric Hinduism (ch. 91), the darshanas (ch. 92), and bhakti and the Sikh Khalsa (ch. 93) follow.
Part 10. East Asia (ch. 94–103)
Part 10 starts from Shang divination and the Mandate of Heaven (ch. 94) [Analects, with selections from traditional commentaries, #40662]. It then covers Confucian state orthodoxy (ch. 95), Daoism from Laozi to the Celestial Masters (ch. 96), Chinese Buddhism (ch. 97), State Shinto (ch. 98), Japanese Buddhism (ch. 99), the Dalai Lama institution (ch. 100) [van Schaik, Tibet: A History, #70190], and Korea from shamanism to Juche (ch. 101). Two chapters address the region’s particular pattern of religion and revolt: the millenarian rebellions from the Yellow Turbans to the Boxers (ch. 102), and the modern new religions and the party-state, including Falun Gong, Aum and Keshe’s picture of China (ch. 103).
Part 11. The Western esoteric tradition and Freemasonry (ch. 104–115)
Part 11 follows the hidden-knowledge current from Kabbalah (ch. 104) through Renaissance Hermetism, read with Yates’s thesis (ch. 105) [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768], alchemy and astrology (ch. 106), the Templar history and legend (ch. 107) and the Rosicrucian manifestos (ch. 108). Five chapters treat Freemasonry: its origins and the Grand Lodge of 1717 [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1] (ch. 109), its degrees and symbols (ch. 110), Albert Pike’s comparative history of religions in Morals and Dogma (ch. 111) and his Lucifer and Kabbalah passages together with the Taxil hoax (ch. 112) [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717], and the lodge conflicts and the Illuminati (ch. 113). Chapter 111 ties the Part back to Zoroaster and Mithra. The Masonic role in the American, French, Latin American and Romanian revolutions (ch. 114) and the occult revival of Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and Anthroposophy (ch. 115) close it.
Part 12. Satanism, Luciferianism and modern occultism (ch. 116–124)
Part 12 traces the Adversary from Angra Mainyu to Satan, Lucifer and Iblis (ch. 116). It follows the witch hunts through the primary documents [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807] (ch. 117), and then the pacts, Black Masses and Hellfire Clubs, where alleged and documented Satanism diverge most widely (ch. 118). The rehabilitation of Lucifer from the Gnostic serpent to Eliphas Levi (ch. 119) leads to Crowley and Thelema (ch. 120) and to LaVey’s Church of Satan, which Faxneld and Petersen treat as the first “enduring and public tradition of Satanism” [Faxneld & Petersen, The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction] (ch. 121). The later Left-Hand Path schisms (ch. 122), neopaganism and chaos magic (ch. 123), and the Satanic panic with its revival in QAnon (ch. 124) complete the Part.
Part 13. New religious movements and cults (ch. 125–136)
Part 13 opens with the contested vocabulary of “cult” and “brainwashing”. It quotes Willis’s caution that “one person’s cult is another person’s religion” [Willis, American Cults, #63203, Introduction] and sets the Lifton-Singer-Hassan model against its academic critics (ch. 125). It then follows the American prophetic and healing movements: the Mormons and their fundamentalist offshoots (ch. 126–127), the Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science (ch. 128), and Spiritualism (ch. 129). Scientology (ch. 130), the Unification Church and the Children of God (ch. 131), Jonestown (ch. 132) and Waco (ch. 133) are the major case studies, each presented with its competing accounts. Aum and the Solar Temple (ch. 134), the UFO and Ascended Master religions (ch. 135), and NXIVM and the anti-cult movement (ch. 136) bring the Part to the present.
Part 14. Religion and politics (ch. 137–148)
Part 14 draws together the political thread of the whole book. It runs from sacral kingship and divine right (ch. 137) [Roberts & Westad, The Penguin History of the World, #69765, ch. 3] and the papacy against the emperor down to Westphalia (ch. 138) [Grzymała-Busse, #62062], to missions and colonialism (ch. 139), the Enlightenment and laïcité (ch. 140), and Marxist state atheism (ch. 141). American civil religion (ch. 142), Zionism and Palestine (ch. 143), the Iranian revolution (ch. 144), and petro-Islam and global jihad (ch. 145) follow. The Vatican as a financial and diplomatic power (ch. 146) and religion in present-day great-power politics, including Patriarch Kirill’s Russia and Ukraine (ch. 147) [Matthews, Overreach, #66606, ch. 4], come next. Chapter 148 sets out, with strict attribution, the claims of the secret-society literature about elite forums and orders, beside the documented record of each.
Part 15. The Keshe Knowledge Seekers Workshops (ch. 149–158)
Part 15 presents Mehran Tavakoli Keshe’s teaching almost entirely from the Foundation’s own transcripts. Chapter 149 states the governing caveat: the library holds no independent biography or study of him. The workshops’ format and phases (ch. 150), his plasma physics (ch. 151) and his metaphysics of the Soul and the Universal Council (ch. 152) lead to the religious-historical core, Chapter 153. There Keshe claims that the “true Christmas” was 21 December, “the birthday of Mitra, some 8,000 years ago” [Keshe, KSW 360, #378072]. His readings of Zoroaster and Judaism (ch. 154), Christianity and the Vatican (ch. 155), and Islam and Iran (ch. 156), his political programme and the Keshe Coin (ch. 157), and his dated prophecies and reception (ch. 158) follow, each set against the mainstream accounts of the earlier Parts.
Part 16. Singularity: Mitchell Heisman (ch. 159–166)
Part 16 treats Heisman’s Suicide Note, catalogued as “a ~1900-page philosophical treatise interrogating reason, meaning, free will, God, and self-destruction” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, catalogue record] (ch. 159). It follows his thesis that “God is Technology” and that monotheism was a proto-Singularity (ch. 160). It then sets out his treatments of Judaism as a “meta-sociobiological technology” (ch. 161), of Christianity and liberalism (ch. 162), and of Nazism (ch. 163), each reported in his own terms. His Norman-Yoke sociology of liberal democracy (ch. 164) and his conclusion that “the Singularity would be the technological genesis of God” [#38252, Part I] are set beside Kurzweil, Vinge, Geraci and Harari (ch. 165). Chapter 166 compares his eschatology with Keshe’s and with the traditional ends of the world from Zoroaster onward.
Part 17. Comparisons and synthesis (ch. 167–174)
The final Part compares the material directly. Its chapters set side by side cosmologies and world-ages (ch. 167) [ERE, “Ages of the World”, #60381], the one, the two, the three and the none in conceptions of the divine (ch. 168), the saviour figures from Saoshyant to Kalki and Mitra (ch. 169), the afterlife (ch. 170), and sacred time, including 21 December, 25 December and Nowruz (ch. 171). They also compare law and priesthood (ch. 172). A master timeline from 3000 BCE to the present traces the co-evolution of religion and politics (ch. 173). The book closes by measuring Keshe and Heisman against the whole study and listing the questions its sources leave open (ch. 174).
Threads to follow
Five threads cross the Parts and are worth tracking. The first is dualism: from its antecedents in Egypt’s Maat set against isfet (ch. 4) and the mirror-image inversion by which the daevas became demons in Iran and the asuras in India (ch. 6–7), to the twin Spirits of Yasna 30 (ch. 11), and on through Mani (ch. 27), the Gnostics (ch. 46) and the Cathars (ch. 61) to the Adversary (ch. 116) and the comparison in Chapter 168. The second is Mithra and the solstice, running from the Vedic Mitra, god of the compact and partner of Varuna (ch. 6–7), and the Mitanni treaty (ch. 6, 19), with Cumont’s view that Chaldaean theology assimilated Mithra to the sun god Shamash (ch. 6), through 25 December (ch. 25) and Yalda (ch. 27) to Keshe’s 21 December (ch. 153) and Chapter 171. The third is the end of time and the judgment of the dead: the Mesopotamian underworld with no judgment (ch. 3), the Egyptian weighing of the heart (ch. 4), the Chinvat Crossing and resurrection from the dry bones that Boyce places before Zarathushtra (ch. 6), Frashokereti (ch. 17), Jewish and Christian apocalyptic (ch. 31, 48), the Mahdi (ch. 74), the Taiping and Aum (ch. 102, 134), and the Singularity (ch. 165–166, 169). The fourth is the altar and the throne: the theme of Part 14, but present in nearly every chapter. It begins with Frazer’s magicians who “developed into chiefs and kings” (ch. 1), the Sumerian King List, Ashur’s “steward” and Hammurabi (ch. 3), the pharaoh as “Son of Ra” and the power of Amun’s priests (ch. 4), Boyce’s chariot warriors and their Indra (ch. 6), the purohita beside the Vedic king (ch. 7), and khvarenah and the disputed “temple-state” (ch. 8). It runs on from the Achaemenid inscriptions (ch. 14) to the Universal Council (ch. 152). The fifth is the sacred drink: soma and haoma as the central Indo-Iranian rite and the dispute over the plant (ch. 6, 8), the entheogen hypothesis at Eleusis (ch. 39), the Mithraic sacred meal and the Eucharist (ch. 22, 26), and the place that Keshe’s and Heisman’s technologies take as the medium of contact with the divine (ch. 166, 174).