History of Zoroastrianism/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Scope of the work. This book is the revised and much enlarged edition of my Zoroastrian Theology, which has been out of print for the past fifteen years. The publication of my Zoroastrian Civilization and Our Perfecting World, Zarathushtra's Way of Life, and professional duties have delayed the completion of the work. I have inserted new material in several chapters and added nineteen new chapters to the book. I have given a concise account of the religious beliefs and practices prevalent among the Zoroastrians and their early Iranian ancestors from the pre-Gathic times to the present day and named the book History of Zoroastrianism.
Arrangement and method. I have divided the entire period of the history of Zoroastrianism on the linguistic basis. The earliest Zoroastrian documents are the Gathas, written in the Gathic dialect. They represent the earliest phase of the religion of Zoroaster. But ancient Iran had a religion which preceded Zoroastrianism in point of time. I have labelled this period pre-Gathic; for its beginning is lost in remote antiquity, and the advent of Zoroaster brings its end.
The time when Zoroaster flourished is a moot question. The approximate date at which he lived is 1000 b.c. Zoroaster revolutionizes the religious life of the Iranians, which hitherto represented the evolutionary phase of religion. It was the movement in which we find the religious thought creeping for ages to rise from the lower to the higher level. To put this in another way, the pre-Gathic religion of Iran is the evolution of the religious thought of many men and many ages; Zoroaster's is the creation of one man and one age. The prophet of Iran establishes a new religion. In the pre-Gathic religion the trend of religious thought struggles from the complex to the simple, from concrete to abstract, and is yet the farthest removed from the ideal stage. Zoroastrianism, on the other hand, as preached in the Gathas is the very embodiment of the simple and the abstract. It is the realization of the ideal. It is the form to which the coming generations have to conform. Deviation from it means a fall, a degeneration of the religious life. This second period I have termed Gathic.
Decay soon begins in the language in which Zoroaster composed his immortal hymns, and his successors now write in the Avestan dialect, which replaces the Gathic. The Avestan language remains the written language of the Zoroastrians from now onward to probably the last days of the Parthians, when the Pahlavi language becomes the court language of the Sasanians and supersedes the Avestan. The most extensive literature on Zoroastrianism is written in Avestan. This period, which I have called Later Avestan period, extends to the early part of the Pahlavi era and goes even beyond it. When the two periods thus overlap each other, it often becomes difficult to determine whether a certain phase of religious thought is on one side or the other of the dividing line between them. The Avestan works, in the form in which they were written in the Avestan period, no longer exist. They were scattered by the storm that swept over Persia when Alexander conquered the country, and shook her religious edifice to its base. The form in which the Avestan texts have reached us is that which was given them during the Pahlavi period. The artists employed to restore the broken edifice belong to the Pahlavi period, but the materials used come down from the Avestan sources.
The Pahlavi period ranks fourth in the arrangement of the present work, and it covers a period of about eight centuries Although It is most productive under the Sasanian rule, it does not close with the collapse of this, the last of the Zoroastrian empires, but survives it by at least three centuries in Moslem Persia. Though Pahlavi had replaced Avestan, the early works written in the ancient language had not yet ceased to influence the Pahlavi writers. In fact, some of the most important of the Pahlavi works are either versions of some Avestan works now lost to us, or draw their thought from the Avestan sources. Thus, the Pahlavi Bundahishn is the epitome of the Avestan Damdat Nask, which is subsequently lost. Similarly, not a few of the Pahlavi works written two or three centuries after the conquest of Persia by the Arabs tenaciously preserve the tradition handed down by Sasanian Persia. These are characterized by two layers of thought, one traditional, and the other representing new thought current during the writer's times. The Menuk-i Khrat, for example, betrays Moslem influence when it preaches fatalism, but is otherwise faithfully voicing the sentiments of the orthodox Sasanian Church. This interweaving of old ideas with the new ones, and the interpolations and additions of the later writers in the works of earlier generations, often make it hopeless to disentangle the complications and distinguish between the opinions and ideas of different periods.
Thirteen hundred years have elapsed since the dissolution of the last of the Zoroastrian empires. Henceforth we have to record the religious history of the Zoroastrian remnants in Persia and the Zoroastrian settlers of India. Zoroastrianism sinks with the Zoroastrian power, and a long period of obscurity follows. I have named it a period of decadence.
Under the aegis of the British rule in India Zoroastrianism emerges once again with the prosperity of the Parsi community. I have hailed this as the period of the revival of Zoroastrianism.
These various periods, which represent chronologically different stages of the historic development of the religious thought of Iran, from remote antiquity down to the immediate present, will, I hope, give the reader a general and comprehensive view of the history of Zoroastrian religion. As the subjects are treated piecemeal in different periods according to the natural growth of ideas from period to period, the reader will have to read crosswise when he needs a complete account of any particular concept. For example, if he wants to know all that the Zoroastrian literature has to say about Ormazd, he will get it as a whole not from any one period, but from all. The detailed list of contents and the index will help him in his inquiry.
Transliteration of the technical terms. I have sought to preserve the changes that these have undergone during successive periods, and have variously transliterated them in the treatment of the different periods, according as they represent the Avestan, Pahlavi, or Persian pronunciations. Thus, for example, Ahura Mazda of the Gathic and Avestan periods become Ormazd in the Pahlavi period. Angra Mainyu assumes the form Ahriman in the subsequent periods. The Avestan Vohu Manah changes into Pahlavi Vohuman and into Bahman in Persian. In the frequent use of the name of the prophet, I have, however, not scrupulously followed this method. I have distinguished between the Avestan, Pahlavi and Persian forms by writing Zarathushtra for the first, and Zaratusht for Pahlavi and Zartusht for Persian as they actually occur in these languages; but I have adopted the more familiar form Zoroaster for general use. Similarly, I have called the religion of the prophet Zoroastrianism. With a view to simplicity for the general reader, I have avoided, as far as it has been practicable, the free use of diacritical marks, and have employed simple transcriptions of the names of the heavenly beings, persons, and books when they occur in the text.
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I am grateful to Dr. Charles J. Ogden who has carefully revised the greater part of the proofsheets and favoured me with his scholarly criticism.