|
The religion of Zarathushtra is so little
known in our times, though many Judeo-Christian traditions and beliefs
have their origin in this ancient religion, which was so dominant and
wide-spread in Persia before the birth of Christ.
We use words such as ‘satan,’ ‘paradise,’
‘amen’ almost daily without knowing, however, their Zarathushti origin.
We all know of the three magi that predicted the birth of Christ. So sad,
however, is the state of our ignorance about this religion, that few are
today aware that these magi from the East were none other than Zarathushti
priests. Zarathushtis can thus proudly claim that they heralded
Christianity to the world. Zarathushtis had a belief in the coming of a
Savior, born of a virgin mother, centuries ago [Vendidad 19.5 and
Zamyad Yasht 19.92].
Mithraism and Christmas. Most scholars
agree that Christ was not born on December 25th, which was reckoned as the
winter solstice in the Julian calendar. The Romans celebrated it very
fervently as the Nativity of Mithra, the Sun-God that they adopted from
Iran.
Mithraism was very popular among the Romans
and many relics of Mithra temples, unearthed all over Europe, bear
testimony to it. It was a corrupted and distorted form of the Zarathushti
religion, but even in its corrupted form, it stood for certain basic
Zarathushti values such as truth, justice, brotherhood, kindness and
loyalty, which inspired allegiance among millions of Romans and
Europeans. Franz Cumont, a noted authority on Mithraism, writes in his
book, “The Mysteries of Mithra”:
“Never perhaps, not even in the epoch of the
Mussolman invasion, was Europe in greater danger of being Asianicized than
in the third century of our era … a sudden inundation of Iranian …
conceptions swept over the Occident, … and when the flood subsided, it
left behind in the consciousness of the people a deep sediment of Oriental
beliefs, which have never been obliterated.”
It seems the early Christians absorbed many
Mithraic traditions and festivals, but gave them a Christian significance,
such as to Christmas on December 25th.
Major contributions. Among
Zarathushtra’s major contributions to our present-day religious heritage,
was a belief in an all-wise, all-powerful and eternal God, free will,
heaven and hell, individual judgement, resurrection, last judgment, life
everlasting for the reunited soul and body, the coming of a savior, strong
ethics based on good thoughts, words and deeds, and equal rights and
respect for women.
One of the chief attributes of the Lord is
feminine – the name ‘Mazda’ itself having a feminine base and, of the six
amesha spentas, three are masculine and three feminine. Words such as
‘paradise’ among others, are ancient Iranian. Zarathushtra discovered that
the whole universe was governed by a cosmic Law of Asha (righteousness)
and enjoined upon his disciples to follow this law and make this earth a
better place to live for all mankind. His scriptures revere the souls of
all good men (as well as women) of all times and nations, even those at
war with Iran, who follow this law and further the kingdom of God on this
earth. These teachings later became so familiar to the nations west of
Iran. Nevertheless, it is only in the religion of Zarathushtra that these
doctrines have retained their fullest logical relevance and purity, as
Zarathushtra time and again emphasized the goodness of the physical world
and human body, and the utter impartiality of divine justice.
Individual salvation he made repeatedly clear,
depends on the sum of his or her thoughts, words and deeds, and how well
one follows the Law of Asha. There could be no intervention whatsoever,
whether compassionate or capricious, by any divine being or priests to
alter this. The Day of Judgment, therefore, has an overwhelming and
pointed significance to a Zarathushti.
Cyrus and the Jews. How well
Zarathushtra’s doctrines shaped the conduct of his followers and how they
in turn shaped the course of history is, however, most evident in the
conduct of the most powerful emperors Iran has ever produced, namely Cyrus
and Darius, who are also the greatest empire-builders known to recorded
history. It was King Cyrus who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity.
Cyrus (and his successors) made no attempt to
impose the Zarathushti religion on his subjects but his inscriptions bear
live witness to the fact that he encouraged each of his subjects to live a
good life according to their own tenets. He allowed the Jews to rebuild
their temple in Jerusalem. Dr. Mary Boyce observes in this regard [Zoroastrians:
Their Religious Beliefs and Practices,” 1979, p. 51]:
“This was only one of many liberal acts
recorded of Cyrus, but it was of particular moment for the religious
history of mankind; for the Jews entertained warm feelings thereafter for
the Persians, and this made them the more receptive to Zoroastrian
influence.”
The Jews regarded Cyrus as a Messiah, and
therefore one who acted in Yahweh’s name and authority. In the Old
Testament [Second Chronicles 36:22 and 23] reads:“In the first year of
Cyrus, King of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord, spoken by
Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus, King of Persia, to make a
proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing. This is what
Cyrus, King of Persia, says: ‘The Lord, the God of Heaven, … has
appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem.’”
Again in the Old Testament, the first verse of
Ezra repeats this theme and adds that King Cyrus returned to the Jews
5,400 articles of gold and silver which the Babylonians had taken away
from their temple in Jerusalem.Yahweh himself is represented as saying [Isaiah
42: 1,4]
“Behold my servant whom I uphold,” “Cyrus
will bring forth justice to the nations … he will not fail … till he has
established justice in the earth.”
Pre- and post exilic beliefs.
Zarathushti doctrines became disseminated throughout the Persian empire
which extended from India to the Mediterranean. The Jews who were one of
these peoples found many congenial elements and similar ideas in their
faith. Both had many common beliefs such as belief in one God, coming of
a Messiah and a strict code of behavior and ethics. The Jews had
progressed much in their ethical and spiritual conceptions during the
Babylonian captivity. This progress happened to be for the most part in
just those doctrines which were commonly held by millions of Zarathushtis
among whom they lived.
Perhaps the foremost among these is the belief
in a future life. Those portions of the Old Testament that were written
before the Exile scarcely mention it. They knew no reward for their deeds
other than what they found on this earth. Their hopes were centered
around this world and prosperity in this life. The Exile, however, made a
great difference in the Jewish thinking in this regard, for it is during
this period and thereafter that we find for the first time in their
recorded history, the expression of a hope in the other world. There is an
entirely new note struck in the words such as these in the later Isaiah:
“Let thy dead live, let thy dead body rise.
Awake and sing, ye shall dwell in the dust; for thy dew is the dew of
heroes, and the earth shall cast forth the shades.”
Also in Daniel:
“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Even after the Exile this lesson about the
immortality of the soul was not assimilated by all Jews, notably by the
Sadducees. But the people who professed this new doctrine were called the
Pharisees, meaning ‘Persians’ (according to some scholars). Zarathushti
influence on the Dead Sea Scrolls has been unanimously accepted by
historians.
As Dr. Boyce notes [Zoroastrians: Their
Religious Beliefs and Practices,” 1979, p. 99]:“So it was out of a
Judaism enriched by five centuries of contact with Zoroastrianism that
Christianity arose – a new religion with roots thus in two ancient faiths,
one Semitic, the other Iranian. Doctrines taught perhaps a millennium and
a half earlier by Zoroaster began in this way to reach fresh hearers: but
again as in Judaism, they lost some of logic and coherence by their
adoption into another creed; for the teachings of the Iranian prophet
about creation, heaven and hell and the days of judgment, were less
intellectually coherent when part of a religion proclaimed the existence
of one omnipotent God, whose unrestricted rule was based not on justice
but on love. They continued nevertheless, even in this new setting, to
exert their powerful influence on men’s strivings to be good.”
The authority of Zarathushtra. The
influence of Zarathushtra’s teachings was so profound on western thought
that the intellectuals in Europe referred to him time and time again
through the centuries. In one of Faust’s stories Zarathushtra is depicted
as the author of a book which Faust studies so well that he earns the
title of a second Zoroasteris. Later the book receives the same attention
from his famous student, Christopher Wagner.
The Greeks made a practice of sheltering a
philosophic or ‘scientific’ theory under the guise of Zarathushtra’s
authority. This practice was continued during the Renaissance with a book
on Zarathushtra written by Jessenius, a physician to Francescus Patricius,
editor of the Chaldean Oracles:
“Zoroaster, first of all men, came near to
laying the foundations, however rudimentary, of the Catholic faith.”
In “Thus Spake Zarathushtra” in 1887,
Nietzsche deliberately depicted Zarathushtra as exactly the opposite of
what he was. His purpose in deliberately distorting the truth was lost on
the readers, which frustrated him greatly. “I have not been asked,” he
exclaimed in Ecce Homo, “I should have been asked what the name
Zarathushtra means in my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for
what makes this Persian a fantastically unique figure in history, is just
the opposite of it.
“Zarathushtra was the first to see in the
battle of good and evil, the prime mover of all things: the translation
of morals into metaphysics, as a power, cause and end in itself, was his
work.” [Insel edition, p. 117].
European travelers. When European
travelers of India began writing about the existence and religion of
Parsis in India, the West sent many scholars to study their religion to
find an Iranian origin for Christianity. As Dr. Hinnells, Professor of
Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, observes:
“The British respected the Parsis (greatly)
because in them they saw, in a strange and foreign land, people who shared
similar morals, principles and even physical similarity.”
The favorable reports of various European
travelers had created such an interest in the religion that as early as in
1700 an Oxford professor, Thomas Hyde, wrote a book to prove that
“Zoroastrianism was the Persianized form of an idealized Judaism.” His
great respect for Zarathushtis led him, rightly or wrongly, to seek in it
resemblances to his own faith.
The Portuguese generally referred to the
Parsis as Jews from the 16th century, which, as Prof. Hinnells maintains,
was the best compliment the devout Europeans of the 16th century could
give to any distant people by identifying them with their own religious
traditions.
As Schaeder commented in his book on Goethe in
1938: “With the knowledge of the Avesta there arose a temptation to
search the Iranian religion for the hidden sources of primitive
Christianity.” The French sent Anquetil Duperron to India to study the
Avesta. He lived among the Parsis in Surat, India for many years and
published his book, Avesta, in 1771.
How much the European philosophers were
excited by Anquetil’s trip to India and how much it raised their hopes,
especially those of Voltaire and Diderot, to see anything in the Avesta
that could be used against Christianity is depicted superbly by Raymond
Schwab in his book, Vie de Anquetil - Duperron [Paris, 1934].
The rivalry between the English and the French
prompted the English scholars to reject Anquetil’s findings summarily, but
ultimately the truth prevailed, opening up the gilded door of Avestan
studies in Europe.
Voltaire praised Anquetil for his courage to
tell the truth; his famous comment will ring through the corridors of
history: “People speak a lot about Zoroaster and will go on speaking about
him forever.”
[i]
This article posted on vohuman.org on November 4, 2004, was originally
featured in the Fall 2004 issue of FEZANA journal.
|
