Zoroastrianism

A faith born in the distant prehistoric past, rooted in ancient Iranian texts over 4,000 years old, Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest living religions. and one that shaped empires. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Almut Hintze to explore the origins, beliefs, and enduring legacy of Zoroastrianism. From the teachings of the prophet Zarathustra and the central role of Ahura Mazda, to holy fire and its influence on the Achaemenid and Sasanian worlds, join us to discover how this ancient religion helped shape ancient empires and Persian identity for millennia MORE The Wise Men Listen of Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000679904941 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/30JcS3z8gUODOvbR8k47mh?si=9NdGEaABS-C-AlGAXB_ePg Persia Reborn: Rise of the Sasanians Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000644788751 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/7gSKjbVzB2jstHXUJKDtUO?si=Cl2_WdJjSNWe-TTJUe5A4w Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Theme music from Motion Array, all other music from Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:07Tristan Hughes?

  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 Almut Hinzser. 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.

• 2:01Tristan Hughes?

  It's a religion with roots deep in the prehistoric past, and that still endures down to the present day. Centred around beliefs passed down for more than 3,000 years, preserved in an archaic Iranian language: the religion of Zoroastrianism. In antiquity, Zoroastrianism was central to several great ancient Iranian empires, from the Achaemenids to the Sassanians. But what do we know about this religion? What were, and still are, its key beliefs? How did it emerge? Who are the central figures of Ahura Mazda and the prophet Zarathustra? And why is fire so important? This is the story of Zoroastrianism,

• 2:46Tristan Hughes?

  with our guest, Professor Almut Hinz.

• 2:51Tristan Hughes?

  Almut, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Oh, the pleasure is all mine. I'm delighted to have you here and to talk to you about Zoroastrianism.

• 2:58Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, yes, because can we say it is the oldest or one of the oldest living religions today?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  I would say so. I would say one of the oldest, because there may be religions still being practiced of which we do not know. And 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.

• 3:37Tristan Hughes?

  Because 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.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  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 laypeople in their prayers, recite texts which date back to the second millennium BCE. And these are what we call the Ghatas of Sarasustra and the Yasna Haptang Hiti, 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.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  And in fact, it's the oldest witness of any Iranian language and it belongs to the oldest attested Indo-European languages.

• 4:40Tristan Hughes?

  And what is this language?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  We call it Avestan.

• 4:43Tristan Hughes?

  Avestan, okay.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yes, because it is the language of the Avesta. And Avesta is the name of the sacred texts of the Zoroastrians, the texts which the Zoroastrians recite aloud in prayer and in the rituals. And Avestan has survived basically only as part of those rituals and prayers. So it's the language of the Avesta.

• 5:15Tristan Hughes?

  It's amazing that that has endured to the present day, given how old a language that is and that it is practiced still to say. So there are still many people out there in Iran who would know that language, who know that language?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  They know the text, they know the language in so far 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 Ghatas, the oldest parts of the Avesta.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  And in particular, prehistoric sounds, which linguists call laryngals. Sounds which are pronounced in the back of the throat.

• 6:17Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, the larynx kind of.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  The larynx, yes. You have them in Semitic languages, these ah sounds. We don't have them in Indo-European languages. But in prehistoric times, Indo- proto- Indo-European languages did have those sounds as consonants. 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, are still there as consonants. And at the time, the oldest texts of the Avesta were composed. Those laryngals must still have been present.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  We can, because in the Metta, the Metta of the Gatas tells us that they stopped two, two vowels to coalesce into one long vowel. And those two vowels, A plus A, with a larynge in the middle, count as two syllables. So that is the strongest indication for the 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 texts.

• 7:40Tristan Hughes?

  We'll explore more about those texts and what they talk about in a bit. But as we're going back to the second millennium B.C., I'd like to see how far back we can go. I mean, what do we know, Elmo, about the origins, the roots of Zoroastrianism? Can we go back to the word Indo-European?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  We can go back to some extent, thanks to comparative historical philology and linguistics.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  The Iranian languages are cognate with the Indo-Aryan languages. Indo-Aryan, these are the languages of Indo-European origin spoken in this Indian subcontinent. In India, okay. 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 scenario.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  So 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. However, we can reconstruct that prehistoric ancestor to some extent by comparing the oldest surviving Iranian documents, which is the Avesta and especially the Gatas,

• 9:30Speaker 02

  but also the old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, which date from 520 BCE onwards. A bit later on, yes. A bit later on, a thousand years later than the Gata, so they are much older, the Gatas. 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.

• 10:04Tristan Hughes?

  Rigveda and the like, is it?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Exactly, the Rigveda and the other Vedas, Yajnaveda and the Samaveda and the Atarvaveda, but especially the Rigveda, which is the oldest.

• 10:16Tristan Hughes?

  And those are linked to the early Hinduism, aren't they, in the second millennium B C, Sanskrit and the like, yeah?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So the languages, the language of the Vedas, especially of the Rigveda, and the language of the Avesta are so similar to each other that they are like two different dialects of the same language. And you can transpose expressions in Avestan into Sanskrit. So for example, in Avestan, we say, "Vahu manach" or "Vahu manach", for good thought. "Vahu" is good and "manach" is thought, and in Sanskrit it's "vassu manas". So a Vedic and an Avestan speaker, they would have probably been able to understand each other.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  The grammar is identical. It's only some phonetic, the phonetic changes have happened in the way they pronounce the words.

• 11:14Tristan Hughes?

  So that linguistic similarity shows how Hinduism and Zoroastrianism were linked, at least linguistically, with their ancestor, I guess.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  And all of that, we are trying to reconstruct on the basis of the historically attested documents, which is those are those religious hymns, because that's all that has survived, nothing else, no other texts have survived.

• 12:10Tristan Hughes?

  So the Gathas on one side and the Rigvada and the like on the other side, so comparing them as you say, really interesting. I love, I know our audience loves as well, talking about the linguistic side of things. I'm really glad that we could talk about that at the beginning of this chat. You mentioned, of course, the second millennium B.C.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:26Tristan Hughes?

  With the Gathas. So who is it believed that Zoroastrianism begins with at that time?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  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 Zarasushtra 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 take indications and which try

• 13:14Speaker 02

  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 laryngals, for example, are the smoking gun which tells us it cannot have been much later than the second, middle of the second millennium B.C.E. because those laryngals were still pronounced when the Gathas were composed. So the composer of the Gathas pronounce the laryngals, otherwise they wouldn't have prevented, because they prevented that merging of the two adjacent vowels. Then there are a number of other indicators which point

• 13:58Speaker 02

  to a quite early date of the beginning of the Zoroastrian religion, although that is also disputed. So, and that is the demonization of the Dives.

• 14:12Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Now, this takes us into the conceptual world of the Zoroastrian religion.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  And Davah, Davah means god in Indo Iranian. It is the word which you also have in Latin Deus.

• 14:32Tristan Hughes?

  Gods, yes, yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  And in English, Divine.

• 14:35Tristan Hughes?

  Divine, yeah, okay.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  The Divine bit is the same as dive in Davah.

• 14:40Tristan Hughes?

  It's Davah.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And in Sanskrit, it's Deva.

• 14:44Tristan Hughes?

  So you, once again, you see the similarities between.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, Deva in Sanskrit and Davah in Avestan. And in Sanskrit, what happened is that the I became E. So they say in India, the Indo Aryan say Deva, which means god. In Avestan, in the Gatas, Davah are the false gods. Who should not be worshipped. They are terrible and they are very vehemently rejected in the Gatas. And the demonization of the old Indo European gods is a feature which we find in the Iranian tradition only.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Nowhere else. And innovations are major indicators for change, for cultural change. Archaeisms are not so much indicators because you have just retained an old tradition. There are lots of archaeisms in the Zoroastrian tradition. But what helps us with the dating are innovations.

• 15:49Tristan Hughes?

  So, so do we think, 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 Aryan and the Indo Iranians, of a rejection of the gods that have been worshipped previously and looking towards something else, that change, as you were saying?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So that is, so we have the Indo Iranians, the common people, and they split into Iranians and into Indo Aryan. And the Iranians are marked by the rejection of the old gods.

• 16:26Tristan Hughes?

  The Davah.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  The Davahs, the old gods, all of a sudden. They are bad.

• 16:32Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  And they are rejected. And of course, these gods do not exist on their own, but there is a whole cult related to it. There is a priesthood who have a stake in it, 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.

• 16:57Tristan Hughes?

  Hmm.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Because their livelihood depends on the worship of those gods. And they have been trained in worshiping those gods. So this is not, this is not a trivial thing. To say that the divas, the gods are wrong, you should not worship them. But that's what the Gatas do.

• 17:17Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  The, oh, the only individual who is linked to this is the figure of Sarasustra.

• 17:37Tristan Hughes?

  Sarasustra, I agree.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  And the Gatas are the oldest texts which we have, and they talk exactly about this. So Sarasustra figures prominently in the Gatas. His name is, occurs sixteen times. His, in those hymns, there are seventeen hymns altogether, grouped into five Gatas. Gata means song. And basically a meter, the meter of a song. And these seventeen hymns are grouped according to their meter into five groups of unequal length. The first group is one Gata, it consists of seven hymns. And then we have two more of four hymns each.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  And then we also have two of one hymn only. So.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  These are the seventeen hymns grouped into those five gatas and in those hymns, we have the name of Sarasustha seventeen times. And the other name which occurs most prominently is that of Ahura Mazda.

• 18:43Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay, who's this?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  That's the god.

• 18:46Tristan Hughes?

  That's the, is this the god that are saying, turn away from the old gods, this is the god you should follow, is that the idea?

• 18:50Speaker 02

  This is exactly what the gatas are about.

• 18:52Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  They talk about this. And Sarasustha talks to his god Ahura Mazda. He has a special relationship to Ahura Mazda. And Ahura Mazda talks to him. So Sarasustha asks him questions. He says, oh, tell me, Ahura Mazda, who made this world? Who keeps the stars in the sky and prevents the clouds from coming down, from falling down?

• 19:22Tristan Hughes?

  The sky from falling on our heads, I think, okay, right, yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Who has made this world? 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, 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.

• 19:52Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So they need to follow truth, which is Asha. And they need to worship Ahura Mazda and not the divers. Because the divers are wrong.

• 20:05Tristan Hughes?

  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. Is the logic then, is this a monotheistic religion?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  There is one god, only one god, which is Ahura Mazda.

• 20:20Tristan Hughes?

  Interesting.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Who is the maker of everything that is good.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  And what is good are his creations. 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 holy 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.

• 21:10Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so they're always kind of opposing each other. You're always fighting against evil in pursuit of good, is that the idea?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  That is called Spunta mainyu in Avestan. Mainyu, it has the root man to think, which we have in English, mental, for example, this man bit. Mainyu is a force, a spiritual force. And Spunta means life-bearing.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Something like that, that means it has the capacity of producing life. And it is this creative life-bearing force in a Western Spenta, mind you, which has a negative opposite, and that's called Angra, mind you.

• 22:41Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Angra, Angra means destructive, hostile. And mind you again, means force, it's a destructive force which is diametrically opposed to Spenta, mind you. And you can even see it from the language, the words, they are symmetrically, symmetrical. Spenta, mind you, Boza, mind you, and Angra, mind you. And Angra, mind you, is destructive. That means he wants to destroy everything that Spenta, mind you, produces. And Angra, mind you, is likewise a spiritual force. He wants to destroy on the spiritual level, but he can't really destroy the spiritual world.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Because in Zoroastrianism, the spiritual world is immortal. It exists, and so the destructive force is primordial. It has ever existed, always existed, and will always exist. And Ahura Mazda and his life-giving force will also always exist. And all the spiritual world is immortal. And this is what we call dualism in Zoroastrianism. This diametrical opposition between the life-bearing force and the destructive one.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  So there, but you can see from the system that Ahura Mazda is on top of the life-giving force. Whereas the destructive force, Angra, mind you, has nobody on top. It's just a force, it's a blind force which wants to destroy.

• 24:24Tristan Hughes?

  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 Ahura Mazda and the light and keeping on the right track, I guess.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and people have to associate themselves with Ahura Mazda.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  And not this Angramma in you, the destructive force. And human beings have a choice, which of the two to choose. And they should, of course, choose the creative one and follow Ahura Mazda and not the destructive one.

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• 26:47Tristan Hughes?

  And so how does fire and the sacred flame come into all of this with the ghatas and with those religious songs, the religious texts, the Avesta?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  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 in 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.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  And rituals developed around the fire. Already in Indo-Iranian times, a ritual which is performed for the gods, for the divine beings, is perceived as an act of hospitality.

• 27:58Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  So it is basically a banquet, which the human beings prepare in a special space, a precinct, which can be created ad hoc in the space, also in the open air. They just draw, then design a space. And there they prepare a 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 abodes.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And the link between the human beings and the divine beings is created by the fire.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  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 Yasna Haptang Haiti, which is the text that is recited after the first Gata.

• 29:26Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  In the Zoroastrian core ritual, which is called the Yasna, the Yasna ritual. But also in the other solemn rituals which are based on the Yasna. In all of these, 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 Avastin text, Jangka Avastin text, it's, the fire is also addressed as the son of Ahura Mazda.

• 29:59Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:25Tristan Hughes?

  So are they songs or are they poems or how should we say them?

• 30:28Speaker 02

  They are spoken, it's, it's sometimes.

• 30:31Tristan Hughes?

  Spoken passages.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Spoken passages in the Avastin language. I would say it's sort of the Yasna Haptang Haiti is not metrical in the sense of that the meter. The syllables are being counted, as is the case for the Gatas.

• 30:46Tristan Hughes?

  The older Gatas.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it is probably more sort of rhythmic type of recitation. And the fire then comes down and is present in the ritual, 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 and.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  The fire is then addressed, still in Yasna thirty six, as the most beautiful, visible form of Ahura Mazda. So Ahura Mazda is himself is thought to be present in the form of the fire, and of course, the fire is light.

• 31:38Tristan Hughes?

  Hmm.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  And that's why the the fire is regarded as his body, his visible form. And 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.

• 32:07Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Zoroastrians have a whole cosmology.

• 32:36Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:51Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  And the destructive, his creative and the destructive forces, they are, have always been there.

• 33:01Tristan Hughes?

  So they are all primordial beings, they've been there from the beginning.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely, they're beginningless.

• 33:06Tristan Hughes?

  Hmm.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  And 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, good thought, bohumana, right mindedness. And these spiritual concepts and qualities, they have negative counterparts in the evil camp.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  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 lie.

• 33:54Tristan Hughes?

  The lie, okay.

• 33:55Speaker 02

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

• 34:40Speaker 02

  and he does so out of his spiritual creations. And that's why all these beings, this Spenta, mind you, the creative force is life-bearing. The word Spenta is of, has, has in the past often been translated something like bounteous, which embodies generosity.

• 35:04Tristan Hughes?

  Bountiful, yes.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Abundant, yes. But what it really means is that it has the capacity of producing life.

• 35:15Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Because this word Spenta, the Sp, it, if you look at linguistics and etymology, it corresponds to a word which we have in Greek, Q E O, which with this K U, it corresponds to the S P in Spenta. And that means to be pregnant.

• 35:40Tristan Hughes?

  So fertility idea.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yes, and that's what this word Spenta means. And in in the Greek word, Qe, or I am pregnant, it means life-bearing. And producing offspring. This is the centre 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 is capable of producing a material world. And this is what Ahura Mazda does through his life-bearing force. That he produces a material world, the cosmos, the visible cosmos.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  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 this Spenta mind you. And this is something which the destructive force doesn't have. Because it can only destroy. It is incapable of producing a material world. In any way negating the.

• 36:57Tristan Hughes?

  It can destroy but not.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  It can only destroy, it cannot discreate, yeah.

• 37:01Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 37:08Speaker 02

  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 set. And. Mas, the Masbit, it again, it's formed from the root man to think. And the Masbit contains the word manas, manach, which is thought. So literally Masda means the one who says his thought, his thinking.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  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 mi- 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 Ahudamasta. It threatens, it poses a threat and it wants to destroy Ahudamasta. And wants to make the light dark.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  And in order to prevent this from happening, Ahudamasta 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 Maynu because he is eternal, he will always be there. But what matters for Ahudamasta is that Angra Maynu is incapacitated and relegated back to the place where it had come from in the, to destroy. And so it will never ever come back again.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  So this then takes us into what happens at the end of time and the purpose of this world. So Russian 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 Ahudamasta then makes the material world. And Angra Maynu, due to his lust to smite, as the text pu- put it.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  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 it. 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 Ahuramasta on the earth. And he then tries also to storm the sky and to invade the sphere where Ahuramasta dwells. But he's successful only on the earth.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  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 Ahuramasta dwells. There he cannot get because he is stopped at the Spentamayyavastars. This is the Avesta 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.

• 41:03Tristan Hughes?

  The shield, okay.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  A shield and Angra Maynu is incapable of penetrating it. Because Spentamaynu and Angra Maynu are completely incompatible with one another. And he is repelled there. And then according to the cosmological story myth. 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.

• 41:35Tristan Hughes?

  So yeah, okay, six hundred, seven hundred A D or C E.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. But all of that is based on ancient traditions and some of it we have in the Avesta. And one thing which we have in the Avesta is Sarasustavos Bhuun.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  And Sarasusthwa brought to humankind the weapon to fight evil successfully.

• 41:58Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  And 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 Dainar Mazda Yasni. Dainar is a Navastan word which means the vision literally. It then becomes a word for religion, you have it in Persian deen and the Arabs borrowed it. Deen in Arabic, it is a Navastan word. And this is the weapon to fight evil, the Dais and Angramainu.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  This fight then progresses and it culminates at the end of time with the ultimate defeat of evil. And in the process, the Avester 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 Sarasusthwa, who are in the tradition of Sarasusthwa, to perform those rituals. And that weakens the presence of evil.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  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 creation. And at that point, all the dead are going to resurrect, to be resurrected.

• 43:52Tristan Hughes?

  To be soldiers in that battle, is that the point?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  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. Because...

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Death has been defeated. Death in the form of Angra Mindyou 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.

• 44:26Tristan Hughes?

  So Zoroastrians do believe ultimately in resurrection?

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:29Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay, so that's their thoughts, but only at the end of time.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  That happens at the end of time. And the body is of course the material creation. And the spiritual creation is immortal anyway. That never dies. So when a person dies.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:12Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, once again, like Egypt's Book of the Dead, and I guess also judgment in the Christian religion, you know.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:18Tristan Hughes?

  And the like, you know, it's it's depending on how you lived your life, you know, what will happen.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, and and the criterion for how you live, what is good and what is bad. Is of course, from a Zoroastrian point of view, whether you supported Ahura Master.

• 45:34Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  You worshiped Ahura 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 deeds. 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 thoughts and words and deeds and the bad ones are collected. It has to cross that bridge and.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Either enters Ahura Mazda's paradise, the Garo de Mana where Ahura Mazda dwells, or it goes to the place where Angramain you play, 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,

• 46:58Speaker 02

  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 Sassanian period, where all the metals in the earth are going to be melted and the bodies, 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 milk. Like warm milk, ah. But they all come out at the other end. And there then, the bodies, resurrected bodies, are going to be united with their respective souls.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  And then the person will 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, achshayamno, as it says in the Avesta. So we have two types of creation in Zoroastrianism, spiritual and material.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  And the spiritual precedes the material world. The material world is rooted in the spiritual world, and the spiritual world descends from Mahadhamasta. 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.

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• 50:31Tristan Hughes?

  So having said all of that, Almut, with what they believed and what would ultimately happen to the bodies, what do we know about how Zoroastrians, whether it's in the second millennium B.C. or in the time of the Achaemenid Persians, or the Parthians, or the Sassanians later, what do we know about how they buried their dead?

• 50:48Speaker 02

  So for the Zoroastrians, death was not meant to be for Auroda Master's creations. He wanted his material world to live forever, but he created the material world as an instrument to defeat evil. So when evil, unremind you, 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

• 51:25Speaker 02

  from unremind you is bad, polluted, and needs to be removed as quickly as possible. So anything that is detached from a living being, be it just a hair from our head, or 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.

• 51:56Tristan Hughes?

  So no burial idea?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  No, because the earth is thought to be Auroda Master'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 a son of Ahudamaz.

• 52:26Tristan Hughes?

  The cremation's out of the.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:38Tristan Hughes?

  Exclamation.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Exclamation. Vultures are excellent for that. They do a great job. And 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 police. And this practice of exposure is probably also rooted in ancient, very ancient practices of the culture in certain areas where the photo Iranians came from, where it was opportune to expose dead bodies.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  And they would have taken them up to the hills and lay them down on stone, on a stone platform and just leave the bodies there to be exconnated by the birds. 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 bones would be dry, just dry bones. So there would be nothing polluting in the bones anymore.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  And we have got such bone containers or ossuaries have been found in Central Asia, especially of the Soccians. The Soccians were a people in the first millennium of the Christian era. But they must have been around also their predecessors in earlier times.

• 54:21Tristan Hughes?

  They're in Uzbekistan area.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Uzbekistan area, yes, exactly, and Tajikistan.

• 54:26Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  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, ossuaries have been found, which depict Zoroastrian scenes. With priests and there is also a tomb, a stone tomb, where probably the, 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 death.

• 55:12Tristan Hughes?

  And so if these beliefs stem all the way back to, say, the second millennium B C, is that what we presume then?

• 55:19Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah.

• 55:20Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, I mean, so if that is all kind of laid out by that time already, in like the late Bronze Age period. 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 Persians 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, is the wrong word, but people really started to find them appealing and start following them?

• 55:51Speaker 02

  It seems to me that Zoroastrianism started really early. And 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 Iranians, that they already had the religion with them, they carried it with them, the Zoroastrian religion.

• 56:34Tristan Hughes?

  So when we get to the 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.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 57:08Tristan Hughes?

  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 full scores. How they interacted with this religion from Iran that was so prominent there?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, indeed, yes. The oldest evidence we have is from Babylonia. When, from the times of the Achaemenids, when we have the reports in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Isaiah. Who talks about Cyrus.

• 57:58Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Who did not know Yahweh, because Cyrus, of course, would have worshipped another god, he would, I think, why not? He should have worshipped Ahura Mazda. But that he released the Jews from captivity. And 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.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Because they had settled by then and they seemed to have been quite happy to live under the Persian rule. Under Achaemenid rule. And exchanges, intellectual religious exchanges must have taken place. They had a common language, which was the Aramaic language. That was the language of administration of the Akheminid Empire. And the Jew and the Israelites, they would have spoken Aramaic. And we can see from within the Israelite texts, the Hebrew Bible. We can see how they slowly, very slowly develop and as eschatology.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Ideas about life after death. And gradually within the with the with the Israelite religion. Death all of a sudden becomes something bad, which it wasn't before. And you are at that culminates then in Christianity in the letter of Paul. In the Corinthian, but one of the letters to the Corinthians where Paul writes. The ultimate enemy to be defeated is death.

• 59:51Tristan Hughes?

  And do you think that is an influence from Zoroastrians? Interesting. I mean, I could ask so much more, of course. Well, I will ask then, come on, it's another episode, but the wise men in the in the nativity story. Is it very likely that they were Zoroastrians?

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  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 Matthew. But that they are called Magoy. Not wise men, we we we call them wise men or the kings. They are called Magoy. And nobody else is called Magush, except the Zoroastrian priest.

• 1:00:32Tristan Hughes?

  So major like magicians and all that kind of stuff, I guess.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  That's where our word magician comes from.

• 1:00:36Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Magush is the word for a priest, especially in Western Iran. We have the word also in in the Avesta, but only once. It's not very prominent in the Avesta itself, but then in Western Iran, they use that word Magush. And but the word Maga from which it is derived. Plays it's an important role in the Zoroastrian ritual and in the Gattas already in the oldest texts. It probably means that the whole ritual is a maga. Because in the ritual, in the performance of a ritual, of a Zoroastrian ritual, a gift exchange is enacted. Between the humans, the priest and the divine.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  It puts an exchange of gifts into motion. So probably that's where maga, the maghbit, comes from. And it is a term, a technical term for a priest.

• 1:01:33Tristan Hughes?

  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 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 of Christianity and other religions as well, that the 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.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Interestingly, Zoroastrianism has always remained the religion of the Iranian people. That might well be because, 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.

• 1:02:48Tristan Hughes?

  Ahmed, these beliefs, they've endured for so many centuries, so many millennia. They are in the Persian period, the Parthians, the Sassanians, and down to the present day. And it's amazing just how old those beliefs are and how they endure.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  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, but 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.

• 1:03:21Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely fascinating. What a way to end it on. Ahmed, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  It has been my pleasure and honour. Thank you.

• 1:03:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was leading expert Professor Ahmed Hinsa giving you a wonderful introduction to what Zoroastrianism is, its key beliefs, and its origins far back in prehistoric times. I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we did recording it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you're doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Now, don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

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