Zoroastrianism

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Speaker 1 Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. You might remember a few weeks back I did an introduction where I mentioned how I was going to interview a professor about Zoroastrianism.

Speaker 1 Well, that interview went really well and I'm delighted to share the episode with you now.

Speaker 1 Our guest is Professor Almut Hinser. She is a leading expert on Zoroastrianism.
She's based at SOAS, the University of London.

Speaker 1 She was so warm and welcoming when she let us into her office, and we interviewed her for roughly an hour on the big picture of Zoroastrianism in antiquity. What do we know about its origins?

Speaker 1 What are its key beliefs? This was a really interesting chat delving deep into what Zoroastrianism is, and I really do hope you enjoy.

Speaker 1 It's a religion with roots deep in the prehistoric past and that still endures down to the present day, centered around beliefs passed down for more than 3,000 years, preserved in an archaic Iranian language.

Speaker 1 The religion of Zoroastrianism. In antiquity, Zoroastrianism was central to several great ancient Iranian empires, from the Achaemenids to the Sasanians.
But what do we know about this religion?

Speaker 1 What were and still are its key beliefs? How did it emerge? Who are these central figures of Ahura Mazda and the prophet Zarathustra? And why is fire so important?

Speaker 1 This is the story of Zoroastrianism with our guest, Professor Almut Hintz.

Speaker 1 Almut, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 6 Oh, the pleasure is all mine. I'm delighted to have you here and to talk to you about Zoroastrianism.

Speaker 1 I mean, yes, because can we say it is the oldest or one of the oldest living religions today?

Speaker 6 I would say so. I would say one of the oldest, because there may be religions still being practiced of which we do not know.

Speaker 6 And a feature of Zoroastrianism is that the past lives on in the present, very much so. It is a very ancient religion.
Its roots reach back into the second, third millennium BCE and even earlier.

Speaker 6 And many of the rituals and words which they recite in their ritual performances actually date from that time.

Speaker 1 Because I was going to ask, is there many differences between modern Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrianism in antiquity? But it sounds like, I mean, quite a lot of it is the same.

Speaker 6 We think so, as far as the language is concerned, which which is a great guide to dating Zoroastrianism.

Speaker 6 In their ancient rituals, the Zoroastrians, the Zoroastrian priests, but also Zoroastrian lay people in their prayers recite texts which date back to the second millennium BCE.

Speaker 6 And these are what we call the Gatas of Zarasustra and the Yasna Haptang Haiti, which is also composed in the same language.

Speaker 6 So the language is very archaic, the language of those texts which the Zoroastrians recite in ritual and in prayer. Very archaic.

Speaker 6 And in fact, it's the oldest witness of any Iranian language, and it belongs to the oldest attested Indo-European languages.

Speaker 1 Wow. And what is this language?

Speaker 6 We call it Avestan.

Speaker 1 Avestan, okay.

Speaker 6 Yes, because it is the language of the Avesta.

Speaker 6 And an Avesta is the name of the sacred texts of the Zoroastrians.

Speaker 6 The texts which the Zoroastrians recite aloud in prayer and in the rituals.

Speaker 6 And Avestan has survived basically only as part of those rituals and prayers. So it's the language of the Avesta.

Speaker 1 It's amazing that that has endured to the present day, given how old a language that is and that it is practiced still today.

Speaker 1 So, there are still many people out there in Iran who would know that language, who know that language?

Speaker 6 They know the text, they know the language insofar as they know the words which they recite, and they learn these words by heart.

Speaker 6 And they recite these words aloud, so they need to be spoken. And these texts and these rituals were composed orally without the use of writing, the oldest being from the second millennium BCE.

Speaker 6 We know that the dating is based on certain linguistic features in the language of the Gartas, the oldest parts of the Avesta,

Speaker 6 and in particular prehistoric sounds which linguists call laryngeals,

Speaker 6 sounds which are pronounced in the back of the throat and

Speaker 6 the larynx, yes. You have them in Semitic languages, these sounds.
We don't have them in Indo-European languages, but in prehistoric times,

Speaker 6 Proto-Indo-European languages did have those sounds as consonants, and they could also turn into vowels.

Speaker 6 And these sounds later disappeared in all of the Indo-European languages, except in Hittite, where they were then found as still there as consonants.

Speaker 6 And at the time, the oldest texts of the Avesta were composed, those laryngeals must still have been present,

Speaker 6 because in the meta, the meter of the Gatas tells us that they stopped

Speaker 6 two vowels to coalesce into one long vowel. And those two vowels, a plus a, with a laryngeal in the middle, count as two syllables.

Speaker 6 So that that is the strongest indication for their existence at the time when these texts were composed and that cannot have been much after the middle of the second millennium bce so that's one of the main arguments for the early for the date second millennium date of the gatas the oldest texts well we'll explore more about those texts and what they talk about in a bit but as we're going back to the the second millennium bc i'd like to see how far back we can go i mean what do we know Almud, about the origins, the roots of Zoroastrianism?

Speaker 1 Can we go back to the word Indo-European?

Speaker 6 We can go back to some extent. Thanks to comparative historical philology and linguistics,

Speaker 6 the Iranian languages are cognate with the Indo-Aryan languages. Indo-Aryan, these are the languages of Indo-European origin spoken in this Indian subcontinent.

Speaker 6 The Indo-Aryans were immigrants into the Indian subcontinent. We know that for sure.
Well, pretty sure, yes.

Speaker 6 Although there are some people who think they have always been there, especially Hindu nationalists nowadays.

Speaker 6 But from an Indo-Europeanist point of view, the immigration of the Indo-Aryans into India is the most probable scenario. So

Speaker 6 Iranian and Indo-Aryan are sister languages of a common prehistoric ancestor, which we call Indo-Iranian, and that prehistoric ancestor is not attested, hasn't survived.

Speaker 6 We have no oral or written documents of that prehistoric language from which those two branches derive.

Speaker 6 However, we can reconstruct that prehistoric ancestor to some extent by comparing the oldest surviving Iranian documents, which is the Avesta and especially the Gatas,

Speaker 6 but also the old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, which date from 520 BCE onwards. A bit later on, yes.

Speaker 6 A bit later on, a thousand years later than the Gatas, so they are much older Gatas.

Speaker 6 So by comparing those earliest old Iranian sources with the earliest Indo-Aryan sources from the Indian subcontinent, and the oldest surviving Indo-European documents from the Indian subcontinent are the Vedic hymns.

Speaker 1 This is the Rig Veda and the like, is it?

Speaker 6 Exactly. The Rig Veda and the other Vedas, Yajo Veda and the Sama Veda and the Atarva Veda, but especially the Rig Veda, which is the oldest.

Speaker 1 And those are linked to the early Hinduism, aren't they? In the second millennium BC, Sanskrit and the like?

Speaker 6 Absolutely.

Speaker 6 So the languages, the language of the Vedas, especially of the Rig Veda, and the language of the Avesta are so similar to each other that they are like two different dialects of the same language.

Speaker 6 And you can transpose expressions in Avestan into Sanskrit. So, for example, in Avestan,

Speaker 6 we say wohu manach or vahu manach for good thought wahu is good and manach is thought and in sanskrit it's vasu manas

Speaker 6 so i

Speaker 6 a vedic and an avestan speaker they would have probably been able to understand each other the grammar is identical it's only some phonetic the phonetic changes have happened in the way they pronounce the words so that linguistic similarity shows how hinduism and zoroastrianism were linked, at least linguistically, with their ancestor, I guess.

Speaker 6 Indeed, with their common prehistoric ancestor, Indo-Iranian ancestor. And that means that these two languages are genetically related.

Speaker 6 They are two sister branches of a common parent language, which is an Indo-Iranian or Aryan language. And they would have shared a common language, not only that, but also a common thought system

Speaker 6 and a common religion and a common social structure.

Speaker 6 And all of that we are trying to reconstruct on the basis of the historically attested documents, which is the those are those religious hymns, because that's all that has survived.

Speaker 6 Nothing else, no other texts have survived.

Speaker 1 So, like the Garthas on one side and the Rigveda and the like on the other side, so comparing them, as you say. Really interesting.

Speaker 1 I love, I know our audience loves as well, talking about the linguistic side of things. So, I'm really glad that we could talk about that at the beginning of this chat.

Speaker 1 You mentioned, of course, the second millennium BC with the garters. So, who is it believed that Zoroastrianism begins with at that time?

Speaker 6 Yes, so while they share this common heritage, the origins of Zoroastrianism would not reach back into the Proto-Indo-Iranian period because

Speaker 6 we do not have a Zarasushtra in the Vedic tradition. The religion must have started after the two branches split from one another.

Speaker 6 But exactly when and where the Zoroastrian religion developed, that is a question which is debated amongst scholars.

Speaker 6 We can only take indications and which try like detectives trying to find indications, traces, a smoking gun, so to say, which points us into a certain space, a geographical area, and a time when that might have happened.

Speaker 6 So those laryngeals, for example, are the smoking gun, which tells us it cannot have been much later than the second middle of the second millennium BCE because those laryngeals were still pronounced when the garters were composed.

Speaker 6 So the composer of the garters pronounced the laryngeals. Otherwise, they wouldn't have prevented

Speaker 6 because they prevented that merging of the two adjacent vowels. Then there are a number of other indicators which point to a quite early date of the beginning of the Zoroastrian religion,

Speaker 6 although that is also disputed. So, and that is the demonization of the divas.

Speaker 6 Now, this takes us into the conceptual world of the Zoroastrian religion.

Speaker 6 And diva, diva, means God in Indo-Iranian. It is the word which you also have in Latin deus,

Speaker 6 yes, yeah.

Speaker 6 And in English, divine, divine,

Speaker 6 the div bit, is the same as dive in diva. It's diva.
And in Sanskrit, it's deva.

Speaker 1 So you once again you see the similarities between

Speaker 6 deva in Sanskrit and diva in Avestan.

Speaker 6 And in Sanskrit, what happened is that the I became E.

Speaker 6 So they say in India, the Indo-Aryans say Deva, which means God.

Speaker 6 In Avestan,

Speaker 6 in the Gatas, Daiva are the false gods who should not be worshipped. They are terrible.
And they are very vehemently rejected in the Gatas.

Speaker 6 And the demonization of the old Indo-European gods is a feature which we find in the Iranian tradition only,

Speaker 6 nowhere else. And innovations are major indicators for change, for cultural change.
Archaisms are not so much indicators because you have just retained an old tradition.

Speaker 6 There are lots of archoisms in the Zoroastrian tradition, but what helps us with the dating are innovations.

Speaker 1 So do we think then, just to clarify, do we think the origins of Zoroastrianism is very much linked to a belief at that time, you know, after the splits between the Aryan, Indo-Aryans and the Indo-Iranians, of a rejection of the gods that had been worshipped previously and looking towards something else?

Speaker 1 That changed, as you were saying.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. So

Speaker 6 that is, so we have the Indo-Iranians, the common people, and they split into Iranians and into Indo-Aryans. And the Iranians are marked by the rejection of the old gods.
The divas. The divas,

Speaker 6 the old gods, all of a sudden,

Speaker 6 they are bad

Speaker 6 and they are rejected.

Speaker 6 And of course, these gods do not exist on their own, but there is a whole cult related to it. There is a priesthood who have a stake in it, in the worship of the gods.

Speaker 6 So if you reject, if you tell your people,

Speaker 6 these are, you are all worshiping false gods, what do the priests do? They are very upset about it

Speaker 6 because their livelihood depends on the worship of those gods and they have been trained in worshiping those gods. So this is not

Speaker 6 this is not a trivial thing to say that the divas, the gods are wrong. You should not worship them.
But that's what the Gautas do.

Speaker 1 And do we have any idea who is the, I guess, the prophet equivalent who is going around at that time, you know, kind of proclaiming this message that, you know, worshiping the old gods and what these priests were doing is wrong?

Speaker 6 The only individual who is linked to this is the figure of Zarasustra.

Speaker 1 Zarathustra.

Speaker 6 And the Gatas are the oldest texts which we have, and they talk exactly about this.

Speaker 6 So Zarasustra figures prominently in the Gatas. His name occurs 16 times

Speaker 6 in those hymns. There are 17 hymns all together, grouped into five Gatas.
Gata means song and basically a meter, the meter of a song.

Speaker 6 And these 17 hymns are grouped according to their meter into five groups of unequal length. The first group is one Gata.
It consists of seven hymns. And then we have two more of four hymns each.

Speaker 6 And then we also have two of one hymn only.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 these are the 17 hymns grouped into those five gatas. And in those hymns, we have the name of Sarasushtra 17 times.
And the other name, which occurs most prominently, is that of Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 1 Right, okay.

Speaker 6 Who's this? That's the god.

Speaker 1 Is this the god that they're saying, turn away from the old gods, this is the god you should follow?

Speaker 6 this is exactly what the gajas are about right

Speaker 6 they talk about this and zarasushtua talks to his god ahura mazda he has a special relationship to ahura mazda and ahura mazda talks to him so zarasushtua asks him questions he says oh tell me ahura mazda who made this world who keeps the stars in the sky and prevents the clouds from coming down, from falling down?

Speaker 1 The sky from falling on our heads.

Speaker 6 Yeah, right, yeah. Who has made this world?

Speaker 6 And who has arranged the day in such a way that we get up in the morning and go to sleep in the evening? And of course, the answer is Ahura Mazda. So Ahura Mazda is seen as the creator of the cosmos,

Speaker 6 but also as the one

Speaker 6 who

Speaker 6 tells people how they should lead their lives. Right.

Speaker 6 So they need to follow truth, which is Asha, and they need to worship Ahura Mazda and not the Daivas, because the Daivas are wrong.

Speaker 1 And do we also get a sense then, this might be too simplistic, but I have to ask, if it is focused on Ahura Mazda,

Speaker 1 is the logic then, is this a monotheistic religion?

Speaker 6 There is one God, only one God, which is Ahura Mazda. Interesting.
Interesting. Who is the maker of everything that is good?

Speaker 6 And what is good are his

Speaker 6 creations.

Speaker 6 And he creates

Speaker 6 everything

Speaker 6 on a spiritual level in the first instance.

Speaker 6 And out of that spiritual creation, he creates the matter, the physical world. which is the world, the cosmos, which is visible and tangible.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 he is that god who is wholly good and who is the creator of the world so there is one god only

Speaker 6 but a special feature of the zoroastrian religion is that evil has a separate existence right so they're always kind of opposing each other you're always fighting against evil in pursuit of good is that the idea basically yes in today's practice and as it then evolved, yes.

Speaker 6 But in the system,

Speaker 6 as we have it in the Avesta, Ahura Mazda has no direct counterpart on the evil side.

Speaker 6 But Ahura Mazda is the father.

Speaker 6 He produces out of himself. He has.
He is creative. Because being good means being...
creative and multiplying to yourself. Good is what is good is productive, it's fruitful, and it's creative.

Speaker 6 And this capability of creating and giving life, especially life is inside Aura Mazda.

Speaker 6 That is called Spenta Mainyu in Avestan. Mainyu, it has the root man, to think, which we have in English, mental, for example, this menbit.

Speaker 6 Mainyu is a force, a spiritual force, and spenta means life-bearing,

Speaker 6 something like that. That means it has the capacity of producing life.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 it is this creative life-bearing force in Avestan, spunta, mind you,

Speaker 6 which has a negative opposite.

Speaker 6 And that's called angra, mind you. Okay.

Speaker 6 Angram, angra means

Speaker 6 destructive, hostile. And mind you, again, means force.
It's a destructive force which is diametrically opposed to spenta main you.

Speaker 6 And you can even see it from the language, the words, they are symmetrically symmetrical. Spenta mainu, bosa mineu, and angra mainu.
And angra main you is destructive.

Speaker 6 That means he wants to destroy everything that spenta main you produces.

Speaker 6 And angra mainu is likewise a spiritual force. He wants to destroy on the spiritual level, but he can't really destroy the spiritual world because in Zoroastrianism, the spiritual world is immortal.

Speaker 6 It exists. And so the destructive force is primordial.
It has ever existed, always existed, and will always exist.

Speaker 6 And Ahura Mazda and his life-giving force will also always exist.

Speaker 6 And all the spiritual world is immortal.

Speaker 6 And this is what we call dualism in Zoroastrianism, this diametrical opposition between the life-bearing force and the destructive one.

Speaker 6 So, there, but you can see from the system that Ahura Mazda is on top of the life-giving force,

Speaker 6 whereas the destructive force, Angra Mainyu, has nobody on top. It's It's just a force.
It's a blind force which wants to destroy.

Speaker 1 So the people who come afterwards, they're very much, it's ingrained in them through this text that they need to be mindful of this destructive force whilst also paying reverence to Ahura Mazda and the light and keeping on the right track, I guess.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. And people have to associate themselves with Ahura Mazda

Speaker 6 and not with Angra Mainyu, the destructive force. And human beings have a choice which of the two to choose.

Speaker 6 And they should, of course, choose the creative one and follow Ahura Mazda and not the destructive one.

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Speaker 1 And so how does fire and the sacred flame come into all of this with the garters and with those religious songs, the religious texts?

Speaker 6 The Avesta? Yeah. Fire plays an important role already in Indo-Iranian culture.

Speaker 6 We have it in the Vedic culture as well, Agni, the fire, who is presented as a messenger between the human beings and the gods, and probably even from Indo-European times.

Speaker 6 Fire is almost a human universal. It's so important

Speaker 6 for our life, for cooking our food and for warmth in cold weather and also a source of light.

Speaker 6 So, this is something which has very, very ancient roots, and it continues to be treasured also in the Iranian Zoroastrian tradition, and rituals developed around the fire.

Speaker 6 Already in Indo-Iranian times, a ritual which is performed for the gods, for the divine beings, is perceived as an act act of hospitality. Right.

Speaker 6 So it is basically a banquet which the human beings prepare in a special space, a precinct, which can be created at hoc in the space,

Speaker 6 also in the open air.

Speaker 6 They just draw, then design a space, and there they prepare a place for the divine beings and they prepare food and the priests recite hymns to invite the divine beings to come down, be present in the ritual, enjoy the hymns, and the food, and the drinks which are being prepared ritually during the ceremony, and then return to their heavenly abodes.

Speaker 6 And the link between the human beings and the divine beings is created by the fire. Right, okay.
So, this is certainly how it was in the Indo-Iranian culture, and the Vedic hymns talk about this.

Speaker 6 Agni prepares a path between the human and the divine, and the gods travel on that path from their heavenly abodes down to the ritual space, and they return on it again.

Speaker 6 In Zoroastrianism, it's a little in the Zoroastrian ritual, it's a little bit different there.

Speaker 6 We know that from the Yasna Habtang Haiti,

Speaker 6 which is the text that is recited after the first Gata

Speaker 6 in the Zoroastrian core ritual, which is called the Yasna, the Yasna ritual, but also in the other solemn rituals which are based on the Yasna.

Speaker 6 In all of these, the fire of Ahura Mazda is addressed as the one who is at a distance, you there. So it's a heavenly fire of Ahura Mazda.
In the later Avestan texts, younger Avestan texts,

Speaker 6 the fire is also addressed as the son of Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 6 It's invited to come down and be present in the ritual precinct. And this coming down of the heavenly fire, of Ahura Mazda's fire, happens during the recitation of Yasna 36,

Speaker 6 which in the 72 chapter, Yasna is right in the middle. of the ritual performance.
36 is halfway through.

Speaker 1 So are they songs or are they poems, or how should we say them?

Speaker 6 They are spoken. It's sometimes spoken passages, spoken passages in the Avestan language.

Speaker 6 I would say it's sort of the Yasna Haptang Haiti is not metrical in the sense of that the meter, the syllables are being counted, as is the case for the Gatas. The older Gatas, yeah,

Speaker 6 but it is probably more sort of a rhythmic type of recitation.

Speaker 6 And the fire then comes down and is present in the ritual from then on in the ritual precinct. And the worshippers

Speaker 6 affirm

Speaker 6 their purity with which they approach the fire now, which has been transformed, because the heavenly being is now present within the ritual precinct. And

Speaker 6 the fire is then addressed in still in Yasna 36

Speaker 6 as the most beautiful, visible form of Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 6 So Ahura Mazda himself is thought to be present in the form of the fire. And of course, the fire is light.

Speaker 6 And that's why the fire is regarded as his body, his visible form.

Speaker 6 And this is the foundation of the central role played by the fire in the Zoroastrian ritual and the call for purity,

Speaker 6 utmost purity of the performer of the ritual, but also of those who are present while this ritual is performed.

Speaker 1 So it's so interesting, once again, you have the garters and you have the yasnas, like these spoken passages and how far back in time they go.

Speaker 1 And it feels like we've very much set the scene with the beliefs. But I must also ask, you mentioned earlier how Ahura Mazda is credited as the person who created the world, created everything.

Speaker 1 So it sounds like they have their own creation myth story. Do they also believe in an afterlife at the same time? Yeah.

Speaker 6 So the Zoroastrians have a whole cosmology

Speaker 6 which goes from

Speaker 6 the primordial beginnings of the cosmos right to the end.

Speaker 6 And they believe that at the beginning there was certainly Abura Mazda

Speaker 6 and the destructors, his creative and the destructive forces,

Speaker 6 they are have always been there.

Speaker 1 So they are all primordial beings. They've been there from the beginning.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. They're beginningless.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 Ahura Mazda is seen as the creator of the world.

Speaker 6 But before he makes the material world, first he multiplies himself in the form of his spiritual beings, spiritual creations, which embody

Speaker 6 qualities such as truth,

Speaker 6 good thought, wohu mana, right-mindedness.

Speaker 6 And these spiritual concepts and qualities,

Speaker 6 they have negative counterparts in the evil camp, and those are thought to come from the destructive force.

Speaker 6 So the evil can multiply itself in the form of spiritual features, such as the lie, the lie, okay, and bad thought, and arrogance and other such negative forces, greed,

Speaker 6 is no end to that. All these negative forces, but they're all spiritual, they come from the mind

Speaker 6 and that's important.

Speaker 6 So the evil for Zoroastrianism exists first and foremost on the spiritual level. And all these negative forces, they are negations of positive qualities which come from Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 then, as a creator, Ahura Mazda produces a material world and he does so out of his spiritual creations.

Speaker 6 And that's why all these beings, this ispenta, mind you, the creative force, is life-bearing. The word spenta is of has in the past often been translated something like bounties,

Speaker 6 which embodies

Speaker 6 generosity, bountiful, yes,

Speaker 6 yes.

Speaker 6 But what it really means is that it has the capacity of producing life.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 Because this word spenta, the spur,

Speaker 6 if you look at linguistics and etymology,

Speaker 6 it corresponds to a word which we have in greek kuo which means this k u it corresponds to the sp in spenta

Speaker 6 and that means to be pregnant oh it's a fertility idea yes and that's what this word spenta means and in in the greek word kue

Speaker 6 i am pregnant it means life bearing and producing offspring this is the center of the meaning of this word.

Speaker 6 That's why I prefer to translate it as life-bearing, because it has the capacity of producing life.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 that means not only on the spiritual level, but it's capable of producing a material world.

Speaker 6 And this is what Aura Mazda does through his life-bearing force.

Speaker 6 that he produces a material world, the cosmos, the visible cosmos, which consists not only of what we see here on Earth, but also the entire cosmos, all the stars, the universe.

Speaker 6 He produces this out of his, out of these spiritual beings, which he makes through this bantamindu.

Speaker 6 And this is something which the destructive force doesn't have because it can only destroy. It is incapable of producing a material world

Speaker 6 in any way, negating the it can destroy, but not destroying. It can only destroy, it cannot discreate.

Speaker 1 And also, just quickly before we move on, the afterlife idea as well, is there one very much embedded in the

Speaker 1 verbal passages?

Speaker 6 Totally. That relates to the figure of Ahura Mazda.
So Ahura means Lord. Mazda, we translate it often as sort of wise lord, but it this translation in no way represents what Mazda actually means.

Speaker 6 So Mazda, Da, means to set.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 Maz, the Mazbit, it again, it's formed from the root man to think.

Speaker 6 And the Mazbit contains the word Manas, Manach, which is thought. So literally, Mazda means the one who sets his thought, his thinking.

Speaker 6 And he is super intelligent.

Speaker 6 And he thinks it all out.

Speaker 6 he's the purpose why he starts the creation at all why he multiplies himself in the spiritual creation and then makes the material the mid-material cosmos the reason why he does it what is it he wants to incapacitate evil the destructive force this destructive force being destructive wants to dethrone Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 6 It threatens, it poses a threat and it wants to to destroy Ahura Mazda and wants to make the light dark.

Speaker 6 And in order to prevent this from happening, Ahura Mazda springs into action and he makes a plan. So his creation has a plan from the beginning right to the end.

Speaker 6 And the plan is a way of incapacitating evil once and for all, not destroying it. You cannot destroy it.
You cannot destroy Angramainu Angra,

Speaker 6 because he is eternal. He will always be there.
But what matters for Ahura Mazza is that Angra Mainyu is incapacitated and relegated back to the place where it had come from

Speaker 6 to destroy. And so it will never ever come back again.
So this then takes us into what happens at the end of time and the purpose of this world.

Speaker 6 So Rastian cosmology has a purpose and the purpose is to incapacitate evil. And then as we go along, we can see how this is done.

Speaker 6 So Ahura Mazda then makes the material world, and Angra Maynyu, due to his lust to smite, as the text put it, he intrudes, he breaks, he attacks the material world, which consists of the earth, but also of the whole cosmos.

Speaker 6 He breaks into it from outside. So he is somehow before he attacks, he is outside of it.
He comes into it and he tries to kill and to pollute and to destroy everything. And he does so.

Speaker 6 He destroys the first creations of Ahura Mazda on the earth.

Speaker 6 And he then tries also to storm the sky. and to invade the sphere where Ahura Mazda dwells.
But

Speaker 6 he's successful only on the earth.

Speaker 6 But then as he tries to invade the heavenly abodes where the stars are and then the moon and the sun and paradise is up there where Aura Mazda dwells, the Garo Domana, the house of welcome or of song where Ahura Mazda dwells,

Speaker 6 there he cannot get because he is stopped at the Spanta Meinjava stars. This is the Avestan name for a group of stars which is perceived like the Milky Way, the Milky Way, which we can see in the sky.

Speaker 6 It is perceived like a protective belt.

Speaker 1 The shield, okay.

Speaker 6 The shield, and Angra Mainyu is incapable of penetrating it because Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu are completely incompatible with one another, and he is repelled there.

Speaker 6 And then according to the cosmological story myth, as we have it, both this one, both in the Avesta and in the Middle Persian texts from the Sasanian period that means from 6700

Speaker 6 but all of the Christian era.

Speaker 1 So yeah, okay, 600, 700 AD or AD.

Speaker 6 Yes, yes, exactly.

Speaker 6 But all of that is based on ancient traditions. And some of it we have in the Avesta.
And one thing which we have in the Avesta is Zarasustra was born

Speaker 6 and Zarasustra brought to humankind the weapon to fight evil successfully. Okay.
And now we have the Mazda worshipping religion.

Speaker 6 The religion which focuses on the cult and worship of Mazda, Ahura Mazda, of course.

Speaker 6 And this religion, which is called the Daina Mazda Yazni, Daina is a Nawestern word, which means the vision literally. It then becomes a word for religion.

Speaker 6 You have it in Persian Dein, and the Arabs borrowed it, Din

Speaker 6 in Arabic. It is in a Western word.

Speaker 6 And this is the weapon to fight evil, the divas, and Angra mind you.

Speaker 6 This fight then progresses and it culminates at the end of time with the ultimate defeat of evil.

Speaker 6 And in the process, the Avesta calls on men and women alike to fight evil

Speaker 6 and reduce the power of evil in the world. And how do you do that? By focusing your mind on Ahura Mazda and worshiping him, having rituals performed, paying the priests of our Zarasushtra,

Speaker 6 who are in the tradition of Zarasushtua, to perform those rituals.

Speaker 6 And that weakens the presence of evil. And evil is ultimately going to be removed from this world at the end of time.

Speaker 6 And there is going to be a big battle. And evil is going to withdraw from the cosmos and going to go back to the place where it had come from in the first instance to destroy Ahura Mazda's creation.

Speaker 6 And at that point,

Speaker 6 all the dead are going to resurrect, to be resurrected.

Speaker 1 To be soldiers in that battle, is that the case?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 6 But also, all the dead, they have the resurrection of the body. Death is seen as a victory of evil.
And when evil is going to be defeated, the dead automatically are going to be resurrected because

Speaker 6 death has been defeated. Death in the form of angra, mind you, has been defeated.
And that means the deeds of evil are going to be undone and the dead are going to be resurrected. The body.

Speaker 1 So zoroastrians do believe ultimately in resurrection yes

Speaker 6 okay so that's their thoughts of but only at the end of time that happens at the end of time and the body is of course the material creation and the spiritual creation is immortal anyway that never dies so

Speaker 6 when a person dies

Speaker 6 The spiritual part, each person has a spiritual part.

Speaker 6 It's called Urvan, one of the spiritual parts urvan that's the soul so the soul is immortal so when a person dies the soul of the person moves on and it faces individual judgment after death oh once again like a like egypt's book of the dead and i guess also judgment in the christian religion you know yeah and the like you know it's it's depending on how you lived your life you know what will happen exactly and and the criterion for how you live, what is good and what is bad is, of course, from a Zoroastrian point of view, whether you supported Ahura Mazda, you worshipped Ahura Mazda, you had the rituals performed for him, praise him, and reduce the power of evil in the world, then you have a lot of good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

Speaker 6 And each individual should amass as many good thoughts, good words, good deeds as possible. And after death, these good thoughts and words and good deeds are going to to be weighed on scales.

Speaker 6 And depending on how that individual judgment ends, the soul then has to cross a bridge, a bridge of where the good thoughts and words and deeds and the bad ones are collected.

Speaker 6 It has to cross that bridge and either enters Ahura Mazda's paradise. the Garo Domana where Ahura Mazda dwells, or it goes to the place where Angramaynu

Speaker 6 dwells, if bad thoughts, words, and deeds, especially deeds, prevail. And then there they have to stay until the end of time, until the perfection of the world, when evil is going to be defeated.

Speaker 6 And at that point, there is going to be a judgment of the body.

Speaker 6 So the soul, the individual souls have been judged in their individual judgments each time a person dies.

Speaker 6 But then at the end, there is a universal judgment when all the resurrected bodies

Speaker 6 also have to be judged. And they use an image of a stream of molten metal.

Speaker 6 That's we have that in the Middle Persian text from the Sasanian period, where all the metals in the earth are going to be melted. And the bodies, the resurrected bodies, have to pass through that.

Speaker 6 And for those who, where the evil deeds prevailed, it will be very painful. And for the good ones, it will feel like warm milk,

Speaker 6 but they all come out at the other end. And there, then, the bodies, the resurrected bodies, are going to be united with their respective souls.

Speaker 6 And then the person will continue to exist in perpetuity. And Ahura Mazda will then exist with his spiritual and material creations forever.

Speaker 6 And evil is going to withdraw and it has been incapacitated it will be powerless ach shayamlo as it says in the avesta

Speaker 6 so we have two types of creation in zoroastrianism spiritual and material

Speaker 6 and the spiritual precedes the material world the material world is rooted in the spiritual world and the spiritual world descends from a hurda mazda

Speaker 6 and we have two judgments an individual judgment that is for the spiritual part of a person,

Speaker 6 and we have a universal judgment at the end of time.

Speaker 6 So, we have two judgments, and those two judgments have their justification in the two types of creation: in the spiritual and the material creation. Each of them is going to be judged.

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Speaker 1 So having said all of that, Almut, with what they believed and what would ultimately happen to the bodies, what do we know about how Zoroastrians, whether it's in the second millennium BC or in the time of the Achaemenid Persians or the Parthians or the Sasanians later, what do we know about how they buried their dead?

Speaker 6 So, for the Zoroastrians, death was not meant to be for Ahura Master's creations.

Speaker 6 He wanted his material world to live forever, but he created the material world as an instrument to defeat evil.

Speaker 6 So, when evil, Angra Mayu, inflicts death on a living being, that looks like a victory. And death is considered

Speaker 6 as a bad thing by the Zoroastrians. And everything that comes from Angra, mind you, is bad, polluted, and needs to be removed as quickly as possible.
So

Speaker 6 anything that is detached from a living being,

Speaker 6 be it just a hair from our head, or

Speaker 6 be it a dead body where life is no longer in it, is considered to be extremely polluting. And it needs to be removed from the living world as quickly as possible.

Speaker 1 So, no burial idea.

Speaker 6 No,

Speaker 6 because the earth is thought to be Aura Mazda's creation and it was pure and perfect. It should not be polluted with a dead body, nor should the water be polluted.

Speaker 6 If you throw a dead body into a water, it's considered to be polluting. It's bad for the water.
And you should certainly not throw a dead body into fire because fire is a son of Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 6 The cremation is

Speaker 6 out of the question as well.

Speaker 6 So the best way to dispose of a dead body is to expose it to vultures. And vultures.
Excarnation. Excarnation.
Vultures are excellent for that.

Speaker 6 They do a great job and they are highly regarded by the Zoroastrians. And they do it very quickly.
And they don't fly. You know, they eat it on the ground, whatever they eat.

Speaker 6 And so they are almost like a hygiene police.

Speaker 6 And this practice of exposure is probably also rooted in ancient, very ancient practices of the culture.

Speaker 6 in certain areas where the Proto-Iranians came from, where where it was opportune to expose dead bodies, and they would have taken them up to the hills and lay them down on

Speaker 6 a stone platform and just leave the bodies there to be exconnected by the birds. And then they would collect the bones.
Then they would have had something what we call secondary burial.

Speaker 6 They collect the bones and then they

Speaker 6 sometimes they would have have created a little casket and then bury that, put that into the earth. But the bones would be dry, just dry bones.

Speaker 6 So there would be nothing polluting in the bones anymore. And we have got such bone containers or ossieries

Speaker 6 have been found in Central Asia, especially of the Sogdians.

Speaker 6 The Sogdians were a people in the first millennium of the Christian era, but they must have been around also their predecessors in earlier times.

Speaker 1 They're in the Uzbekistan area.

Speaker 6 Uzbekistan area, yes, exactly. And Tajjikistan.
Yes. And they, in the first millennium, during the Achaemenid period and later still, they were traders along the Silk Road.
They traded with China.

Speaker 6 And in Central Asia, there, ossuries have been found which depict Zoroastrian scenes with priests. And there is also a tomb, a stone tomb, where probably

Speaker 6 the bones would have been put in,

Speaker 6 which depict the crossing of that bridge of the soul when it has to cross the bridge.

Speaker 6 So these are illustrations of imagery of Zoroastrian eschatological ideas, ideas about what happens to the soul after death.

Speaker 1 And so if these beliefs stem all the way back to the second millennium BC, is that what we presume then?

Speaker 6 I think so, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, so

Speaker 1 if that is all kind of laid out by that time already in like the late Bronze Age period, do we know how quickly it becomes a very popular religion to follow, particularly in places like Iran?

Speaker 1 Because we do normally think of the Persians and the Parthians.

Speaker 1 as the ones who really did follow this religion but do we have any idea just how quickly these beliefs were seized upon as the wrong word But people really started to find them appealing and start following them.

Speaker 6 It seems to me that Zoroastrianism started really early. And for me, the most probable scenario is that it started in proto-Iranian times.

Speaker 6 That means at the time when the Iranians were still one people, and that they all shared in the demonization of the daivas, of the old gods, and the worship of Ahura Mazda.

Speaker 6 So that was with them right from the beginning, before they dispersed and split, especially in Eastern and Western Iranians, that they already had the religion with them, they carried it with them, the Zoroastrian religion.

Speaker 1 So when we get to the time, let's say, of the Medians, so just before the Persians, would they have been Zoroastrian as well? Yes, they would have been.

Speaker 6 Interesting. And of course, then in historical periods, it might well have taken different manifestations in different areas, just as the different Iranian dialects then developed.

Speaker 6 So also there might have been modifications of different, of the practice, the religious practice, but they would have carried the worship of Ahura Mazda and the demonization of the divers with them already, and with it also the Avesta.

Speaker 1 Yes. And then, of course, if you're going west, then you get into the world of the Jews and, you know, the other Mesopotamian religions as well.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, you know, the Greeks and the the Romans. So, this is another episode in its own right.
But is it also interesting with the rise of Persia and then the Parthians afterwards?

Speaker 1 Is it also interesting to study how these

Speaker 1 foreign groups, who I guess Zoroastrians would see as people who are following the divers or the false gods, how they interacted with this religion from Iran that was so prominent there?

Speaker 6 Yeah, indeed, yes. The oldest evidence we have is from Babylonia, when from the times of the Achaemenids, when we have the reports in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Isaiah, who talks about Cyrus,

Speaker 6 who did not know Yahweh, because Cyrus, of course, would have worshipped another God. He would, I think, why not? He should have worshipped the Hura Mazda.

Speaker 6 But that he released the Jews from captivity

Speaker 6 and restored the temple treasures to the Jews and facilitated the return of the Jews, of the Israelites better to say, to Palestine, where they had come from, to their promised land, and to rebuild their temple.

Speaker 6 And then many Jews, many Israelites remained, stayed on in Mesopotamia, in Babylonia, because they had settled by then.

Speaker 6 And they seemed to have been quite happy to live under the Persian rule, under Achaemenid rule, rule,

Speaker 6 and exchanges, intellectual, religious exchanges must have taken place. They had a common language, which was the Aramaic language, that was the language of administration of the Achaemenid Empire

Speaker 6 and the Israelites, they would have spoken Aramaic. And we can see from within the

Speaker 6 Israelite texts, the Hebrew Bible, we can see how they slowly, very slowly develop an eschatology ideas about life after death. And gradually within the

Speaker 6 Israelite religion, death all of a sudden becomes something bad, which it wasn't before.

Speaker 6 And that culminates then in Christianity, in the letter of Paul.

Speaker 6 in the Corinthian, one of the letters to the Corinthians, where Paul writes, the ultimate enemy to be defeated is death.

Speaker 1 And do you think that is an influence from Zoroastrians?

Speaker 1 Interesting. I mean, I could ask so much more.
And of course, well, I will ask then. Come on, it's another episode.
But the wise men in

Speaker 1 the Nativity story,

Speaker 1 is it very likely that they were Zoroastrians?

Speaker 6 It's very likely, yes. And the most, the strongest indicator for that is not only that they came from the east, that's what it says in Matthew,

Speaker 6 but that they are called Magoi.

Speaker 6 Not wise men.

Speaker 6 We call them wise men or the kings.

Speaker 6 They are called Magoi. And nobody else is called Magush except a Zoroastrian priest.

Speaker 1 So major like magicians and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 I guess that's where our word magician comes from.

Speaker 6 Magush is the word for a priest, especially in Western Iran. We have the word also in the Avesta, but only once.
It's not very prominent in the Avesta itself.

Speaker 6 But then in Western Iran, they use that word, Makush.

Speaker 6 But the word Maga from which it is derived plays an important role in the Zoroastrian ritual and in the Gatas already, in the oldest texts.

Speaker 6 It probably means that the whole ritual is a Maga, because in the ritual, in the performance of a ritual, of a Zoroastrian ritual, a gift exchange is enacted between

Speaker 6 the humans, the priest, and the divine. It puts an exchange of gifts into motion.
So probably that's where mag, the mag bit, comes from. And it is a term, a technical term for a priest.

Speaker 1 This has been fascinating. I know we've largely focused on like the origins of Zoroastrianism and the core beliefs that stay there.

Speaker 1 But it was quite nice to do it this way because otherwise we could have done a narrative and go through just kind of scratch the surface of the Achaemenids, the Parthians, Sasanians, as I've mentioned.

Speaker 1 But I guess those beliefs are the things that stay there throughout, isn't it? And you can see down to the present day.

Speaker 1 And what's also interesting is the fact that, as we've touched upon there, like links with Christianity and other religions as well, that Zoroastrians would have, I guess, seen as, you know, the lie and not the truth.

Speaker 1 And yet the interactions there and the influence of Zoroastrianism is there almost, I guess, is their belief in they are bringing the truth to these other groups at the same time.

Speaker 6 Yes. Yes.
Interestingly, Zoroastrianism has always remained the religion of the Iranian people.

Speaker 6 That might well be because

Speaker 6 the Zoroastrians pray, continue to pray in the Avestan language. It's very much tied to the Iranian Avestan language.
So it has remained the religion of the Iranian people.

Speaker 6 But at the same time, they have also coexisted with followers of other religions.

Speaker 1 Ahmed, these beliefs, they've endured for so many centuries, so many millennia. They are in the Persian period, the Parthians, the Sasanians, and down to the present day.

Speaker 1 And it's amazing just how old those beliefs are and how they endure.

Speaker 6 Yes, indeed. And for the Zoroastrians up to the present day, the motto is good thoughts, good words, good deeds, and not bad thoughts, bad words, bad deeds.

Speaker 6 And that is linked to their concept of evil as a separate force who needs to be fought against. And that lives on up to the present day.

Speaker 1 Absolutely fascinating. What a way to end it on.
Almut, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 6 It has been my pleasure and honor. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was leading expert, Professor Almut Hinser, giving you a wonderful introduction to what Zoroastrianism is, its key beliefs and its origins far back in prehistoric times.

Speaker 1 I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we did recording it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.
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