Zarathustra

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. M. L. West glosses it "Old-camel man", and places the family "somewhere in the eastern territories."^[2] 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, on the evidence of the Gāthās, 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 world the hymns disclose is small and pastoral. Zarathustra names a hierarchy of social units, from the household and the clan up through the local community to the dahyu-, the "land" or region, which is the largest political unit in his horizon and, tellingly, the very word Darius and his successors would later use for the provinces of the empire.^[3] There is no sense in the Gāthās of a central imperial authority; the "rulers of the region" appear as distant, and often hostile, figures. It is a society in which cattle are wealth and the herdsman's peace is broken by raiders. In one of his most striking poems (Yasna 29) the prophet stages the soul of the ox crying out to the powers above against the cruelty it suffers, driven off and slaughtered by followers of a false cult. This is the most concrete of the ills Zarathustra sets himself to cure, and he cannot cure it, because he lacks the wealth, the followers and the temporal power that would let him impose the divine will he preaches.^[3] The grievance is not an abstraction: he is a priest with too few cattle and too few converts, looking to his God, and then to a patron, for rescue.

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.^[4] 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. Insler, as quoted in Malandra^[5]

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".^[5] And he names his rescue: the patron "who bounteously gratified Spitāma Zarathuštra among men,"^[5] 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 looking to his God for the help "a friend would give a friend".^[5] It is this concreteness, more than any external record, that persuades most scholars a real person stands behind the hymns.

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", "seeing afar", the one "whom none deceives", and "clad in hardest stone", that is, the sky.^[1] 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. Insler, as quoted in Malandra^[5]

The religion he reformed was the traditional polytheism of a common Indo-Iranian past, whose gods still appear on both sides of the divide: Mitra, the god of contracts, worshipped in India as in Iran (and honoured in the later Avesta as Mithra); the wind-god Vayu; the drink pressed from the haoma plant; the sacral fire. Some of these Zarathustra kept and remade; others (Indra, Nāsatya, Śarva, great gods of the Rigveda) the later tradition demoted to demons, the daēvas, the false gods whose worship the prophet condemned.^[3]

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^[6]

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^[6]

And the two share nothing, the prophet's starkest word, and the axis the whole later religion 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^[6]

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"^[1] (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";^[6] 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^[6]

A point of doctrine is easy to garble here, and matters for how the whole religion is understood. In the received Zoroastrian tradition, the Wise Lord acts through a Bounteous Spirit, Spənta Mainyu, while 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 rather than 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."^[7]

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^[7], 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. Boyce held this reading a misinterpretation, no part of the prophet's own teaching, though the Gāthās themselves, calling Ahura Mazdā the "father" of Aša and of Good Mind and of Ārmaiti, use a metaphor of divine fatherhood elastic enough to have made the confusion possible.^[7]

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 stand at once as facets of the Wise Lord and as divine powers in their own right. They are at once qualities the Wise Lord possesses and gifts he holds out to those who choose him: to walk in Good Mind and Right-mindedness is to draw the Beings into oneself, and so toward Wholeness and Immortality. 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,"^[1] and he moves freely between addressing the Lord as "Thou" and, with his attendant Beings, as "You."

To his one God and his moral dualism Zarathustra joined a doctrine that, so far as the record goes, he was the first human being to articulate clearly: a judgement after death decided by conduct alone. The old Iranian belief, Boyce reconstructs, was that those who had won the gods' favour, largely by sacrifice, crossed safely over the "Bridge of the Separator" (the Cinvatō Pərətu) to heaven, while the rest fell from it into a shadow-world of the dead.^[8] Zarathustra kept the Bridge but transformed what happened there. Now each soul is met by a maiden, its own daēnā, the embodied sum of its deeds, beautiful if it has lived in Truth and hideous if in the Lie; and at the Bridge a strict moral reckoning takes place, "favour bought of the gods" counting for nothing, each person's thoughts and words and deeds weighed "in scales of hair's breadth precision."^[8] The righteous cross to the House of Song; the followers of the Lie are dragged down to a hell of torment. "He who shall come to the Aša-follower, to him belongs heavenly splendor,"^[5] runs Yasna 31.20; "a long time of darkness, with bad food, the uttering of woe"^[5] awaits the followers of the Lie, "on account of your own deeds." For the soul whose good and bad exactly balance the prophet reserved a grey middle place, the later Hamēstagān.^[8]

Above the individual judgement stands a cosmic one. Zarathustra looked to a final making-wonderful, the frašō.kərəti, when evil would be defeated and the world restored to a perfect and unchanging state, and he spoke of one "greater than good" still to come. On that seed the later tradition built the figure of the Saošyant, the Saviour born of the prophet's own miraculously preserved line, who at the end of "limited time" will bring about the Renovation and raise the dead.^[8] Whether the developed eschatology is all Zarathustra's or partly his priesthood's cannot be separated out; but the shape of it, a world made good, a last judgement, a redeemer to come, is already sounded in the hymns.

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 centre of gravity exists, it lies somewhere between the twelfth and the sixth century BCE.

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,^[9] 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. On this reading Zarathustra "cannot have lived later than about 1000 B.C." and may have flourished earlier still.^[9]

Against the high chronology stands the famous "traditional date": the later Zoroastrian books, reckoning through a mythological "cosmic calendar" of 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.^[10] This date had able defenders (W. B. Henning, and after him Ilya Gershevitch), and it has not simply gone away. A. Shahbazi argued (BSOAS 40, 1977) that the 258-year figure was very probably back-calculated after the founding of the Seleucid era in 312/311 BCE, a late artefact of the priests' effort to square their millennial scheme with real history rather than a memory of when the prophet lived.^[11] Yet M. L. West, translating the Gāthās in 2010, defends a low date on other grounds: the underlying prophecy that the empire would fall but the religion endure was invented "shortly after Alexander's conquest," and its author placed the prophet about a century before Darius, near the fall of Assyria, a reckoning that West thinks "yields a dating that sits well with the rest of our evidence and may not be far wrong."^[3] Gherardo Gnoli likewise, refusing prehistoric dates altogether, put the prophet around 618–541 BCE.^[12]

No single confident date can honestly be stated. The linguistic case for a high, second-millennium date is the one most widely held, but it turns entirely on the archaism of the language, and a serious minority reads the same silence of the Avesta as consistent with a prophet of the seventh or sixth century. What would settle the question, a datable event named somewhere in the Gāthās, does not exist, so the range stays genuinely open. Any precise figure offered for Zarathustra is only ever an argument.

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 most consequential for Achaemenid history: 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.

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:^[13] since the poet sometimes names "Zarathustra" in the second or third person ("O Zarathustra, who is thy righteous ally?"),^[5] they argued he cannot be the speaker, and that the hymns are, in Kellens's own words, "not the work of a personality, but a product of a mentality", the collective utterance of a priestly circle rather than one man's work.^[14] P. O. Skjærvø put the sceptic's case at its bluntest:

Zarathustra is not a 'historical' person in the sense that he belongs in a known historical context or that there are recognizable historical details associated with him. He is also not represented as a 'real' person in the texts, much less so than, for instance, Jesus in the Gospels.

Skjærvø, Introduction to Zoroastrianism, 2005^[15]

At the far other pole stands the older maximal historicism. Ernst Herzfeld made Zarathustra a real western figure of the early sixth century, a kinsman and contemporary of the Achaemenids, identifying his patron Vīštāspa with Darius's father Hystaspes, a reconstruction now generally rejected as folk-conflation. Between the poles, Gnoli argued for a historical prophet, firmly dated but pushed back into the seventh century.

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,"^[1] Malandra writes, is of "the passionate expression of an inspired individual in dialogue with God",^[1] not of a committee. M. L. West, introducing his own translation of the hymns, states the mainstream verdict flatly: "His existence is as well authenticated as that of most people in antiquity."^[2] That majority view stands: a real Zarathustra, of the Spitāma family, composed the Gāthās; the sceptical position stays live because the man leaves no footprint the historian can independently touch.

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 millennial world-calendar in which the prophet's soul was created six thousand years before his birth.^[16] Eudoxus and, following him, Aristotle likewise put him six thousand years before Plato; Hermodorus and Hermippus, five thousand years before the Trojan War, a spread that betrays, as de Jong shows in cataloguing the whole Greek testimony, that the Greeks "clearly had no solid information" and were reworking scraps of Iranian chronology to their own ends.^[17] To Plato's circle he was "Zoroaster son of Oromazes," founder of the mageia 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. The image says much about how the Greeks imagined the East, and almost nothing about the prophet of the Gāthās. The parallel question of when the Magi adopted Zoroaster as their own prophet, and how his name became attached to "magic," belongs to the priesthood (see the Magi); how far Greek testimony on Persia can be trusted is a wider question (see Herodotus).

As the man receded, a marvellous life grew up around him. The ninth-century Dēnkard and the other Pahlavi books wrap the prophet in miracle: his glory (xᵛarǝnah) descends from heaven into his line; his guardian spirit and his bodily substance are conveyed into his mother through the haoma and the sacrificial milk; at his birth he laughs aloud rather than cries, and the demons flee underground before him. Grown, he is tempted by the Hostile Spirit and refuses, receives his revelation in a series of visions of Ahura Mazdā and the Aməša Spəntas, and after long rejection converts King Vīštāspa, whose court becomes the first stronghold of the faith. None of this is history, and the biographical romance was already flourishing in the classical period, when Greek writers knew Zoroaster as a sage of impossible antiquity. But it preserves, in mythologised form, the two facts the Gāthās themselves attest: a prophet who met bitter resistance, and a royal patron without whom his mission would have died.

The 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.

Whether the kings should therefore be called "Zoroastrians" is the oldest debate in the study of Persian religion (see Ahura Mazdā); what belongs here is the prophet's own side of the ledger. The maximal case for continuity (Boyce) runs 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) through the fire-holders at Pasargadae to the profoundly Zoroastrian scene carved over Darius's tomb.^[18] The cautious default of much recent scholarship is that none of this requires the specific reform of the historical Zarathustra, and that the safest label is "Mazdaean": a worshipper of the Wise Lord inside the older Iranian religion, without the claim that the early kings followed the prophet's particular reform.^[19] Jean Kellens presses the point further still: "Saying that the Achaemenids were Mazdean or Zoroastrian would be putting words in their mouths," for the kings, like the people of the Avesta, had no word for a religious allegiance in the modern sense at all.^[20]

One rejected but tempting shortcut keeps recurring: 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.^[2] The prudent conclusion is 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, one the historian cannot explain away.

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. Later Zoroastrianism knows the Wise Lord as Ohrmazd, and the dualism hardens into open cosmic war against Ahriman, while Anahita and Mithra rise beside Ahura Mazdā in the royal inscriptions of Artaxerxes II. 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.