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Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Far­ava­har, a sym­bol of Zoroas­tri­an­ism, at Persepolis.

I’ve been read­ing some things, such as this book, about Per­sian reli­gion before Islam. What fol­lows is based as much on Paul Kriwaczek’s In Search of Zarathus­tra [item 15183] as on this book, as well as on ear­lier read­ing [Mary Boyce Zoroas­tri­ans: Their Reli­gious Beliefs and Prac­tices; M. J. Ver­maseren Mithras, the Secret God, the Zoroas­trian scrip­tures, and many books on ancient Per­sia and on the dual­ist Chris­t­ian here­sies of the mid­dle ages. The more I look at it, the more I’m con­vinced that an under­stand­ing of ancient Per­sian his­tory is essen­tial to putting togeth­er an intel­li­gi­ble pic­ture of the ancient world. The more I read about the Zoroas­trian tra­di­tion, the more I come to see it as smack dab in the cen­ter of a con­tin­uum of cul­ture between India and Mediter­ranean. I was look­ing for evi­dence of con­sular insti­tu­tions, either in reli­gious or sec­u­lar bod­ies, but the evi­dence is too frag­men­tary and ambigu­ous to per­mit any secure state­ments. This dri­ves me crazy, because just one or two clear-cut exam­ples would but­tress my instinc­tive belief that urban and trib­al con­sular insti­tu­tions oper­ated in pret­ty much the same way across the con­tin­uum. In oth­er words, thou­sands of name­less and for­got­ten “republics”, con­fed­era­cies, oli­garchies and monar­chies strug­gling with the same issues as the Indi­an and Greek ones, scat­tered every­where. But how to prove it, when only two regions pro­vide us with any kind of doc­u­men­ta­tion? You can’t infer it from the archaeology.

But one thing became obvi­ous to me, while search­ing. Zoroas­tri­an­ism was an incred­i­ble dri­ving force, and we have tremen­dously under­es­ti­mated its impact on Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, and Bud­dhism. For one thing, I don’t see Zoroas­tri­an­ism, in any of its phas­es from the time of the Gathas to the Sas­sanids, as being “dual­is­tic” in the sense that it is usu­ally described by Euro­pean his­to­ri­ans. Mod­ern Zoroas­tri­ans reject such an inter­pre­ta­tion, and Zoroas­trian prac­tice, both ancient and mod­ern, con­forms to a monothe­is­tic inter­pre­ta­tion. Ahri­man, the force of evil in the Zoroas­trian scrip­tures, is con­sis­tently pre­sented as with­out fore­knowl­edge, and doomed to fail­ure. He is no more the equal of Ahu­ra Maz­da than Satan is to God in the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion.. What you had, I think, was a monothe­is­tic reli­gion that layed out the for­mula that Chris­tian­ity lat­er adopt­ed. There are so many details that match up, that I con­clude that ear­ly Chris­tians pat­terned most of their beliefs on the norms well estab­lished in the Zoroas­trian faith that dom­i­nated the mid­dle east at the time. It’s esti­mated that a large per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion in Per­sia dur­ing the Achaemenid, Seleu­cid, Parthi­an, and Sas­sanid peri­ods were Jews, and an equal­ly large per­cent­age in the last three peri­ods were Chris­tians. Peri­ods of mul­ti-faith tol­er­ance alter­nated with peri­ods of state repres­sion. The Per­sian Sas­sanid Empire, in which the Zoroas­trian faith was the state reli­gion and the largest sin­gle faith, also con­tained a large per­cent­age of the world’s Chris­tians dur­ing the crit­i­cal, for­ma­tive peri­od of Chris­tian­ity. A strong influ­ence of the for­mer on the lat­ter should not sur­prise us.

His­to­ri­ans empha­size a dual­ist inter­pre­ta­tion of Zoroas­tri­an­ism because they con­flate Zoroas­trian belief with the relat­ed faiths and here­sies that co-exist­ed with Zoroas­tri­an­ism. Manicheanism and Maz­dak­ism are the best known of these. These hereti­cal move­ments act­ed with­in the Zoroas­trian world in much the same way that the dual­is­tic here­sies did in Chris­tian­ity. Ortho­dox Zoroas­tri­ans, how­ever, reject­ed them just as firm­ly. In fact, some of these dual­is­tic move­ments trav­eled back and forth between the Chris­t­ian and Zoroas­trian zones. Dual­ism often appeals to the most oppressed and the dis­en­fran­chised, pre­sum­ably because it is eas­ier for them to con­clude that life sucks and the world is dom­i­nated by evil. Some of the Euro­pean dual­is­tic here­sies fol­lowed the same course as the Per­sian ones, com­ing to the con­clu­sion that the world we see is the cre­ation of the evil force, not of the good God.

Anoth­er curi­ous phe­nom­e­non is Mithraism, a faith wide­spread in the Roman Empire which shows some con­nec­tions with Per­sia [Mithra is cog­nate with both the Vedic and Iran­ian Mitra, some Roman texts refer to the faith as “com­ing from Per­sia”, and one of the ranks of ini­ti­a­tion was des­ig­nated as “Per­sian”]. How­ever, the descrip­tions of Mithra­ic rites and cus­toms don’t much resem­ble those of the reli­gion found­ed by Zoroast­er, nor do the artis­tic motifs. While Mitra appears in the old Indo-Aryan pan­theon, and was incor­po­rated into Zoroaster’s struc­ture of angels and man­i­fes­ta­tions of the divine, but he is not cen­tral to the faith. He does, how­ever loom large in Maz­dak­ism, with cen­ters of wor­ship in pre-Chris­t­ian Arme­nia. The cen­ters of Mithra­ic wor­ship seem to have been in the west­ern Empire, in Rome itself, in Britain, along the Ger­man fron­tier, and in Mau­ri­ta­nia. No Mithra­ic sites have been found in Per­sia. How­ever the god made his way in the west, it seems to have been by a con­vo­luted path.

There are lit­er­ally hun­dreds of known Mithra­ic sites, called mithraea (sin­gu­lar: mithraeum), so the faith was evi­dently quite pop­u­lar. It is esti­mated that there were as many as sev­en hun­dred mithrae in the imme­di­ate area of the city of Rome. There are some well-pre­served ones in Eng­land. The mithraea were noth­ing like clas­si­cal tem­ples, but they bore a strong resem­blance to ear­ly Chris­t­ian church­es (an altar fac­ing three par­al­lel aisles, in which the con­gre­ga­tion shared a sacred meal). Yet despite this wide­spread pop­u­lar­ity, the faith seems to have shriv­eled to noth­ing and van­ished in an extra­or­di­nar­ily brief time. For some­thing that was pre­sum­ably its most sig­nif­i­cant com­peti­tor for adher­ents, Mithraism does not seem to have trig­gered much con­cern among Chris­tians. The ear­ly church fathers loud­ly denounce every tiny pagan sect, but they are strange­ly silent about Mithraism. This is most pecu­liar. Reli­gions with mass fol­low­ings don’t usu­ally dis­ap­pear overnight, qui­etly, with­out conflict.

I have a feel­ing that many Mithra­ic con­gre­ga­tions were absorbed into Chris­tian­ity by mor­ph­ing into it, with­out any dra­matic con­flict, and that the pre-exis­tence of a net­work of Mithraist com­mu­ni­ties, from Syr­ia to Hadrian’s wall, is what allowed Chris­tian­ity to sud­denly emerge in the lead­ing posi­tion. But even that hypoth­e­sis leaves unan­swered questions.

An inter­est­ing fea­ture of Mithraism is that the con­gre­ga­tion took its sacred meal reclined, like Greek and Roman ban­queters. Now, this way of eat­ing, in Roman soci­ety, was con­fined to the upper class­es. It would have been an extreme trans­gres­sion for a com­moner or a slave to engage in this activ­ity. Yet we know for a fact that many par­tic­i­pants in the cult of Mithra were ordi­nary sol­diers, com­mon­ers and slaves. We have inscribed ded­i­ca­tions in the tem­ples to con­firm it. This means that the Mithra­ic cult was mak­ing a strong state­ment about human equal­ity, at least in a spir­i­tual sense. Com­pare this to the old Jew­ish tra­di­tion of tak­ing the sad­er meal reclined, “to demon­strate that we are not slaves”.

I think we’ll even­tu­ally come to think of a sin­gle “Clas­si­cal World”, from India to Ire­land, where ideas and insti­tu­tions trav­eled rapid­ly from one end to the oth­er, and can’t be dis­en­tan­gled or com­part­men­tal­ized. Poor doc­u­men­ta­tion from the mid­dle por­tion just cre­ates an illu­sion of an east-west dichoto­my that did not real­ly exist. Hope­fully, when Iran comes out of its present iso­la­tion, there will be a new wave archae­ol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans and philol­o­gists ready to fill in the gap.