For Zoroastrians the most treasured part of their holy writings,
known collectively as the Avesta, are seventeen great poems or
hymns, the Gathas, composed by their prophet himself. Zarathushtra
lived, it seems, between 1400 and 1200 B.C.E. when stone age was
yielding to bronze age for the Iranian tribes, who then as pastoralists
inhabited the South Russian steppes. It was for them an epoch
of turmoil and unrest, when, as Zarathushtra’s hymns show, his
own people suffered much from roving war-bands, who raided and
slaughtered their more peaceable neighbours; and the sorrow and
bloodshed which he himself saw led him to meditate deeply on good
and evil, and the purpose of this troubled life. Himself a priest,
he was also a seer and a profoundly original thinker; and he finally
offered his people, as revealed truth, a great vision of unity
and moral purpose in the cosmos. There was, he taught, one eternal
God, Ahura Mazda, the ‘Lord of Wisdom’, omniscient, just and wholly
good. To him is opposed an adversary, the Hostile or Evil Spirit,
Angra Mainyu, who likewise is uncreated, but who in the end will
perish. He is in all ways contrary to God, being ignorant, malevolent
and full of hate; and God’s purpose in creating this world was
to make a battleground where their two powers could encounter,
and evil be defeated, and so removed from the universe. This prophetic
vision Zarathushtra evidently expounded in plain words to ‘those
who came from far and those from near’; and it is the main theme
also of his great hymns. These are composed in a richly intricate
poetic tradition, old already in his own day; and they would be
difficult for us to understand in detail without the help of the
later Zoroastrian writings, for their meaning is densely packed
into subtle, allusive words. In them Zarathushtra addresses Ahura
Mazda trustfully as his friend and teacher, but also venerates
him profoundly as the exalted ‘Creator of all things through the
Holy Spirit’, the One who ‘in the beginning, at creation, established
the course of sun and stars’, and who still ‘upholds the earth
from below, and the heavens from falling’. All that He made was
good; but everything was maliciously attacked and tainted, as
He had foreseen would happen, by the Evil Spirit. It is the Evil
Spirit who has thus brought wickedness and corruption, disease
and death, into this once perfect world; and the whole striving
of Ahura Mazda’s creation, instinctive in nature but conscious
in man, should be to overcome this alien evil, whether moral,
spiritual or physical, and so bring about the destruction of Angra
Mainyu and restore the world once more to its original perfect
state.
Meanwhile evil abounds, and for every creature there is death.
When a man or woman dies, Zarathushtra taught, the soul is judged.
Its thoughts, words and acts during this life are exactly weighed.
If the good outweigh the bad, it ascends to the ‘Best Existence’,
that is, heaven; if the bad weigh more heavily, it goes down into
the ‘Worst Existence’, hell, a place of torment hollowed out by
Angra Mainyu in the depths of the earth; and if good and bad weigh
the same, it is sent to a place where it feels neither pain nor
joy, but simply exists until the Last Day. Thus justice, which
is not to be found in this now corrupted world, will be met with
hereafter, when those who have lived good lives, and have been
just, truthful, generous and kind, will have their reward. Finally
the forces of good will triumph also in this world. Then the souls
of the dead will be united again with their resurrected bodies.
The Last Judgement will take place, when ‘each will behold his
own good or bad deeds, and the just will stand out like white
sheep among the black’. A torrent of molten metal will cover the
earth and flow down into hell, purifying all things. Mankind will
have to pass through this torrent in the resurrected flesh; and
to the good it will be as harmless as warm milk, but the wicked
will perish, together with the Evil Spirit, their master. Nature
will revive, and the kingdom of God will come on a transfigured
earth, flourishing like a garden (‘Persian paradise’) in spring;
and the blessed will rejoice in God’s presence for ever.
Zarathushtra alludes again and again in his Gathas to these ‘last
things’; and he also speaks of one who will come after him as
a Saviour (Saoshyant), who will lead mankind to fulfil its part
in bringing them about. His followers treasured both his teachings
and his words. The Gathas were made part of the liturgy of the
daily service, the ‘yasna’; and so they have been recited each
day from beginning to end by Zoroastrian priests since the time
of the prophet. Further, every Zoroastrian has a duty to pray
five times a day, standing, in the presence of fire, which their
prophet saw as the symbol of justice and order (for ‘fire’ includes
the sun, nature’s great regulator); and verses from the Gathas
form part of the prescribed daily prayers. Zoroastrians also use
constantly a short prayer which Zarathushtra taught his disciples,
the ‘Ahunvar’, which is as sacred to them as the ‘Lord’s Prayer’
is to Christians.
In time Zarathushtra’s followers elaborated his teachings concerning
the Saoshyant, and their expectations of his advent came to be
embodied in a fine apocalyptic literature, also in verse, of which
only scattered fragments survive. This literature was especially
cultivated, in various Iranian languages, after Alexander conquered
the Persian Empire in the fourth century B.C.E. and subjected
Zoroastrians for the first time to alien and infidel rule. One
offshoot of it was the poetry of the Persian Sibyllists, who like
all Sibyllists wrote in Greek hexameters, and so helped to make
Zoroastrian beliefs widely known in the Greco-Roman world. They
evidently wrote much about the end of time to be heralded by the
coming of the Saoshyant, who, according to developed belief, was
to be born of Zarathushtra’s own seed, miraculously preserved
in the depths of a lake. A virgin will bathe in this lake and
become with child; and this child will be the Saoshyant, a world
saviour who, with divine help, will lead the forces of good to
triumph in the last great battle against evil. This expectation,
fully developed evidently by at least 600 B.C.E., continued to
sustain the Zoroastrian community, especially in times of trouble
and oppression.
Meantime each individual had to expect personal judgment at death;
and many of the later texts tell of the weighing in the scales
of justice at the ‘Chinvat Bridge’. This bridge, repeatedly referred
to in the Gathias, was held traditionally to span the space between
earth and heaven. After the weighing it became broad and safe
for the just, but for the wicked it contracted to the narrowness
of a blade’s edge, so that they fell from it, down into hell.
Some manuscripts of a much read work, the ‘Book of the Just Viraz’,
have illustrations vividly depicting this fall, and the terrors
of hell itself. The book tells how Viraz, chosen by lot as the
most upright member of his community, is put into a seven-days’
trance, during which his spirit visits the other world to establish
the truths about heaven and hell. Being just, he is allowed to
visit both, and speaks glowingly of the joys of heaven, and even
more dramatically of the horrors of hell, ‘where close and many
in number are the souls of the dead . . . Yet they see not and
hear no sound from one another. Each one thinks: ‘I am alone.’
And they suffer gloom and darkness and stench and fearfulness
and torment . . ., so that he who has been but one day in hell
cries out: ‘Are not those nine thousand years yet fulfilled, that
they do not release us from this hell?’ The story of Viraz’s vision
is old (his name appears in one of the most ancient parts of the
Avesta); but it was told and retold, and has been shown to be
the ultimate source of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’.
When Zarathushtra lived, his people had no knowledge of writing;
and this alien art was long held to be unfit for holy texts. The
Avesta was therefore handed down by word of mouth for countless
generations, as were its translations into various later Iranian
tongues. Eventually the whole Avesta, in twenty-one books, was
set down in an alphabet especially evolved for this purpose, in
the fifth or sixth century C.E. This huge work contained what
was held to be ‘all knowledge’, all of which, it was believed,
derived from Ahura Mazda’s revelation to Zarathushtra. It included
liturgical and devotional works, the life and legend of the prophet,
expositions of doctrine, apocalyptic writings, and books of law,
cosmogony and scholastic science. Copies were made and placed
evidently in the chief temples; but all were eventually destroyed
through successive conquests of Iran by Muslim Arabs, Turks and
Mongols. About a quarter of this ‘Great Avesta’ survived, however,
those texts, that is, which were in constant devotional use and
so were known by heart by all working priests, and were set down
also in separate manuscripts for their use. Many of the lost Avestan
texts are known, moreover, through Middle Persian translations;
but these, made by scholar-priests, usually intersperse the translation
with glosses and commentaries (sometimes extensive), as well as
often copious citations from other parallel works; so that laborious
study is needed to identify the actual translation and so recover
the lost texts themselves, much of whose poetry and power has
inevitably been diluted by this bookish rehandling. The Gathas,
of course, survive intact; and the inspired teaching which they
enshrine can still be seen exerting its spiritual and moral force
even in the most crabbed and pedestrian of these later scholastic
works, so devoutly and patiently compiled ‘for the sake of the
path of the religion of Ahura Mazda and Zarathushtra’.
The nature of the Gathas themselves and their linguistic isolation
means, however, that there is no accepted standard translation
in any language of these venerable hymns, which for the Zoroastrian
priests remain manthras, sacred words of profound power.
Suggested Further Reading
M. Boyce (ed.), Textual sources for the study of Zoroastrianism.
Textual sources for the study of religion, general ed. J.R. Hinnells,
Manchester University Press, 1984, with bibliography).
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