[SPEAKER_00]: This show is a hopeful media podcast production. [SPEAKER_00]: Hello everyone, welcome to the history of Persia. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Trevor Cully, and this is episode one hundred and fifty, the time lord. [SPEAKER_00]: This has certainly taken longer than I expected. [SPEAKER_00]: But then again, I wasn't really prepared for how much has happened in the last month and a half. [SPEAKER_00]: My wife is now a space doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I met my baby nephew for the first time and my city for the moment was ravaged by tornadoes. [SPEAKER_00]: Then I had a wedding to go to and my job went haywire. [SPEAKER_00]: It's still going TBH, but the long and short of it is it's been a long summer. [SPEAKER_00]: And when I wrote this paragraph, [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't even technically summer yet. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and the news. [SPEAKER_00]: The mother.
[SPEAKER_00]: News. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll address that either in a different episode or on America secret wars, we'll see how things develop. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk tiny, whiny stuff so that I can get on to some straightforward narrative episodes again. [SPEAKER_00]: At the time of recording the first episode of Antioch is the second is already written and ready to go. [SPEAKER_00]: So let's hope for smooth sailing for at least a little while to recap.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the last three episodes, I introduced the concepts of orfism, the mythology of the bard cleric orfias, the basic beliefs of the orfic religion, and their strange complex ideas of how the universe and humanity came to be. [SPEAKER_00]: All the while, I've been promising this all somehow ties back to Iran, Zoroastrianism, and the Hellenistic Age. [SPEAKER_00]: Today's the day. [SPEAKER_00]: We are starting with everyone's favorite topic, a discussion of our sources.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I am admittedly, really stretching things to cover this topic here. [SPEAKER_00]: But I think it is important to include at this stage of the narrative, and the ancient authors involved are at least interesting in their own right. [SPEAKER_00]: This entire series has been predicated on a single paragraph from the early sixth century CE, so over seven hundred years after our current narrative place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, it comes from Damascus's difficulties and solutions of the first principle. [SPEAKER_00]: A very late neoplatonic philosophical text about the creation of the universe. [SPEAKER_00]: Damascus of Athens himself was situated at a very unique point in history. [SPEAKER_00]: Almost two hundred years after Christianity was first accepted as the state religion of the Roman Empire and after a series of imperial crackdowns on traditional polytheistic beliefs.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was before those beliefs vanished entirely. [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, Damascus's story is sort of the story of how that happened. [SPEAKER_00]: He was the last skulllark to lead Plato's Academy in Athens before the Emperor Justinian ordered its closure and Damascus fled to Persia.
[SPEAKER_00]: That, of course, is a story for another time in like seven or eight years probably, but it provides context [SPEAKER_00]: Damascus's treatise on the first principles was written partially to provide as much pagan opposition to Christian dogma as possible. [SPEAKER_00]: That led him to analyze basically as many different approaches to the story of creation as he could get his hands on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the greater shams of history is that none of his work after fleeing Athens have survived. [SPEAKER_00]: because I suspect he would have had a lot to say about the religious movements he encountered in the East. [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, we just have this one short paragraph that provides a very broad description of Iranian religion. [SPEAKER_00]: But it does cite its sources, or rather source.
[SPEAKER_00]: The now lost philosopher, you deemiss of roads, a student of Aristotle who flourished in the latter half of the fourth century BCE, right at the start of the Hellenistic era. [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the more noteworthy fragments have allowed scholars to place a few of his works on mathematics and astronomy together, but Udimus' history of theology remains effectively lost to the sands of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, since he is cited by Damascus as a source for both orphism and zoroastrianism, and he wrote in the time period we are currently discussing, [SPEAKER_00]: I am latching on to what I can get here. [SPEAKER_00]: If you deemus is the citation, then we can reasonably intuit that the beliefs being discussed were contemporary with the roti in philosopher if not slightly older. [SPEAKER_00]: So without further ado, the so-called paragraph from Damascus.
[SPEAKER_00]: As for the magi and the entire Iranian people, as U.D. [SPEAKER_00]: mis writes about this, some of them call the intelligible and universe space, using the Greek word topos. [SPEAKER_00]: And others call it time, the Greek word, Kronos, from which are differentiated either a good deity or a bad demon. [SPEAKER_00]: or light and darkness before these, as some say.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they then themselves posit the twofold differentiated rank of the superiors after the undifferentiated nature, one leader of which is Hora Mazda and the other of which is Armanios. [SPEAKER_00]: I will be entirely honest, I'm not sure what exactly you deemous and or Damascus meant by topos as the first principle in Iranian belief. [SPEAKER_00]: That's not really a concept I've encountered personified in the same way as time before.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I guess you could read it as Zoroastrian creation stories lacking the absolute non-existence of some Greek myths. [SPEAKER_00]: Even at its most arcane, zoroastrianism still presents creation as happening in the cosmos, as opposed to the Greek's description of chaos and ither coming into existence from absolute nothingness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fwasha, the zoroastrian equivalent of tapas, is usually referenced alongside Zervon, but so are most of the other more abstract yazadas that represent different elements of the cosmos, like Vaayu and Vata, Wind and Air, which are somewhat comparable to the Greek ideas of chaos and ithar. [SPEAKER_00]: Time, the Greek, Kronos, [SPEAKER_00]: is another matter entirely. [SPEAKER_00]: As you deemous and Damascus explain it, time is a first principle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first concept to exist in the universe. [SPEAKER_00]: And from time came good and evil, light and dark. [SPEAKER_00]: The polar opposite divinities Damascus called Hora-Masta and Aramanios, and which I usually call a Hora-Masta and Angra-Mainu. [SPEAKER_00]: This is ever so slightly different from the way I usually present things, or the way it usually appears in the Avesta, or the way it is usually framed by modern Zoroastrians.
[SPEAKER_00]: In all of those cases, either a Hora Mazda is the first principle of the universe, and all things, including evil, emanate from accepting or rejecting him, or [SPEAKER_00]: A horror Mazda and Aungra Minu both existed simultaneously, and their endless conflict gave rise to the dualistic universe as we know it. [SPEAKER_00]: Udemus provides our earliest hint at an alternative view of these ideas, wherein time existed first.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a horror Mazda and Angra Minu differentiated themselves from the great winding neutrality of time itself, or to use the Avestin name, Zervon. [SPEAKER_00]: We have encountered Zervon in passing a few times before, usually as just one of the many Yazadas listed in Scripture. [SPEAKER_00]: The most notable appearance was probably in my episode on the Vendedod, where Zervon is described as the creator of the Chinvat bridge, where dead souls are judged.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bridge from life to death is literally described as a passage of time with a capital T. Aside from that, though, Zervon doesn't really appear to be very important beyond providing [SPEAKER_00]: concept of time to the universe. [SPEAKER_00]: He's not usually presented up there with a Hora Mazda, Mithra, Anahita, and the other big Yazadas. [SPEAKER_00]: Until we get to you, Demis. [SPEAKER_00]: Then all of a sudden, Zerban is the first principle of the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Under normal circumstances, this is the sort of thing we would immediately write off as a Greek misconception, or projecting more familiar beliefs like those of orphism onto their Iranian neighbors. [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a normal circumstance, though. [SPEAKER_00]: Fast forward a few centuries from U.D. [SPEAKER_00]: to the third century CE. [SPEAKER_00]: You're now in the reign of the Sassanid dynasty of Persia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Greek rule has long been swept away, and the Zoroastrian religion is more organized and tied to the government than ever before. [SPEAKER_00]: The Mobodon Mobed, priest of priests, is second in influence only to the king of kings, and some of those high priests [SPEAKER_00]: have left inscriptions to rival those of the kings they ruled alongside. [SPEAKER_00]: These inscriptions express a worldview that sounds a lot like what you deemists proposed Iranians believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: centuries earlier. [SPEAKER_00]: So now we have served on as a first principle, circa a three hundred BC and three hundred CE, but minimal evidence to support that view in the Avesta nor any source from the intervening six hundred years. [SPEAKER_00]: Nor for that matter, most post-sassanted sources.
[SPEAKER_00]: This zoroastrian sect called servinism appears to have emerged at the tail end of the accaminated period but struggled to find purchase until a new dynasty of Persian kings emerged. [SPEAKER_00]: One possibility that I simultaneously think is probably close to the truth and have no evidence for is that servinism largely developed in Parisis. [SPEAKER_00]: which would explain its ties to the Sassanids and seeming absence from the wider Iranian discourse in the interim period.
[SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of its exact history, Zirvanite beliefs are rooted in some fairly obscure of vestin theology, at least to modern readers. [SPEAKER_00]: It's entirely possible that a better explanation would have been found in the innumerable lost of vestin hymns, but we work with what we've got. [SPEAKER_00]: In the avesta, Zirvan is given two epithets.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is both Zirvan Akarana, [SPEAKER_00]: and Zervon Duryo Kivadata translated literally as infinite time and time of the long dominion. [SPEAKER_00]: Despite what Gorvadal's novel creation may lead you to believe, the time of the long dominion is actually the present, or more accurately, the human way of perceiving time as a linear sequence of events in the universe created by Ahora Mazda.
[SPEAKER_00]: Infinite time is the more sci-fi counterpart, the big ball of timey whimmy stuff for you, Doctor Who fans. [SPEAKER_00]: Zervon Akarana is a boundless non-linear experience of time outside the mortal universe. [SPEAKER_00]: Zervon Akarana is the version posited as a first principle. [SPEAKER_00]: And in a very orfic way, it sort of implies that Akarana is the original power of creation, like Kronos in the beginning of the orfic rhapsodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Duryo Kavadata is a reformed version in a Hora Mazda's new universe. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not quite that one to one, no version of Zoroastrianism has all of the baton-passing universe recreation of the Orphics, but the long dominion is Zervon of our universe, and Akarana is Zervon as a first principle of creation. [SPEAKER_00]: Many secular scholars of Zoroastrianism, such as Mary Boyce, have suggested that zirvanism was actually fairly widespread in the former accaminid west.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Iranian holdout regions like Capidokia and Armenia, as well as Mesopotamia and Parisis. [SPEAKER_00]: They point to the Greek and Roman sources that seem to cling strongly to the core zirvanite principle. [SPEAKER_00]: Ohoramasta and Ongremine-U are equal and to opposite twins created simultaneously. [SPEAKER_00]: As I've said, this conclusion isn't impossible to reach without including Zervon in the equation.
[SPEAKER_00]: If anything, I think it's actually the most consistent view with the goppas, aside from Ongremine-U, apparently not being a name that early in the theology.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, [SPEAKER_00]: Zervenism, following a very similar line of thought to various Greek and Babylonian mythographers over the centuries, appears to spring from the fact that it is difficult to reconcile a Hora Mazda as purely good and aligned with Asha, as well as the sole creator of everything, which would have to include Angra Manu, Druj, and evil in general.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I've said in the past, one of the things about Zoroastrianism, I find particularly endearing, is that purely Mazdian theology answers this question with free will. [SPEAKER_00]: A horror Mazda is purely good, and part of that is allowing his creations to have free will, including the freedom to reject goodness. [SPEAKER_00]: Servenism found a different explanation. [SPEAKER_00]: On Gramainew, later called Araman, was an accidental byproduct of a Hora Mazda's creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And their opposition began when Zirvan granted supremacy of the universe to a Hora Mazda. [SPEAKER_00]: In this way, both good and evil appear as equal forces at the moment of creation, with good simply ranking above evil, and evil in constant conflict over that fact. [SPEAKER_00]: I want to spend the rest of this episode talking about the outside influences, including Greek orphism, that may have influenced these conclusions.
[SPEAKER_00]: But first, I want to suggest a theory for why, when and where, zirvanism first emerged and later became popular. [SPEAKER_00]: Free will and human air, as fundamental parts of Asha, a Hora Mazda's divinely ordained perfect order for the universe are great. [SPEAKER_00]: I'd personally argue that they are still a moral good today, whether your Zoroastrian or not. [SPEAKER_00]: However, they are not exactly compatible with autocracy and the divine right of kings.
[SPEAKER_00]: If evil is just as fundamental to the universe as good, and the steady march of time, rather than simple goodness, is the ultimate driver of the universe, [SPEAKER_00]: then free will is suddenly a lot less important. [SPEAKER_00]: If it even exists at all. [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, this exact view is espoused by the dataston manogicrod, a medieval zoroastrian text, and one of the latest to espoused a zirvenite approach to theology.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that text, the author wrote that a Hora Mazda allotted happiness to humanity, but if we do not receive it, it is because of the intercession of the planets. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a reference to astrology, specifically the Babylonian influence to astrology used in much of ancient West Asia, where the planets disrupt life on earth by their movements through the skies.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Zoroastrianism specifically, the unfixed movements of the planets compared to their static star counterparts led astrologers to interpret the planets as a largely evil influence on astrological predictions. [SPEAKER_00]: In some medieval translations of the Menagi Krad, Zervon was translated as fate rather than simply time.
[SPEAKER_00]: and since the movement of the planets are predictable, this declaration suggests that some servenites believed in a form of predestination rather than free will. [SPEAKER_00]: So why when and where? [SPEAKER_00]: In reverse order, the Persian Empire under the accaminid and sassanid dynasties.
[SPEAKER_00]: and because diminishing the role of free will in theology and the fallibility of kings and priests provided excellent support for the sort of divine right monarchy that ruled those empires. [SPEAKER_00]: It excused their failings and solidified their importance as divinely ordained not only because of the inherent goodness of a horror Mazda, [SPEAKER_00]: but a predetermined path set out by an even higher power.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we accept twenty-th century authors like Mary Bois and Robert Zainer, then I think we can get even more specific. [SPEAKER_00]: Those scholars suggest that this predestination was tied to Babylonian theology, which would conveniently tie the rise of Zervon [SPEAKER_00]: to the Babylonian influence religious changes under Darius II and Artizarxes II, which would be right around the proper time for it to reach the Greeks and by extension, you deem this in the fourth century.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, or I guess in about two minutes, we will shift to Orfic influences after the break. [SPEAKER_00]: Now we get to the whole reason for this big long series of episodes in the first place. [SPEAKER_00]: Part of that should already be clear if you remember the big themes of this episode and the last one. [SPEAKER_00]: Zervenism, first appeared in the historical record, right around the time that Kronos started appearing in the forefront of Orphic beliefs about the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Greeks are all over Iran and West Asia. [SPEAKER_00]: The Greeks start thinking about the god of time as the creator of the universe in a cosmology where later deities can take over and become the new de facto creator god. [SPEAKER_00]: The Iranians start talking about a theology where the time god is the creator of the universe and a created deity then takes over as the new de facto creator god.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a huge leap in logic to think those two developments might be connected. [SPEAKER_00]: We even know that this was a period of a lot of religious cross-pollination. [SPEAKER_00]: The early Hellenistic age would have been the time when the Armenians absorbed a lot of Zoroastrian beliefs and deities into their own practices. [SPEAKER_00]: and zoroastrian influences are obvious in a lot of second-temple Jewish texts as well, as are Greek philosophical influences.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I've said before, zoroastrian developments are a lot harder to trace in this period. [SPEAKER_00]: But by the time we get another burst of information in the third-century CE, it's clear that they had absorbed plenty of external influence, too. [SPEAKER_00]: That's just what happens when you have so many overlapping and moving communities for a long enough period of time. [SPEAKER_00]: Originally, this section was going to be quite short.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was basically going to reiterate the evidence and muse about the causes and effects of those influences just a bit. [SPEAKER_00]: Basically, this episode was supposed to be a brief introduction to zirvenism to let you all know that this concept is cooking in the background of Iranian belief. [SPEAKER_00]: and to allow me to reference it without much explanation before we get to the big Xervenite moment in the Sassanid period.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, I read the Durveni papyrus, and I had to reassess my entire hypothesis. [SPEAKER_00]: You would think I ran out of big dramatic pre-hellenistic developments in Greco-Persian relations a long time ago. [SPEAKER_00]: I certainly wouldn't have expected something as big as one of the most famous documents in European archaeology to be completely glossed over in all of the sources I've encountered for the last decade if it were relevant. [SPEAKER_00]: Here we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nine years and nine months almost to the day since I first started researching ancient zoroastrianism, and I am just now discovering the idea of esoteric Greek magi. [SPEAKER_00]: After a lot of searching, I think I know why, though. [SPEAKER_00]: There's just not much written about this for anybody else in eronology to encounter it either. [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm relying heavily on a paper called The Magi in the Derveni papyrus by James R. Russell.
[SPEAKER_00]: and by the simple luck of good timing and taking too long to deliver this episode, a dissertation by Garrett Hansen at the University of Arizona, which cannot have been online for more than a few weeks at the time this episode releases. [SPEAKER_00]: It is established that the Greeks had a fascination with the Magi, both before and after the Hellenistic period.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they frequently associated them with exceptional philosophical and mythical accomplishments, like attributing all of Babylonian science to Zoroaster, or the philosopher and pedicles describing a magus who could descend into Hades and retrieve a dead soul in exchange for magical powers. [SPEAKER_00]: And that view of things is pretty common in Greek literature. [SPEAKER_00]: from the Greek perspective, Zoroastrian, and generally Iranian rights and beliefs were strange, foreign.
[SPEAKER_00]: And very much alien from their common strains of religion. [SPEAKER_00]: And we have discussed all of that before. [SPEAKER_00]: Try as they might to interpret comparisons between the gods of the Persians and Meads with their own, the classical Greeks just struggled to grasp Zoroastrianism. [SPEAKER_00]: So instead, some writers let their fantasies run wild. [SPEAKER_00]: And Magos, the most common title of Iranian priests, became synonymous with magic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And influence that persists across many languages to this day in the word magic itself. [SPEAKER_00]: Often in Hellenistic literature, Magos would be better translated as wizard than cleric. [SPEAKER_00]: But then we get this passage from the Derveni papyrus describing orfic rights. [SPEAKER_00]: The beginning and ending sentences are cut off by damage to the document, but here we go. [SPEAKER_00]: Yada yada yada broken broken broken broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prayers and offerings appease the souls, whereas the incantation of the Magoie is powerful enough to change the demonace who hinder the souls. [SPEAKER_00]: The demonace hinder because they are hostile to the souls. [SPEAKER_00]: That is why the Magoie performed the sacrifice as if paying compensation. [SPEAKER_00]: and over the sacrifices they pour water and milk from which they make also their light-bations.
[SPEAKER_00]: They make offerings of innumerable and many naveled cakes because the souls are also innumerable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Initiates make preliminary sacrifices to the humanities in the same manner as the Magoi because the humanities are souls on whose account whoever intends to sacrifice to the gods must first make an offering of poultry to broken broken broken [SPEAKER_00]: Here we have a description of an orfic ritual in pre-Alexandrian Macedonia, presided over by initiates who are described as doing the same thing as magi, driving away dimonase.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can probably guess that dimon is the root word of the modern English word demon, which is true. [SPEAKER_00]: But in ancient Greek, it meant something more like micro-duty, or spirit, a vague category of supernatural beings that influenced daily life. [SPEAKER_00]: These could be good or bad, and in this case, we are obviously talking about bad dimonase. [SPEAKER_00]: Coco dimonase in Greek.
[SPEAKER_00]: These hinder the souls of humanity, but even with that context, the use here with magi is interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, the end of the paragraph reveals that these demonese in particular are the humanities, also called the Arinias or the Furies, under world goddesses that punish the souls in the afterlife. [SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of similar testing spirits in world mythology, but one obvious comparison rises above the rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's even, etymologically, related. [SPEAKER_00]: Divas. [SPEAKER_00]: Greek, Kakodimonis, and Zoroastrian lesser divas are extremely similar. [SPEAKER_00]: It goes further, too. [SPEAKER_00]: This ritual involves libations of water and milk, which sounds plausibly similar to some Alma rituals described in the Avesta. [SPEAKER_00]: The many naveled cakes described in Dervennied Papyrus also bear some resemblance to baked goods common in later Zoroastrian funeral services.
[SPEAKER_00]: That might just not have been documented in as much detail this far back in time. [SPEAKER_00]: James R. Russell even makes a connection between the offering of poultry and zoroastrian beliefs, which historically associated the rooster and its sunrise crowing, with the Azada Srasha, the patron of human conscience who hears our prayers. [SPEAKER_00]: The prayers in this case, being for the end of darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, in that context, even in very ancient times, Zoroastrians would not have sacrificed a bird that was sacred to one of the Yazadas, but it's not unreasonable to think that something was lost in translation here. [SPEAKER_00]: Or alternatively, it refers to some other kind of bird's sacrifice common in Persian territory at the time. [SPEAKER_00]: Russell specifically suggests that this could all be related to Greeks witnessing a formal Saturn ceremony.
[SPEAKER_00]: A zoroastrian prayer for honoring the dead and their fravashis. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if I'd be quite as willing to pin this one ancient paragraph on a specific ceremony, but something of that nature would make sense in context. [SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of what ceremony or ceremonies, these Macedonian orfics were aware of, the Derveni papyrus makes one thing clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The initiates saw enough similarity between their own beliefs about death and those of their neighbors to the east to deliberately copy Iranian rituals into their own rights. [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, that opens a further question for my inquiries here. [SPEAKER_00]: which came first, the sacrificial chicken or the cosmic egg. [SPEAKER_00]: Unlike my original expectations of orphism directly influencing Xervenite beliefs, this appears to have been a very two way street.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just hard to say which story and belief set originated on which side. [SPEAKER_00]: Almost all of our sources for servanism come from much later, but the connection is undeniable at this early point in history. [SPEAKER_00]: The simple fact of the matter is that we just can't know how exactly this religious exchange played out or in what order. [SPEAKER_00]: What we can do is talk about those points of overlap.
[SPEAKER_00]: Scholars love to point out the similarities between Greek mythology and other myths from West Asia, and there are almost certainly influences there, especially in the structure of the Theogany. [SPEAKER_00]: But just because a group like the Hittites wrote down their stories first doesn't mean that we should assume that one group borrowed from another.
[SPEAKER_00]: broad strokes of the theogany and mythical motifs like wars of succession between the gods are common across many cultures, both related and not. [SPEAKER_00]: So we'll bypass that issue for now. [SPEAKER_00]: One idea that is a bit more specific is the cosmic egg. [SPEAKER_00]: In the last episode, I discussed how the Orphic Creation God fondays emerged from an egg created in the primordial matter by Kronos the God of Time.
[SPEAKER_00]: A version of this appears in Zoroastrian literature as well, specifically the Boondahishim. [SPEAKER_00]: which is not a Zervenite text, but was written after the period of Zervenite dominance. [SPEAKER_00]: And it says, first he, or Ma's, created the sky, bright, visible, distant in the form of an egg, made of shining iron, its essence steel, male, joined at the top to the endless light.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is at least similar enough to be of note, especially to some orfic ideas of nicks the night being the primordial essence. [SPEAKER_00]: But I should note that Garrett Hansen dismisses this potential connection in his thesis, pointing to the clearly Mazdaite focus of the Bundahishan. [SPEAKER_00]: But Hanson is an Orphic scholar, not focused on Zoroastrianism, and I think his narrow focus on the Boundahician in his review is just as misguided.
[SPEAKER_00]: Given that it's also from the eighth or ninth century CE, the Boundahician should be seen as a product of Zoroastrianism after Zorvanism had a chance to influence more conventional theology. [SPEAKER_00]: So while Zervon might not be the principal force in the universe to that text. [SPEAKER_00]: Servinite ideas or even ideas that influenced both orthodox practice and servinism at an earlier point should be expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Significantly earlier, we might have it either a point of influence on both the Zoroastrians and the Orphics, something from broader Indo-Aranian culture that filtered in, or the concept that influenced ancient Zoroastrians before reaching Greece. [SPEAKER_00]: The Indic Chandagya Upanishad, which includes the passage in the beginning, this world was non-being, then it was being, then it sprang up, then an egg developed, then it lay for the duration of a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it broke. [SPEAKER_00]: The two halves of the egg were silver and gold. [SPEAKER_00]: The silver one, this was the earth. [SPEAKER_00]: The golden one, the sky. [SPEAKER_00]: That is from around seven hundred B.C. [SPEAKER_00]: And it certainly sounds a lot like the cosmic egg in orphism and the boondahician.
[SPEAKER_00]: Early index sources provide another point of influence in the even older Athara Veda, dated to around one thousand BC, in which there is no cosmic egg, but there is a cosmic embryo. [SPEAKER_00]: And time is credited as the creation god. [SPEAKER_00]: Udemus, as in our source for the so-called Udemian Theogity, is once again cited by Damascus to describe another similar tale from Sidon in Phoenicia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once again, we have time as the first deity followed by several generations of primordial gods and then a cosmic egg. [SPEAKER_00]: Hanson dismisses this connection as well, which again, I think is misguided for many of the same reasons he uses as evidence in his own argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: Damascus only offers a summary and slight differences like inserting more primordial generations before or after the egg doesn't really point to a lack of connection just a different understanding of the cosmos. [SPEAKER_00]: In general, Hansen is very focused on drawing a connection between the Hittite, Combari cycle and Greek religion, which is accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Evidence for significant cultural exchange between the Mycenian Greeks and the Hittites has been accumulating for decades. [SPEAKER_00]: If anything, the strong parallels in both Hittite and Vedic texts might point to some other as yet undocumented influence, an Indo-European origin or just a case of convergent cultural evolution during the Bronze Age, which eventually all mixed together in the classical period.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that brings me back to the magi, because Hanson II came to roughly the same conclusion as Russell. [SPEAKER_00]: The author of the Draveni papyrus was familiar with some zoroastrian theology and ritual to a degree rarely seen in pre-hellenistic Greek writing. [SPEAKER_00]: The biggest difference is that Hanson suggests the lawn ceremony referenced in the Persepolis fortification tablets [SPEAKER_00]: as a point of origin instead of the Satoom prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: That seems both more and less likely, depending on the angle you approach the question from. [SPEAKER_00]: On one hand, the lawn has the benefit of contemporary documentation, but on the other, it also seems to be more generic than the specific ritual described by the Durvenni author. [SPEAKER_00]: Either way, the basic concept is the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, we're still talking about two strains of religious thought at a time in history when our total evidence for both of them could fit inside a thick pamphlet. [SPEAKER_00]: There is evidence for lots of potential outside influence on both or phism and zirvanism. [SPEAKER_00]: all over West and South Asia. [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, right at the moment, when servanism first enters the historical record, we have two crucial pieces of evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the same point in time that Kronos became a core deity in Orphic belief. [SPEAKER_00]: And the Dervani papyrus directly states that Orphic initiates imitated the rituals of the Iranian magi. [SPEAKER_00]: trying to draw straight lines in religious history is a fool's errand. [SPEAKER_00]: There's always a milieu of ideas influencing one another. [SPEAKER_00]: And there are plenty of other better documented examples of how Greek and Iranian thought connected.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of that said, if the timeline fits, wear it. [SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of whether it was the helines or the Iranians who had the idea of time as a primary force first, [SPEAKER_00]: They were sharing ideas back and forth in the Hellenistic Age, and that will eventually manifest into highly influential religious movements for both cultures. [SPEAKER_00]: And, see... [SPEAKER_00]: All right, everybody. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the Orphic Xervenite series in the bag.
[SPEAKER_00]: Next time, God's willing without too much delay, we are back to the narrative, and it's full steam ahead through Antiochus II, aka Antiochus II. [SPEAKER_00]: until then. [SPEAKER_00]: If you want more information about this podcast, you can go to hopfulmedia.com. [SPEAKER_00]: That's where you'll find things like my bibliography, episode imagery, and additional resources.
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