“The purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of things.”

So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra.

“And what was there at the beginning?” the prophet asked.

“There was light and the living Word." Long later the statement was repeated in the Gospel attributed to John.  Originally it occurred in the course of a conversation that the Avesta reports.  In a similar manner Exodus provides a revelation which Moses received.  There Jehovah said:  ’ehyeh ’[)a]sher ’ehyeh.  In the Avesta Ormuzd said:  ahmi yad ahmi. Word for word the declarations are identical.  Each means I am that I am.

The conformity of the pronouncements may be fortuitous.  Their relative priority uncertain chronology obscures.  The date that orthodoxy has assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C.  Plutarch said that Zarathrustra lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy.  Both dates are perhaps questionable.  But a possible hypothesis philology provides.  The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew Jhvh, now usually written Jahveh and commonly translated:  He who causes to be. The original rendering of Ormuzd is Ahura-mazda.  Ahura means living and mazdao creator.  The period when Exodus was written is probably post-exilic.  The period when the Avesta was completed is assumed to be pre-Cyrian.  It was at the junction of the two epochs that Iran and Israel met.

But, however the pronouncements may conform, however also they may confuse, the one reported in Exodus is alone exact.  In subsequent metamorphoses the name might fade, the deity remained.  Whereas, save to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, once omnipotent throughout the Persian sky, has gone.  A time, though, there was, when from his throne in the ideal he menaced the apathy of Brahm, the majesty of Zeus, when even from the death of deaths he might have ejected Buddha and, supreme in the Orient, ruled also in the West.  Salamis prevented that.  But one may wonder whether the conquest had not already been effected, whether for that matter the results are not apparent still.  Brahma, Ormuzd, Zeus, Jupiter, are but different conceptions of a primal idea.  They are four great gods diversely represented yet originally identical, and whose attributes Jahveh, in his ascensions, perhaps absorbed.

Ormuzd represented purity and light.  For his worship no temple was necessary, barely a shrine, never an image.  In his celestial court were parikas, the glittering bayadères of love that a later faith called péris, but his sole consorts were Prayers.  About him and them gathered amshaspands and izeds, angels and seraphs, the winged host of loveliness that in Babylon enthralled the Jews who returned from captivity escorted by them.  The allurement of their charm, enchanting then, enchants the world to-day.  There has been little that is more poetic, except perhaps Ormuzd himself, who symbolized whatever is blinding in beauty, particularly the sun’s effulgence, the radiance of light.

The light endures, though the god has gone.  Yet at the time, aloof in clear ether and aloft, he resplended in a sovereignty that only Ahriman disputed.

Ahriman has been more steadfast than Ormuzd.  He too captivated the captive Hebrews.  The latter adopted him and called him Satan, as they also adopted one of his minor legates, Ashmodai ­transformed by the Vulgate into Asmodeus ­a little jealous devil who, in the apocryphal Tobit, strangled husbands on their bridal nights.  Ahriman, his master, represented everything that was the opposite of Ormuzd.  Ahriman dwelt in darkness, Ormuzd in light.  Ormuzd was primate of purity; Ahriman, prince of whatever is base.  One had angels and archangels for aids, the other fiends and demons.  Between their forces war was constant.  Each strove for the soul of man.  But after death, when, in the balance, the deeds of the defunct were weighed, there appeared a golden-eyed redeemer, Mithra, who so closely resembled the Christ that the world hesitated, for a moment, between them.

It was because of these conceptions that Persia dreamed of conquering the West.  At Marathon and at Salamis that illusion was looted.  History tells of the cohorts that descended there.  It relates further what they did.  But of what they thought there is no record.  It was, perhaps, too obvious.  Ormuzd, god of light and, in the Orient, god of the day, was, in the darker and duller Occident, menaced there also by Ahriman.  Politically the expedition is not very explicable.  Considered from a religious standpoint the motive is clear.  But though the Persian forces could not uphold their light in Greece, higher forces projected it far beyond, to the remote north, to a south that was still remoter.

Originally the light was Vedic.  It was identical with that of Agni, of Indra and of Varuna.  But while these, without subsidence, passed, absorbed by Brahm, the light of Iran, deflecting, persisted, and so potently that it lit the Teutonic sky, glows still in Christendom, after refracting perhaps in Inca temples.  Its revelation is due to Zarathrustra.

Zarathrustra, commonly written Zoroaster, is a name translatable into “star of gold” and also into “keeper of old camels.”  Probably it was first employed to designate an imaginary prophet, and then a series of spiritual though actual successors by whom, in the course of centuries, the Avesta was evolved.  Otherwise Zarathrustra and Gotama are brothers in Brahmanaspati.  Both had virgin mothers.  In the lives of both miracles are common.  The advent of Zarathrustra was accounted the ruin of demons.  When he was born he laughed aloud.  As a child he slept in flames.  As a man he walked on water.  Before prodigies such as these fiends fell like autumn leaves.  Hence, on the part of the devil, an attempt to seduce him from the divine.  Mairya, the demon of death, offered him, as Mara offered Gotama, as Satan offered Jesus, the empire of the earth.  Zarathrustra rebuked the devil first with stones, then with pious words.  From him, as from the Buddha and the Christ, abashed the tempter retreated.

That victory over evil, the Parsis to-day regard as the capital event in the history of the world.  It was the immediate prelude to the revelation of the Law which Ormuzd vouchsafed to his prophet.

The revelation occurred on a mountain, in the course of conversations, during which Zarathrustra questioned and Ormuzd, in the voice of heaven, replied.  So was the Law proclaimed in India.  There Mithra and Varuna sang it through the sky. The expression is notable, for the song of the sky is thunder and the theophany that of Sinai.  There is another rapprochement in Babylonian lore and a third in the Eddas, where it is related that to Sigurd the secret of the runes was sung.

Meanwhile, the revelation completed and proclaimed, Zarathrustra died as miraculously as he was born, foretelling, as he went, the coming of a messiah, his own son, Coshyos ­the delayed fruit of an immaculate hymen that is not to be fecund until the end of time ­but who, at the consummation of the ages, will rejuvenate the world, affranchise it from death, vanquish Ahriman, terminate the struggle between good and evil, purify hell and fill it full with glory.  Then the dead shall rise and immortality be universal.

Zoroaster is obviously mythical.  The Buddha is also.  But precisely as the Buddhist scriptures exist, so also do the Zoroastrian.  They do more.  Frequently they enlighten, occasionally they exalt.  Written in gold on perfumed leather, the original edition, limited to two copies, was so sacred that it was sullied if seen.  Burned with the palace of Persepolis ­which Alexander, the Great Sinner, in a drunken orgy, destroyed ­only fragments of the fargards remain.  These tell of creation, effected in six epochs, and of a pairi-daeza.

Delitzsch voluminously asked:  Wo lag das Paradies? There it is.  There is the primal paradise.  In it Ormuzd put Mashya, the first man, and Mashyana, the first woman, whom Ahriman, in the form of a serpent, seduced.  Thereafter ensued the struggle in which all have or will participate, one that, extending beyond the limits of the visible world, arrays seasons and spirits and the senses of man in a conflict of good and evil that can end only when, from the depths of the dawn, radiant in the vermillion sky, Coshyos, hero of the resurrection, triumphantly appears.

The parallel between this romance and subsequent poetry is curious.  In Chaldea, before the fargards were, the story of Creation, of Eden, and of the fall had been told.  In Egypt, before the Avesta was written, the resurrection and the life were known.  Similar legends and prospects may or may not represent an autonomous development of Iranian thought.  The successors of the problematic Zarathrustra, the line of magi who wrote and taught in his name, may have gathered the tales and theories elsewhere.  In the creed which they instituted there is a trinity.  India had one, Egypt another, Babylonia a third.  Babylonia had even three of them.  But in Mithra, Iran had a redeemer that no other creed possessed.  In Coshyos was a saviour, virgin born, who nowhere else was imagined.  In Mara, Buddhism had a Satan.  The Persian Ahriman is Satan himself.  Babylon had angels and cherubs.  In Iran there were guardian angels, there were archangels with flaming swords, there were fairies, there were goblins, the celestial, the poetic, the demoniac combined.  Zoroasterism may or may not have had a past, it is perhaps evident that it had a future.

An inscription chiselled in the red granite of Ekbatana describes Ormuzd as creator of heaven and earth.  In the Veda the description of Indra is identical. It was applied equally to Jahveh in Judea.  But above Jahveh, Kabbalists discerned En Soph.  Above Indra metaphysicians discovered Brahma.  Similarly the Persian magi found that Ormuzd, however perfect, was not perfect enough and, from the depths of the ideal, they disclosed Zervan Akerene, the Eternal, from whom all things come and to whom all return.

That conception is not reached in the Avesta.  It is in the Bundahish, a work which, while much later, is based on earlier traditions, memories it may be, of antediluvian legends brought from the summits of upper Asia by Djemschid, the fabulous Abraham of the Persians of whom Zarathrustra was the Moses.  But in default of the Eternal, the Avesta contains pictures of enduring charm.

Among these is a highly poetic pastel that displays the soul of man surprised in the first post-mortem ambuscades.  There a figure, beautiful or revolting, cries at him:  “I am thyself, the image of thine earthly life.”

If that life has been beautiful, the soul of man, led by itself, is conducted to heaven.  Otherwise, led still by itself, it descended to Drujo-demana, the House of Destruction, where, fed on insults and offal, it waited till its sins were destroyed.  The waiting might be long.  It was not everlasting.  There was Mithra to intercede.  Besides, evil was regarded but as a shadow on the surface of things.  In the seventh epoch of creation, a period yet to be, the age which Coshyos is to usher, the shadow will fade.  The wicked, purified of their wickedness, will be received among the blessed.  Even Ahriman is to be converted.  In that definite triumph of light over darkness is the resurrection and the life, life in Garo-demana, literally House of Hymns, a pre-Christian heaven, yet strictly Christian, where, to the trumpetings of angels, hosannahs are ceaselessly sung.

John ­or, more exactly, his homonym ­was perhaps acquainted with that idea, as he may have been with other theories that the Avesta contains.  But the possibility is a detail.  It is the idea that counts.  Behind it is the unique character of this doctrine which, in eliminating evil, converted even Satan.

Satan seldom gets his due.  He was the first artist and has remained the greatest.  In creating evil he fashioned what is a luxury and a necessity combined.  Evil is the counterpart of excellence.  Both have their roots in nature.  One could not be destroyed without the other.  For every form of evil there is a corresponding form of good.  Virtue would be meaningless were it not for vice.  Honour would have no nobility were it not for shame.  If ever evil be banished from the scheme of things, life could have no savour and joy no delight.  Happiness and unhappiness would be synonymous terms.

It is for this reason that scoffers have mocked at heaven.  Heaven may be very different from what has been fancied.  But the theory of it, however unphilosophic, which Zoroasterism supplied, carried with it a creed not of tears but of smiles, a religion of lofty tolerance, one in which the demonology barely alarmed, for redemption was assured, and so fully that on earth melancholy was accounted a folly.

Though tolerant, it could be austere.  Meanness, thanklessness, loquaciousness, jealousy, an unbecoming attire, evil thoughts, whatever is sensual, whatever is coarse, any promenade in mud actual or metaphorical, severely it condemned.  Particularly was avarice censured.  “There are many who do not like to give,” Ormuzd, in the Vendidad, confided to Zarathrustra.  The high god added:  “Ahriman awaits them.”

Ahriman awaited also the harlot who, elsewhere, at that period, was holy.  Yet in lapses, confession and repentance sufficed for remission, provided that in praying for forgiveness the sinner forgave those that had sinned against him.  If he lacked the time, were he dying, a priest might yet save him with words whispered in the ear.  That was the extreme unction, hardly administrable, however, in case of wilful omission of the darun, which was communion.

This sacrament, the most mystic of the Church, was observed by the Incas, who also confessed, also atoned, who, like the Buddhists, were baptized, but who, like the Persians, worshipped the sun and, with perhaps a finer instinct of what the beautiful truly is, worshipped too the rainbow.

Huraken, the winged and feathered serpent-god of the Toltecs, was adored in temples that upheld a cross.  The Incas lacked that symbol.  But they had a Satan.  They had also the expectation of a saviour, belief in whom could alone have consoled for the advent of Pizarro.  Over what highways of sea or sky, the living Word, which Ormuzd spoke, reached them, there has been no somnambulist of history to divine.  But in the splendour that Cuzco was, in the golden temples of the town of gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred peacocks strolled and girls more sacred still ­vestals whom Pizarro’s soldiers raped ­in that City of the Sun, the Word re-echoed.  The mystery of it, reported back to the Holy Office, was declared an artifice of the devil.

Less mysteriously, through the obvious vehicle of cognate speech, it reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie sagas.  Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite as black as Ahriman and his cohorts.  The conflict of good and evil is almost as fully dire.  But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd.  The aesir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the izeds.  The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of Mithra.  Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garo-demana, was more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns.

What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light.  However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north its rays were lost.  The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set the gods in twilight.  It stirred the scalds to runes but not to inspiration.  There is none in the Eddas.  Nor was there any in the Nibelungen, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the flaming scores of Wagner.

Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from their secular slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their Occidental apotheosis, and, it may be, on steps of song, mounted to the ideal where Zervan Akerene muses.