he is spoken of as a pioneer of the doctrine revealed by Ormazd. In the relation between Zoroaster and Vīshtāspa already lies the germ of the state church which afterwards became completely subservient to the interests of the dynasty and sought its protection from it.
Among the grandees of the court of Vīshtāspa mention is made of two brothers, Frashaoshtra and Jāmāspa; both were, according to the later legend, vizirs of Vīshtāspa. Zoroaster was nearly related to both: his wife, Hvōvi, was the daughter of Frashaoshtra, and the husband of his daughter, Pourucista, was Jāmāspa. The actual rôle of intermediary was played by the pious queen Hutaosa. Apart from this connexion, the new prophet relies especially upon his own kindred (hvaētush). His first disciple, Maidhyōimāongha, was his cousin: his father was, according to the later Avesta, Pourushaspa, his mother Dughdōvā, his great-grandfather Haēcataspa, and the ancestor of the whole family Spitama, for which reason Zarathushtra usually bears this surname. His sons and daughters are repeatedly spoken of. His death is, for reascns easily intelligible, nowhere mentioned in the Avesta; in the Shāh-Nāma he is said to have been murdered at the altar by the Turanians in the storming of Balkh.
We are quite ignorant as to the date of Zoroaster; King Vīshtāspa does not seem to have any place in any historical chronology, and the Gāthās give no hint on the subject. In former times the assertion often was, and even now is often put forward, that Vīshtāspa was one and the same person with the historical Hystaspes, father of Darius I. This identification can only be purchased at the cost of a complete renunciation of the Avestan genealogy. Hutaosa is the same name as Atossa: but in history Atossa was the wife of Cambyses and Darius. Otherwise, not one single name in the entourage of our Vīshtāspa can be brought into harmony with historical nomenclature. According to the Arda Vīrāf, 1, 2, Zoroaster taught, in round numbers, some 300 years before the invasion of Alexander. The testimony of Assyrian inscriptions relegates him to a far more ancient period. If these prove the name Mazdaka to have formed part of Median proper names in the year 715 B.C., Eduard Meyer (v. Ancient Persia) is justified in maintaining that the Zoroastrian religion must even then have been predominant in Media. Meyer, therefore, conjecturally puts the date of Zoroaster at 1000 B.C., as had already been done by Duncker (Geschichte des Altertums, 44 78). This, in its turn, may be too high: but, in any case, Zoroaster belongs to a prehistoric era. Probably he emanated from the old school of Median Magi, and appeared first in Media as the prophet of a new faith, but met with sacerdotal opposition, and turned his steps eastward. In the east of Iran the novel creed first acquired a solid footing, and subsequently reacted with success upon the West.
Zoroastrianism.—Zoroaster taught a new religion; but this must not be taken as meaning that everything he taught came, so to say, out of his own head. His doctrine was rooted in the old Iranian—or Aryan—folk-religion, of which we can only form an approximate representation by comparison with the religion of the Veda. The newly discovered Hittite inscriptions have now thrown a welcome ray of light on the primitive Iranian creed (Ed. Meyer, Sitzungsberichte der Preuss. Akademie, 1908). In these inscriptions Mitra, Varuna, Indra and Nāsatya are mentioned as deities of the Iranian kings of Mitani at the beginning of the 14th century—all of them names with which we are familiar from the Indian pantheon. The Aryan folk religion was polytheistic. Worship was paid to popular divinities, such as the war-god and dragon-slayer Indra, to natural forces and elements such as fire, but the Aryans also believed in the ruling of moral powers and of an eternal law in nature (v. Ed. Meyer in the article Persia: History, § Ancient). On solemn occasions the inspiring drink soma (haoma) ministered to the enjoyment of the devout. Numerous coincidences with the Indian religion survive in Zoroastrianism, side by side with astonishing diversities.
The most striking difference between Zoroaster's doctrine of God and the old religion of India lies in this, that while in the Avesta the evil spirits are called daēva (Modern Persian dīv); the Aryans of India, in common with the Italians, Celts and Letts, gave the name of dēva to their good spirits, the spirits of light. An alternative designation for deity in the Rig-Veda is asura. In the more recent hymns of the Rig-Veda and in later India, on the other hand, only evil spirits are understood by asuras, while in Iran the corresponding word ahura was, and ever has continued to be, the designation of God the Lord. Thus ahura-daēva, dēva-asura in Zoroastrian and in later Brahman theology are in their meanings diametrically opposed.
Asura-daiva represent originally two distinct races of gods (like the Northern Aser and Vaner)—two different aspects of the conception of deity, comparable to δαίμων and δεός. Asura indicates the more sublime and awful divine character, for which man entertains the greater reverence and fear: daiva denotes the kind gods of light, the vulgar—more sensuous and anthropomorphic—deities. This twofold development of the idea of God formed the point of leverage for Zoroaster's reformation. While in India the conception of the asura had veered more and more towards the dreadful and the dreaded, Zoroaster elevated it again—at the cost, indeed, of the daivas (daēvas), whom he degraded to the rank of malicious powers and devils. In one Asura, whose Aryan original was Varuna, he concentrated the whole of the divine character, and conferred upon it the epithet of “the wise” (mazdāo). This culminating stage in the asura-conception is the work of Zoroaster. The Wise Lord (Ahurō Mazdāo—later Ormazd) is the primeval spiritual being, the All-father, who was existent before ever the world arose. From him that world has emanated, and its course is governed by his foreseeing eye. His guiding spirit is the Holy Spirit, which wills the good: yet it is not free, but restricted, in this temporal epoch, by its antagonist and own twin-brother (Yasna, 30, 3), the Evil Spirit (angrō mainyush, Ahriman), who in the beginning was banished by the Good Spirit by means of the famous ban contained in Yasna, 45, 2, and since then drags out his existence in the darkness of Hell as the principle of ill—the arch-devil. In the Gāthās the Good Spirit of Mazda and the Evil Spirit are the two great opposing forces in the world, and Ormazd himself is to a certain extent placed above them both. Later the Holy Spirit is made directly equivalent to Ormazd; and then the great watchword is: “Here Ormazd, there Ahriman!” The very daēvas are only the inferior instruments, the corrupted children of Ahriman, from whom come all that is evil in the world. The daēvas, unmasked and attacked by Zoroaster as the true enemies of mankind, are still, in the Gāthās, without doubt the perfectly definite gods of old popular belief—the idols of the people. For Zoroaster they sink to the rank of spurious deities, and in his eyes their priests and votaries are idolaters and heretics. In the later, developed system the daēvas are the evil spirits in general, and their number has increased to millions. Some few of these have names; and among those names of the old Aryan divinities emerge here and there, e.g. Indra and Nāonhaitya. With some, of course—such as the god of fire—the connexion with the good deity was a priori indissoluble. Other powers of light, such as Mitra the god of day (Iranian Mithra), survived unforgotten in popular belief till the later system incorporated them in the angelic body. The authentic doctrine of the Gāthās had no room either for the cult of Mithra or for that of the Haoma. Beyond the Lord and his Fire, the Gāthās only recognize the archangels and certain ministers of Ormazd, who are, without exception, personifications of abstract ideas. This hypostasization and all-egotization is especially characteristic of the Zoroastrian religion. The essence of Ormazd is Truth and Law (asha = Vedic rta): this quality he embodies, and its personification (though conceived as sexless) is always by his side, a constant companion and intimate. The essence of the wicked spirit is falsehood: and falsehood, as the embodiment of the evil principle, is much more frequently mentioned in the Gāthās than Ahriman himself.
Zoroaster says of himself that he had received from God a
