The ancient religion now known as Zoroastrianism is a relatively obscure faith of perhaps 300,000-500,000 remaining adherents, established in what was ancient Persia (now Iran) and currently located mostly in India (as “Parsis”) and to some extent in Iran and nations of the south Asian diaspora. Few Westerners have even heard of it. Yet it was a cultural force that profoundly influenced not only modern Iranian culture, but also the ideology of every Abrahamic faith (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and, indeed, the very foundations of Western civilization’s values and worldview –from ancient times through the present day.
Zoroastrianism is named for its founder Zoroaster (or “Zarathustra” in the Western lexicon) who scholars estimate lived and taught sometime from 1200—600 BCE. Nothing specific is known about his life outside of the Zoroastrian stories and scriptures, but these describe his life achievements as a wandering prophet who suffered persecution until gaining favor with a ruler in eastern Persia through a miracle, and thereafter preaching and fighting on behalf of the true faith until being martyred at his alter by enemies. He systematized and reinterpreted earlier religious beliefs in the region (which originally had a close relationship to various myths, stories and gods from the Hindu Vedas in neighboring south Asia) giving them a novel eschatology in which his message became one of world salvation. The world, in this view, was created by a single, beneficent ,and all-powerful God, “Ahura Mazda” (which, incidentally, inspired the automobile name) who separated light from darkness and good from evil. The ancient gods were recast as “spentas” (angels) and “daevas” (demons) –the spentas in service to the supreme God, but the daevas falling under the sway of a supreme evil ruler, “Angra Mainyu”. The subsequent history of humankind has been, and will remain, the story of the struggle between these two forces for the soul of humanity and destiny of the world. Human life involves a choice between a life that emulates the righteousness path of Ahuru Mazda or the corrupt path of Angra Mainyu, and there are strict moral codes that the righteous must follow to choose the right path. At the end of time, a final battle will ensue between the forces of light and darkness, in which Angra Mainyu, his daevas, and those souls who followed him, will be cast into an eternal fire. Later scriptures and myths describe a ‘second-coming’ of Zoroaster’s spirit, who will lead the spentas and righteous souls in this final apocalyptic confrontation.
This narrative should sound very familiar to any Jew, Christian, or Muslim, and the similarity is no coincidence, as each of these religious traditions was influenced directly by Zoroastrian teachings. The Jewish conception of history in terms of a struggle between good and evil, the concept of Satan, and the call for a messianic savior, all probably trace back to the “Babylonian captivity” or exile of the ancient Hebrews in Zoroastrian Babylon. Similar Christian beliefs derive from its Jewish origins (especially perhaps, in the influence of the Essenes, a Jewish sect in Palestine around Jesus’ time, whose eschatology mirrored Zoroastrianism’s and whose constituency may have included Jesus’ teacher, John the Baptist), as well as various religious sects in the Middle East like Mandeanism, Manicheanism, and Mithraism, which were directly influenced by Zoroastrianism and whose ranks may have included several prominent early Christian leaders. Islam’s Muhammed was also very much influenced by the apocalyptic lessons from Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and other sources to which he was exposed as a travelling merchant during his early life.
The influence of Zoroastrianism, via the Abrahamic traditions, on Western civilization’s values and worldview is so pervasive and far-reaching that no summary could ever do justice to its scope, but there are several broad and very significant ideals and themes that the Zoroastrian worldview has imparted to the West in ways that underwrite (both implicitly and explicitly) key values, institutions, policies, and cultural legacies, that have persisted to this day. Moral ideals, for instance, like ethical absolutism, ethical dualism, and abstract principles of justice, are fundamental to its history and character. Ethical absolutism (the belief that certain values are universal and categorical) in the West derives largely from the concept of monotheism, which owes its origins largely to Zoroastrian theology. The idea that there is a single supreme moral authority in the universe, whose hegemony is all-encompassing, has provided a basis for every historic political principle from the “divine right” of kings to the United States’ Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truth of universal equality. In Enlightenment political theory emerging at the dawn of modernity, every philosophy of government from the “social contract” to “libertarianism” to “democratic socialism” has been justified on this basis and grounded on the absolute authority of a constitution establishing it. It was in this spirit that Martin Luther King proclaimed: “A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law. But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law. And an unjust law, as St. Augustine said, is no law at all.”
This kind of ethical absolutism is related to the belief in the abstract principles of justice that follow from it. If there is an ultimate standard of supreme virtue, embodied in God or an equivalent secular ideal like human rights, then certain principles are justified insofar as they express this supreme virtue. Zoroastrianism encoded abstract principles of justice in its written texts (most prominently, the Avesta) and this legacy has continued through the history of Western law, from Biblical commandments, Hammarabi’s Code, the Middle Assyrian Law, and the Hittite Code in very ancient Middle Eastern societies, to the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitutional Bill of Rights, and United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in the modern world. Indeed, every current professional code of ethics and corporate mission statement is an extension of this legacy. Cosmologist Paul Davies also observes in The Mind of God and elsewhere, that the scientific concept of absolute universal physical laws and mathematical laws of logic, grounded on what Steven Hawking has called “The Grand Design” of the universe, have roots in the theological notion that such abstract principles are directly derived from an absolute divine source of truth.
Further, the Zoroastrian concept of moral absolutes and cosmic battle around them, fostered an ethical dualism (often referred to as a “Manichean” worldview after the Manichean faith inspired by the Zoroastrian legacy) between God and Satan, light and darkness, good and evil, that shaped the subsequent scope of Western culture’s moral paradigm. Like the Zoroastrian worldview that they largely inherited, Jewish, Christian and Islamic views have been configured by this sharp opposition between good and evil. Social/political policies influenced by these traditions through Western history have therefor been conceived in these terms as well. In European colonial conquests and American foreign policy from “manifest destiny” (bringing “Christian civilization” to “heathen savages”) to the Cold War (between the “free world” Vs. “Godless Communism”) to the recent War on Terror in the Middle East (in George Bush’s terms: “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”), conflicts have been framed in terms of an uncompromising battle between good and evil. Even contemporary domestic conflicts like the “war on drugs”, abortion, socialism vs capitalism, political elections, and debates over vaccination/mask requirements, have often taken on the language of zero-sum religious crusades. In these ways, the zealous, uncompromising, and sometimes militant moral message of Zoroastrianism has also persisted with enduring tenacity as a cultural force shaping Western civilization’s moral paradigm. Largely to its benefit, and sometimes to its detriment, this influence is one of its most significant and enduring legacies.
