Zoroaster

Zoroaster, known in his own language as Zarathustra, was an ancient Iranian priest and poet whom followers of Zoroastrianism revere as the prophet who founded their faith. He is credited with the Gathas, a group of hymns that are the oldest part of Zoroastrian scripture, in which he calls on people to worship Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, and to choose truth over the lie. Almost nothing about his life can be established with certainty: scholars disagree on when he lived by more than a thousand years, and the dates given here, around 1000 BCE, are only a rough convention reflecting a common modern estimate.

No source from Zoroaster's own time mentions him apart from the hymns attributed to him, and these say nothing about dates or rulers that can be matched to known history. Ancient writers offered wildly different answers. Some Greek authors of the fourth century BCE placed him six thousand years before the Persian invasion of Greece, a figure that may reflect a misunderstanding of Zoroastrian teaching about the ages of the world. Later Zoroastrian tradition, preserved in Middle Persian texts of the ninth and tenth centuries CE, put him 258 years before Alexander the Great, which would place him in the sixth century BCE, but many scholars think this date was worked out by priests long after the event.

Modern scholarship divides into two main camps. A late dating, to the seventh or sixth century BCE, would make him roughly contemporary with the rise of the Medes and the early Achaemenid Empire. An early dating rests mainly on language. The Old Avestan of the Gathas is very close to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, the oldest Indian hymns, and the society it describes is one of herdsmen and priests with no trace of cities, kings of great states or iron. On this basis scholars such as Mary Boyce placed him somewhere between about 1500 and 1000 BCE. Many specialists today regard a date around 1000 BCE or somewhat earlier as most likely, but a range from about 1500 to 500 BCE is still defended, and some doubt whether the biography attached to his name has any historical basis at all.

His homeland is equally uncertain. The places named in the oldest parts of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scriptures, lie in eastern Iran and Central Asia, and most scholars place him somewhere in that broad region, perhaps in what is now eastern Iran, Afghanistan or the neighbouring lands to the north. Later tradition located his birth in the west, in Media, but this probably reflects the later centre of the religion.

What Zoroastrians believe about his life comes largely from later texts. He belonged to the Spitama family, and his father was Pourushaspa. Trained as a priest of the old Iranian religion, he is said at about thirty to have received a revelation on the bank of a river, where a radiant being led him into the presence of Ahura Mazda. His preaching met hostility from the priests and princes of his own people, until a ruler named Vishtaspa accepted his teaching and became his patron. Tradition says he married three times, had six children and died at seventy-seven, by one account killed by a priest of the old religion while at prayer. The Gathas themselves confirm only a few of these details, such as the names Spitama and Vishtaspa, and his sense of being rejected and in need of protection.

The Gathas are difficult texts, and their interpretation is much debated, but their central themes are clear. Zoroaster called for the worship of Ahura Mazda as the supreme, wise and good creator. He described a fundamental choice between asha, truth or right order, and druj, falsehood or deceit, made at the beginning of time by two primal spirits and repeated by every human being. People are free to choose, and are responsible for their choice, which shows itself in good thoughts, good words and good deeds.

Zoroastrians believe that each soul is judged after death, crossing a bridge that widens for the righteous and narrows for the wicked, and that history will end in a final renewal of the world, when evil is defeated and the dead are raised. Later Zoroastrianism developed this into a clear dualism between Ahura Mazda and a destructive spirit, Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, and honoured a group of divine beings, the Amesha Spentas, who embody aspects of the Wise Lord. How much of this goes back to Zoroaster himself, and how much reflects later development, is one of the main questions in the study of the religion. Fire, as a symbol of truth and purity, became central to Zoroastrian worship, though fire temples appear only much later.

How and when Zoroaster's teaching spread across Iran is unclear. The Achaemenid kings, beginning with Darius the Great, proclaimed in their inscriptions that they ruled by the favour of Ahuramazda, but they never mention Zoroaster, and scholars disagree about how far their religion should be called Zoroastrian. By the time Greek writers learned of him in the fifth century BCE, Zoroaster was already regarded as a figure of the remote past, and in the Greek and Roman world he became a legendary sage, credited with founding astrology and magic and with books he never wrote.

Zoroastrianism was the leading religion of Iran under the Parthian Empire and the state religion of the Sasanian Empire, when the Avesta was written down in a special alphabet. After the Arab conquest of the seventh century, Iran gradually became largely Muslim, and Zoroastrians declined to a small minority. Some migrated to Gujarat in western India, probably between the eighth and tenth centuries, where their descendants are known as Parsis and later played a prominent part in the life of Mumbai.

Some historians argue that Zoroastrian ideas about angels and demons, the last judgement, resurrection and the end of the world influenced Judaism after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, and through it Christianity and Islam. Others think the similarities are overstated or arose independently, and the question remains open. In modern Europe Zoroaster became a symbol of ancient wisdom: he appears as the wise priest Sarastro in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, and Friedrich Nietzsche chose him as the spokesman of his own very different philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Today there are probably between one and two hundred thousand Zoroastrians worldwide, mainly in India, Iran and among emigrant communities in North America and elsewhere, for whom he remains the prophet of the Wise Lord.