Zoroastrian Influences on Judaism and Christianity I.2
Pre-Zoroastrian Iranian Religion
What right have we to neglect matters which concern not only the past record of our spiritual development but its present healthfulness?Lawrence H Mills
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 17, 2000
Abstract
Aryan Native Religion
The origin of “Ahura Mazda” is obscure. The many Vedic Asuras (Iranian, Ahuras) were “Lords”—even that long ago the title of the gods—but they were restricted to three in the Avesta of the Iranian religion—the great asha-protecting triad—Ahuramazda, Mithras and Apam Napat, the Son of the Waters. In the Rig-Veda, an “asura” was a powerful and potentially frightening god, and they became devils in Indian tradition, but the power was placed before the fear in the Zoroastrian reform. Ahuramazda was an Ahura, Ahura Mazda, and he was declared the Most Powerful God, the single true God above all others. The Persians always wrote the name of the god as one word, but Zoroaster would use the words separately and in no fixed order, evidence that his works were genuinely earlier because the name had not become stereotyped.
In Babylonia, about 1760 BC, the Kassites who conquered the land from western Iran, had a god written down as “Suriias”—the Indo-Iranian, Suryas. Clay tablets from about 1400 BC Egypt testify to gods with Iranian names in Syria and Palestine, and plainly enough, Syria and Assyria contain the name, Surya, itself, “sura” being a common adjective in Persian scriptures meaning “strong” or “mighty”, evidently derived from the word “surya”.
The Vedas, scriptures written by the Indo-Europeans that migrated to India, know an indistinct god called “The Asura” but otherwise the high gods were Varuna, Mithras and Indra. The job of pre-Zoroastrian Iranian gods like Varuna and Mithras was to uphold “Arta”, (Persian, Asha, Vedic, Rita) the principle of truth, justice, righteousness and order, but Indra was an amoral adventurer who granted arbitrary favours not rewards for “Arta”. The word, “Arta” can be seen in the names of Medes mentioned on Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions in the ninth century BC. The mention of a god Assara Mazas in the eighth century Assyrian tablets must be Ahuramazda, and probably is “The Ahura” of the Vedas.
Later, Mazda appears as the leading part of “Masdayasna” in scripts, and in theophoric names in Assyrian, Elamite and Aramaic texts. The original high gods seem to disappear and are replaced by the single god Ahuramazda. Mithras later made a comeback but Varuna disappeared unless he was an entity called the Baga (the God), a name of Varuna in the Vedas, and Indra disappeared because he was the chief of the daevas, the immoral gods hated by Zoroaster.
Oddly, the Zoroastrian yazata of waters, Apam Napat, was also called the “High Lord”, suggesting that he had been Varuna, the link between water and the sun being that the sun sets into the sea (doubtless the Caspian Sea for the Aryans) to become Varuna, the god in charge of the subterranean ocean. Or, the important water qualities of Varuna were assigned to Apam Napat when Varuna disappeared.
In treaty forms found at Boghozkoy in Turkey, four gods, Mithra, Varuna, Indra and Nasatyas are invoked as witnesses. These are either Indo-Iranian or proto-Indian gods, the Indians therefore appearing west of Iran at a fairly early date. Assyrian records suggest that the route to the east of the plateau into India was well trodden by 700 BC, to judge by the preponderance of Aryan names, but so many names did not appear in the west.
Avestan “Mithra” was a “covenant” or “contract”, (Vedic, Mitra = “friend”). In Persian, the same word became “mihr”, meaning “loving kindness” or “friendship”, and a title of the god Mithras was “The Friend”. Mithras is the purveyer of Arta—order, truth and harmony. Arguably, Mithras began as a guardian spirit of contracts, but must quickly have become associated with the sun because the sun always was considered to see all wrongdoing from its vantage point in the sky. So he became the aspect of the sun god that guarded contracts, and as other sun gods disappeared from the scene he became the epitome of a sun god. Mithras is recognized as the Judge (Yt 10:81,92), a warrior in a chariot, drawn by white horses, that casts no shadow (Yt 10:68; 102; 125; 136), and had a thousand perceptions and ten thousand eyes (Yt 107;82), all features of solar gods.
Some of the Yashts suggest that Mithras was the god of the space between the heavens and the earth (Yt 10:44:75).
His place is the width of the earth.
He looks upon all that is between earth and heaven.
He holds embraced heaven with his greatness, earth with his glory.
It is, of course, the sun that does these things, “his glory” being the light and warmth spread by his benign rays. And, in Yasht 10:127, Mithras is accompanied by a wild boar, syncretism with Attis, or the source of Attis being linked with a boar, Attis being a form of Tammuz.
In India, Mitra’s brother Asura, his solar partner, was Varuna, both names having similar meanings. When he emerged from chaos, Varuna became the night-time sun and guardian therefore of the underworld and the cosmic ocean below. Mitra was the day time sun. Mitra dwelt in fire, Varuna in water, whence the latter’s alternative name, Son of the Waters. The Vedic Mitra acts most often with Varuna. The Iranians must have had the same god. Varuna evolved into the chief god of the Rig-Veda, equalled only by Indra, both seen as universal gods. He was a fearful god in the Rig Veda but has the title the “All-Knowing Lord”, reminding us of Ahuramazda, and so gave wisdom to his devotees as knowledge of the cosmic order. Both Varuna and Mitra guard “Rita”. So, Varuna had frightening but also valuable qualities, and Mitra, the daylight sun had all its blessings and punishments—justice!
They are so closely associated that they are invoked jointly with the single word, Mitravaruna, a pair-compound in Old Iranian, a regular grammatical construction used as a plural noun, without a conjunction, in which the shorter name is first whether it is the greater of the two or not. The name Mithrasoromasdes has been found even in the UK, on tessara at St Albans. Plutarch mentions Mesorromasdes (Mica-Ahuramazda). Mica-Ahura is a south western Iranian form of the archaic Iranian god, Mitra-Ahura. Such constructs usually stand for equal pairs like left and right, day and night, showing that Mitra and Varuna were initially equal. The two equal aspects of the sun—night/day, winter/summer, rainy/dry.
In India, Varuna grew—while Mitra declined—and eventually became “The Creator” and the God of waters (and semen), ruling his “kingdom” as “Bagha”, being especially linked with marriage. The Avestan, Ahuranish, a name for the waters, is “Wives of the Ahura”, a name parallelled by the Vedic, Varunani, “Wives of Varuna”. Varuna was called, in Iranian liturgy, “the Ahura”, and “the lofty Ahura”, Ahura barazan, later Burj Yazad (the angel Burj). Nymphs of the Waters were called “Wives of the Ahura” on the Xanthos monument. The question is what happened to Varuna in Iran. A great god, clearly equal to Mithras disappears. Or does he? Did he come to be called only by his main title, “The All-Knowing Lord”, Ahura Mazda, or simply “the Dispenser” “Baga”—God?
Boyce explains it was common in Iranian religion that a deity became exclusively known by a title and not by their proper name. Shahrbanu, a title, replaced Anahita’s name, and the earlier goddess, Harahvati, lost her name to the title, aredvi sura anahita. Similarly, Varuna lost his proper name and became known only as, Apam Napat, a title, but, in Zoroastrianism, Mithras and Apam Napat have the same relationship as do Mitra and Varuna in Vedic tradition.
Though Baga seemed to mean “god” as a title, when Artaxerxes II invoked Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithras, or Mithras alone, he did not use the word Baga at all, unlike Artaxerxes III. So Baga was not, in Old Persian usage, a title for Mithras. But, in an Avestan passage (Y 10:10), the Baga is credited with setting haoma on the mountains, an act in the Rigveda (RV 5:85.1) of Varuna. So Varuna is known as Baga, and makes up the ancient pair of Mithras and Varuna. Artaxerxes II substituted Anahita, a goddess of waters!
Baga was the general word for god, often in used proper names. Bagastana, Mt Behistun, meant “Place of God”. The Old Persian name for September/October, Bagayadi, meant “worship of God”. Baga appears in more Median names of the eighth and seventh centuries than any other god, is equally popular in Persian names and so too in Elamite cuneiform, suggesting that Varuna had become “God”. Varuna was called Baga all right, but not in liturgy or on inscriptions where perhaps he was Ahuramazda. The explanation might be that the name of the high god, Varuna, could not be uttered—just as, in Judaism, Yehouah could not—so he was always referred to indirectly, by his honorific title, the “Wise Lord”, or simply as “God”.
Or, did Ahuramazda in Iran always stand for the dual deity Mitra-Varuna of the Vedas? Ahura is “The Lord”, a title of Varuna, and Mazda is “illuminating”, a quality and perhaps a title originally of Mithras. Moreover, Mithras had the title “The Friend” but the specific divine friend of Zoroaster was Ahuramazda! On Elamite tablets of the time of Darius, offerings are five times recorded for Mica-Baga—where Mica was Old Persian for Mithras (cf Hebrew, Micah!)—and on one occasion these offerings coincided with offerings to Ahuramazda. Later, Artaxerxes III, invoked “Ahuramazda and Mithras Baga”. In the compound, Mithras-Baga, Varuna, under the title Baga, began as an equal partner, but because Baga was understood to mean simply God, and was not used liturgically, Varuna was forgotten as a separate entity, and the compound was understood as Mithras-God (cf Hebrew, Michael!).
Eventually, in the later Persian period, “Baga” was thought of as meaning Mithras. So, the Zoroastrian calendar gave Mithras the month September/October, formerly attributed to the Baga. The autumn festival then was called Mithraskana, implying that Bagayadi had always been devoted to Mithras, and Mithras was Baga [†]
The Aramaic text of the Xanthos trilingual (erected in 358 BC to promote honesty in legal affairs) speaks of a god, Khshathrapati, apparently identified in the Greek with Apollo. Now Mithras was usually the Persian god identified with Apollo, so Dupont-Sommer thought Khshathrapati was Mithras. “Khshathra” means “kingdom”, or rule, and its Zoroastrian religious usage is the source of the Christian notion of the “kingdom” of God. A tenth century BC Vedic hymn refers to Mitra as “lord of ksatra”. A similar phrase occurs in the Gathas (Y 44:9) to mean Ahuramazda! By the fourth century when the Xanthos texts were written, “khshathra” meant, besides the spiritual realm of God, the actual earthly kingdom of God, the Achaemenian empire. Khshathrapati later was a known title of the Sassanian kings, and its feminine equivalent, Shahrbanu, “Lady of the realm”, besides a title of the divinity Anahita, often paired with Mithras, was a title of royal women. Khshathrapati evidently was not exclusively a title of a god, but it was used to invoke the God of the Achemenian kings. If this God was Mithras, then Mithras was Ahuramazda, at least in the aspect of Khshathrapati!
A D H Bivar noted that, phonetically, “khshathrapati” could be pronounced as “sarapis” by a Greek. Sarapis, first attested in the fourth century BC, was also worshipped under the title Khshathrapati! It suggested the god, was, at least partly, Mithras. Sarapis had kingly and benign attributes, granting favours and blessings, and, like Mithras, supervising justice. The Ptolemies, in their promotion of the cult, added elements of the cults of Osiris, Apis, Pluto, Dionysus and Asklepios, burying its origins in Khshathrapati.
Could the Xanthos inscription have been erected by an apostate satrap? By the time of the Xanthos stele, Boyce says the Zoroastrian Achaemenians could not have permitted any satrap publicly to maintain a religion other than Zoroastrianism. The royal religion must have provided the Achaemenid kings their ceremonies, rituals of oath-taking, and official holy days. It can hardly have been a mistake. Indeed, Persian words in the Xanthos Aramaic show it was prepared in the satrap’s chancellery where only the official religion can have been allowed.
In the view that Ahuramazda embodied both Mitra and Varuna, Mitra as the god of the morning and summer sun, and Varuna as the god of the night-time and winter (rain bringing) sun, Ahuramazda was the daily and annual sun—the God of the Heavens. This deity is already a dual one. It is interesting in the context of Yehouah being a Persian imposition as the god of the Jews, that the most common biblical name for god is a so-called plural of majesty, Elohim! Elohim means “gods”, not just God!
The deity of Zoroaster, on this thesis, is a dual sun god from the outset, so it is not far to Zoroaster seeing in it two contrasting gods. Because Zoroastrians worshipped in the morning, and never at night, when the evil spirits might be around, in Iran, after a period obscured by the title Ahuramazda, Mithras emerged as the face of God, or Spenta Mainyu (“Improving Mind”), while Varuna became Angra Mainyu (Worsening Mind) and then Ahriman. Mitra was never separated from the pre-Zoroastrian Ahuramazda, and evidently only for a short time, if at all, from the post-Zoroastrian one. Mithras was a part of the high god, and was not officially named sparately, in Persian inscriptions, until the reign of Artaxerxes II (404-358).
So, Ahuramazda looks like the same god as Varuna of the “Vedas” or the dual god Mitravaruna. Varuna also looks to be the same word as the Greek Uranus, meaning “the Heavens” (Boyce denies this on philological grounds, but they must be compelling technicalities because the words, their meaning and their provenance all yell out their identity), and as such must have been the equivalent of Ahuramazda. Like Varuna, Ahuramazda has a surrounding court of ministering spirits—the compound god will have had the attributes of each of his constituents—but his goodness is manifest in nature—the ordinary realm of phenomena—the real world. Though people were rewarded or punished in the after life, Zoroaster was concerned with their behaviour here on earth.
The cult of the sun was a powerful one throughout the near east, and arguably all the great gods were sun gods in some of their aspects. “Hvar” (Hur) is “sun”, so the Hurrians, an earlier Indo-European tribe to invade the region of upper Mesopotamia, were associated with the sun. A prominent Babylonian god was Shamash, the Sun God, god of Justice and Righteousness—the Great Judge. Asura meant a sun god and all the Aryan chief gods were sun gods in some aspect or another. But the Iranian sun god was not a powerful god. He was Huar Khshaeta. Already Mithras and Varuna had taken on roles as moral gods, indeed might have been abstract moral gods who took on a solar aspect. Mithras was the god of covenants and contracts, while Varuna was a god of oaths and vows. Mithras was the rising sun, the sun of the pre-noon day, and Varuna was the setting sun, the sun of the night (and so the moon) when the sun was out of sight. Possibly the power of Shamash as a judge of righteousness influenced the Iranians in restoring the solar aspects of their moral gods, uniting them in Ahuramazda.
Akkadian gods were associated with a star. Shamash was associated with Ishtar, the goddess who was the Morning Star. Ishtar was a goddess in the mould of Kali, a goddess of love and of war. At some stage in the distant past, the evening and morning stars had not been recognized as the same and were given opposite attributes, even in respect of sexuality. The careful observations of the Chaldaean astronomers showed the planet was just one and they opted for it to be Ishtar, the morning star, but naturally it had to take the attributes of the evening star too. The ambivalent goddess was the outcome.
The Iranians identified their goddess Anahita (Greek, Anaitis) with Ishtar. Anahita was a goddess of rivers and waters, so suddenly obtained far more significance. Because of this transfer, Herodotus said that the goddess was adopted from the Assyrians and Arabians, but mysteriously he calls her Mithras. As a goddess of love, Ishtar was linked with Tammuz (Dumuzi) who was bewailed each year. An equal cult has been traced in the far north east of Iran in Sogdiana, where the goddess is called “Nana the Lady”, the name of a Babylonian goddess also with characteristics of Ishtar. Both had shrines at Erech within the temple of Anu, the sky god, and both were linked with Venus, but Nana was slightly the lesser goddess. The Iranians could not see the difference between them, calling both Anahita but using Nana as a familiar name for her.
In Babylonia, Nana was the consort of Nabu, a powerful god, the son of Marduk. He was a Babylonian Hermes, the god of messages, an intermediary who supervised the bringing of messages from the gods to earth. Note that a word in Hebrew for a prophet, who does the same job of transmitting messages from God is “nabi”. As a messnger, Nabu was also the god of writing and therefore of scribes. The Elamite scribes who kept Persian annals had the Babylonian god Nebu as their own god. The Persian for Nabu is “Tiri”. He became associated with Tishtrya, the Zoroastrian yazata of the star Sirius.
Vahu is the wind god, though he is not the wind itself, which is another god called Vata. Vahu is the “Breath of Life” but is also the last gasp on dying, so he is the god of life and death, of both the Good Creation and the Evil Creation. In this sense, of course, he is the creator of good and the creator of evil, rather like Yehouah. He is the “All-conqueror”, a title of Indra in the Vedas, so he was a powerful god. He is also described as “pitiless”. Thus he has characteristics of a storm god and is associated with the space between heaven and earth, as might be expected of a wind god. Later, he was to become associated with Zurvan. More significantly, his name is part of the name of Darius—in Persian, Darayavahu.
Aryan Legends
The Iranian Vendidad or the “Law to Fight against Evil” is one of the ancient scriptures of the Zoroastrians. The Vendidad actually describes the pre-Zoroastrian legends of the Golden Age of the Aryans in their ancient homeland when they were ruled by “Yima Khshaeta” (Jamshad). King Yima ruled wisely in a world in which there was no old age and death. From the weather described in the Vedas, the ancient Aryan home seems to have been in the Arctic regions, north of Russia.
In the pre-Zoroastrian legends, king Yima was judged to have sinned in some unknown way concerning a bull sacrifice, implying that the ancient Iranians had a bull sacrifice—not surprisingly. It continued into later times to judge by Mithraic iconography. Yima either had an unworthy thought or became arrogant and dedicated the sacrifice of the bull to himself as a god. So, he “sinned”, lost his immortality and died. Nevertheless, he remained a noble figure. The image is that of many of the heroes and kings of Israel and Judah. No matter what their merits, they always sinned at some stage.
In a later development of the tale, the king was told by the gods that the earth had become wicked and would be punished. He was instructed to build a “var” beneath the earth and, like Noah, populate it with pairs of animals. It is a Persian myth that draws upon the same Babylonian sources as Noah, and also links the Persian Yima with the Indian one. Despite their split with their Iranian brothers in the migration, the Indians remembered Yima, but he had transposed into “Yama Raja, lord of the underworld”.
From the evidence of both the Vedas and the most archaic Avestan texts, the continuance of life after death was something taken for granted as self-evident and not open to question.Mary Boyce
In India, the Rig-Veda implies a heavenly paradise for those who have been observant, but otherwise people at death dwelt in a joyless place beneath the earth.
Zoroaster
Before anyone other than the Pharaoh Akhenaton, Zoroaster introduced a practical “monotheism” equivalent to that the Jews and Christians think is unique to them. “Zoroastrianism” is the name of the religion Zoroaster first devised sometime before the Persian king Cyrus the Great set up the Persian empire in the sixth century BC, perhaps, in the time when the Persians were still migrating south of the Caucasus towards their eventual homeland, between c 1000 BC and about 700 BC. Zoroastrianism was the original of all the truly universal religions, which Toynbee saw working in history.
The adjective “Magian” describes a group of related religions derived from the thoughts of the prophet Zoroaster. Mithraism and Judaism are forms of Zoroastrianism. Christianity is Mithraism applied to Judaism. Zoroastrian priests, Magi, were present at the nativity of Jesus, and ascribed their coming to a prophet—the prophet was Zoroaster!
Some say Zoroaster is a myth. The works attributed to him are more than any single person could have written, and many of the stories of his life are obviously late and obviously mythical, but none of this means that there was no Zoroaster. Especially in these ancient times, great men always accumulated myths and some perhaps were even turned into gods, but all innovations have a founder, and the founder here was Zoroaster. Later embellishments by his followers were doubtless attributed to him until the corpus of his work became Herculean, yet Zoroaster remains at the core. He is not simply a mythical figure but a real historical person to whose name were attached the work of many later holy men, all of whom were possibly called Zoroaster as a title.
In the west, Zoroaster is the Magus, the founder of the Magian system. The date of Zoroaster’s life is uncertain. Agathias remarks that it is no longer possible to determine with any certainty when he lived and legislated.
The Persians say that Zoroaster lived under Hystaspes, but do not make it clear whether by this name they mean the father of Darius or another Hystaspes. But, whatever may have been his date, he was their teacher and instructor in the Magian religion, modified their former religious customs, and introduced a variegated and composite belief.
No reference to him at all appears in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Persian kings, the Achaemenids, although they were undoubtedly devoted adherents of Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster is not mentioned by Herodotus in his sketch of the Medo-Persian religion. He occurs for the first time in a fragment of Xanthos of Lydia in 470 BC, and in the Alcibiades of Plato, who calls him the son of Oromazdes. Hermodorus and Hermippus of Smyrna date him 5000 years before the Trojan war, Xanthos 6000 years before Xerxes, Eudoxus and Aristotle 6000 years before the death of Plato. These are obviously misinterpretations of the mythical 12,000 year timescale of Zoroastianism, which is divided into four quarters of 3000 years each.
The existence of Zoroaster even so is assured by the Gathas, teachings attributed to him in the Zoroastrian holy book, the Avesta. The Avesta is our principal source for the doctrine of Zoroaster. The thirteenth section, or Spena Nash, which was mainly a description of his life, has perished, while the biographies founded upon it in the seventh book of the Dinkard (ninth century AD), the Shah-Nama, and the Zardusht-Nama (thirteenth century AD), are legendary. The litanies of the Yasna, and the Yashts, refer to him as a personage belonging to the past. The Vendidad also merely gives accounts of the dialogues between Ahuramazda and Zoroaster.
The Gathas of Zoroaster claim to be his authentic utterances. The person we meet in these old hymns differs from the Zoroaster of the Avesta. Zoroaster displays emotions, doubt and despair in some of the Gathas, this being taken, like Jesus’s emotions expressed in Mark’s gospel, as a sign of authenticity. Here he is not a miraculous person of legend, but is simply a man, grounded in reality, but who trusts in God and the protection of his friends, for, at times, his position is precarious. Besides exterior opposition and the doubts of adherents, he has to deal with the inward misgivings of his own heart as to the truth and final victory of his cause. Hope, despondency, confidence, doubt and despair, a firm faith in the speedy coming of the kingdom of heaven, or the thought of fleeing—all these emotions find their expression in the Gathas. Yet they give no historical account of the life and teaching of their prophet. They are general admonitions, asseverations, solemn prophecies, sometimes directed to the faithful flock or to the princes, but generally cast in the form of dialogues with God and the archangels, whom he repeatedly invokes as witnesses to his veracity. Moreover, they contain many allusions to personal events which later generations have forgotten. It must be remembered, too, that their extent is limited, and their meaning, moreover, frequently dubious or obscure.
The Gathas have elements in common with the Vedas of India which date to the start of the first millennium BC. The language of most of the Gathas differs from the language of the rest of the Avesta. It seems to be an archaic form of Avestan, and from this and the personal style it is written in, it seems to be the original musings of the prophet. Most of the rest of the Avesta, written in more normal Avestan, is probably the additional work of the later Zoroasters and Magi, as the religion evolved.
Avestan is like Latin and Hebrew, a holy language kept in sacred usage long after it had ceased to be used in daily communication. Indeed, it was dead long before the Avesta’s final recension in the time of the Sasanian king, Khusrau I (531-579 AD). Just as the Jewish scriptures were expanded in the commentaries of the Talmud, the Avesta required extensive commentaries written in Pahlavi. Much of the original Zoroastrian writing was destroyed by Alexander, and much of the restoration of it under the Parthians and the Sasanids was destroyed by the Moslems. Patriarchal religions are not deterred from Patricide!
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Moses and Exodus
