Zoroastrians

“ In the last five or ten days of their year the Zoroastrians hold their feasts for departed relatives, when souls come back to the world to visit the living, and receive from them offerings of food and clothing. ”

“ To the belief in a spiritual world composed of all these various intelligences—one half of whom were good, and the other half evil—the early Zoroastrians added notions with respect to human duties and human prospects far more enlightened than those which have usually prevailed among heathen nations. In their system truth, purity, piety, and industry were the virtues chiefly valued and inculcated. Evil was traced up to its root in the heart of man ”

“ It is evident that a religion in which such results are possible cannot be unfavourable to the development of the ‘mens sana in corpore sano;’ and that, although we may not turn Zoroastrians, we may envy some of the results of a creed which inculcates worship of the good, the pure, and the beautiful in the concerns of daily life, as well as in the abstract regions of theological and philosophical speculation. ”

“ What seems certain is that Arab religion was of a complex hybrid nature, not much to be wondered at when one remembers that Arabia was the asylum of many religious refugees, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians. In the later pre-Islamitic times spirits, or jinns, as they were called, of which each tribe or family had its own, were worshipped, and there was but a vague idea of a Supreme Being. ”

“ Zoroaster is to be classed with [pg 52] such great religious leaders as Buddha and Mohammed. He was the predecessor of Mohammed and the worship and belief which he instituted were trampled out in Persia by the forces of Islam in the seventh century of our era. The Persian Zoroastrians fled to India, where they are still found as Parsis on the west coast of Hindostan. The religion of Zoroaster was a Dualism. Two powerful and creative beings, the one good the one evil, have control of the universe. ”

“ Zoroaster hears of it; he promises to cure the horse, provided they will not hang him. The bargain being made, he causes one leg to issue out of the belly, and says: "Sire, I will not restore you the second leg unless you embrace my religion." "Let it be so," says the monarch. The prophet, after having made the second leg appear, wished the king's children to become Zoroastrians, and they became so. The other legs made proselytes of the whole court. The four envious sages were hanged in place of the prophet, and all Persia received the faith. ”

“ It is the form to which the coming generations have to conform. Deviation from it means a fall, a degeneration of the religious life. This second period I have termed Gathic.
Decay soon begins in the language in which Zoroaster composed his immortal hymns, and his successors now write in the Avestan dialect, which replaces the Gathic. The Avestan language remains the written language of the Zoroastrians from now onward to probably the last days of the Parthians, when the Pahlavi language becomes the court language of the Sasanians and supersedes the Avestan. ”

“ Its key beliefs center on a transcendent creator God, Ahura Mazda, and the concept of free will. The key ethical tenets of Zoroastrianism expressed in its scripture, the Avesta, are based on a dualistic worldview where one may prevent chaos if one chooses to serve God and exercises good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. Zoroastrianism is generally a closed religion and members are almost always born to Zoroastrian parents. Prior to the spread of Islam, Zoroastrianism dominated greater Iran. Today, though a minority, Zoroastrians remain primarily in Iran, India, and Pakistan. ”

“ Appendix, The Human Races of Persia, pp. 87 and following. See also Duhousset, The Populations of Persia, pp. 4–7; N. de Khanikoff, Ethnography of Persia, pp. 19, 47, 50, 56, &c.
14 According to General Houtum-Schindler (see Memoir already cited, pp. 82–84) , the hairs of the Zoroastrians are smooth and thick, generally black, or of a dark brown colour; one seldom meets with a clear brown colour, never with the red. In Kirman some beards do assume this colour, but they incline rather to the yellowish. ”

“ Zoroastrianism spreads its influence abroad. The Magi had established themselves during the Parthian period in large numbers in eastern Asia Minor, Galatia, Phrygia, Lydia, and even in Egypt. These colonies of the Zoroastrian priests became an active source of the diffusion of the Zoroastrian beliefs. [16] The rulers of the dynasties established in Pontus, Cappadocia, Armenia, and Commagene took pride in tracing their dynasties to the kings of the fallen empire. They encouraged Iranian tradition and religion in opposition to the Greek kings of Pergamon and Antioch. ”

“ Zoroaster’s religion has faded from that Media where once it reigned, and few and humble now are the worshippers who raise prayers to Ormuzd under the open heaven, and whose bodies are borne up the stony valley and cast into the Tower of Silence.
We dismounted from our horses and sat down on the hillside. The plain stretched below us like a monotonous ocean which had billowed up against the mountain flanks and had been fixed there for ever; we could see the feet of the mountains themselves planted firmly in the waves of dust, and their glistening peaks towering into the cloudless sky ”

“ Several of the Eranian kings incurred the censure involved in the nickname of "idolaters" in consequence of the favour they extended to the preachers of Nirvana. [164] No religion of antiquity was less favourable to a life of passive contemplation than Zoroastrianism, which defined life as a continuous struggle, and considered virtue as a successful battle with the powers of darkness; and yet little by little Zoroastrian monasteries sprang up by the side of the Fire Temples, and offered a quiet refuge from the turmoil of the world to the pious worshippers of Ahura Mazda. ”

“ Tried by this test, Zoroastrianism has made good its claim to be called the ‘excellent religion.’ Its followers, the limited community of Parsees in India, are honourably distinguished for probity, intelligence, enterprise, public spirit, benevolence, tolerance, and other good qualities. By virtue of these qualities they have raised themselves to a prominent position in our Indian empire, and take a leading part in its commerce and industrial enterprise. ”

“ These followers of an eclectic philosophy, and interpreters of the divine scriptures through a claimed knowledge of occult and hidden meanings, applied the theosophic principles of explanation to the teachings of Zoroaster, and adapted them to the Zoroastrian theology. Such an interpretation, however, led them to credit the religion of Zoroaster with ideas that in no period of its religious history were ever included in its sphere. ”

“ These modern votaries of Zrvan were, however, not to be confounded with the Zarvanite sect of old, which looked to Zrvan Akarana as a personality as much defined as Ormazd. We have already seen that, in postulating impersonated Time as the originator of Ormazd and Ahriman, the sect aimed at supplanting Zoroastrian dualism by monotheism, in order to save their religion from the so-called stigma of dualism. Not so the theosophists, who grafted this new feature on the pure teachings of Zoroaster. ”

“ CHAPTER XXXVII EASTERN MYTHOLOGY—ZOROASTER—HINDU MYTHOLOGY—CASTES—BUDDHA—GRAND LAMA ZOROASTER Our knowledge of the religion of the ancient Persians is principally derived from the Zendavesta, or sacred books of that people. Zoroaster was the founder of their religion, or rather the reformer of the religion which preceded him. The time when he lived is doubtful, but it is certain that his system became the dominant religion of Western Asia from the time of Cyrus (550 B.C.) to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. ”

“ So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations of clean and noble lives. From that spirituality the impulse descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor of a few ruins in the wilderness—the course the lion and the lizard keep. It reached the plane of military power, and flowed over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile ”

“ Peoples of diverse faiths and nationalities have, likewise, written about Zoroaster and his teachings from the earliest to the modern times. Greeks and Romans and Christians in the Occident and Indians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, and Chinese in the Orient have contributed to the fund of information on the subject. ”

“ The last things and the end of the world are relegated to the close of a long period of time (3000 years after Zoroaster) , when a new Saoshyant is to be born of the seed of the prophet, the dead are to come to life, and a new incorruptible world to begin.
Zoroastrianism was the national religion of Iran, but it was not permanently restricted to the Iranians, being professed by Turanians as well. The worship of the Persian gods spread to Armenia and Cappadocia and over the whole of the Near East (Strabo, xv. 3, 14; xi. 8, 4; 14, 76) . ”

“ There are only 100,000 of these followers of Zoroaster in the world. 90,000 of them are in India; and nearly all of these reside in Bombay and its vicinity. Their faith, Zoroastrianism, is the purest of ethnic religions. It has preserved its ancient integrity and high tone much better than its sister faith, Brahmanism. Among the members of this religion are found men possessed of great enterprise, much wealth, the spirit of progress and of philanthropy and culture. ”

“ THE MAGI.—The Zoroastrian religion was not the same at all times and in every place. The primitive Iranian emigrants were monotheistic in their tendencies. In their western abodes, they came into contact with worshipers of the elements,—fire, air, earth, and water. It is thought by many scholars, that the Magian system, with its more defined dualism and sacerdotal sway, was ingrafted on the native religion of the Iranians through the influence of tribes with whom they mingled in Media. The Magi, according to one account, were charged by Darius with corrupting the Zoroastrian faith and worship. ”

“ Thus the Zarvanites represented Ormazd and Ahriman as twin sons proceeding from the fundamental principle of all—Zrvana Akarana, or limitless time.
Ethically, too, the new doctrine stands on a higher plane, and represents, in its moral laws, a superior civilization. The devil-worshippers, at their sacrifices, slay the ox; and this the daēvas favour, for they are foes to the cattle and to cattle-breeding, and friends to those who work ill to the cow. In Zoroaster's eyes this is an abomination: for the cow is a gift of Ormazd to man, and the religion of Mazda protects the sacred animal. ”

“ A conjecture might be made, not without reason or probability, that the Yashts represent the pre-Zoroastrian sagas and hymns of praise, and that in the new religion or Zoroastrian reformation of the old faith, concessions were made, and the Yashts were allowed to remain as a form of worship, and were given a scriptural or orthodox tone. Or possibly they may be later restorations of old myths and forms of worship, introduced after the Prophet's time, when the religion had sunk to a somewhat lower level than the high spiritual plane on which it had been placed by its founder. ”

“ Many men and women, with or without higher education, are seen to-day running after any form of occultism that they come across. These continue to interpret and explain the sacred texts on the allegorical basis. With overweening presumption, common to the occultists of all ages and places, they claim to be the only correct interpreters of Zoroastrianism and are busy producing a novel type of Zoroastrian ideological literature. ”

“ It is the only privileged priestly class that the Avesta recognizes.
Spread of Zoroastrianism in remote lands. The Zoroastrian missionaries travelled to distant lands for the purpose of promulgating the religion, and their homeward return from their sacred missions is celebrated by the faithful. [53] The promulgating zeal on the part of the Zoroastrian priests seems to have provoked opposition from non-believers. Keresani, a powerful ruler of a foreign land, we are informed, prevented the fire-priests of Iran from visiting his country to preach the Zoroastrian doctrines. ”

“ But in the Zoroastrian religion men and women render assistance and encouragement to the gods, and we find the chief deity, Ahura Mazda, saying to Zoroaster concerning the Fravashis, or souls, of holy men and women: “Do thou proclaim, O pure Zoroaster, the vigor and strength, the glory, the help and the joy, that are in the Fravashis of the faithful ... ”

“ I have known of it for years as the key to the treasure of Zoroaster. As I have said, it is a circular piece of jade, bright yellow in colour, and of about the size of a saucer. On both sides of the stone various signs and symbols have been cut. On one side, from the centre, nine radii divide the circumference into nine equal arcs. In each arc is a distinct cuneiform character, similar to those which have been found upon the stone monuments of Persia and Arabia.
"The Arabs are in many ways the most wonderful people in the world. Their vitality as a race is amazing. ”

“ The affinity between Zoroastrianism and art is easily explained when we consider that in one respect it has a manifest advantage over most Christian forms of religion. Christianity in its early origins received a taint of Oriental asceticism which it never shook off, and which in the declining centuries of the Roman empire, and in the barbarism and superstition of the Middle Ages, developed into what may be almost called a devil-worship of the ugly and repulsive. ”