Zarathustra

Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks, Zardusht in later Persian) is the prophet and poet-priest to whom the Zoroastrian tradition traces itself, and the composer of the Gāthās, seventeen dense hymns embedded in the Avestan liturgy that are the oldest Iranian religious texts we possess. In them a single visionary voice hails Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord, as the one God worthy of worship; sets before every person the choice between aša (the Truth) and druj (the Lie); and looks to a final setting-right of the world. Almost everything about the man is uncertain (when he lived, where, whether the tradition's memory of him is history or legend), but the Gāthās are a real and singular document, the passionate utterance of an inspired individual in dialogue with his God, and through them the prophet remains, in William Malandra's phrase, "the most skilled poet of pre-Islamic Iran."^[1]

This compendium takes the honest position, argued at length under Ahura Mazdā and Religion & the Lie, that the Achaemenid kings and the prophet are deeply related and not simply identical. Zarathustra is the hinge of that relationship, and the hardest figure in the whole record to fix.

The name

The Western name Zoroaster comes through Greek Zōroastrēs; in his own hymns the prophet calls himself Zaraθuštra, and that is the form used throughout the Avesta. It is a compound, and its second element, -uštra-, is uncontroversially the ordinary word for "camel." The first element, zarat-, is disputed; the obvious reading takes it from the verb "to be, to grow old," giving something like "he whose camels are old", a name that has struck some scholars as oddly banal for a prophet, set beside his father-in-law Frašaoštra, "he whose camels are wonderful," and the Wohuštra ("good camels") and Arəjaṱ.aspa of the same Avestan name-lists. That very ordinariness is itself a kind of evidence: it is not the sort of name a later age would invent for a holy founder, but the plain herding-name of a real Bronze- or Iron-Age Iranian. The later Western Iranian forms (Pahlavi Zardu(x)št, New Persian Zardusht) developed the "Zard-" by a false analogy with words like zard "yellow" and sard "cold"; the Greek Zōroastrēs rests on an Old Persian form in which the final dental had dropped away, exactly as Darius's own name appears as Dārayavauš rather than Dārayavahuš.

He belonged, the Gāthās tell us, to the Spitāma family (hence Spitāma Zarathuštra), and the hymns name a handful of his circle: his daughter Pouručistā, married into the Haēčaṱ.aspa family; his father-in-law Frašaoštra and the latter's brother Jāmāspa, among his earliest and most influential converts; and, as his crucial royal patron, Kavi Vīštāspa. His parents' names, Pourušaspa and Duγδōuuā, survive only in the later tradition.

The Gāthās, his own words

Unlike the kings, who left inscriptions but no creed, Zarathustra left words that are almost certainly his own. The Gāthās are seventeen hymns, grouped by their metres, set at the heart of the Yasna liturgy and composed in Old Avestan, a language so archaic, and so close to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, that it stands centuries apart from the rest of the Avesta around it. They are the utterance of a zaotar, a sacrificing priest, who speaks to Ahura Mazdā with startling intimacy: entreating, questioning, complaining, certain that he has seen the Lord in vision and conversed with him.

The prophet's own precariousness sounds through them. One hymn opens on a cry of exile:

"What land to flee to? Where should I go to flee? From (my) family and from (my) clan they banish me. The community to which I belong has not satisfied me, nor have the Drugwant rulers of the country! How Thee can I satisfy, O Mazdā Ahura?" (Gāthās, Yasna 46.1, trans. S. Insler)^[2]

He names his enemies (the karpans and the kawis, priests and princes who "squandered" their office and perverted the sacrifice) and vents at the withholding of his priestly stipend, "ten mares with a stallion and a camel" (Y. 44.18). And he names his rescue: the patron "who bounteously gratified Spitāma Zarathuštra among men," Kavi Vīštāspa, whose protection he plainly regarded as the pivot of his mission. These are not the abstractions of a legend but the grievances of a man with too few cattle and too few followers, looking to his God for the help "a friend would give a friend" (Y. 46.2). It is this concreteness, more than any external record, that persuades most scholars a real person stands behind the hymns.

The theology of the Gāthās

Zarathustra took what Malandra calls "the immense step" of hailing Ahura Mazdā not as one great god among the many of the inherited Iranian pantheon, but as the one uncreated God, wholly wise and good, Creator and upholder of aša.^[1] He praises him as "all-seeing" (Y. 45.4), "seeing afar" (Y. 33.13), the one "whom none deceives" (Y. 43.6), "clad in hardest stone", that is, the sky (Y. 30.5). In the most searching of his hymns he approaches the Lord through a litany of rhetorical questions, each a claim about who truly made the world:

"This I ask Thee, speak to me truly, O Lord! Who through his generative power is the original father of Truth? Who fixed the path(s) of the sun and the stars? Who is it through whom the moon waxes, now wanes? ... Who supports both the earth below and the heavens from falling down? Who the waters and plants?" (Gāthās, Yasna 44.3–4, trans. S. Insler)^[2]

But Ahura Mazdā, for the prophet, is not omnipotent. Suffering and evil have a source other than the Wise Lord; he can diminish and at the last annihilate them, but not command them in the present. This is the root of Zoroastrian dualism, and the Gāthās locate it not in the beginning of things but in a choice. At the origin of the moral world stand two primal Spirits:

"Now the two primal Spirits, who reveal themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad, in thought and word and action. And between these two the wise ones chose aright, the foolish not so." (Gāthās, Yasna 30.3, trans. Christian Bartholomae)^[3]

The two Spirits meet and, choosing, bring into being "Life and Not-Life":

"And when these twain Spirits came together in the beginning, they created Life and Not-Life, and that at the last Worst Existence shall be to the followers of the Lie, but the Best Existence to him that follows Right." (Gāthās, Yasna 30.4, trans. Christian Bartholomae)^[3]

And the two share nothing, the prophet's starkest word, and the axis the whole later religion (and this game) turns on:

"I will speak of the Spirits twain at the first beginning of the world, of whom the holier spoke thus to the enemy: 'Neither thought, nor teachings, nor wills, nor beliefs, nor words, nor deeds, nor selfs, nor souls of us twain agree.'" (Gāthās, Yasna 45.2, trans. Christian Bartholomae)^[3]

What Zarathustra did with the raw material of myth was, in Malandra's reading, an act of genius: he took "a well-known ancient amoral myth about primordial twins" (one of whom slays the other and makes the world from his body) and transformed it into "a fundamental paradigm about choosing good over evil."^[1] The choice is not made once, by the Spirits, and finished; it is laid on every person, again and again. "Hear with your ears the best things," the prophet urges, "look upon them with clear-seeing thought, for decision between the two Beliefs, each man for himself" (Y. 30.2); and the Wise Lord made men so that they must:

"When Thou, O Mazda, in the beginning didst create the Individual and the Individuality, through Thy Spirit, when Thou madest life clothed with the body, when Thou madest actions and teachings, whereby one may exercise one's convictions at one's free-will." (Gāthās, Yasna 31.11, trans. Christian Bartholomae)^[3]

To this Zarathustra joined a doctrine that, so far as the record goes, he was the first human being to articulate clearly: a judgement after death, a heaven for the righteous and a hell for the wicked, each soul led by its own daēnā (the sum of its own deeds) across the Bridge of the Judge to the House of Song or the House of the Lie. "He who shall come to the Aša-follower, to him belongs heavenly splendor," runs Yasna 31.20; "a long time of darkness, with bad food, the uttering of woe" awaits the followers of the Lie, "on account of your own deeds."

Getting the twin-Spirit doctrine right

A point of doctrine is easy to garble here, and matters for how the whole religion is understood. In the received Zoroastrian tradition, Ahura Mazdā creates through his Bounteous Spirit, Spənta Mainyu, and his uncreated adversary is the Hostile Spirit, Angra Mainyu (later Ahriman); the two "twins" of Yasna 30.3 are the Bounteous and the Hostile Spirit, and Ahura Mazdā stands above the pair, not among them. Boyce reads the Gāthic verse this way, and the Pahlavi commentary on it explicitly repudiates the notion that "Ohrmazd and Ahriman were brothers."^[4]

The rival reading (that the two twins are Spənta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu, and that Ahura Mazdā himself is the "father" of both, and so the ultimate source of evil as well as good) is a nineteenth-century interpretation, argued by Martin Haug on a fresh construal of Yasna 30.3. There is, as Boyce insists, no trace of such a doctrine in Zoroastrian tradition; but when Haug propounded it in Bombay, Parsi reformists adopted it gratefully, as an escape from the dualism for which Christian missionaries were attacking them^[4], and their writings then carried it back to Europe as if it were an independent witness. The idea that Zarathustra proclaimed an omnipotent Ahura Mazdā, source of both good and evil, became widespread on that shaky footing. It is best treated as later interpretation, not the prophet's own teaching, though the Gāthās themselves, calling Ahura Mazdā the "father" of Aša and of Good Mind (Y. 31.8) and of Ārmaiti (Y. 45.4), use a metaphor of divine fatherhood elastic enough to have made the confusion possible.

Around the Wise Lord stand the six great Beings the later tradition calls the Aməša Spəntas, Aša (Truth), Vohu Manah (Good Mind), Xšaθra (Dominion), Ārmaiti (Right-mindedness), Haurvatāt (Wholeness) and Amərətāt (Immortality), aspects of his own nature that have absorbed the functions of older gods, and that in the Gāthās function as "autonomous modalities" of his being. Whether to call the resulting theology monotheist, dualist or polytheist is, Malandra concludes, a fruitless exercise: "he was an inspired prophet, not a systematic theologian," and he moves freely between addressing the Lord as "Thou" and, with his attendant Beings, as "You."^[1]

The problem of the date

When Zarathustra lived is genuinely unknown, and has been, in Malandra's words, "an embarrassment of long standing to Zoroastrian studies."^[1] Reputable scholars have proposed dates as far apart as c. 1750 BCE and 258 years before Alexander; if anything approaching a consensus exists, it places him around 1000 BCE, give or take a century or so.

The root of the trouble is that the Avesta contains not one event that can be tied to any datable chronology. The internal evidence is all linguistic: the Old Avestan of the Gāthās is so close to the oldest layer of Vedic Sanskrit that many linguists (Boyce among them) argue the hymns must be of comparable antiquity, roughly 1200–1000 BCE,^[5] and composed far to the east, for no Achaemenid king, and no western Iranian people or place, is named anywhere in the Avesta, which points its whole geography at eastern Iran and Central Asia.

Against this stands the famous "traditional date": the later Zoroastrian books, reckoning through a mythological "cosmic calendar" of four ages of three thousand years, place Zarathustra's conversion of Vīštāspa 258 years before Alexander, which would put his career in the early-to-mid sixth century BCE, a generation or two before Cyrus.^[6] This date has had able defenders (W. B. Henning, and after him Ilya Gershevitch). But A. Shahbazi argued (BSOAS 40, 1977) that the figure was very probably back-calculated after the founding of the Seleucid era in 312/311 BCE, that is, it is a late artefact of the priests' effort to square their millennial scheme with real history, not a memory of when the prophet lived.^[7] If that demonstration holds, the "258 years" ceases to bear on the question at all, and (as Boyce noted) it also removes the old reason for insisting Cyrus could not have been a Zoroastrian: the prophet no longer has to be Cyrus's contemporary.

This compendium therefore states no single confident date. The early, linguistic case is the stronger, but the honest verdict is that the range is wide and the evidence thin, and any precise figure offered for Zarathustra is an argument, not a fact.

The homeland

The Gāthās give no clue where Zarathustra lived or worked. The wider Avesta, though (the geography of the Vendīdād and the Yašts, and the eastern dialect of the texts themselves), locates the whole tradition in eastern Iran: Chorasmia, Sogdiana, Bactria, the lands of the Oxus and the Inner Asian steppe. Later traditions that set the prophet in Media or Azerbaijan in the west are generally judged secondary, a westward migration of his memory once the faith had spread across the plateau. Particular proposals, Chorasmia (Henning), Sogdiana (Gershevitch), the Kazakh steppe (Boyce), rest, Malandra cautions, on slender evidence, and he settles only for "somewhere in the northeast." What can be said with confidence is the negative that matters most for this compendium: Zarathustra was not a man of Persia proper, nor of the Achaemenid heartland, but of the far eastern Iranian world, and his hymns reached the Persian southwest across an unknown gulf of space and time.

Did he even exist? The sceptical case

Because the man is invisible outside his own hymns, a strand of scholarship has tried to dissolve him into legend altogether. In the 1890s Darmesteter argued the Gāthās were a first-century-BCE composition inspired by Neoplatonism, with "Zoroaster" a merely legendary name lent to them, a thesis at once rejected, and untenable given the archaic language. More seriously, Jean Kellens and Éric Pirart (from 1988) denied that Zarathustra composed the Gāthās at all: since the poet sometimes names "Zarathustra" in the second or third person ("O Zarathustra, who is thy righteous ally?", Y. 46.14), they argued he cannot be the speaker, and that the hymns are the "emanation of a mentality" (the collective product of a priestly guild) rather than one man's work.^[8] P. O. Skjærvø observed, pointedly, that scarcely any modern scholar has actually argued for the prophet's historicity; it is simply assumed.

Malandra answers the sceptics on their own philological ground. A poet's addressing himself by name in the third person is a well-attested convention of exactly this Indo-Iranian poetic tradition: the Rigvedic seer Vasiṣṭha does the same thing, his voice sliding between "I," "you" and "Vasiṣṭha" within a single hymn, without anyone doubting that Vasiṣṭha composed it. "The subjective experience that most students of the Gathas have had," Malandra writes, is of "the passionate expression of an inspired individual in dialogue with God", not of a committee.^[1] This compendium follows that majority view: a real Zarathustra, of the Spitāma family, composed the Gāthās; but it flags the sceptical position as a live one, because the man leaves no footprint the historian can independently touch.

The Greek "Zoroaster"

The Greeks made of Zoroaster something the Iranians never did: an impossibly ancient sage of magic and the stars. Xanthus of Lydia (fifth century BCE), the earliest to name him, is reported to have set his date six thousand years before Xerxes' crossing into Greece, probably, Malandra suggests, a garbling of the last two three-thousand-year ages of the Zoroastrian world-calendar.^[9] Plutarch made it five thousand years before the Trojan War. To Plato's circle he was "Zoroaster son of Oromazes," founder of the magEία the young Persian king was taught (Alcibiades I 122a); to the elder Pliny he was the inventor of magic, and the only man ever to have laughed on the day he was born. Herodotus, who describes Persian religion and the Magi in detail, never mentions him at all.

This whole Greek image is legend, and a self-serving one: a great foreign antiquity onto which Greek writers projected astrology, sorcery and secret wisdom, and under whose name a library of pseudepigrapha later circulated. It tells us much about how the Greeks imagined the East, and almost nothing about the prophet of the Gāthās. (The evaluation of Greek testimony on Persia is developed on the Herodotus entry.)

Zarathustra and the Achaemenids

Here is the fact that governs this compendium's whole religion slice: the Achaemenid kings worship Zarathustra's Wise Lord, and make his Truth-and-Lie the very axis of their ideology, yet no royal inscription ever names the prophet: not Darius, not Xerxes, not any king down to Darius III; nor does Zarathustra appear in the later Sasanian royal inscriptions, even those of the zealous high priest Kirdēr. Darius invokes Ahura Mazdā endlessly, frames every rebel as a follower of drauga, the Lie, and preaches an ethic (discernment, justice, self-mastery, truth-telling) wholly consonant with Zarathustra's; but he also invokes "the other gods who are," uses the old Persian word baga rather than the Avestan yazata, and shows no distinctively Gāthic doctrine that could not equally belong to the broader Old Iranian worship of a great Ahura Mazdā.

So were the kings "Zoroastrians"? The question is the oldest debate in the study of Persian religion, and it is treated at length under Ahura Mazdā and Religion & the Lie. Mary Boyce argued the strong case for continuity: from the royal theophoric names (an Achaemenid of c. 600 named a son Vīštāspa, the name of Zarathustra's own patron; Cyrus named a daughter Hutaosā/Atossa, the name of that patron's queen) to the fire-holders at Pasargadae and the profoundly Zoroastrian scene carved over Darius's tomb.^[10] Against her stands the caution that none of this requires the specific reform of the historical Zarathustra, and that the safest scholarly default is the middle term "Mazdaean", devoted to Ahura Mazdā within the old Iranian religious world from which Zoroastrianism grew, without the claim that the early kings followed the prophet's particular teaching.^[11] A rejected but tempting shortcut deserves flagging, because it recurs: Zarathustra's royal patron Kavi Vīštāspa is not securely Darius's father Hystaspes/Vīštāspa. Were they the same man, the Avesta would surely record that its patron's son became King of Kings, and Behistun would surely boast of it; neither does. The identification is folk-conflation, not history.

The prudent conclusion is the one this compendium keeps as a well-defined uncertainty: the kings' Mazdā-worship and the prophet's reform are deeply related and not simply identical, and the silence of the inscriptions about Zarathustra is a real fact to be reckoned with, not explained away.

Legacy

Whatever the historian can and cannot fix, the movement Zarathustra began became, in time, the dominant religion of Iran until the coming of Islam, and one of the most consequential in the history of thought. The judgement after death, the Bridge of the Judge, the cosmic contest of good and evil resolved at the end of time, a saviour (saošyant) to come, motifs first sounded, so far as the record shows, in the Gāthās, have long been thought to have left their mark on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though the lines of influence are debated and hard to prove. In later Zoroastrianism the Wise Lord becomes Ohrmazd, the dualism hardens into open cosmic war against Ahriman, and the prophet himself is wrapped in the miraculous romance of the ninth-century Dēnkard: born laughing, his glory descending through the fire and the haoma into his mother, driving the demons underground at his birth. But the living core is continuous from the hymns: one God, wholly good, who made the world and set humankind free to choose, in every thought and word and deed, between the Truth and the Lie.