What Is Zoroastrianism? The Religion That Shaped the Ones That Followed

Zarathushtra, known in Greek as Zoroaster, was a priest of the older Indo-Iranian religion who received what he understood as a revelation and preached a reformed version of it. When he lived is genuinely uncertain: Greek sources put him thousands of years before Plato, Zoroastrian tradition places him around the sixth century BC, and most modern scholars, arguing from the archaic language of the hymns attributed to him, favour a date between 1500 and 1000 BC, which would make him roughly contemporary with the earliest Vedic material. The seventeen hymns called the Gathas are held to be his own words and are composed in a language so close to Vedic Sanskrit that the two traditions clearly share a recent ancestor. He appears to have been rejected at first, to have found a patron in a local ruler, and to have preached a message that placed moral choice at the centre of the universe.

The framework is a dualism that is ethical rather than metaphysical. Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, is the uncreated creator of everything good, wholly benevolent and not responsible for evil. Opposed to him stands Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, who is not his equal and did not create anything but corrupts what was made. The universe is therefore a battleground in which every person is an active participant rather than a spectator, and the choice between truth and the lie is made continuously by ordinary actions. This is where the religion's most quoted formula comes from, the triad of good thoughts, good words and good deeds, which is the whole of its ethical requirement and is inscribed everywhere in its buildings. The outcome is not in doubt: the tradition holds that good wins, that the dead are raised, that a final purification removes evil entirely, and that even those in hell are eventually restored, which makes it unusual among religions with a hell in not making it permanent.

Several features are commonly misunderstood, and the fire is the first:

• •Fire is a symbol of purity and of the divine presence, not an object of worship, and worshippers face it or any source of light while praying rather than praying to it
• •Fire temples maintain a continuously burning flame, and some in India are said to have burned without interruption for centuries, tended by priests who cover the mouth to avoid contaminating it with breath
• •The natural elements are regarded as pure and must not be polluted, which is why the traditional treatment of the dead avoids burial and cremation and instead exposes bodies in structures called towers of silence to be consumed by birds
• •Initiation at around the age of fifteen involves receiving a sacred shirt and a cord tied around the waist, which is untied and retied several times a day with prayer
• •The calendar carries six seasonal festivals plus the new year at the spring equinox, Nowruz, which is now celebrated across Iran, Central Asia and beyond by people of every faith
• •There is no monasticism, no celibate ideal and no fasting from food, since asceticism is rejected on the grounds that the material world is good and is to be enjoyed and defended

It was the religion of the Achaemenid empire under Cyrus and Darius, whose inscriptions credit Ahura Mazda directly, then of the Parthians, and then of the Sasanians, who from the third century AD organised it as a formal state church with a hierarchy, a canon and a degree of intolerance towards other faiths. That organisation ended with the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, after which conversion proceeded through a mixture of taxation, legal disadvantage and periodic persecution over several centuries. A group of adherents emigrated to Gujarat in western India, by tradition in the tenth century, and became the Parsis, who prospered under later Indian and British rule and produced a community of merchants, industrialists and philanthropists out of all proportion to its size, including the Tata family. The population has been declining for a century, in India through a very low birth rate and rules that in most communities do not permit conversion or recognise the children of women who marry outside, and in Iran through emigration.

The historical influence is disputed in detail and hard to dismiss in outline. The Judaean elite spent decades in exile in Babylon and returned under Cyrus, who is named in the Hebrew Bible as an anointed instrument of God for permitting the return and the rebuilding of the temple, and the concepts that become prominent in Jewish writing afterwards, including a developed adversary figure, angels in ranks, a general resurrection, a final judgement and an end-time, are ones the Persian tradition already had. From there they pass into Christianity and Islam, the latter also taking the five daily prayer times, a bridge crossed at judgement and other details that have Persian precedents. The magi of the nativity story are Zoroastrian priests. Whether this represents direct borrowing, parallel development or a shared environment is argued over by specialists, and the safer statement is that these ideas are attested in Persian material first, and that the traditions were in sustained contact for centuries.

Taught by Zarathushtra in Iran, probably between 1500 and 1000 BC, the religion holds that a wholly good creator is opposed by a destructive spirit who corrupts rather than creates, that every person chooses sides through ordinary acts, and that good will win, the dead will rise and evil will be destroyed. Its ethics reduce to good thoughts, words and deeds, fire is a symbol rather than an object of worship, and the natural elements must not be polluted. It was the state religion of three Persian empires, survives chiefly among the Parsis of India, and the ideas it holds are attested there before they became prominent in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.