The Avesta
The Avesta is the portion of Zoroastrian scripture written in an obscure Iranian language conventionally called Avestan. Avestan, especially in its archaic form, is by far the oldest Iranian language, with the earliest preserved material dating back to the mid-2nd Milennium BC. It has a fairly high degree of mutual intelligibility with Vedic Sanskrit, but as far as I know no extant Iranian language is thought to be particularly closely related to it. It is in this way very unlike Sanskrit, which is usually thought to be the ancestral language of all modern Indic (or Indo-Aryan) languages – Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, &c. But I digress.
http://avesta.org/yasna/index.html
The Avestan material can be classified into two parts – older, and younger. One section of the material is collected into the Yasna (literally meaning “liturgy”). The bulk of the Old Avestan material is contained in the poetic hymns in strict meter, the Gathas (chapters 28-34, 43-51, 53). 35-42, the “Yasna Yaptanghaiti” are in a dialect identical to the Gathas and presumably similarly old, but in “prose”. Most of the rest of the Yasna material (minus a verse here or there) are in “younger Avestan”, which since the work of the great 19th-century philologist Martin Haug have been accepted to be separated from the older material by a minimum of centuries.
http://avesta.org/vendidad/index.html
The next big collection is the Vendidad (or Videvdad), which is a big book of… stuff, that is sometimes kind of weird (see chapter 8: “Funerals and purification, unlawful sex” or chapter 14: “Atoning for the murder of a water-dog”) and clearly of a highly mixed age – some of it must be so young as to date no earlier than around the Parthian period (i.e. from around 200 BC to 200 AD), but scholarly orthodoxy (e.g. Boyce) holds that it was mostly fixed at some point prior to the Achaemenid period. Much of it is dedicated to moral guidances, directions on ritual purity, and pseudo-laws. This is said to be the one book out of twenty-one in the canon of the Sasanians that has survived, which really makes you wonder how weird the other twenty were. I tend to take the supposed extensiveness of Avestan material destroyed by Alexander.
Finally, there is the Khordeh Avesta, which is the prayer book that many Zoroastrians carry with them. It contains mostly material from the rest of the canon.
Pahlavi Literature
The Pahlavi literature, in Middle Persian, is extensive and diverse and it’s hard to fully explain but www.avesta.org explains the Zoroastrian cosmology in e.g. the Bundahishn. However, it postdates the Sasanian period, and it is generally questionable to what degree it preserves older tradition – it may only be a small sliver of interpretations and vernacular glosses of scripture that survived the collapse of Sasanian Persia (diversity is suggested by e.g. Arabic accounts of Zoroastrian beliefs).
Zoroaster and the Gathas
Virtually all studies of the origins of Zoroastrianism stands on the shoulders of the great philologist Martin Haug. Haug identified the Gathas as the holiest scripture of contemporary Zoroastrianism, and realized that they were written, as I noted above, in a much older (centuries, at least) dialect than much of the older variant (Being a 19th century German linguist, he was obviously more quantitative and specific about these relationships than I will try to be here). Drawing up a chronology, he found the traditional dating of Zoroaster as a contemporary of Cyrus the Great to be implausible, and proposed instead that Zoroaster must have lived in the 2nd milennium BC. Haug’s theological “insights” were, shall we say, less impressive, and I won’t go into them here.
It goes without saying that it is not actually possible to prove that a prehistoric prophet personally composed the Gathas – one problem with the type of pastoral society the Gathas are set in is the lack of geographic identifiers. We do at least however have the prophet identified as Spitama Zarathustra, i.e., Zarathustra of the Spitaman clan, and other names associated with his family. Moreover, we can present the usual arguments – their preservation in a peculiar metric form, the unlikelihood of a movement springing from nowhere, the distinct literary style, consistent theology, the abscence of certain elements of later societies (most famously, iron)… and the fact that the author helpfully identifies himself:
Y 43.7 As the holy one I recognized thee, Mazda Ahura, when Good Purpose came to me and asked me: “Who art thou? to whom dost thou belong? By what signs wilt thou appoint the days for questioning about thy possessions and thyself?”
Y 8 Then I said to him: “To the first (question), Zarathushtra am I, a true foe to the Liar, to the utmost of my power, but a powerful support would I be to the Righteous, that I may attain the future things of the infinite Dominion, according as I praise and sing thee, O Mazda.
The best summary, I think, of the core of Zarathustra’s belief, is found in Y 30:
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.
And to him (i.e. mankind) came Dominion, and Good Mind, and Right and Piety gave continued life to their bodies and indestructibility, so that by thy retributions through (molten) metal [this could mean bronze, but possibly also molten stone] he may gain the prize over the others.
So when there cometh their punishment for their sins, then, O Mazda, at Thy command shall Good Thought establish the Dominion in the Consummation, for those who deliver the Lie, O Ahura, into the hands of Right.
Terse poetic flow of the Avestan:
Y 30.3 at tâ mainyû pouruyê ýâ ýêmâ hvafenâ asrvâtem manahicâ vacahicâ shyaothanôi hî vahyô akemcâ åscâ hudånghô eresh vîshyâtâ nôit duzhdånghô.
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
They carry some biographical matter (the story of Zarathustra), some statements of doctrine (e.g. Y 30), some are more prayer or mantra-like, and some could serve as both prayers and sermons. But some also seem surprisingly personal:
34.5 Have ye Dominion and power, O Mazda, Right and Good Thought, to do as I urge upon you, even to protect your poor man? We have renounced the robber-gangs, both demons and men.
34.6 If ye are truly thus, O Mazda, Right and Good Thought, then give me this token, even a total reversal of this life, that I may come before you again more joyfully with worship and praise.
34.7 Can they be true to thee, O Mazda, who by their doctrines turn the known inheritances of Good Thought into misery and woe. I know none other but you, O Right, so do ye protect us.
34.8 For by these actions they put us in fear, in which peril is for many — in that the stronger (puts in fear) (me) the weaker one — through hatred of thy commandment, O Mazda. They that will not have the Right in their thought, from them shall the Good Abode be far.
46.1 To what land shall I go to flee, whither to flee? From nobles and from my peers they sever me, nor are the people pleased with me [……], nor the Liar rulers of the land. How am I to please thee, Mazda Ahura?
46.2 I know wherefore, O Mazda, I have been unable (to achieve) anything. Only a few herds are mine (and therefore it is so) and because I have got but few people. I cry unto thee, see thou to it, O Ahura, granting me support a friend gives to friend. Teach me through the Right what the acquisition of Good Thought is.
Linguistic and textual considerations:
largely from the Wiley-Blackwell Companion:
Helmut Humbach, who is largely credited having come up with the innovation (probably more or less correct) that the Gathas belong to the same genre as Vedic hymns in 1959, starts off with a commentary of the name Zarathustra. The most common explanation of the name, identifying the second part -ustra as “camel” supposes a softening of a predecessor “Zaratustra”, giving a meaning along the lines of “loved by camels”. Humbach rejects this for deep and mystical philological reasons which I will not bore the reader to death with, concluding that Zarathustra’s vernacular must have been an archaic form of Sogdian – arguing that Avestan was a liturgical language even in the prophet’s own time. Humbach notes a point relevant to the previous section – Zarathustra only once clearly identifies himself in the first person (43.7-8) but otherwise speaks in the third person. However, this he considers a literary convention. Moreover, Humbach (who, it should be noted, is an old-school Iranologist, writing this in his mid-90’s (!)) is dismissive of the poetic structure of the Gathas, noting it as “a quite simple poetic technique mostly operating with lexical and grammatical variations of single words”, which, um, no comment. He also puts no weight on the apparent interchangability of terms like “Mainyu” (conventionally translated ‘spirit’) and the cognate “Manah” (Mind) because this is “for metrical reasons”. And so on it goes.
Humbach concludes pessimistically: “The Gathas are no religious handbook. They are texts of a ritual poetry, which to a large extent was traditional and must be interpreted as such. Detailed information on Zarathustra’s religion, on the laws given by him and on the customs of his community must have been laid down in other works of a contemporary literature that are lost forever.” One could always quibble about what “detailed information” or “religious hanbook”
The next essay has the enticing title “The Gathas, Said to be of Zarathustra” by Jean Kellens, which sets the tone. The introductory page caps it off with “Today, I have decided to be even more radical. The Gathas are not a historical text in that they do not tell us anything either about the life of a man or about the organization of a society”. He goes on a bit further on: “Who was Zarathustra? How can we know this, since recent exegesis does not draw upon any historical tradition whatsoever and relies arbitrarily on the romantic fable of a proselytizing prophet elaborated in the 19th century by scholars imbued with Judeo-Christian culture? The sole approach remaining is the hazardous path of internal textual analysis.”
Kellens make rather contrived argument about how the arrangement of the Gathas into five songs (rather than seventeen hymns) constitutes editing, and therefore they could have been “maniputaled” to a degree we are unable to determine and because they are hymns about deities, they are only concerned with the divine like the Rgvedas, et cetera. His conclusion is something akin to the idea that Zoroastrianism was not a faith founded by Zoroaster, but something more like Hinduism, where a previous liturgical tradition (the Gathas/Vedas) were appropriated as material into a religious structure of a different time.
Geography and Linguistics:
There is no disagreement (except perhaps by those that consider him a literary construct) that Zarathustra’s time and place must have been the mid-2nd milennium BC, in the East of Greater Iran – perhaps modern Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, etc. Franz Grenet makes the case that there’s a total absence of a vocabulary suggesting urbanization or agriculture – he lists towns, temples, canals, grain, etc. The closest we find to anything resembling permanent shelter are the sieitibio vizibio of Y 53.8, which he translates “Dwelled-in abodes”. He goes on with an extensive discussion of Vd.1, a chapter of the Younger Avesta which details the created lands of Ahura Mazda, attempting to identify them, concluding that they center on Southeast Afghanistan. However, it is suggested that this does not tell us much if anythign about where the faith originall came from. In the next chapter, Almut Hintze makes the case that we cannot really correlate Avestan to any known dialect, and that it shows no phonological characteristics typical of East Iranian languages – essentially, it is too old for that, though “its geographical horizon is that of southern central Asia and eastern Iran”. He goes through the standard analysis that shows that the younger Avestan is separated from the older by several centuries, and ultimately suggests that in the mid-2nd milennium BC, the movement of Iranian tribes and the few geographic characteristics he manages to identify in Avestan would coincide in “the south of Central Asia”, presumably meaning Turkmenistan or Afghanistan.
Reflections and Historiography:
Mary Boyce, easily the most significant scholar on the subject in the 20th century, simply because she has had by far the most influence on my own view. She took an integrative approach that involved studying not only ancient texts and languages and the particular words used, but also interacting with extant Zoroastrian communities (thus, I think, being more equipped to take its tradition seriously than many other authors, who treat it as obscure eastern mysticism), doing cross-cultural comparison, and forming a cohesive narrative and understanding that could do more than speculate on the particular kind of ritual a certain text was read in. There are many conclusions or assumptions of hers that I have quibbles with, but she, more than anyone else, successfully explained the survival of Zoroastrianism as a cohesive tradition.
Books:
Hausberg et. al, Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015)
Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979)
Boyce, Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigor
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Haug, having made his realization about the Gathas, argued that Zoroaster (who mostly speaks of very abstract divinities like Power, Truth, Purpose, etc, and less about elements) was actually a monotheist, that the Spenta Mainyu (Holy “Spirit”) of Yasna 30.3 was not a primal force but a creation or “emanation” of Ahura Mazda, and that Ahura Mazda was infinitely superior to Angra Mainyu (Destructive Spirit), like God over the Devil. He reasoned that the divinities like “Power” were to Zoroaster mere philosophical abstractions (which is a very bad framework to apply in a tradition that does not clearly distinguish abstract concepts from divinities). Haug moreover argued that these “pure” teachings had been “corrupted” and thus that the Younger Avestan corpus was a distortion of Zoroaster’s “original teaching”.
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