Zoroastrianism

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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. Well that interview went really well and I'm delighted to share the episode with you now. Our guest is Professor Almer Hintzer. She is a leading expert on Zoroastrianism. She's based at SOAS, the University of London. 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? What are its key beliefs? This was a really interesting chat delving deep into what Zoroastrianism is, and I really do hope you enjoy.

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. The religion of Zoroastrianism. Central to several great ancient Iranian empires, from the Achaemenids to the Sasanians. But what do we know about this religion? What were and still are its key beliefs? How did it emerge? Who are these central figures of Ahura Mazda?

And why is fire so important? This is the story of Zoroastrian. With our guests. Almert, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Oh the pleasure is all mine. I'm delighted to have you here and to talk to you about Zoroastrianism.

I mean yes, because can we say it is the oldest or one of the oldest living religions today? I would say so. I would say one of the oldest, because there are maybe religions still being practiced of which we do not know. And uh 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.

And many of the rituals and words which they recite in their ritual performances actually date from that time. Cause 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. We think so, as far as the language is concerned, which is a great guide to dating Zoroastrianism.

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. And these are what we call the Gatas of Zarasustra and the Yasnahaptanghaiti, which is also composed in the same language. So the language is very archaic, the language of those texts which the Zoroastrians recite in ritual and in prayer. Very archaic. It's and in fact it's the oldest witness of any Iranian language.

And it belongs to the oldest in attested Indo European languages. And what is this language? We call it a western. Vestin, okay. Yes, because it is the language of the Avesta and the Avesta is the name of the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian. The texts which the Zoroastrians recite aloud in prayer and in the ritual. And Avestan has survived basically only as part of those rituals and prayers.

So it's the language of the Avesta, It's amazing that that has endured to the present day, given how old a language that is and that it is practiced still so there are still many people out there in Iran who would have who would know that language, who know that language? They know the text, they know the language insofar as they know the words which they recite, and they learn these words by heart. 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. We know that the dating is based on certain linguistic features in the language of the Gartas, the oldest parts of the Avesta. and in particular prehistoric sounds, which linguists call laryngels.

Uh sounds which are pronounced in the back of the throat and you kind of very larynx yes you have them in Semitic languages these sounds we don't have them in Indo-European languages but in prehistoric times Indo Proto-Indo-European languages did have those sounds as consonant And they could also turn into vowels. 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.

And at the time the oldest texts of the Avesta were composed, those laryngeos must still have been present. We can because In the Mita, the Mita of the Gatas tells us that they stopped to Two vowels to coalesce into one long vowel. And those two vowels A plus A with an laryngeal in the middle count as two syllables. So 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.

Well we'll explore more about those texts and w 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 the roots of Zoroastrianism. Can we go back to the like the word Indo European? We can go back to some extent thanks to comparative historical philology and linguistics. The Iranian languages are cognate with the Indo Aryan language.

Indo Aryan, these are the languages of Indo European origin spoken in this Indian subcontinent. The in the Indo Aryans were immigrants into the Indian subcontinent, we know that for sure. Well, pretty sure, yes, although there are some people who think they've always been there, especially Hindu nationalists nowadays. But from an Indo Europeanist's point of view the immigration of the Indo Aryans into India is the most probable uh scenario.

So I 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. We have no oral or written documents of that prehistoric language from which those two branches derive. We can reconstruct that prehistoric ancestor to some extent by comparing the oldest surviving Iranian documents, which is the Avesta and especially the Gatas.

But also the old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, which date from five hundred and twenty B C E onwards. Later on. 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. Is the Rig Vader and the like, is it? Right. Exactly. The Rig Veda and the other Vedas, Yajovi.

the Sama Veda and the Atarva Veda, but especially the Brick Veda, which is the oldest. And those are linked to the ear early Hinduism, aren't they, in the second millennium BC, Sanskrit and the like, yep. Absolutely. So the languages, the language of the Vedas, especially of the Rig Veda, and the language of the Avestas. are so similar to each other that they are like two different dialects of the same language. And you can co transpose expressions in Avestan into San

So for example in Avestan you we say we say Vohu Manach or Vahu Manach for good thought. Vahu is good and manach is thought and in Sanskrit it's Vasu Manach. So I 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 it.

So that linguistic similarity shows how Hinduism and Zoroastrianism were linked, at least linguistically, with their their ancestor, I guess. Indeed. With their common prehistoric ancestor, Indo Iranian ancestor. And that means that these two languages are genetically related. They are two sister branches of a common parent language, which is the Indo-Iranian or Aryan language. And they would have shared a common language, not only that, but also a common thought system.

and a common religion and a common social structure. And all of that we are trying to reconstruct on the basis of the historically attested documents, which is the r those are those religious hymns. 'Cause that's all that has survived, nothing else, no other texts have survived.

So like the Garthas on one side and the Rig Vader and the like on the other side to be comparing them as you say. Really interesting. 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.

You mentioned of course the second millennium BC with the Gatas. So who is it believed that Zoroastrianism begins with at that time? Yes, so while they share this common heritage, the origins of Zoroastrianism would not reach back into the Proto-Indo-Iranian period. because we do not have a Zarasustra in the Vedic tradition. The religion must have started after the two branches split from one another.

But exactly when and where the Zoroastrian religion developed, that is a question which is debated amongst scholars. We can only ch 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. 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. So the composer of the garters pronounced the laryngeal. Otherwise they wouldn't have prevented the uh because they prevented that merging of the two adjacent vowels. Then there are a number of other indicators which point to a f quite early date of the beginning of the Zoroastrian religion.

Although that is also disputed. So, and that is the demonization of the divers. Okay. Now this takes us into the conceptual world of the Zoroastrian religion. And Daiva Diva means God in Indo-Iranian. It is the word which you also have in Latin deut. Gosh, yes, yes. And in English D ไฟไฟไฟไฟไฟไฟ The div bit is the same as dive in daiva. It's daiva. And in Sanskrit it's deva. So you once again you see the similarities between

Deva in Sanskrit and Deva in Avestan. And in Sanskrit what happened is that the I became E. So they say in India the Indo Aryans say Deva, which means God. In Avestan, in the Gatas, Diva are the false gods. Who should not be worshipped, they are terrible, and they are very vehemently rejected in the God. And the demonization of the old Indo European god is a feature which we find in the Iranian tradition only. 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. There are lots of archaeisms in in the Zoroastrian tradition. But what helps us with the dating are innovation. So 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, that change as you were saying. Absolutely. So 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. Dive. The diversity all of a sudden They are bad. Right. And they are rejected. And of course, these gods do not exist on their own, but there is a whole cut.

related to it there is a priesthood who have a state. in the worship of the gods. So if you reject if you tell your people these are you are all worshipping false gods, what do the priests do? They are very upset about it because their livelihood depends on the worship of those gods, and they have been trained in worshiping those gods. So this is not But this is not a trivial thing, but to say that the divers, the gods, are wrong, you should not worship them. But that's what the Gatas do.

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?

The only individual who is linked to this is the figure of Sarah Sustrom. Sarathustra. And the Gatas are the oldest texts which we have and they talk exactly about So Zarasustra figures prominently in the Gatas, his name is occurs sixteen times. Der er 17 hymns all together, grouped into 5 gatas. Gata means song.

And basically a meter, the metre of a song. And these seventeen hymns are grouped according to their meter into five groups of unequal length. The first group is one garter, it consists of seven hymns. And then we have two more of four hymns each, and then we also have two of one hymn only. So These are the seventeen hymns grouped into those five Gatas and in those seventeen We have the name of Sarasustra 17 times. And the other name which occurs most prominently is that of Ahura Mazda.

Right, okay. Who's this? That's the god. That's the is this the god that they're saying, Turn away from the old gods, this is the god you should follow. This is exactly what the garters are about. Right. They talk about this. And Zarasushtwa talks to his God. He has a special relationship to Ahuda Mazda, and Ahura Mazda talks to him. So Zarasushtra asks him questions. He says, Oh tell me, Ahura Mazda, who made this work?

Who keeps the stars in the sky and prevents the clouds from coming down, from falling down? The sky from falling on our heads I Yeah. Who has made this one? 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. but also as the one who tells people how they should lead their lives.

So they need to follow truth, which is Asha, and they need to worship Ahuramasta and not the diver. Because the divers are wrong. 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? Uh is the logic then is this a monotheistic religion?

There is one God, only one God, which is Ahura Mazda. Interesting. Who is the maker of everything that is good. And what is good are his And he creates everything at a on a spiritual level in the first instance. And out of that spiritual creation, he creates the matter, the physical world, which is the world, the cosmos, which is visible and tangible. So he is that God who is wholly good and who is the creator of the world. So there is one God only.

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. But in the system, as we have it in the Avesta, Ahura Mazda has no direct counterpart. On the evil side. But Ahura Mazda is the father. 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. And this capability of creating and giving life, especially, life is inside Ahura Mazda. That is called spuntamini. In Avestan. Mind you, it has the root man to think, which we have in English, mental, for example, this manbit. Mind you is a force, a spiritual force, and spenta means life-bearing.

Something like that. That means it has the capacity of producing light. And it is this creative life-bearing force in Avestan spenta, mind you, which has a negative opposite. And that's called Angra mind you. Okay. Angram means Hostile. And mind you again means force. It's a destructive force which is diametrically opposed to spunta mind you. And you can even see it from the language, the words they are symmetrically. Symmetrical. Spunta mind you? Bosa mineu.

you and angra mineu and angra mine you is destructive. That means he wants to destroy everything that spentamine you produce. And Angra Mayu is likewise a spiritual He wants to destroy on the spiritual level, but he can't really destroy the spiritual world. Because in Zoroastrianism, the spiritual world

it exists and so the destructive force is primordial. It has ever existed, always existed, and will always and Ahura Mazda and his life-giving force will also always The and all the spiritual word is And this is what we call dualism in Zoroastrianism, this diametrical opposition between the life bearing force and the destructive one. So there, but you can see from the system that Ahura Mazda is on top of the life-giving form. Whereas the destructive force Angram, mind you, has nobody on.

It's just a force, it's a blind force which wants to destroy. 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 the to Ahuramazda and and the light and keeping on the right track, I guess. Absolutely. And people have to associate themselves with Ahura Mazda.

And not Miss Angra, mind you, the destructive force. And human beings have a choice, which of the two to choose. They should, of course, choose the creative one and follow Ahura Mazda and not the destructive one. Amen.

And so how does fire and the sacred flame come into all of this with the garters and with those religious songs, the religious tone? Yeah. Fire plays an important role already in Indo Iranian culture, 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.

fire is almost a human universal, it's so important for our life, for cooking our food and for warmth and cold weather and also a source of light. 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. Already in Indo-Iranian times, a ritual which is performed up for the gods, for the divine beings, is perceived as an act of hospitality.

Right. Okay. So it is basically a banquet which the human beings prepare. In a special space, a precinct, which can be created at hook in the space. also in the open air, in they just draw then a design a space and there they prepare a s 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 abode. 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. 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.

In Zoroastrianism, it's a little in the Zoroastrian ritual, it's a little bit different there. We know that from the Yasnahabtang Haiti, which is a text that is recited. After the first Gata in the Zoroastrian core ritual which is called the Yasna the Yasna ritual but also in the other Soleim rituals which are based on the Yasna. In all of this, 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 text, younger Avestan text, it's the fire is also addressed as the son of Ahura Mazda. 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 thirty six, which in the seventy two chapter Yasna is right in the middle. of the ritual performance. Thirty six is halfway through.

So are they songs or are they poems or how should we say them? Uh They are spoken. It's uh it's sometimes Passages. Spoken passages in the Avestan language. I would say it's sort of the Yasnahaptang Haiti is not metrical in the sense of that the meter, the syllables are being counted, as is the case for the Gata. The older garters, yeah. but it is probably more sort of a rhythmic type of recitation.

And the fire then comes down and is present in the ritual pr from then on in the ritual precinct and the worshippers they affirm their purity with which they approach the fire now, which has been transformed, because the heavenly being is now present within the ritual precinct. The fire is then addressed in still in Yasna thirty-six as the most beautiful visible form of Ahura Maj.

So Ahura Mazda is himself is thought to be present in the form of the fire, and of course the fire is light. And that's why the the fire is regarded as his body, his visible form. And it this is the foundation of the central role played by the fire in the Zoroastrian ritual and the call for purity. Utmost purity of the performer of the ritual, but also of those who are present while this ritual is performed.

So it's so interesting once again you have the Gatas and you have the Yasnas, like these spoken passages and how far back in time they go. And it feels like we've very much set the scene with 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. So it sounds like they have their their own creation myth story. Do they also believe in an afterlife at the same time?

So the Zoroastrians have a a whole cosmology. Which goes from the primordial beginnings of the cosmos. Right to the end. And they believe that at the beginning there was certainly Ahura Mazda and the destruct his creative and the destructive force. They are have al always been there. So they are all primordial beings. They've been there from the beginning. Absolutely. They're beginningless. Ahura Mazda is seen as the creator of the world.

But before he makes the material world, first he multiplies himself in the form of his spiritual beings, spiritual creations, which embody qualities such as truth. Vohu good sort. Vohu mana right minded. And these spiritual concepts and qualities They have negative counterparts in the evil camp, and those are thought to come from the destructive force. So the evil can multiply itself in the form of spiritual features. Such as the lion The lie, okay.

And bad thought and arrogance and other such negative forces, greed. It's n no end to that. All these negative forces, but they're all spiritual. They come from the mind. And that's important. So their evil for Zoroastrianism exists first of all. up foremost on the spiritual level. And all these negative forces, they are negations of positive qualities which come from Ahura Mazda. Then, as a creator, Ahura Mazda produces a material world, and he does so out of his spiritual creation.

And that's why all these beings, this is spenta, mind you, the creative force is life-bearing. The word spenta is of has has in the past often been translated something like bounty. which embodies so generosity But what it really means is that it has the capacity of producing life. Because this word spenta, the spur bit, if you look at linguistics and etymology, It corresponds to a word which we have in Greek Q, which with this K U it corresponds to the S P in spenta.

And that means to be present in Ah it's a fertility idea, isn't it? Yes, and that's what this word spunta means. And in in the Greek word cue or I am pregnant at means life bearing and producing offspring. This is the center of the meaning of this word. That's why I prefer to translate it as life-bearing, because it has the capacity of producing life.

And that means not only on a spiritual level, but it it's capable of producing a material world. And this is what Aura Mazda does through his life-bearing force. 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. He produces this out of his out of these spiritual beings which he makes through the spentamini.

And this is something which the destructive force doesn't have because it can only destroy. It is c incapable of producing a material world. in any way negating the It can destroy but not create. Only destroy, it cannot decreate. And and also just quickly before we move on, the afterlife idea as well, is there one very much embedded in the in the verbal passages? 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. So mazda da means to say. mass the mass bit it gain it's formed from the root man to think And the muzbit contains the word manas, manak, which is thought. So literally Mazda means the one who sets his thought, his thinking, and he is super intelligent.

and he thinks it all out. His the purpose why he starts the creation at all, while he multiplies himself in the spiritual creation and then makes the materi the mit 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. It threatens, it poses a threat, and it wants to destroy Ahura Mazda.

and wants to make the light dark. 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, and the plan is A way of incapacitating evil once and for all. Not destroying it. You cannot destroy it. You cannot destroy Angra mind you because he is eternal. He will always be there.

But what matters for Ahura Mazda is that Angra mind you is incapacitated and relegated back to the place where it had come from in the f 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. So Rastrian cosmology has a purpose.

And the purpose is to incapacitate evil. And then as we go along we can see how this is done. So Ahura Mazda then makes the material world. And Angra Main Yu, due to his lust to smite, as the text put put it. He intrudes, he breaks, he attacks the material world. Which consists of the earth, but also of the whole cosmos. He breaks into it from outside. So he is some somehow before he attacks, he is outside of.

He comes into it and he tries to kill and to pollute and to destroy everything. And he does so. He destroys the first creations of Ahura Mazda on the earth. And he then tries also to storm the sky and to invade the sphere where Ahura Master dwells.

is successful only on the earth 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 Ahuramasta dwells, The Garo Domana, the house of welcome or of song, where I would have mastered Because he is stuck. at the Spunta Mein Yava stars this is the Western name for a group of stars which is perceived like the Milky Way, the Milky Way which we can see in the sky. It is perceived like a protective belt.

and Angra Mind You is incapable of penetrating it because Spunta Mind You and Angra Mind You are completely incompatible with one another and he is repelled there. And then according to the cosmological story. As we have it both this one both in the Avesta and in the Middle Persian texts from the Sasanian period, that means from six, seven hundred. But all of the Christian era. Okay. Six hundred, seven hundred A D you'll see. Yes, exactly.

But all of that is based on ancient traditions. Uh we and some of it we have in the Avesta. And one thing which we have in the Avesta is Sarasustra was born And Sarasustra brought to humankind the weapon to fight evil successfully. Okay. Now we have the Mazda worshipping religion. The religion which focuses on the cult and worship of Mazda, Ahura Mazda, of course. And this religion, which is called the Dina Mazdayazni. Dina is a Narvestan word, which means the vision literally.

It then becomes a word for religion, you have it in Persian Din, and the Arabs borrowed it Din. in Arabic. It isn't a Western word. This is the weapon to fight evil, the divers, and Angramin. Then progresses and it culminates at the end of time with the ultimate defeat of And in the process calls on men and women alike to fight evil. And reduce the power of evil in the world. And how do you do that?

By focusing your mind on Ahura Mazda and worshipping him, having rituals performed, paying the priests of our Zarasustra, who are in the tradition of Zarasustra, to perform those rituals And that weakens the presence of evil and And evil is ultimately going to be removed from this world at the end of time. 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.

And at that point All the dead are going to resurrect, to be resurrected. Right. Is that the first thing that's the first thing? Yes. 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.

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. So Zoroastrians do believe ultimately in resurrection. Oh okay, so that's their thoughts of but uh only at the end of time. That happens at the end of time. And the body is of course the material creator. And the spiritual creation is immortal anyway, that never dies. So when a person dies.

The spiritual part, each person has a spiritual part. 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 was Oh, once again like uh like Egypt's Book of the Dead and I guess also judgment in the Christian religion, you know, um and the like, you know, it it's it's depending on how 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 Zoroasian point of view, whether you support it Ahura. You worshipped our master, 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 things.

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 be weighed on scales. And depending on how that individual judgment ends. The soul then it has to cross a bridge, a bridge of where the good souls and words and deeds and the bad ones are collected. It has to cross that bridge and Either enters Ahura Mazda's Paradise.

the Garo Dhamana where Ahura Mazda dwells, or it goes to the place where Angra Mainu pla 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. And at that point there is going to be a judgment of the body. So the soul, the individual souls have been judged in their individual judgments each time a person dies.

But then at the end there is a universal judgment when all the resurrected bodies they also have to be judged and they use an image of a stream of molten metal. 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.

And for those who where the evil deeds prevailed it will be very painful, and for the good ones it will feel like warm 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. And then the person will con continue to exist in perpetuity, and Ahura Mazda will then exist with his spiritual and material creations forever.

And evil is going to withdraw and it has been incapacitated. It will be powerless. As it says in the Avesta. So we have two types of creation in Zaurassianism, spiritual and material. And the spiritual precedes the material world. The material world is rooted in the spiritual world and the spiritual world descends from Mahuda Mazda.

And we have two judgments an individual judgment, that is for the spiritual part of a person, and we have a universal judgment at the end of time. So we have two judgments.

And those two judgments, they have their justification in the two types of creation, in the spiritual and the material creation. Each of them is going to be judged. So having said all of that, Almut, with what they believed and what would ultimately happen to the bodies, uh 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?

So for the Zoroastrians, death was not meant to be for Audamaster. He wanted to be Material world to live forever. But he created the material world as an instrument to defeat evil. So when evil, Angra Mayu, inflicts death on a living being that looks like a victory, and death is considered 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 uh anything that is detached from a living being, be it just a hair from our head, or be it uh 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. So no burial idea. No, 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. 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 the son of Ahura Maz. And out of the question as well. So the best way to dispose of a dead body is to expose it to vultures. And vultures Excarnation. Excaration. Vultures are excellent. They do a great job.

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, and so they are almost like a hygiene pulley. And this practice of exposure is probably also rooted in ancient, very ancient practices. of the culture in certain areas where the proto Iranians came from, where it was opportune to expose dead bodies.

And they would have taken them up to the hills and lay them down on stone a stone platform and just leave the bodies there to be excavated by the bird. and then they would collect the bones, then they would have had something what we call secondary burial. They collect the bones and then they Sometimes they would have created a little casket.

and then bury that, put that into the earth. But the door bones would be dry, just dry bones. So there would be nothing polluting in the bones anymore. And we have got such bone containers or ossues. and have been found in Central Asia. especially of the Sogtians. The Sogtians were a people in the first millennium of the Christian era. But they must have been around also their predecessors in earlier times. They're in Uzbekistan area.

Uzbekistan area, yes, exactly. And Tajikistan. 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. And in Central Asia there, osseres have been found which depict Zoroastrian sea. with priests and there is also a tomb, a stone tomb, where probably the uh the bones would have been put in which depict the crossing of that bridge of the soul when it has to cross the bridge.

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

And so if these beliefs uh stem all the way back to the say the second millennium BC, is that what we presume then or So, yeah. Exactly. If that is all kind of laid out by that time already in like the late Bronze Age period, um do we know how quickly it becomes a very popular religion to follow, particularly in places like Iran, because we do normally think of the the Persians and and the Parthians

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. It seems to me i that Zoroastrianism started really early. For me the most probable scenario is that it started in proto Iranian times.

That means at the time when the Iranians were still one people, and that they all shared in the demonization of the divas, of the old gods, and the worship of Ahura Mazda. So that was with them right from the beginning, before they dispersed and split, especially in eastern and western Iraq. That they already had the religion with them, they carried it with them.

religions. So when we get to time, let's say of the Medians, so just before the Persians, would they have been Zoroastrian as well? Yes, they would have been. Interesting. And of course then in historical periods it might well have taken different manifestations in different areas, just as the di different Iranian dialects then developed.

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 demon demonization of the divers wisdom already and with it also the Avesta.

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, and ultimately, you know, the Greeks and the Romans. So this is another episode in its own right, but is it also interesting?

with the rise of Persia and then you know the Parthians afterwards, is it also interesting to study how these, you know, foreign groups, who I guess Zoroastrians would see as people who are following the divers or the force gods, How they interacted with this religion from Iran that was so prominent. Yeah, indeed, yes. The oldest evidence we have is uh from Babylonia when from the times of the Achaemenids, when we have the report.

In the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Isaiah, who talks about Cyrus. Yes. who did not know Yahweh, because Cyrus, of course, would have worshipped another god. I'm thinking, why not? He should have worshipped Ahura Mazda. but that he released the Jews from captivity. and uh restored the temple treasures to the Jews and facilitated the 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.

And then many Jews, many Israelites remained, stayed on in Mesopotamia in Babylonia, because they had settled by then, and they seemed to have been quite happy to live under the Persian rule, under Achaemenid rule. exchanges, intellectual or religious exchanges must have taken place. They had a common language which was the Aramaic language, that was a language of administration of the

Achaemenid Empire and the Jew and the Israelites, they would have spoken Aramaic. And we can see from within the the Hebrew Bible, we can see how they slowly, very slowly develop and as eschatology ideas about life after death, and gradually within the which it wasn't before. And you are that culminates then in Christianity, in the letter of Paul. in one of the letters to the Corinthians where Paul writes The ultimate enemy to be defeated is death.

And do you think that is an influence from Zoroastrians? Interesting. I mean I could ask so much more and of course well I will ask then. Come on, it's another episode. But uh the wise men in the in the nativity story. Is it very likely that they were Zoroastrians? 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 Massia. but that they are called mago. Not wise men. The we we we call them wise men or the kings.

They are called Magoi and nobody else is called Magush except a Zoroastrian priest. So major like magicians and all that kind of stuff. I guess it's not a good thing. A 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, but then in Western Iran they use that word, makush, and uh but the word magga from which it is derived

plays im it's an important role in the Zoroastrian ritual and in the Gatas already, in the oldest texts. It probably means that the whole ritual is a Magga. Because in the ritual, in the performance of a ritual, of a Zoroastrian ritual, a gift exchange is enough. between the humans, the priest and the divine. It puts an exchange of gifts into motion. So probably that's where mug, the mug bit comes from. And it is the term a technical term for

Ahmed, this has been fascinating. I know we've largely focused on like the origins of Zoroastrianism and the core beliefs that stay there, but I it 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, the Sanians, as I've mentioned. But I guess those beliefs are the things that stay there throughout, isn't it? And you can see down to the present day.

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 You know, Zoroastrians would have I guess seen as you know, the lie and not the truth, 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.

Yes. Yes. Interestingly, Zoroastrianism has always remained the religion of the Iranian people. That might well be because So because 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. And but at the same time they have also coexisted with followers of other religions.

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, and it's amazing just how old those beliefs are and how they endure. 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. 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. Absolutely fascinating. What a way to end it on. Almond. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. It has been my pleasure and honour. Professor. is its key beliefs and its origins far back. just as much as we did recording it. Thank you. to this episode of the ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or

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