In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  The idea was that wisdom was everywhere, if only followers could seek it, reach for it and use it. He could have easily said ‘all powerful, all seeing’, Farrokh Vajifdar added, which Zarathustra conveyed in his Gathas, the sixteen or seventeen hymns in the Avesta that were his own compositions. There was no conflict between the material and the mental or spiritual worlds, described as two opposite poles of a unitary whole, where man is a product of the physical form and the spirit.

  This relationship between the material and the spiritual is a complex one for westerners to understand, Alan Williams said, as they have a theological background in western monotheism. Ahura Mazda is the figurehead, the focus, but surrounded by a pantheon of six other spiritual beings, or entities in some sense.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: If you’re a monotheist, you think of these as aspects of God. But, in fact, they work with God, they collaborate. One of them, a very important one, is the idea of Kshatra Vairya, which means the best governance. This is symbolised by the sky, each of these divine beings has a physical correspondent. The sky looks after the earth, which is the next Amesha Spenta, or blessed immortal. And the Spenta Armaiti is the earth and represents holy piety, translated as ‘benevolent piety’.

  Water is spiritualised in the concept of Haurvatāt, which means perfection or wholeness. The next divine being is represented in plant life as Ameretat, immortality. The next very important divine being in this heptad, or group of immortal beings, is the good mind, Vohu Manah, represented by the beneficent animal that is tended by mankind. Humanity itself is the representative of God, Ahura Mazda; the Wise Lord is also known as the Spenta Mainyu, the most holy spirit, and it is man who is the physical embodiment of that most holy spirit. Lastly, there is the notion of supreme truth, Asha Vahishta, embodied in the physical creation of fire, which is a very important religious symbol of Zoroastrianism. These are the realities through which mankind could approach God, embodiments in the physical universe. Ahura Mazda is known primarily as the creator: he created the universe in order to contain the evil spirit and to defeat him ultimately so the world has a purpose.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: This is very difficult to understand, but I can make it clear in this way. This is not ditheism, this is not two gods. Plutarch understood this in first century BC very clearly and he says, the ‘Zoroastrians have one god and one demon.’ And this is how Zarathustra understood the universe, that there were two spirits or two wills and that they’re in conflict with one another. These are not two beings, not two gods, but one monotheistic god and one force of total negativity, which is resisted by man on earth.

  As Zoroastrianism developed, it became more complicated, Melvyn suggested, and, as it was adopted by leaders with military ambitions, it may have become corrupted. That was the way it unfolded in history.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: Alan has mentioned Plutarch, for example; Plutarch, for goodness sake, was situated well in the west. He may have visited Persia, I’m not sure, but the religion originated in the east in a society of pastoralists. The military aspects of the religion were really minimised. In other words, [Zarathustra] used force only to counteract deceit and certainly in self-defence. But there is no militarism involved in it.

  Returning to the compelling nature of Zarathustra’s revelation, Alan Williams preferred to call it a reformation, as Zarathustra was reacting and he was a radical reformer. Zarathustra’s real contribution was that he introduced the idea of an ethical and a soteriological plan, an eschatological plan.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: That’s a long word that simply means a whole line of history that ends in a judgement, a judgement that, he explains, is in terms of our own choice. And it’s this idea that we build our own destiny by making choices for good or choices for evil, in following the good spirit or the evil spirit, and there is a soteriology here, which is extremely attractive, that we can actually build our future and that we’ll be judged on that. And then there’s the promise of heaven or paradise or hell, damnation.

  By the time Zoroastrianism became a state religion, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis continued, the Persian or Iranian tribes had moved into the highlands of Iran. By the time of the first Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, the Persians were well established in what we call now Iran. Depending on the dates for Zoroaster’s life, that would allow perhaps 400 or 500 years for the religion to develop before Cyrus the Great.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: We think that the Achaemenids, the ancient Persians, were Zoroastrians. They do not mention Zarathustra in their inscription, but that is neither here nor there – they don’t need to mention the name of the prophet. They certainly mention again and again Ahura Mazda. All the inscriptions open, ‘By the wish of Ahura Mazda … ’

  The Persians found in Zoroastrianism a religion that was a friend of the person who told the truth and an enemy of the person who told a lie. This was said again and again by Darius in his Behistun Inscription, created in his reign at some point between 522 and 486 BC.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: They follow the righteous path, they introduce a religion that is good. Also, if you look at the figure of Cyrus the Great, he followed a religion that also enabled other people to follow freedom. The Jews were allowed to go back to their homeland and take their cult statues with them. It was a very open religion.

  If someone went to a Zoroastrian temple, they would have seen fire; Zarathustra introduced the worship of fire as a symbol, where the spiritual fire is strengthened through truth. According to Herodotus, the Persians initially had no fire temples.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: The magus, who was a freelance priest, not necessarily a Zoroastrian at the time, would (presumably for a consideration) pray to any god of your choice. And later, when they embraced Zoroastrianism, then, of course, they took over [the practices] in a big way, and we’re very grateful to them because they were the ones responsible for the faithful transmission of Zarathustra’s words.

  Regarding the practices around fire, there was always ritual purity within the person as well, within the worshipper and the priest. The priest had to isolate himself at such times through a very complex ritual.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: In a fire temple, the fire is maintained by priests in the sanctum sanctorum. The worshippers can view it from outside; they say their own prayers in conformity with set prayers, which had been taught to them since childhood. There is no congregational worship in that sense, you do your own thing and pray to whichever aspect of the divinity you wish for.

  In the highest grade temples, the fire burned permanently, constantly maintained by priests who wore a veil over their mouths so that they would not pollute the idea of fire, which had to be kept free of anything extraneous to the wood itself.

  The funeral ceremonies were also distinctive and arose out of the problem of what to do with a body when it was no longer animated, no longer alive.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: In Zoroastrian terms, the body, when the person is alive, is a sacred thing; as we say, the body’s a temple. It’s not considered to be something filthy or something to be spurned. But when the spirit leaves the body, then the body itself is shed like a shell.

  The spirit as it comes out of the body is the person, and this was another of Zarathustra’s insights – that the soul lives on and therefore the soul is judged on the life it has led. The problem remained of what to do with a dead body.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: On the central Asian steppes, in the Iranian desert and, even to this day, in the city of Mumbai, Zoroastrians have to confront the problem of what to do with a corpse. And so we have the idea of the Tower of Silence, which is a form that’s crystallised out of the idea of putting a body on top of a hill and allowing wild animals to dispose of it. This sounds unhygienic to modern western ears but, in fact, it’s a relatively hygienic way of disposing of the dead.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: If I may interrupt, not wild animals, I must stress this – these have to be raptors because the bodies are exposed on open towers, animals cannot get in, not wild dogs nor wolves.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: You’re
absolutely right to correct me on that and the modern practice. But in ancient times …

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: Then the body was actually weighted down so the wild creatures could not drag it to a nearby stream or on to arable land. This was one of the reasons, in fact, we had Towers of Silence.

  The principle of this, Alan Williams said, was that the body should not pollute the earth, it should be raised above the earth, it should not pollute the waters and, above all, it should be distinct from the way that Indians disposed of the dead – for example, the cremation of the corpse was totally forbidden because it would pollute the fire.

  Much of the ideas of Zoroastrianism were, for a long period, transmitted orally rather than written down, a tradition that may be alien in the west but still exists in countries like Iran, for example, and many parts of the Middle East, where people learn to recite stories and poetry, again and again, and keep oral traditions alive.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: We know that it was very important, according to later texts, to recite the Avesta in the original language. This is the holy book of the Zoroastrian, which is the words of the prophet himself. It was very important for these priests to preserve this tradition and they also recited these prayers in the original language, which is exactly like the language of the Gathas and Zoroaster.

  Crucially, added Alan Williams, in ancient oral cultures, orality was accompanied by ritual action; every word of the Yasna, the sacred liturgy of the Zoroastrian rite, was accompanied by sacramental actions.

  As for why the Gathas and the Yasna were committed to writing, Farrokh Vajifdar suggested that those who transcribed them were losing touch with the original language and they had to fix it down.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: Also, there is a question of why this alphabet was invented, based on an earlier consonantal alphabet, and the answer must be (this is conjecture perhaps) [that] the religion came from the east, where the pronunciation of the original Gathic words was rather different to the south-west, where it emigrated as a state religion. Before they lost touch, they felt they had to commit this to writing. And this is around about the sixth century perhaps.

  Turning to the influence of Zoroastrianism, Farrokh Vajifdar noted the big names in Greek culture who wanted to find out about it. Pythagoras was supposed to have visited or wanted to visit Persia. Plato might have been to Syria, where he met some of the magi, and, as a kind of honorary consul, he did meet the magi in Athens.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: A magus is supposed to have visited Plato on the last evening of his life and, of course, before then there were interchanges with them. Now the curious thing is why did they all wish to go to Iran? Right up to the times of Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, the founder of Neoplatonists, Porphyry, all these people. Why Iran? Again, they tell you it was either to meet the successors of Zarathustra or, in the earliest cases, perhaps to meet with Zarathustra himself.

  Regarding the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism and Christianity (or which came first, Judaism or Zoroastrianism), Melvyn observed that people were going to argue about that outside the studio for a very long time. There were apparently interconnections between Judaism and Zoroastrianism, perhaps from a time when Nebuchadnezzar took the leading members of the Jews to Babylon where they stayed until Cyrus let them to go back.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: We’re talking about a milieu in the ancient world when the Jews were tremendously grateful to Cyrus and to the Achaemenians for liberating them and allowing them to go to Jerusalem to build a temple. In a nutshell, the postexilic books of the Bible show signs of having incorporated many ideas. I think now it’s generally accepted that the way in which the postexilic books have changed is that they’re distinct. This idea of eschatology, ideas of judgement, ideas of future life, these then take on a much larger role in both Judaism and Christianity.

  There was also the idea of the saviour in the Gathas, in the sense that Zarathustra talked about himself as one who came to heal the world. The saviour is there in most ancient texts and, of course, in Christianity.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: Zarathustra’s teachings talk about the Saoshyant, the saviour of the world, who rules at the end of the world and, according to Zarathustra’s doctrine, the world comes to an end – there are 3,000 years and the last 1,000 years are ruled by Saoshyant, he’s the saviour. He’s the one who raises the bones of the dead, and he is the one who helps Ahura Mazda give them back their life.

  This great religion, Melvyn observed, which went through so many centuries and three Persian empires, was heavily challenged by the Muslim invasions of the seventh century, after which about 95 per cent of Zoroastrians converted to Islam and a few of the others went to Gujarat, where the Parsis still practise Zoroastrianism. To this day, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis added, there is a very small minority in southern Iran who follow this faith. But what she found most fascinating was the way Shia Islam created a branch of Islam that, to her, shows strong parallels with Zoroastrianism.

  Painting depicting Zarathustra speaking with Goshtasb, the king of Persia, from a Zoroastrian temple in Isfahan, Iran.

  VESTA SARKHOSH CURTIS: The greatest influence of Zoroastrianism or the Iranian religion came to Shia Islam. This is the branch of Islam that believes that, after the prophet Mohammad, there are twelve imams, and the twelfth imam is the saviour. He disappears and he reappears on the last day of judgement. I think this whole idea of Shia Islam has very Zoroastrian nuances, the whole idea of creating this line. Also, in Shia Islam, legend has it, and we believe, that the wife of Imam Husayn, the daughter-in-law of Imam Ali, was an Iranian princess.

  A good number of Zoroastrians went from the Persian Empire into Gujarat and settled there, where the religion developed.

  FARROKH VAJIFDAR: It would be safer to call it Parsiism, which has certain Zoroastrian roots, but they were certainly heavily influenced by Hindu ideas, Hindu customs, which is inevitable with their long stay.

  He and Alan Williams concluded with a remark on the Sasanian Empire, which was a very repressive regime and did no favours to Zoroastrianism, which may have been an additional reason Islam caught on, even if it did take centuries before the 95 per cent of Zoroastrians converted to Islam, as Melvyn mentioned earlier.

  THE PUTNEY DEBATES

  St Mary’s Church, Putney, stands on the south bank of the Thames about 6 miles upriver from central London. Inside, a slate plaque commemorates a seismic event that started here during the English Civil War and went on to influence politics in England and abroad for centuries. The possibility of modern democracy could be said to have emerged here. On 28 October 1647, Oliver Cromwell and other members of the New Model Army met in St Mary’s Church, as it turned out, to discuss a new constitution for England. Charles I had been defeated and imprisoned, and it seemed a new future beckoned. There were still religious and political differences to be overcome and, over many days of discussions, the participants tried to resolve them. But, within a month, the king had escaped and the talks ended without agreement. Nevertheless, the Putney Debates are commonly regarded as a major advance in our idea of what democracy is and how it can be realised.

  Oliver Cromwell.

  With Melvyn to discuss the Putney Debates were: Justin Champion, emeritus professor of the history of early modern ideas and honorary fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London; Ann Hughes, emerita professor of early modern history at Keele University; and Kate Peters, fellow in history at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

  The English Civil War had started about five years before the Putney Debates. By 1640, Charles I had alienated most of the local elites who were represented in parliament; the underlying tensions between the king and parliament were over principles of religion and principles of politics.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: This king believed he was appointed by God and could pretty much do what he wanted, he didn’t need the counsel of parliamentarians. Most of the political nation believed they had some role in governing the kingdom, even if only to give counsel for the king. By 1640, these two politi
cal factions were fighting in Westminster. By 1642, because of an atmosphere of conspiracy, where Charles I was regarded as ultimately being in league with the Antichrist, compromising true religion, parliamentarians thought it necessary to fight a war.

  That war was bloody, brutal and protracted, with a first and then a second civil war, which included great set pieces as well as assassinations and murderous conflicts in villages. It was thought that God’s providence would decide who was wrong and who was right through what happened on the battlefields. As the war progressed, a revolutionary spirit was at large and the king’s opponents moved from wanting to negotiate with him to finding it impossible to hold talks, as so much blood had, by then, been spilt. There was still expected to be a peaceable resolution, though, and, in the early stages, nobody wanted to kill the king.

  Parliament established a New Model Army of 20,000 in 1645 to fight the king’s forces and, in time, some of these soldiers would turn into statesmen with a role in the Putney Debates.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: One of the huge problems was: ‘How do we negotiate a peace settlement with somebody who’s clearly behaving badly, maybe corrupted by the Antichrist, but is still appointed by God?’ And one of the problems is parliament doesn’t quite know what to do. Presbyterians in parliament want to negotiate a peace. Those soldiers who fought, and had seen their comrades die, realised that really parliament wasn’t driving them forwards.

  The English, with the help of a Scottish army, had decisively defeated the king. The New Model Army had a series of stunning victories, Ann Hughes said, and God had shown his providence in their support, but there was still no clear way to a settled peace. Perhaps the majority wanted a settlement with the king and the expensive army to be disbanded so they could go back to the old ways. There was a significant opposing view among the New Model Army.