Zoroastrian

Zoroastrian divinity is arranged as an opposition, and the opposition is moral rather than genealogical. Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, is the creator and the ruler, uncreated and wholly good. Against him stands the hostile spirit, Angra Mainyu, whose existence is not derived from him and whose activity is destruction. The world is the field on which that conflict is worked out and is expected to end.

Around Ahura Mazda stand the Amesha Spentas, the bounteous immortals, six figures who are at once persons and qualities, good purpose, best truth, desirable dominion, holy devotion, wholeness and immortality, each associated with a part of the good creation. Below them the yazatas, beings worthy of worship, include figures with deep Indo-Iranian roots such as Mithra and Anahita.

There is no succession here, because there are no generations. Ahura Mazda does not have a father he displaced, and the Amesha Spentas are brought into being by him rather than born. A pantheon organised as a single creative act rather than as a family history is rare, and it is one of the sharpest contrasts the atlas can draw with the Greek or the Hittite arrangement.

The daevas, whose name is cognate with the Sanskrit word for the gods, are on the wrong side. That reversal, in which the divine class of one branch of a shared inheritance becomes the demonic class of another, is one of the most striking facts in comparative religion.

The Avesta that survives is a fragment of what once existed, and the tradition itself says so. Later Zoroastrian literature describes a much larger collection in many books, of which what remains is the liturgical core, preserved because it was recited.

Within it the Gathas stand apart. They are in an older dialect, they are metrically distinct, and they are attributed to Zarathushtra himself. They are also extremely difficult: the language is archaic, the poetry is compressed, and translations diverge to a degree that has real consequences for what the religion is taken to have originally taught.

The Avestan texts were transmitted orally for a very long time before an alphabet was devised specifically to record their sounds, and the manuscripts that carry them are comparatively recent. Priestly transmission preserved pronunciation with great fidelity across centuries in which understanding of the language itself was fading.

The Middle Persian literature of the ninth century and after, the Bundahishn among it, supplies systematic cosmology and law. It is invaluable and it is late, written under Islamic rule by a community defending and consolidating itself, and it should not be read straight back onto the Gathas.

Outside sources add a further layer: Greek and Roman writers on the magi, Achaemenid royal inscriptions that invoke Ahura Mazda without mentioning Zarathushtra, and the practice of the living community in Iran and among the Parsis of India.