Zoroaster

Zoroaster. The name by which the ancient Iranian prophet Zarathustra has been known in the West. Parsis often date him around 6,000 BCE, following Greek texts which misinterpret ancient Iranian sources. The significance for them is that he is the first of the world's religious prophets. There has been much W. scholarly debate over the dating. Until the 1980s the date most commonly given was the 6th cent. BCE (Gershevitch and Zaehner), but more recently much earlier dates around 1200 BCE have been generally accepted (Boyce, Gnoli).

His teaching has been preserved in seventeen hymns, the Gāthās, Yasna (hereafter Ys.) 28–34 and 43–53. Zoroaster was a practising priest (the only one of the great religious prophets known to have been such), and these hymns were meditations on the liturgy (Yasna) cast into rather esoteric mantic poetry. They are, therefore, extremely difficult to translate and interpret, so that accounts of them differ considerably. Fundamental is the prophet's conviction that he had seen God, the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, in a vision. He believed that he personally had been set apart for his mission from the beginning, a conviction which resulted in a stress on personal responsibility in religion. There are, he taught, two opposing forces, the Bounteous Spirit of Mazda and the destructive power of Angra Mainyu who created respectively life and non-life. Each person's eternal fate would be determined by the choice (s)he made between them (Ys. 30. 3). Zoroaster called upon his followers to worship the good Mazda, who he declared, in a series of rhetorical questions, is the creator of all things.

Central to Zoroaster's belief in Ahura Mazda are the Amesha Spentas, a system of seven spirits which in later tradition at least were opposed to seven evil spirits. He therefore saw a cosmic divide between the forces of good and evil. He used the term which later referred to the expected saviour, Sōšyant, at least partly to refer to the work of himself and his followers, but also probably with a future sense as in the developed eschatology.

Zoroaster says that he was cast out by kinsfolk, rejected by many of his contemporaries, and refused hospitality when travelling. Clearly his teaching provoked opposition from the priests of his day. According to tradition, he was slain (at the age of 77) by invaders while sacrificing at the altar. Among Orthodox Parsis, he is often seen as a manifestation of the divine, almost as an avatāra. He is the great role model for all Zoroastrians.