Zoroastrianism
Book · Iranian Traditions · 1323
The Gāthās
Memorised for Two Millennia
The sacred hymns attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, forming the poetic foundation of Zoroastrian ethics and faith.
SignificanceTheir whole moral architecture is one opposition: aša, truth and right order, against druj, the Lie. Every person is asked to choose, and the choice is treated as genuinely open — a cosmos whose outcome depends on decisions still being made.
The FindingThe oldest surviving copies of the Gāthās are two Yasna manuscripts written in Gujarat in 1323 by the priest Mihrābān Kayhusraw — more than two millennia after the hymns were composed, and long after the Sasanian priests who rendered them into Pahlavi had, Humbach judged, ceased to understand Avestan properly.
Book · around 800 CE
The Avesta
A Liturgy, Not a Book
Zoroastrian scripture in Avestan, held as Ahura Mazdā's revelation to Zarathustra and recited to this day.
SignificanceIt is arranged for recitation rather than for reading: the Yasna is what is said while the ritual is performed, and the text's order is the liturgy's order. The meaning is held to be in the saying, which is why it was transmitted orally for centuries before it was written.
The FindingThe first European Avesta, published by Anquetil-Duperron in Paris in 1771, was called a Parsi forgery in the same year by William Jones — whose grievance, on Michael Franklin's account, was that Anquetil had falsely accused Oxford's Thomas Hunt of professing Avestan and complained of the Bodleian's unheated rooms — and Anquetil was not vindicated until Tychsen and Heeren, some twenty years later.
Practice · The Ancient World○
The Tauroctony and the Seven Grades
The central image of a god slaying a bull, and the seven-stage initiatory ladder of the Roman mystery cult built around it.
What it isThe cult's seven grades, Raven, Bride, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-Runner and Father, each stood under a planet, echoing the ladder of seven planetary gates through which, Celsus reports, the soul passed. Grain sprouting from the dying bull's tail pictures the slaying as the sacrifice from which life springs.
The FindingThe cult was long explained as a Roman import of Persian Zoroastrianism. That theory was formally rejected by scholars at a 1971 international conference — the seven grades are documented in Roman sources on their own terms and do not need a Persian origin to explain them.