Zoroaster
Zoroaster (a.k.a. Zarathustra) was priest, profit, and founder of the Zoroasterian faith.
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Notes
Not much is known about Zoroaster. "The only sure thing is that the prophet hated cruel aristocrats." [1]
He was compassionate and concerned with human suffering, malice, disease, oppression, and poverty.
"He considers that life is not woven of the tissues of joy and happiness alone, but of considerable sorrow and misery also. Injustice and inequity, strife and oppression, poverty and destitution, greed [14] and avarice, wrath and rapine, falsehood and deceit, envy and malice, hatred and jealousy, crime and vice, sorrow and suffering, filth and disease confront him everywhere. He is keenly responsive to human sufferings and the groans and sighs of the agonized hearts. The misery of the multitude touches his heart. His flesh creeps, his heart is heavily oppressed, and his spirit is depressed at the sight of this dark side of human life. He suffers at the sight of suffering and, with eyes suffused with tears, he lives from day unto day thinking and brooding over the woes of the world. Zarathushtra doubts the goodness of gods....He finds that barren formalism, sanctimonious scrupulosity, meticulous ablutions, superstitious fear, and display of external holiness pass for religion. Zarathushtra doubts the religion of his birth."[2]
"According to the tradition Zoroaster was thirty, the time of ripe wisdom, when revelation finally came to him....It is said that Zoroaster being at a gathering met to celebrate a spring festival, went at dawn to a river to fetch water for the haoma-ceremony. He waded in to draw fro midstream; and when he returned to the bank - himself in a state of ritual purity, emerging from the pure element, water, in the freshness of spring dawn - he had a vision."[3]
Zoroaster had several more Connection Experiences, in which he received truths from a Heptad of beings (Vohu Manah, Ahura Mazda and "five other radiant figures."). His revelations, recorded orally in 17 Gathas, became the foundation for the development of the globally influential Zoroasterian faith.[4]
Footnotes
- ↑ Messadie, Gerald. A History of the Devil. New York: Kodansha, 1996. p. 81.
- ↑ Dhalla, Maneckji Nusservanji. History of Zoroastranism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. p. 31.
- ↑ Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Routledge, 2001. p. 19.
- ↑ For an overview of the belief system and just how influential it was, see Sosteric, Mike. “From Zoroaster to Star Wars, Jesus to Marx.” 2018. https://www.academia.edu/34504691.
