Zoroaster

Zoroaster (Zaratustra in its Avestan form, Zarathushtra) is the Iranian prophet founder of Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest religions in the world. Tradition places him between 1500 and 1000 BCE (although his dating is debated) in the region of Airyanem Vaejah, in the east of ancient Iran, born into a priestly family of the Spitama tribe, son of Pourushaspa and Dughdova. Late Pahlavi texts (Denkard, Bundahishn) collect the traditions about his life, but the oldest and most reliable sources are the Gathas, a set of hymns from the Avesta attributed to the prophet himself. According to the account, at the age of thirty, while participating in a rite by the river Daiti, he received the first of his visions of Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord", supreme god and creator, who called him to proclaim a new faith and to combat the cult of the ancient gods, the daevas.

After that first vision, tradition recounts that Zoroaster received more revelations from Ahura Mazda, who made known to him the Amesha Spentas, the «Beneficent Immortals», divine entities that personify the attributes of the god (such as Asha Vahishta, Truth or Order, and Vohu Manah, Good Thought). In the Gathas, the prophet dialogues directly with Ahura Mazda and expounds the core of his message: the cosmic opposition between Spenta Mainyu, the good spirit, and Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, between truth (asha) and falsehood (druj). Zoroaster rejected the daevas as followers of evil and called each human being to freely choose good. His preaching met fierce resistance among the priests of the old religion, and only after years of rejection did he achieve his first great success.

The heart of the doctrine of Zoroaster is an ethical dualism: the world is the stage of the struggle between Ahura Mazda, principle of good, light and truth, and Angra Mainyu, principle of evil, darkness and lies, and each person must take sides through their free will. The ethics are summarized in the triple formula «good thoughts, good words, good deeds» (humata, hukhta, hvarshta). After death, the soul is judged at the Chinvat bridge: the righteous cross it towards the House of Song (the luminous dwelling of Ahura Mazda) and the wicked fall to the dwelling of lies. Zoroaster preached the cult of Ahura Mazda through fire and purity, without images, rejected bloody sacrifices and exalted honest work and the care of creation, laying the foundations of one of the first religions of monotheistic tendency.

The tradition recounts that Zoroastro finally succeeded in converting King Vishtaspa, whose patronage allowed the diffusion of the new faith. Zoroastrianism became with time the dominant religion of ancient Iran, especially under the Persian empires, and its sacred corpus was collected in the Avesta. Its ideas (the dualism between good and evil, the judgment of the souls, paradise and hell, the figure of the savior and the end of the times) exerted a profound and much discussed influence on Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Today a Zoroastrian community survives in Iran and, especially, among the Parsis of India, who preserve the cult of the sacred fire and festivities like Nowruz. The historical figure of Zoroastro continues to be the object of study and debate in modern research, as in the work of the Iranologist Mary Boyce.