When Touraj Daryaee suggested publishing a collection of my essays on ancient Iranian religion, I was both surprised and delighted. While I have worked on other themes, cultures, and traditions at times, none has consistently held and rewarded my interest to the same extent as pre-Islamic Iran. And although I have always preferred to function as a comparatist, some of the authors I most admire (Arthur Christensen, Émile Benveniste, Marijan Molé), some of the teachers to whom I am most indebted (Carsten Colpe, William Malandra), some of the colleagues I respect most highly (Jean Kellens, Clarisse Herrenschmidt, Matthew Stolper), and some of my finest students (Heidar Azodanloo, Matthew Canepa, Ted Good) have been Iranists proper and to work in conversation with them has been a rare privilege.
The chapters that follow were written piecemeal over nearly half a century.1 They are organized in four parts according to the body of evidence they engage most directly: Avestan, Old Persian, Pahlavi, and Iranian materials in comparison with other data. Within each part, the chapters appear in the order of their original publication, running from papers written when I was still a graduate student (Chapters 15 and 16) to those written within the last several years (Chapters 4, 5, 8, 19, and 20). With the exception of Chapter Twenty, all have been previously published, as indicated in the first note of each chapter.
Thematically, this body of work is pretty varied, including studies of myths, especially those with cosmogonic implications (Chapters 2, 5, 11, 15, 18), ritual practices, particularly those concerned with purity and pollution (Chapters 4, 14, 16, 19), cosmological constructions of space and time (Chapters 6, 17), points of intersection between religion, ethics, law, and politics (Chapters 4, 6, 7, 8, 19), ideological aspects of scientific and medical theorizing (Chapters 9, 10, 13, 20), social organization and gender relations (Chapters 1, 2, 9, 10, 14), and other diverse topics. No grand theory inspired these researches, whose coherence, I believe, reflects that of the Mazdaean tradition, which – like most religious systems that precede the fragmentation of knowledge into specialized disciplines – aspired to encompass all aspects of existence and experience within one unified understanding of reality.
Thus, as I meandered from one quirky topic to another, I kept getting led back to the recurrent perspectives from which Mazdaean theorists addressed all issues and questions. Often enough, I simply decided to research a detail that prompted my curiosity: the way Zoroastrians theorized whirlwinds (Chapter 12), insects (Chapter 4), and sexual reproduction (Chapter 9), or the way Achaemenid rulers moved among their capitals (Chapter 17) or put certain images on their coins (Chapter 8), to cite a few examples. Gradually, I came to perceive a common logic uniting the disparate materials I had chosen to study: a remarkably subtle, perceptive, challenging, and consistent understanding of reality.
From a few basic – but extraordinarily broad and bold – postulates, all elements of this worldview logically followed. In the first place, spirit was understood to precede matter and divinity was theorized as possessing absolute benevolence, omniscience, and creativity, but less than omnipotent power. This opened the door for its radical antithesis – a primeval malevolence marked by ignorance, envy, and destructive rage – to corrupt the perfect material beings the divine brought out of eternity into historic time and terrestrial space. Divine benevolence desired that existence be perfect, characterized by unity, tranquility, the absence of any tangible needs, and the life-sustaining qualities of warmth, moisture, light, and truth. Divine omniscience knew, however, that it lacked the power to ensure this primordial perfection would last, given the threat posed by its antithetical antagonist. Once extant, material being surely would be – and was – assaulted by the countless disintegrative forces that produce its undoing, like need, want, hunger, thirst, lust, despair, ignorance, lies, confusion, anger, conflict, disease, fatigue, darkness, cold, desiccation, the passage of time and the aging process. Invaded, infected, and corrupted by such forces, the divinely-created beings lost their perfection, falling subject to death and decay.
In the time and space wherein we mortals pass our lives, all existence is thus marked by ontological and ethical ambivalence. In the first place, there is the duality of matter and spirit, qualitatively different levels and aspects of being that combine to create living bodies, but which separate upon death. Second, elements of good and evil are both inevitably present not quite, but almost ab origine, since the primordial ideal was quickly marred and perverted by the admixture of its demonic antithesis. All fire thus has smoke and all water has pollutants, although the degree of smokiness and pollution varies from one fire or body of water to another. Similarly, the degree of ignorance, malice, falsehood, and ill health varies among living species, groups, and individuals, but no creature living in historic time is entirely free of such defects. Yet as we were initially created by the divine and only corrupted by the demonic at a later stage of existence, it is the inherent nature and responsibility of all living creatures to struggle against the disintegrative forces of non-being, so as to restore the original ideal of perfect truth, harmony, satiety, and contentment the divine intended for all existence. That ideal, moreover, is confidently expected to reappear at the end of history, when good will definitively overcome all that is evil and destructive.2
In the meantime, the struggle between being and non-being, the divine and the demonic, characterizes every moment of historic time and affects every aspect of embodied material existence. The goal of all thought is to better understand the nature of the struggle, so one can speak and act in ways that help truth, goodness, and life prevail against darkness, deception, and non-being. One studies astronomy and astrology, for instance, not from idle curiosity or concern for one’s individual fortune, but to ascertain the state of contention in the heavens between the (mostly) Ohrmazdean constellations and the (primarily) Ahrimanian planets (chapter 13). Similarly, geographic and climatological knowledge were used to organize the Achaemenid king’s annual peregrinations, so he could always be located at the point where the balance of warmth and moisture was most conducive to life’s flourishing, for which he was responsible (Chapter 17). Yet again, a whole set of dietary prescriptions was established with the aim – quite literally – of keeping the cook’s hair out of the soup, not out of aesthetic considerations, but because hair is dead matter and as such threatens the life-sustaining force of proper nutrition (Chapter 14). Having theorized all existence in historic time, worldly space, and corporeal matter as an incessant battle between the divine and the demonic, truth and falsehood, life’s flourishing and bodily decay, the Mazdaean tradition attempts to provide theoretical grounding and practical instructions to all combatants in the struggle (Chapter 5).
It is easy to be caught up in the ideology, rhetoric, and self-understanding of this tradition: to sense and admire its ideals, purpose, and enormous ambition, as well as the painstaking attention it devoted to even the smallest details. Much of what I have learned from studying these details leads me to profound respect and appreciation for the intelligence, moral purpose, and systematicity of that tradition. Yet being an embodied being within historic time, I too am inevitably marked by a certain ambivalence and see that tradition – which, like all religious traditions, is a human creation existing in historic time – as itself ambiguous and contradictory. Thus, in addition to all that is admirable in the Mazdaean perspective, there is also the potential for its insistence on morally-freighted binary oppositions (good/evil, divine/demonic, light/darkness, truth/falsehood, foul/fragrant, center/periphery, life/death) to be brought into simplistic alignment with the contrast of Us and Them, such that men could assert their superiority to women (Chapter 10), Iranians to foreigners (Chapters 1, 17), Zoroastrians to those of other religions (Chapter 14). None of this should be ignored or argued away, but neither should it overshadow and discredit the utopian vision and aspirations of the Mazdaean tradition. Rather, consistent with its own commitments and perspective, we should understand the tradition itself as imperfect, flawed, and subject to corruption, but struggling to realize the perfection it imagines and thematizes in such clear and cogent fashion.
In addition to the essays collected here, I have written about ancient Iran on numerous other occasions: Priests, Warriors and Cattle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), Myth, Cosmos, and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Death, War, and Sacrifice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), within the context of Indo-European religions; Religion, Empire, and Torture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and “Happiness for Mankind” (Louvain: Peeters, 2012), with a focus on the Achaemenid empire; and individual studies in Discourse and the Construction of Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 38–50, Theorizing Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 183–91, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 109–20, and Apples & Oranges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 73–121 and 147–83.
The model of time, in which primordial eternity and eschatological eternity mirror each other in their perfection, but contrast sharply with the finite historic time they encompass, mirrors the way space is understood, whereby Ohrmazd resides in the boundless above and Ahriman in the boundless below, while the finite space between them becomes their battleground. The model also suggests a homology between the nature of the cosmos and the life of an individual, since the time allotted to any life is finite, filled with a mixture of good and evil, and characterized by strife, in contrast to the absolute peace and tranquility of the infinite time preceding that person’s birth and the infinite time that will unfold after his or her death.