The primary sources for the figure of Zarathustra can be divided into a couple of categories:
The Gathas. Seventeen archaic Avestan hymns attributed to Zarathustra himself. (Additionally, there’s the Yasna Haptanghaiti, typically attributed to Zarathustra’s students)
Iranian legends in Avestan and Persian. Here, Zarathustra appears, among other things, as a mentor to the young king Vishtaspa, as a minor deity, and as one chosen by Ahura Mazda after the legendary king Yima declined to be the propagator of the faith.
Classical sources; I am not a hundred percent sure who the first classical author is to explicitly mention Zarathustra, but I think it’s Plato. Here he is discussed as an Iranian or Babylonian sage who existed in the inconceivably distant past, thousands of years before the Trojan war.
The first step to decoding this matter is to realize, as the 19th-century philologist Martin Haug did, that the Gathas and the Yasna Haptanghaiti are linguistically distinct from the rest of the Avestan material (in e.g. the Yashts, hymns to other divinities, and the rest of the liturgy). Linguistically speaking, they are far more archaic and more intelligible with the Old Indic of the Rgveda. Some geographical considerations, using other Younger Avestan material, allows us to plausible date their composition to about 1000-1500 BC, with 1300 BC being the most commonly cited date. Much points to later traditions, including perhaps some Yashts and Middle Persian traditions, as having been derived from exegesis of the Gathas. Indeed, whereas Middle Persian prose is plain-spoken and straightforward, the Gathas are notoriously cryptic:
Now I will proclaim to those who will hear the things that the understanding man should remember, for hymns unto Ahura and prayers to Good Thought; also the felicity that is with the heavenly lights, which through Right shall be beheld by him who wisely thinks.
Hear with your ears the best things; look upon them with clear-seeing thought, for decision between the two Beliefs, each man for himself before the Great consummation, bethinking you that it be accomplished to our pleasure.
Now the two primal Spirits, who reveal themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad, in thought and word and action. And between these two the wise ones chose aright, the foolish not so.
And when these twain Spirits came together in the beginning, they created Life and Not-Life, and that at the last Worst Existence shall be to the followers of the Lie, but the Best Existence to him that follows Right.
Of these twain Spirits he that followed the Lie chose doing the worst things; the holiest Spirit chose Right, he that clothes him with the massy heavens as a garment. So likewise they that are fain to please Ahura Mazda by dutiful actions.
The Gathas speak of the birth of the cosmos, but do not, for example, elaborate on the relationship between the key three entities of Ahura Mazda (the Wise Lord), Spenta Mainyu (the “Holy Spirit”) and Angra Mainyu (the Spirit of Destruction). This is pretty typical of the genre, it’s something you see in the Yashts as well – these hymns were originally meant to be addressed to the gods by people who already know the content and rituals alluded to well; as they morphed into sacred teachings, these familiar allusions turned into cryptic suggestions stimulating the imaginations of inquisitive clergy. Much of the later Iranian tradition is concerned with sorting these things out, resulting in several variations of the same broad story (Ahura Mazda creates the perfect worlds, Angra Mainyu corrupts it), and among other things this makes it reasonable to think that they did not have that much in surviving parallel narratives to form the basis for the figure of Zarathustra in later tradition, instead drawing that from other sources (e.g. the relationship between Zarathustra and Vishtaspa in this tradition is somewhat reminiscent of that between Aristotle and Alexander).
The immense antiquity with which Zarathustra is spoken of in classical sources tend to support this suggestion – he was obscured by the fog of time even in the Achaemenid era. This doesn’t leave us with much, but everything still does suggest that the Gathas come from a very ancient tradition. It is one that describes a pastoral society – practically everything is quantified and measured in terms of livestock, and there are very few items and possessions discussed. It tells of a society in turmoil, disrupted by warfare and raids, consistent with the proliferation of bronze age warfare in the 2nd milennium BC. The figures mentioned by names have the type of names you would expect, referring to possession of horses, camels and such. The Gathas, unlike virtually any other materials, are very consistent on these points, much much more so than later traditions are, and they are written in a consistent style and, as far as we can tell, a consistent theology that is not really quite like any of the later theological developments.
Thus, the best way to explain the Gathas, which do contain self-references to Zarathustra, one in the first person, but most in the third, really seems to be that they were composed by a single author in the mid-late 2nd milennium BC, probably someone who lived around what is today Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, in a pastoral society. In secondary literature, you will find very few who disputes this basic idea.
Zarathushtra Mythicism:
The school is exemplified by Jean Kellens (whose work has mostly not been translated from French, hence why I’m not as familiar with it) who follows a track established by the late, great German philologist Helmut Humbach. The essential idea is that one should not read the Gathas, the seventeen hymns of Zarathushtra, in light of later Middle Persian (or even Younger Avestan) tradition, instead, one should entirely interpret it in light of the Rgveda. The idea that “good” and “bad” refer to moral distinctions is herein rejected, and instead entirely read in orthopraxic terms, i.e., as referring to performing correct ritual. Denunciations of “destructiveness”, “violence”, and so forth are understood to instead refer to spiritual or cosmological injuries to the world which are mended by performing the correct ritual. The figures mentioned by name in the Gathas, like Kauui Vishtaspa, Zarathushtra and so forth, are understood as being identical to the literary characters alluded to in e.g. the Yashts, thus put on the same level as legendary heroes like Karashaspa and Thraetona.
The principal strength of the approach is that it is easy enough (just tedious) to construct a case for it on a purely literarily comparative and philological basis, using the Rgveda to decipher the Gathas. The flipside to this is that the sheer vastness of the Rgveda, consisting of tens of thousands of lines of verse, massively overdetermines your case. The sheer volume of Rgvedic text means that no matter what the 17 hymns that are the Gathas say, you are likely to find something that parallels them among one of the 1024 hymns of the Rgveda.
Perhaps the biggest weakness of the approach is that it is almost insultingly reductionistic. It is, essentially, built on an assumption of a primitivity inherent to prehistorical civlizations. Whereas classicists generally don’t have much trouble admitting that a work like the Theogony straddles several genres, we’re expected to assume that any teaching in Iranian tradition can be reduced into the mechanical performance of ritual sacrifice. Moreover, it reduces our understanding of the features developed in Zoroastrianism almost entirely into “oh, they misunderstood the Gathas at some point”. This is an incredibly unsatisfying explanation, and one that doesn’t mesh well with even the slightest allowing for reading theology into younger Avestan texts (e.g., hymns alluding to eschatology). We’re left completely without explanatory power for the peculiar developments of Zoroastrian theology.
The approach still has some use, in that it highlights the danger of excessively historicist readings of Avestan material (notoriously done by e.g. Mary Boyce), and that we cannot rely on Middle Persian tradition as our only source, but there is not really any clear argument for why we should not be allowed to consider Zoroastrianism as a living, continuous tradition, as long as we’re careful about the inferences we draw. But allowing us to read the Old Avestan texts as at least in part concerned with moral teaching and proper conduct, and understanding spiritual warfare as more complex than a mere matter of ritual, makes for a very convincing explanation for the origin of Zoroastrian peculiarities, which are intimately tied with the argument for a historical Zarathushtra. If we read the Gathas as describing a society undergoing large structural changes, resulting in warfare, turf disputes, and so forth, disrupting traditional ways of life, this permits us to understand the condemnations of violence, the emphasis on good words, good thoughts and good deeds, and the apparent eschatology. If we permit ourselves to infer a centering on a spiritual-material division, we are given a framework where the seeming parallels between personal and universal eschatology can be easily understood as representing spiritual vs. material salvation. The emphasis on choice and personal responsibility becomes clear as well (the material can be corrupted and distorted by outside forces, but the spiritual is good or evil purely by choice and nature).
Perhaps one of the strongest arguments against a “fictional” or mythical Zarathushtra is precisely that the underlying theological structures as outlined above lend themselves very well to a logical and coherent reading. Conversely, in later traditions formed by the kind of iterative and collective efforts Kellens and those who follow him suggest, we find a lot of diversity and often irresolvable contradictions. The establishment of the tenets by a foundational authority also helps explain why we don’t see in Zoroastrianism the almost revolutionary change and diversity that is evident as Vedic tradition evolves into Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used the name Zarathustra in his seminal work Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) ( 1885), in which he fictionalized the historical figure to meet his own literary and philosophical aims. Nietzsche presents Zoroaster as a returning visionary who repudiates the designation of good and evil and thus marks the observation of the death of God. Nietzsche asserted that he chose Zoroaster as a vehicle for his ideas because the historical prophet had been the first to proclaim the manicheic opposition between “good” and “evil” by rejecting the Daēva, who represent natural forces, in favour of a moral order represented by the Ahuras.
Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire promoted research into Zoroastrianism in the belief that it was a form of rational Deism, preferable to Christianity.
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