Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The society into which Zarathustra addressed his ideas was a people who venerated fire and worshipped the familiar gods of earth and sky, plus a host of daevas, spirits and demons.⁹⁸ Zoroastrians believe that Zarathustra received a revelation direct from the one true god, Ahura Mazda. In accepting the revelation, he imitated the primordial act of god – the choice of good. This is a crucial aspect of Zoroastrianism: man is invited to follow the path of the Lord, but he is free in that choice – he is not a slave or a servant.⁹⁹ Ahura Mazda was also the father of a set of twins, Spenta Mainyu, the Good Spirit, and Angra Mainyu, the Destroying Spirit. These twins respectively choose Asha, justice, and Druj, deceit.¹⁰⁰

Zarathustra referred to himself several times as a ‘saviour’ and this helped to shape his idea of heaven and the soul. In the religion of the day, which Zarathustra was born into, only priests and aristocrats were understood to have immortal souls, only they could go to heaven, whereas the laity were consigned to hell.¹⁰¹ He changed all that. He condemned the sacrifice of cattle as cruel and denounced the priestly cult of Haoma, which may have been a hallucinogenic plant related to the Soma mentioned in Hindu scriptures, and possibly cannabis or hemp, which Herodotus records as being used in rituals by the steppe nomads.¹⁰² At the same time, there is some evidence that early Zoroastrianism was itself an ecstatic religion, with even Zarathustra using bhang (hemp).¹⁰³ The name of paradise in the new religion was garo demana, or ‘House of Song’, and there are ancient accounts of shamans reaching ecstasy by singing for long periods of time. The House of Song was in theory open to all in Zoroastrianism, but only the righteous actually got there. The road to the beyond passed over the Cinvat Bridge where the just and the wicked were divided, sinners remaining for ever in the House of Evil.¹⁰⁴ The idea of a river dividing this world from the next is found in many faiths, while the idea of a Judgement became a major feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, as were hell and the devil.¹⁰⁵ One verse of the Gathas says that the soul remains close to a person’s body after death, but after three days a wind arises. For the righteous it is a perfumed wind which quickly transports the soul to ‘the lights without beginning, paradise’, but for others it is a cold north wind, which drives the sinner to the zone of darkness.¹⁰⁶ Note the delay of three days.

The Israelites had been taken into captivity in 586 BC, by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzer. In 539, however, Babylon was captured by Cyrus, a Persian king who had also defeated the Medes and the Lydians. He and his followers spread Zoroastrianism throughout the Middle East. Cyrus freed the Jews and allowed them back to their homeland. It is no accident, therefore, that he is one of only two foreign kings to be treated with respect in the Hebrew scriptures (the other is Abimelech, in Genesis 21). It is no accident that Judaism, and therefore Christianity and Islam, share many features of Zoroastrianism.

The Buddha was not a god and he was not really a prophet. But the way of life that he came to advocate was the result of his dissatisfaction with the development of a new merchant class in the towns, their materialism and greed, and with the local priesthood, their obsession with sacrifice and tradition. His answer was to ask men to look deep inside themselves to find a higher purpose in life. In that, conditions in India in the sixth–fifth century BC paralleled those in Israel.