Zoroaster

He was standing in the river Daiti at dawn with his right foot already out of the water, reaching for the clothes he had left on the bank, when he looked up and saw someone walking toward him out of the south. The figure covered the distance from the sky to the riverbank in three strides. It stopped on the fourth, close enough to speak, and asked him who he was. Spitama Zarathustra, he said. The figure asked what he suffered for, and what he struggled for, and what he wanted. Righteousness, he said, three times over. Then he was told to take off the robe he had just picked up, because nobody goes before Ahura Mazda dressed.

The visitor was Vohu Manah, Good Thought, and everything Zoroastrians have believed for three thousand years hinges on what was said after that. He was thirty years old. He had been drawing water infused with haoma for a morning pressing, which is what priests did and what he had been trained to do, and he went up from the river a different kind of man.

Strip away the miracles and a smaller, sharper figure remains, one who left seventeen hymns behind in a language so archaic it is close kin to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda. In those hymns he calls himself a zaotar, a libation priest. He names his clan as the Spitamids. He complains, in a voice nobody has managed to fake in the twenty-eight centuries since, that his herd is small and his followers are few and he does not know where to graze his cattle because the powerful men of the district will not have him. His cousin Maidyoi-manha believed him. For a long stretch, that was the entire congregation.

Nobody can say when this happened. Greek writers put him six thousand years before Xerxes crossed into Europe, which is a way of saying unimaginably long ago. A rival Hellenistic tradition, traced to Aristotle’s pupil Aristoxenos, made him the teacher of Pythagoras and landed on the oddly specific figure of 258 years before Alexander, an arithmetic stitched together in the second century BCE from a meeting that never took place. Nineteenth-century scholars adopted the tidy number and made him a contemporary of the first Persian kings. The language will not allow it. The archaism of the older hymns puts them in the last centuries of the second millennium BCE, somewhere in the eastern Iranian borderlands that today run through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, in a sedentary cattle-and-camel society that had not yet migrated south. Some scholars go further and argue there was no founder at all, that the hymns are the collective work of a priestly school and that Zarathustra is the name the community chose to gather around. He may not have existed.

The composite man of the later books certainly did not. That biography was written down in the ninth century CE, roughly two thousand years downstream of the hymns, and it begins long before its subject is conceived. His celestial glory was made at the first creative act and lowered through the sun, the moon and the stars into a hearth fire, then into the woman who gave birth to his mother. The newborn girl shone so hard the light filled everything between sky and earth, which alerted the demons and the hostile priests, and her parents sent her away to the Spitama village to be raised in the house of the man she would marry. His spirit was placed inside a stem of haoma and carried to a tree by two birds. His bodily substance came down as rain, warm and fine and falling drop by drop into grass, and Purushaspa drove six white cows with yellow ears onto that grass and had Dugdow milk the two who had never calved. The haoma was pounded into the milk. Both parents drank it, the demons wrecked the village trying to stop what came next, and the three parts of him were joined in one body.

The first thing he did when he was born was laugh, because Good Thought had entered and mixed with his mind, and the midwives had already thought the house was on fire from the light coming off his mother. The laugh unsettled two sorcerer-priests, Durasrav and Bratrokresh, who spent his childhood trying to kill him. The best of those attempts had him thrown into a wolf’s den after her cubs had been slaughtered, so that grief would sharpen her. Instead a ewe was sent in to suckle him, and his mother, arriving in the dark and seeing a shape crouched over her son, mistook the sheep for the wolf. Scholars have noticed how much work the story does to keep a wolf from nursing an infant, since the wolf belongs to the demons, and suspect the whole scene arrived from Rome by way of Romulus and Remus.

Grown, he found the world as unwelcoming as his hymns say it was. He asked people to praise the beneficent immortals and dishonour the demons, and he was refused. He was rebuffed by the Turanians. He was tortured at the court of Kavi Vishtaspa on the urging of the sorcerers there, thirty-one separate punishments, chains and shackles and hunger and thirst, and he outlasted all of them. What finally turned the king was a miracle worked on Vishtaspa’s paralysed horse. Vishtaspa and Queen Hutaosa converted, and the Pahlavi account of that moment abandons its dry theological prose and starts moving like verse, the immortals summoned down to the house of a lord famous for his cattle.

Two temptations bracket that career. Ahriman himself sent demons to destroy him and they dropped harmless on the ground and injured their own master, and Zoroaster chased him off with a stone the size of a house. The subtler attempt came at the riverbank where he had left his clothes. A demon arrived in the shape of a beautiful woman in a bodice of gold, offering union and partnership, claiming to be Spenta Armaiti. He had seen Spenta Armaiti in full daylight, he said, and she was beautiful from the front and from the back. Turn around. She refused twice. On the third demand she turned, and the insides of her thighs were crawling with serpents, lizards, toads and frogs. He spoke the Ahuna Vairya, the prayer that had already knocked the Evil Spirit unconscious for three thousand years at the beginning of things, and she was gone.

That prayer is the closest thing he has to a power. Spoken by him it crushed the visible bodies of the demons so they could no longer walk about the world doing their tricks in the open. The Younger Avesta piles the rest on: first to think, speak and do good, first priest, first warrior, first herdsman, first man to turn his face from the demonic brood, the one whose fravashi is worshipped alongside the divine beings themselves. He is never made a god. He is given a place beside one, which in that tradition is not the same thing and was never allowed to become the same thing.

His limits are the ordinary human ones and the texts keep them in view. He could not persuade his own countrymen. He needed a king’s patronage to survive, and his religion nearly died with his obscurity. He aged. Zadspram gives his death in a single administrative clause, seventy-seven years and forty days old, in the forty-seventh year since he met Ahura Mazda. The long Denkard biography never mentions his death at all, and he simply stops appearing partway through a chapter about his medical knowledge. A separate line elsewhere names Tur i Bratrokresh, the sorcerer who hounded him from infancy, as the worst heretic who ever lived, the one who made the body of Zardusht perish. One scholar has suggested that the older tradition knew no death for him and spoke only of an ascension. What the tradition cares about instead is what he left in the water: three sons yet to be conceived, spaced across the last millennia of the world, the final one arriving to raise the dead and finish the corruption for good.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Zoroaster?

Zoroaster, called Zarathustra in his own language, was an Iranian priest and poet who founded the Zoroastrian religion. He composed the Gathas, seventeen hymns in Old Avestan that name Ahura Mazda as the supreme god and reject the daevas. He is remembered as the first worshipper of Ahura Mazda and the model of correct human conduct, not as a deity himself.

When did Zoroaster live?

Nobody knows for certain, and the ancient sources contradict each other wildly, ranging from six thousand years before Xerxes to 258 years before Alexander. The strongest evidence is linguistic: the Gathas are close in form to the Rigveda, which places them in the last centuries of the second millennium BCE. A minority of scholars argue that no single historical founder existed at all.

What happened when Zoroaster met Ahura Mazda?

At the age of thirty, while drawing haoma-infused water from the river Daiti, Zoroaster was approached by Vohu Manah, Good Thought, who crossed the distance from the sky in three strides. Vohu Manah questioned him, told him to leave his clothes behind, and led him into the presence of Ahura Mazda. The conversation that followed is the founding event of the religion.

How was Zoroaster born?

The Pahlavi accounts describe an assembly rather than a conception. His celestial glory descended through the sun, moon and stars into his grandmother, his spirit was placed in a stem of haoma and carried to a tree by two birds, and his bodily substance fell as rain into grass eaten by white cattle. His parents drank the milk mixed with pounded haoma, and the three components came together in one body.

How did Zoroaster die?

The tradition is inconsistent. Zadspram states plainly that he died at seventy-seven years and forty days old, while the long Denkard biography never mentions his death and simply stops referring to him. Another Pahlavi passage names the sorcerer Tur i Bratrokresh as the man who destroyed his body, and some scholars think the oldest version described an ascension rather than a death.

Related Entries

Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, Amesha Spenta, Vohu Manah, Ahura, Aka Manah, Mithra, Anahita, Simurgh, Chamrosh, Hadhayosh, Div, Zahhak, Rostam, Peri